Comments on: Karl Popper and the McDonald’s Chair of Anthropology

By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Karl Popper and the McDonald’s Chair of Anthropology

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 16:21:49 +0000

[…] Rationality, or Simply Lacking Enough of it? »

Sat 1 Oct 2005
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By: J.S. Nelson

J.S. Nelson — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 05:17:10 +0000

I breifly return from my months of silence to elaborate!
Popper, among other scientists has a sort of optimism about what science is and should be, that I share in a way. It’s easy to see science as potentially a sort of beautiful human endeavor, collaborating to create useful knowlege about the world. It’s unfortunately also easy to ignore the real circumstances of how science is conducted and how that’s contingent on our economic system. Right now science can’t exist without funding, so it’s obvious usefulness is bent to the will of outside economic forces that control how it’s used and how the work proceeds.
This is most obvious when considering Feynman’s account of his work on the atomic bomb. At the time, it certainly seemed a moral cause, and when it worked, there was this joy among the scientists that they had succeeded. It took some time for the implications of how his work was going to be used to sink in for Feynman, and he leaves a sort of morbid account of his inability to comprehend why people would even go on about their daily lives in the face of such obvious impending destruction.
Scientists, hopeful ones at least, across all disciplines seek the sort of culture that promotes free exchange of information in the production of knowledge for the sake of the benefit of humanity.
Things like physics and chemistry are easier to bend to economic means than anthropology, and so within them that culture has been constrained to a much larger degree.
I myself find it pretty scary that business is creeping in on anthropology.
Now, back to my reading assignments.

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 06:42:13 +0000

there is almost no reason for someone in an academic position not to open source

Publish or perish?
Fear that material previously “published” on the Internet will be rejected by the refereed journals where articles have to appear to be counted toward tenure?
Fear of being criticized—altogether realistic in a domain where (OK, I’m exaggerating) “critique” seems 99% of what most people learn to do—reinforced by the one near universal experience from schooling, competing for grades and being afraid of making mistakes?

By: Jim Tzenes

Jim Tzenes — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 20:56:20 +0000

I have found that open source project modeling has been so popular among academics due to the value of patents and discovery. Your average cell phone takes about ten thousand patents to make. So the value of any one is very small. What’s more any invention you do end up making is easily reverse engineered and duplicated in a way that gets around patents (in computing especially). So the question is: why bother?

In fact, open source has a large number of advantages to it such as rapid development and prototyping (read the cathedral and the bazaar http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html#catbmain). As well as the kind of economic advantages that are especially useful to academics on tight budgets.

What’s more large portions of the open source community are not academics, but still seek out the advantages of open sourcing.

This is not to say that you aren’t still right in your view of academics, but there is almost no reason for someone in an academic position not to open source. Especially with most Universities retaining a right to said patents.

By: oneman

oneman — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 16:59:36 +0000

SOmewhat incidental to the main gist of this post, but:

The code of ethics… would prohibit faculty members… from communicating directly with members of the news media…

Aren’t we all, at least potentially, members of the news media? I mean, leave aside that academics publish primarily in periodicals intended to bring their markets up to date on the ideas and events that shape their field (our own newsletter is even called “Anthropology News”), many academics write op-eds, science news, and book reviews for local and national newspapers. Are profs at SIT supposed to get permission to talk to each other? Can they talk to themselves without a letter from their administration?

The other issue brought up here, copyright ownership, is an interesting one. If you listen to commercial copyright advocates, you would be led to understand that copyright is the only thing that protects content producers — writers, musicians, artists, etc. — and allows them to make a living off of their work. Although I have no idea what percentage of publication is academic in nature, I assume that academic writing makes up a reasonably large chunk of the overall whole, and yet academics rarely a) make a living from their writing, or b) hold their own copyrights. Universities hold some copyrights; publishers hold most of the rest — ever notice the “used by permission of [some journal]” credit in collections of previously published work, even when the article is by the author of the book him- or herself? Yet, somehow, with neither copyright protection nor profit potential, academics keep publishing at an apparently tremendous rate. This suggests that there is a kind of “dark matter” of rights and control that is independent of formal copyright — some body of informal incentives that continue to operate in the absence of formal rights. The argument often used against FOSS advocates like Stallman is that the model is unsustainable outside of a marginal subset of code-writers (some “marginality”, to have essentially built the Internet and the Web!) but the academic world would seem to dwarf the FOSS community significantly.