Nicolas Colin  🇪🇺

3/ At this point (where ideas translate into action), most of the original thinkers are missing in action: they even express contempt for those who dare use their ideas without the rigor and jargon that supposedly make intellectuel work so distinctive.

4/ The result is that it's often up to intellectual misfits to do the hard translation work: people that are somewhat looked down upon by both the theorists on one side, and the practitioners on the other. This is why @billjaneway calls those the "theorist-practitioners".

5/ Those misfits' work is what inspires the idea of a missing discipline—that of "progress studies". How come, people like @patrickc and @tylercowen rightfully ask, that nobody in the academic world is tackling those questions & problems on which theorist-practitioners focus?

6/ There are two explanations as to why it's not the case: • Turning science into progress is bound to be in-between: neither thinking, nor action. If that's so, it will never be an intellectual discipline.

7/ • Or maybe it's just because we're in the middle of a paradigm shift, which means that the translation channels are broken and we need to reinvent the whole system. There's an interesting precedent for that: The @sciencespo university in France, which dates back to 1875.

8/ Sciences Po was designed by Emile Boutmy, yet another misfit, who diagnosed that France's defeat against Prussia in 1870 was due to the German university's superiority over the French one—which was stuffy, backward-looking, and divided between ultra-specialized disciplines.

9/ Instead of transforming the academic system from the inside (you can't do that if you're a misfit, if at all), Boutmy decided to found a radically new university: one where the teaching would be done by practitioners and trans-disciplinary culture générale would be mandatory.

10/ Boutmy won his bet in a matter of decades: most of the French elite in the second half of the 20th century was trained at Sciences Po. In a way, what was taught at Sciences Po then was that discipline of progress that @patrickc and @tylercowen are longing for.