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Unabomber Manifesto -- an excerpt
"Thomas McDonald" wrote in message ... "David James Polewka" wrote in message ... http://www.panix.com/~clays/Una/una3.html THE MOTIVES OF SCIENTISTS 87. Science and technology provide the most important examples of surrogate activities. Some scientists claim that they are motivated by "curiosity," that notion is simply absurd. Most scientists work on highly specialized problems that are not the object of any normal curiosity. For example, is an astronomer, a mathematician or an entomologist curious about the properties of isopropyltrimethylmethane? Of course not. Only a chemist is curious about such a thing, and he is curious about it only because chemistry is his surrogate activity. Is the chemist curious about the appropriate classification of a new species of beetle? No. That question is of interest only to the entomologist, and he is interested in it only because entomology is his surrogate activity. If the chemist and the entomologist had to exert themselves seriously to obtain the physical necessities, and if that effort exercised their abilities in an interesting way but in some nonscientific pursuit, then they couldn't giver a damn about isopropyltrimethylmethane or the classification of beetles. Suppose that lack of funds for postgraduate education had led the chemist to become an insurance broker instead of a chemist. In that case he would have been very interested in insurance matters but would have cared nothing about isopropyltrimethylmethane. In any case it is not normal to put into the satisfaction of mere curiosity the amount of time and effort that scientists put into their work. The "curiosity" explanation for the scientists' motive just doesn't stand up. David, This fellow is a comedian. How interesting that he feels competent to rule on what is "normal". FWIW, pretty much everyone I know who has a very narrow scientific focus has a range of curiousity and excitement about other areas. Hell, even Gould was a Red Sox fan, and wrote on baseball. Most scientists I know read things like Science News or Science Digest, and have an avid interest at least in all areas of science (and usually many other areas of learning as well). Alas, we live in a world of specialization which particularly rewards specialists, grant-wise. I can't tell you how many times I've had a grant proposal criticized on the grounds that it wasn't being submitted by a recognized expert in the field in which the work was proposed. That's fine, but this actually happened once in a field my lab had invented, and in which there WERE no experts working on the technique but me and a couple of my team members! The reviewers seemed to think I should also be expert in several related fields, even though I was the inventor, and all those experts in related fields hadn't had the idea in the first place. *******s. If you came up with a genuinely new idea in science, you'll still get "peer reviewed" for grants, even though in a very real sense, you don't have any peers at that point. I've never seen a reviewer with the humility to recognize that. SBH |
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