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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Drew Austin‏ @kneelingbus Jun 16
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      Academia: Spend your life absorbing everything that's ever been said about a topic in order to hopefully add a tiny increment of original thought to it Tech: Disregard everything that's ever been said about a topic and confidently rediscover other fields' most basic ideas

      9 replies 71 retweets 366 likes
    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 17
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      Replying to @kneelingbus

      et tu drew

      1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 17
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      Replying to @vgr @kneelingbus

      Speaking as someone who has spent about a decade in each world, I’m pretty confident (heh!) that the problem is not that tech under-indexes on originality but that academia under-indexes on importance.

      1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 17
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      Replying to @vgr @kneelingbus

      90% of academia’s originality claims are no more than squatting on easily rediscovered trivia and attempting to derive rents from teminological seigniorage based on versions of ideas that aren’t actually as well-adapted to field use as field-rediscoveries.

      1 reply 0 retweets 13 likes
    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 17
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      Replying to @vgr @kneelingbus

      It’s basically an institutional cousin of appropriation complaints culture crossed with a cousin of patent trolling culture (which I’m also generally cynical about)

      1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
    6. Drew Austin‏ @kneelingbus Jun 17
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      Replying to @vgr

      i absolutely agree with that. i felt like i was criticizing tech more than academia when i wrote this tweet but they are both deeply flawed in different ways, and under-indexing on importance is a real problem from what i can see at a distance

      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
    7. Drew Austin‏ @kneelingbus Jun 17
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      Replying to @kneelingbus @vgr

      one point i have that follows from this is that there are certain kinds of knowledge tech won't develop (particularly humanities stuff) bc it will keep rediscovering the same ideas (hence the narrow fetishization of certain books, etc). that's fine, but tech folks keep trying!

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 17
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      Replying to @kneelingbus

      I would argue that a lot of “humanities discoveries” aren’t actually discovered at all, just discussed in an ingroup language devoid of any live context. The claims amount to “we’ve talked about this and we demand you learn French and join our conversation”

      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 17
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      Replying to @vgr @kneelingbus

      There’s some insight porn fun to be had there cf stuff like holey plane and smooth and striated etc, but actually “discovering” something involves entangled analysis/application insight. Analysis is not separable preprocessing. Analysis-synthesis separation happens post-hoc.

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
    10. Drew Austin‏ @kneelingbus Jun 17
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      Replying to @vgr

      yeah. i suppose that academia has made much of its knowledge too esoteric/irrelevant to be accessed by the outsiders like tech even if they wanted to

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 17
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      Replying to @kneelingbus

      I think the blindness I see is a functional fixedness. The presumption that there’s no alternative path (let alone shorter, simpler) to say deleuzean insights than the one their tradition reveres. It’s not just tech that has this problem with acad humanities social science.

      9:35 AM - 17 Jun 2020
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      • Alec Resnick Drew Austin Amalgamated Tsundoku Psychohazard
      2 replies 1 retweet 2 likes
        1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 17
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          Replying to @vgr @kneelingbus

          This is where STEM-envy strikes me as weird. Academic STEM has a very specific limited role in relation to applied domains: injecting mathematical rigor that really strengthens some things and makes certain impossible things possible. Good symbiosis that’s missing in HSS.

          0 replies 1 retweet 3 likes
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 17
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          Replying to @vgr @kneelingbus

          STEM-envy in academia really boils down to math envy: HSS has no unique mode of rigor it can inject into larger knowledge processes that has legitimacy outside their institutions. Hence the overcompensating insistence on characterizing what they do as adding “rigor”. It ain’t.

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jun 17
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          Replying to @vgr @kneelingbus

          Look beyond tech too — acad HSS has this same complaint about politics, media, government (“politicians/movie-makers/bureaucrats don’t use our insights and rediscover what Baudrillard or Deleuze discovered”)

          1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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