The depressing fact about this university is that it has been run, from the beginning, by bureaucrats, businessmen, and people with an engineering background. Unfortunately, that has translated into a shallow and myopic view of education in general, and of the humanities or social sciences in particular.
So, for example, what the philistines continue to harp on about is the "lack of rigour", the "fuzziness" and lack of precision of the humanities. Well, yes, but life isn't an equation and God is not a mathematician! What, ultimately, the gradgrinds appreciate or understand is number-crunching and quantification and this dovetails very neatly with the reductiveness of capitalist culture. One of the cleverest people you know here claims that accounting and finance is a "rigorous programme". Oh dear! Corruptio optimi pessima.
Intelligence is, then, identified with or equated with, grades and the ability to "solve problems"-and that alone. Is it too surprising, then, that some of these very same people end up spending a lot of time in isolated booths, the backroom, like clerks, for a multinational company? You can "empirically verify it"
And this hilarious piece from the New York Times was sent to us by the VC:
"Ms. Grimes is an Internet-age statistician, one of many who are changing the image of the profession as a place for dronish number nerds. They are finding themselves increasingly in demand-and even cool.
I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians, said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. And I’m not kidding.
The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data. In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore-sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more...
Yet data is merely the raw material of knowledge. We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured...But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data"
I kid thee not. You couldn't have made that up if you'd tried.
2 comments:
We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured
that is so sad, tells us all what we need to know about this day and age... indeed, it would have been better to not even try to make such things up.
who controls what is knowledge, controls the rest too
i'm not sure what you mean by nerd or geek. as a self-declared nerd, or as a friend defines nerdiness, as someone addicted to learning, i found the university environment too narrow - and that fact was too sad for me to be able to remain there, in the university.
hello, mani.
Don't know, i think a nerd isn't someone who is addicted to "learning"--that's the whole point. But yes, addicted to something.
take care,
b.
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