Not that I’d want to defend Ezra Klein, but “there’s an entire field of study” has always seemed to me to be a dumb whine. I mean if I write a future speculations article, astrologers could make that complaint. The value of a field must be demonstrated, not just asserted.
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I don’t care if a thousand idiots in a captured academic field of mutual congratulation are writing journal articles at each other using a self-important internal lingo. If you can’t demonstrate your relevance in *public* terms of reference you deserve to be ignored.
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Not just accessible but relevant. Engineering has a natural advantage in that tech produces artifacts you can use whether or not you understand how they work. I don’t need you to study navier stokes equations before complaining about airlines. The airplane itself is “relevance”
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I was thinking about this question of writing to be understandable and it's a funny kind of canard. Klein's piece is pablum riding on McLuhan's popularity (and Postman). McLuhan's work is W-E-I-R-D...
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There has probably not been a single media scholar with that level of public uptake (he wrote NYT Op-eds actually) and it's weird. So I don't know. Is there not a building/hailing publics that work can also do?
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I definitely have a soft spot for semi-outsider types who pwn a discourse claimed by an academic field... like Christopher Alexander and Buckminster Fuller in architecture :D
I think it's a key check and balance to fields achieving regulatory capture on public-interest domains
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I don't think they have. I believe the policing impulse comes from a desire for it. Goes from "somebody is wrong on the internet" to "my friends and I know The Truth and should be deferred to"
Which is dangerous and why I resist even if it means Ezrakleinfication of discourses
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the only HSS field that I think has achieved genuine regulatory capture of the corresponding practitioner field is economics...

