Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿
This is desperately sad and more than a little suspicious: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/top-scientist-mike-joy-loses-role-at-victoria-university/4YJSZM2OGBCF5OQFWIUIZV4U5U/
There's never been a time we needed people like Dr Mike Joy in the public arena more than right now.
lainy
Strypey
@lightweight
To quote Graeber:
"Universities are—or, better said, until recently have been— among the only institutions that survived more or less intact from the High Middle Ages. As a result, universities still reflected an essentially medieval conception of self-organization and self-governance; this was an institution managed by scholars for the pursuit of scholarship, of forms of knowledge that were seen as valuable in their own right."
How do we bring this back?
Strypey
@lightweight
It's really past time those of us who are educated, *and* independent of the "professional-managerial class" (as Graeber politely describes it), launched a serious campaign to re-democratise our universities, and put them back in service of independent research and academic freedom.
Strypey
@lightweight
Something is rotten in the state of our universities. I suspect it has a lot to do with the consequences of the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s/90s, and the rise of managerialism that David Graeber (RIP) wrote about:
https://davidgraeber.org/papers/anthropology-and-the-rise-of-the-professional-managerial-class/
Strypey
@lightweight
> There's never been a time we needed people like Dr Mike Joy in the public arena more than right now.
Damn right. I did an environmental field work paper with Mike when he worked at Massey. He's a national treasure. A meticulous scientist, and unapologetically outspoken about his findings, however uncomfortable that might make the political-economic elites. I'm guessing he got run out of Massey by Big Ag interests and now Vic too. Seriously WTF.
Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿
@Oozenet I'll put it another way. My main issue lies with theistic religions. They require faith, and (esp in the Abrahamic traditions - see Abraham and Isaac) require *faith over reason*. In the US, where I grew up, many see blind faith (e.g. faith in a god) as a virtue. To my mind holding faith over reason is a deep character flaw. One of the reasons I moved to NZ where (based on the census trends) we became a majority irreligious nation a few years ago.
Thaiis Thei 𓁟
@lightweight @strypey That's so sad. True religion does exist. I understand that a lot of people feel as you do because of the way the dominant religions of our culture have traumatised so many people because of their corrupted state. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!
Thaiis Thei 𓁟
@lightweight @strypey True religion is that which is true in every way, in that it produces good humans, in that it is in accordance with the natural world, that it produces flourishing.
Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿
@Oozenet @strypey ah, I've never seen that outside of imagined worlds. I have a very negative view of 'religion' in general, and so it cannot fit with any idealised worlds I imagine. So I can only assume that we have opposite views of true religion - for me, the only true religion is no religion.
Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿
@Oozenet I'm curious to know how you'd distinguish 'real religion' from, presumably, fake religion (?). To be up-front, I have a vanishingly low impression of theistic religion and consider them all entirely human constructs. In a sense, from my perspective, reality & fakeness of religion are entirely subjective, rendering them all equally indefensible (see the "no true Scottsman" argument). @strypey
Thaiis Thei 𓁟
@lightweight @strypey With science alone there is the pursuit of knowledge but there is nothing to moderate the lust for fame or power or riches above all. There is plenty of scientific fraud. Real religion is a method for moderating those things.
Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿
@Oozenet hmm. I'm afraid that doesn't ring true for me. Yes, the scientific process can lead to cults of personality around individuals who are almost worshipped for their cleverness... however, I'd argue that this is much more prevalent in a capitalist-run version of science that we see now... where a brilliant scientist attracts grant money, often from industry, and attracts others who can ride on their coattails... in my experience as a scientist the driver is curiosity, not ego. @strypey
Thaiis Thei 𓁟
@strypey @lightweight Teaching was how they could afford to do scholarship. The key here is that they were doing it because God, they were on a holy mission. This is the motivation we need to get back. The reaction you are currently having to this statement is exactly why we don't have this any more. Our dominant religions have become so corrupted that we rightfuly revile them. But without a motivation based on service only to truth and love we are not going to solve this problem.
Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿
@Oozenet @strypey I feel like 'the pursuit of knowledge' is a compelling motivation - most practising scientists will already feel that, in my experience. I think, in many places, religion is a *disincentive* for learning/knowledge, as increased knowledge reveals the basic inadequacy of religious explanations of everything. Maybe that's another capitalist co-option/corruption of religion - like the Prosperity Gospel.
Strypey
@Oozenet
I think the flaw is the neoliberal idea of teaching as a commodity "service" and students as "customers". Universities only started teaching students as a means of succession, a way of ensuring the current generation of scholars would be replaced as they aged out, or left the institution to do other things. Teaching was not their founding purpose, scholarship was.
Strypey
@Oozenet
> Fund it by students fees going directly to the academics who teach them, who then use those funds to run things as they choose
Chalkle tried that, inspired by the teach-ins at the Occupy camp in Civic Square. It didn't scale:
Thaiis Thei 𓁟
@strypey @lightweight One way to bring it back would be to model an institution on the medieval ones. i.e. start our own uni with hookers and blackjack! No wait, I mean start an institution without the corporate bit. Fund it by students fees going directly to the academics who teach them, who then use those funds to run things as they choose.
Thaiis Thei 𓁟
@lightweight @strypey Your main issue is with protestantism. Not all theistic religions require faith. That is a particularly strange feature of a very few religions, including Christianity. This is protestantism defining your religious experience. The overwhelming majority of religions do not even have the concept of faith.
Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿
@Oozenet @strypey unless I'm mistaken, well more than half of the 'religious' people on earth adhere to an Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, or Islam), and faith is the greatest virtue in all of those. I wouldn't call it a rare feature among the religious.
Thaiis Thei 𓁟
@lightweight @strypey Most religions do not say they are the one true religion. Most recognise that truth can be found everywhere.
Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿
@Oozenet @strypey perhaps my sample size is too small... my impression is that indigenous 'religions' which are inseparable from culture and place are less dogmatic and more accepting, whereas the 'mind virus' religions that see to infect as many as possible (see 'missionary', 'evangelist', and 'jihad') are entirely less so.
Thaiis Thei 𓁟
@lightweight @strypey It is a rare feature of religion based on numbers of religions not numbers of adherents.
Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿
@Oozenet @strypey heh, yes, agreed. Even so, I suspect that each of the 3000ish identified theistic religions, whether or not it values faith, it still says it's the one true religion...
Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿
@Oozenet @strypey to be honest, I'm not overly fussy about which hair-splitting variations of Christianity I reject. I'm equal-opportunity in that respect.
Thaiis Thei 𓁟
@lightweight You seem to have just contradicted yourself, you said it wasn't ego, but now you are saying it is?
Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿
@Oozenet what I'm saying is that external pressures - namely the need to convince non-scientists of the value of one's work to allow it to be sustainably funded, creates a power dynamic that suits certain kinds of personalities, and those personalities are, in my experience, those who're most likely to allow self-interest to overwhelm their quest for understanding.
Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿
@Oozenet I think scientific fraud is generally cause by people feeling forced to get results to research that allow them to continue to receive funding and/or the ego boost that comes from having others dependent on one's perceived value (usually in the eyes of non-scientists who control the finances). @strypey
Thaiis Thei 𓁟
@lightweight @strypey How do you account for scientific fraud then?
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