Conversation

Is the divide between fields that must market themselves to other fields, and ones that don’t need to, the same as the divide between STEM/HSS? 🤔 Feels like the same divide. You don’t see AI people marketing the field to ethics people for eg (correct me if I’m wrong)
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It’s only partly about money. Yes fields that don’t need to market themselves can more easily market themselves independently to finding agencies etc. It’s more an epistemology thing. Non-interdisciplinary-marketing (NIM) fields tend to have direct ways of acting on reality.
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Right now, interdisciplinary relations are mostly conducted on the basis of soft power exercised by weaker fields. I sense an impending shift to hard power via regulatory capture of funding agencies 🤔 Think IRB type mechanisms but representing a growing scope of HSS interests.
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“You don’t think religious studies is relevant to your proposal to study neutron decay in nebulas? Tough. You must include a 5% allocation to a religious scholar panel to evaluate your results in the context of world religions” sorta thing.
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Anthropocentrism is a regulatory interest Funny how “human-centered” means roughly the same thing as “anthropocentric” … just normative instead of epistemic, a distinction without a difference in many situations.
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Often, centering human interests as a normative matter is inseparable from demanding that the universe be described in anthropocentric ways… caricature: “geocentric views are more human-centric and astronomy research must model things in geocentric coordinates”
Replying to
Humans representing other humans is probably the most morally hazardous aspect of societies. For millennia religious cabals claimed to represent all humans in unseen places of power. That didn’t go too well.
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Fiat claims of intercessionsry representation have always been the currency of politics. Democracies try to verify the tip of the iceberg of this representation economy, and contain the worst of priestly excesses, but 90% of representation claims are unverifiable.
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