From: Jkr438@aol.com
Date: Sun Jun 01 2003 - 17:29:51 MDT
In a message dated 5/23/2003 2:25:14 PM Central Daylight Time,
billroh@churchofvirus.com writes:
You are right, that was a strong choice of words - and we do have
varrying skills. But we have very few, if any, doctorate level
participants - and very few discussions that ever get that deep. You
don't talking about serious details very often. We make good
businessmen, students, programmers, geeks, ex-military, we have a lawyer
and a Dr of Pharmacy and a lot of in betweens. But we don't have any
anthropologists, sociologists, chemists, biologists, doctors,
physists... We have a lot of people with a lot of reading and a little
experience.
[Jake] As the lawyer, I would also like to claim my background in sociology.
I started out as a sociology major in undergrad. After a few years of it, I
abandoned the field in disillusion and widened my major to Social Sciences in
order to get a better background in history and political science. At the
time, and as far as I can still tell sociology continues to be a waste of time
field driven more by ideology than any scientific basis. The only thing
worthwhile I got out of it was a basic understanding of statistics, an area that
sociology has no monopoly over. The rest of it was just a spewing of liberal
ideology. As a liberal myself, I have no real allergy to the ideas, but I was a
bit disappointed in the pretense of scientific basis that the field claimed for
this agenda. To me memetics, as a biologically based mythology about
sociology and culture is at least more ideologically neutral and intellectually
honest and many of its adherents do not hold to any pretenses of its supposed
scientific foundations. Some do, of course, but I find them in the minority of
self-proclaimed memeticists. Often the "more serious" scholars, doctorate level
etc., are simply the more indoctrinated and deluded. What I find more
refreshing is a serious commitment reason and rational criticism. Many of the more
serious participants in CoV do have at least a Bachelor's degree education, and
have somewhere along the line achieved more appreciation for reason and
rationality than many post graduate level educated people. I still hold a bit of
respect for people with more education in the more real sciences like biology,
chemistry, physics etc. (though many physicists have now descended in a lot of
pseudo-science themselves as research opportunities in their own field has
dried up in the last 20 or so years and their dreams scientific priesthood have
more or less been flushed down the toilet).
The lack of doctorate level indoctrination in our ranks does not cause me any
real despair. The diversity of real world experience, the ability to
intelligently articulate our ideas, and our capacity for and/or openness to rational
criticism in my mind makes our community more intellectually exciting and open
to possibility than many of the more indoctrinated communities I have
encountered or participated in. Sure, there are some hard hitting academics that I
would love to see participating here, but there are plenty more who are simply
deluded by their own credentials and indoctrination whom I don't have the time
of day to waste on.
I don't think that we have ever held ourselves out to be any more than a
community with an interest in science and religion and a dedication to reason,
empathy, and vision. As such I have been far less disappointed in it than I have
been in other more academically indoctrinated communities.
This thread seems to capitalize on some people's insecurities about lack of
higher (post-grad) education credentials. As such I think it is definitely not
important. More often than not, those who go on to get such credentials do
so out of their own lack of sense and drive to make real world accomplishments
out of their more basic education. The ivory towers are largely full of
people who are hiding from the real world for whatever reason. If that is the
"lack of experience" we are talking about I certainly don't miss it. I will take
real experience over that.
Love,
-Jake
--- To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun Jun 01 2003 - 17:30:21 MDT