CONTRACTING IDEAS | 2008-04-09
I EXPAND on ideas, and I want some of you to do that, too.
In what passes for a seminar today, professors contract student's ideas. First of all, since no professor gets paid for anything except pleasing other professors, students in undergrad are useless, but grads can be useful. A professor's job is to publish or perish, and none of his publications go beyond other professors. So in seminar he will present what he is working on and the students will go out and do detailed research on his subject for him.
I call this "contracting in the first sense." That is, a professor takes on a writing project and then subcontracts the detail work. But it is also contracting in a second sense. You know the definition of a specialist: "A person who knows more and more about less and less until he knows all about nothing." That describes today's grad student perfectly.
Today's student, therefore today's professor, must limit his THINKING to his leisure time in the coffee shop. He gets his degree and his salary by "contributing to the literature" and by "peer review," which means he has to think exactly the same way his colleagues do, and his output must fit nicely into the last set of articles in last month's journal. Which is why those journals have to be financed by force and not by a willing readership.
So "academic thinking" means a steady contraction of an idea. You are given a proposition and you look it up in the dictionary. You find out details about it. You study its history, especially in The Literature.
But the one thing you NEVER do is to lift up your head and take a look around that idea and say, "Does this make any difference?" "Does this make any sense?" The sense it makes, as more than one professor has told me, is that you get paid to do it.
Take the article I wrote below on Jewpernica. I got little feedback from it, but if you EXPANDED on it, you might come up with some new concepts. First of all, I am not asking for more details about Jews. I am saying that we need to lift our heads of The Literature and say, "Does this make any difference?" "Does this make any sense?"
I don't really care what Hezekiah said, because I know too much about that world to think he said anything. We don't know who was REALLY doing what back then precisely because our heads are buried in the Old Testament and, in the case of Marxist professors, in the idea that the world began in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
As far as I can tell, almost everything the Prophets wrote was bitching like we hear today. Theology consists of taking that old bitching as word-for-word statements of what someone actually believed and bitching the same bitches today.
And while our noses are down in that swill, about Amenhotep's left toenail, all of history is ignored. I mean ALL of history. Every day comes another breathless revelation that a cloth "invented" in the Middle East was on Northern Europeans a thousand years earlier, that writing predating hieroglyphs has been found in Romania, that life did not spring up a billion years ago, but in fact probably existed on Earth Mark I before it collided with the planet part of which became our moon four billion years ago.
But, like any other complete retard, history is astonished every single time. It NEVER sees a PATTERN. We still have the same old history books with everything starting in Egypt-Israel-Mesopotamia and people from their teaching others to us their opposable thumb.
THINK about it: Where, in The Literature, would such a pattern FIT? Everything has been carefully built, block by block, on the old ideas, and no peer reviewer is going to let anybody attack the whole edifice in a single article that will be PUBLISHED,
Now there is an idea you could EXPAND on. How is information PRODUCED? What INCENTIVES are there to keep beating dead horses? What concepts have simply not appeared for this reason, and exactly why?
Someone Googled and found that the only reference to the Medicogenetical Institute identical twin study, one of the breakthroughs of our age, About a thousand geneticists were executed for that study. Garrett Hardin discussed it in Nature and Man's Fate. I knew an Oxford professor who lost a hundred friends in Russia in that incident.
That was the incident that put Lysenko in charge of Soviet genetics and starved a million people at least.
I am STILL the only reference to that incident in Google. Why?
Who is going to talk about that study? Respectable conservatives, who say they believe in equality and the birth of retards more than liberals do? Leftists who say that man will be completely transformed by Marxist policy as Stalin did? Professors who are desperate to prove that any practical discussion of genetics in social matters makes one anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews?
So it appears that there is only one person on this planet who will ever EXPAND on this incident. The one you find in Google. Me.
Find the PATTERN. NO ONE IN ANYOTHER SEMINAR WILL EVER ASK YOU TO DO THAT.