2018-10-14: Lobachevsky

Follow the adventures of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Fran and Naga in this all-new humorous entry to the growing Poeverse.
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Nosy Neighbordroid
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2018-10-14: Lobachevsky

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Discussion thread for Lobachevsky
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Graybeard
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Re: 2018-10-14: Lobachevsky

Post by Graybeard »

"One man deserves the credit
One man deserves the blame
Nikolai ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name!"
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Forrest
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Re: 2018-10-14: Lobachevsky

Post by Forrest »

Since the real-life thing post-dates the idea in this comic, I wonder if the real-life authors are readers of this comic and thought "hey, yeah, I'm going to actually do that, and make a point of it!"?
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Re: 2018-10-14: Lobachevsky

Post by Graybeard »

On reading more carefully, the concept of someone stepping on Naga's toes is amusing.
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Alice Machaer
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Re: 2018-10-14: Lobachevsky

Post by Alice Machaer »

A fascinating and troubling study indeed, but I think the root of the problem in academia goes even beyond identity politics. What makes it so easy for that sort of nonsense to get published in the first place is the outmoded tenure system with its resultant "publish or perish" demands. Padding out your C.V. with nonsense is more of a challenge in the hard, applied and (some) social sciences because it requires fudging your data, which is relatively easy to spot and can mean the end of your career. The humanities, however, rely solely on argumentation (which is neither a bad nor a good thing in itself). So you can publish ridiculous claims (whether you know they're ridiculous or believe they're the truth), even in refereed journals, as long as your grasp of rhetoric and jargon are good enough.

The continuing fondness, within the humanities, for anything "postmodern" or "deconstructionist" doesn't help matters. And I'm not just talking about the obscurant, near-impenetrable language typical of that approach ("problematizing the rubric's alterity" and such). Once it's decided that authorial intent doesn't matter, pretty much any claim you wish to make is fair game -- again, as long as you have the rhetorical skill and grasp of jargon to sell it.

Only when tenure committees learn to value rigor over quantity is the situation likely to change. And change it must, because "publish or perish" is, amongst the other problems with it, a true barrier to the participation of less privileged groups in academia. When you have kids to raise (a job still primarily assumed by women) or have to take on additional non-research work to make ends meet (if you come from a background of poverty and lack of "connections"), it's ridiculously hard to publish quality work on anything like a regular basis. No wonder so much junk gets accepted, and no wonder that creates an opening for hardcore ideologues, on the left or the right, to exploit this.
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