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Could Isaac Newton Get a Faculty Job?
An anonymous reader writes "Could Isaac Newton get a faculty job, or is modern society too intolerant of eccentricity? That's one of the questions that Glenn Reynolds asks Neal Stephenson in this interview over at TechCentralstation. Others involve the changing nature of fame in an age of fragmented media, the role of the Seventeenth Century in shaping the modern world, and what it's like to write a book with a fountain pen, in the twenty-first century."
I don't think he could get a job, but if he already had one, he could definetely get tenure.
His eccentricity would no doubt have been diagnosed as ADD or ADHD. He would have been drugged with narcotics and told to behave himself.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
This isn't just science. How many major computer companies were founded by people who never even finished college? Dell, Microsoft, Apple, and so on, these are all companies that would never hire their own founders considering them unqualified. I'm reasonably certain that this problem persists in other industries as well.
Could Isaac Newton get a faculty job, or is modern society too intolerant of eccentricity?
Modern society might be, and often for good reason, but if there's any place where eccentricity is tolerated, or promoted even, it's academia. I often think that many of the professors are purposefully eccentric. It's almost become something expected of the truly gifted, and many fraudulently flaunt their own eccentricity for the express purpose of making others think they are gifted. They've heard too many stores about Einstein, Turing, and Newton and get delusions of grandeur.
The fact is, most Universities won't care if you wear your underwear outside of your pants if you manage to do something truly brilliant. You won't be hired to teach, you'll be hired simply so the University can advertise that you're on staff.
Sorry to say, I'm not kidding...
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The university system is one of the last havens of eccentricity. It's full of eccentrics. To claim otherwise bespeaks an ignorance of university culture.
"Normal" people end up in investment banking, consulting, or corporate law where there truly is no room for eccentrics.
Two words:
Principia Mathematica.
There has never been a more significant scientific publication.
If you published something that important, you could find an appointment just about anywhere...even if you were purple and lived off of pop-rocks.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
It seems there is something missing today in much of communication, and I am guilty of contributing to this, as I'm sure are many of you. Email, telephone, and perhaps worst of all: chat rooms. All of these things contribute to the attitude of raking our discourse in the mud; we treat it as so common and vulgar, as though it is an ugly tool not an art. We must all take an active role in preserving and promoting that grand and noble thing which is rational dialogue between two human persons.
Very few of us have the opportunity to particpate in, for example, discourse through publishing scholarly papers, and even for those who do, the whole processes is necessarily exclusive.
I believe that manual letter writing is perhaps the most rewarding means of communication. Yes, manual letter writing: that thing people do with a real pen and real dead-tree paper, like your mother and aunts and grandmothers did and, if living, probably still do. Our mothers do more to promote an atmosphere affirming the dignity of human dicourse than probably do many of us!
every letter has a greater sense of importance - It could be weeks before you receive a reply, and how the world can change in that time; the letter is an occasion to "put on your best suit and use your finest china", as it were.
it is deliberate - You might take a week to ponder and absorb the thoughts of your interlocutor before evening sitting down to write. Writing your response - what must suffice as the only communication between the two of you for perhaps weeks or more - is a task for more than even a single evening. This is no 30 word email that you bang out in as many seconds.
it necessitates greater attention to quality and clarity - This is a grand occasion. If you do not put forth your best effort, you will regret it immediately. How many of you have thought to yourselves, "I should have said that instead?" Here there is no recourse. You can not call up your acquaintance and offer a clarification or warning before it is read; you can not send off a follow-up email to explain yourself that evening.
it provides for cooler heads - You may be steaming-mad now, but consider how horrible you will feel in many days or even weeks when you receive a reply. Oh, how foolish you will feel when you must read your brash and irrational words quoted to you then!
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
two things:
firstly, bipolar disorder isn't genetic as far as we can tell.
secondly: we have enough trouble successfully diagnosing that condition today with biographers trying to retroactively diagnose dead people with it.
lysergically yours