Last night I tried to describe the rationalist community to a friend who had never heard of it. I struggled, but finally settled on describing it as "A school of philosophy that arose on the internet rather than in the academy."
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I think this is incredibly important (as the university system is collapsing) and inspiring. I’d like to contribute, to the extent I can!
My vague sense is that para-academic fields suffer from being under-networked. A little too much of the non-joiner, "I'm going my own way" mentality. Not enough people building off each others' work.
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For all its faults, the academy does a great job forcing people to connect their ideas to each other's. The emphasis on credit, citations, learning the history of a field, the glory of being "first," paying homage to predecessors, etc — all contribute to the stability of a field.
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Yes… if/as para-academia develops, it will need to develop more structure and mechanisms of this sort (while also leaving freedom for experimentation and iconoclasm)
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I agree… the “weekend salon” we organized a year and a half ago, which you contributed to, was an attempt to address that. I expected to make that a series, but life events intervened… Funding is also a major issue, I think. Not many people can be a full-time para-academic.
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You and Michael have both helped foster para-academic networks! But yeah, it's hard to sustain without funding/institutional support.
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we need inter-para-academic networks for knowledge transfer and peer review
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slack server foreign exchange students
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