Author: Curt Doolittle

James Lindsay’s Suggestion for Academic Incentives
Note: Given that the term science is simply an application of legal testimony, our organization’s proposal is the same regardless of context, which is to use the courts to punish those who publish other than testifiable testimony (science) as doing harm to the public commons of information. This includes charges of sedition against the constitution of natural, common, concurrent law. This (a) causes academic insurance (b) creates a network outside of the academy – which will logically consist of retired academics – that profits from ‘clearing’ the academy of bias and deceit.

LINDSAY”S SOLUTION
via James Lindsay @ConceptualJames
The holy has to be defended from the profane. In a Classically Liberal system that doesn’t mean existing knowledge cannot be questioned, but it does mean it has to resist subversion. Good-faith criticism and bad-faith criticism (ruthless critique) have to be distinguished.

Academics might not even be equipped for this job, to be honest, but that made them poor guardians of the effective heart of the systems depending on their charge. We’re paying the price for this now and trying to salvage what we can before the library is burned.

If you’re going to be the high priests of the canon of knowledge, you had damned well better be able to protect that canon’s integrity. Various incentive structures, specialization, etc., led to the academic goal being merely to ADD TO the canon of knowledge. But who defends it?

There is actually a simple structural reform to this that is clearly necessary. Rather than granting PhDs, tenure, advancement, glory, etc., to academics merely for doing “new” research, academia must start elevating people who successfully do academic cleanup, rigorously.

There’s a key difference between a Magisterium, which checks against orthodoxy, and what I’m saying here, though. Academia is already a poisoned Mystical Magisterium of Social Gnosticism. That’s rigor according to rationality and especially skepticism (checking against evidence).

The Library, to use the metaphor, almost deserves to be burned because it’s rotted through with parasitical pseudo-knowledge, critical magick, outright corruption, and nonsense posing as profundity, but there’s too much wheat to burn it all as chaff. This is important.