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.
Conversation
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.
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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)
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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
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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!
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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”
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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”)
Yet when people DO listen the result is often disastrous. I would not, for instance, call things like critical pedagogy in education a success. Nor do I think the “MFA machine” produces successful or interesting literature. Etc etc.
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So when acad HSS complains all I hear is...
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read image description
ALT
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