Post filosófico do dia

"(...) All academic social sciences seem plagued with the same disease. You can’t have any opinion before reading and knowing all the opinions of the « great predecessors ». And once you know them, you are not allowed to differ from what they say. And you are not allowed to think like them because that woul’d be plagiarism.

The summary is clear and is what my philosophy professors were trying to teach me: you are not allowed to think at all. You are only allowed to recite the « great ancients » and to analyse what they said. This is, of course, reminiscent of every decadent civilisation.

Academia has turned upside down. People don’t go to university to learn anymore but to get an administrative form (called « diploma ») that will allow them, they hope, to land a useless but prestigious punching card job with a good salary in an administrative society. They may also use the opportunity to meet other people and create a network. Learning? When some skills will be necessary, they will be learned on-the-fly on a day-to-day basis. At the cost of losing depth and the big picture of the knowledge. If really needed, reading a book worth more than spending hours on a chair listening to someone who has a full-time job getting grants for his/her PhD students and which was selected for that job because she was one of the best to find grants and to memorise answers to arbitrary questions at an exam. (...)"

("Despair and Hope: From the Stupidity of Academic Bureaucracy to the Poetry of Bitcoin", @ploum)