On an eccentric use of volcabulary.

I want to write another blog post later today, but found myself wanting to use a word that I feared would be misunderstood. Hence, I am breaking my sickness and paperwork induced blog silence by talking not about something grandiose, but rather minute by comparison to my usual topics: two words, and why I prefer one to the other.

The first word, "evil," is one that I try to avoid using as much as possible. Not, mind you, because of some sense of moral relativism, but rather because of the connotations of the word. To many people, evil necessarily derives from some external evaluation of the world, be it by a god or authority figure. To me, however, being a utilitarian (at least to a rough approximation) means that any evaluation of what is good or bad must come from a rational argument and not the decree of another. Of course, this sense of the word "evil" is far from universally held, but it would be truly unfortunate for my writing to be misunderstood by virtue of such a colored meaning.

In preference, I choose to emulate Richard Dawkins in his use of the word "wicked." Specifically, I call wicked that which is directly, intentionally and needlessly harmful to other intelligent beings, their bodies and their rights. Moreover, I call wicked those value systems and philosophies that compel their adherents to wickedness towards others. On this latter point, I likely deviate from others, such as Dawkins, in applying the word to what is inherently a matter of thought rather than action. My motivation is not to ascribe to any individual a responsibility for the thoughts in their heads, but rather to examine what could compel an otherwise decent agent to act in a wicked manner towards their peers.

By using this word in preference to "evil," I hope to avoid my meaning being lost in the noise of cultural connotations. (Plus, the word sounds cooler, anyway.) It is important that my meaning makes it though, as something wicked truly this way comes.

Academia and the unreal.

A little while ago, someone offered me advice on how to get a job in the real world after grad school. This advice, though unsolicited, was undoubtedly well-intentioned, but hidden in the offer is the germ of an idea that I find quite poisonous. Implied is that the academic realm is somehow disjoint from the "real world." This phrase is often, in my experience, used in a condescending way to separate and denigrate various environments from some set of environments that are sufficiently "real" to merit recognition.

Consider one particularly harmful example of this. Since children are often told that things aren't like their school environment out there in the real world, reality as recognized by this phrase must surely exclude the first 20 or so years of our lives. Years in which we discover much about ourselves and in which our bodies change and betray us in myriad ways. Years in which we undergo challenges that we are, almost by definition, unprepared for. Years in which we experience emotions and pains which are all too real. To add to those burdens the condescending dismissal of unreality is a tragic perversion of the good intentions that must surely underlie the use of a phrase like "real world." What is seen by adults as a promise of a better tomorrow comes across as a failure to empathize with the problems of adolescence. This is why I call the ideas epitomized by the phrase "real world" poisonous: they pervert and distort our intentions and empathies.

How, then, does such a term come to be applied to academia? To many people not in academics, I suspect that the academic world is unfamiliar and arcane. Many people are not concerned with funding proposals, postdoc applications, tenure reviews, or any other of the myriad distractions from research. Even more fundamentally, the goals of an academic researcher are very different from the goals of most people employed in industry. It is all too easy, then, to fail to recognize these goals and concerns as being as real as those associated with other pursuits. Likewise, it is all too easy to compartmentalize the concerns of academics to some mythical ivory tower, locked away from daily life as surely as the princesses locked away in the towers of our more misogynistic fairy tales.

What could be more real than learning? In all walks of life, we must learn and grow to succeed, and it is this process that academia tries to incorporate and cultivate. When we lock this ideal, however imperfectly realized, out of our conception of the real world, we do ourselves a great disservice. Rather than responding to the foreignness of academia by drinking the poison of the real world, then, I encourage my friends and loved ones to ask questions of their academic friends. It can be difficult to bridge divides, to be sure, and those of us on the academia side of this divide aren't always the best at empathizing with the rest of society, but we can all do better than to dismiss so thoroughly the concerns of those around us.

The Curious Case of a Linguistic Degeneracy: An Accidental Manifesto

I am an odd fellow-- you may have noticed. To start with, I am a physicist, and thus count myself amongst a group not widely known for excessive bouts of conformity. Add to this that I am a gamer, an occasional programmer, a sci-fi fan, a mild movie buff, etc., and you get a recipe for an overall odd fellow, about on par for the course of one that is in the process of spending upwards of a decade in college to get a PhD.

As a part of being an odd fellow, I have a few linguistic quirks. Some, such as my overreliance on words like "orthogonal," "asymptotic," "potential," or those starting with "eigen," can be well-characterized by my being a physicist. Others, such as my apparent inability to differentiate between the words "rationalist," "skeptic" and "scientist" seem significantly harder to explain. Thus, I would like to take a moment to explain why it is that I often conflate these three words, especially where religion and politics are concerned.

To do so, it's instructive to take a step back and note that I am a hopeless idealist. I have a (perhaps overdeveloped) sense of how the World Should Be. Of course, I am not so naive as to think that my ideals reflect how the world currently is, or that my ideals are anywhere near universally agreed upon. Rather, my idealism often takes the form of considering issues in the context of an asymptotic approach to my ideals. Thus, my apparent degeneracy in vocabulary, in which I may appear to be unable to distinguish between rationalists, skeptics and scientists stems from the fact that in my ideal world, these concepts are degenerate.

In the real world, of course there are profound differences between these three groups-- important differences. As an idealist, though, I am often much less interested in discussing these differences than I am in discussing a world in which the primacy of evidence is universally accepted, and in which all actions and conclusions are susceptible to analysis. Humans are, by nature, flawed and error-prone-- therein lies our creative power, as suggested by a viewpoint informed by formal logic. As such, in order to minimize the frequency and damage done by our errors, we need to recognize the efficacy of rational thinking in arriving at conclusions, of skepticism with respect to our conclusions and of the scientific method in establishing conclusions.

I will often refer to one or the other of these three facets of evidenced-based thinking when discussion politics or religion, as issues that arise there can provide useful examples for the importance of evidence-based thinking. Really, though, I have very little interest in atheism itself (for example). To me, it is an inevitable consequence of what I am: a scientist that attempts, however successfully or unsuccessfully, to apply the standards of criticality and evidence to all aspects of my life-- especially those that have impacts on the lives of others, such as my political decisions.

On the other hand, I recognize that we do not live in my ideal world. I recognize that there are, for instance, religious scientists that are damn good at what they do. It is perhaps inescapable, then, that I sound somewhat judgmental in declaring religiosity as a deviation from my notion of the ideal scientist, but this is not my intention at all. I do not expect others to share my ideals, though I do try to perpetuate and propagate them. Nor do I expect that there is any person-- scientist or not-- that lives up to the relevant ideals in all ways. For me, ideals are not quite a goal, so much as the asymptotic limit that our goals reach as we push forward, so that there is always more room for improvement.

That I can find ways in which I think that society can be improved is not unique; ask anyone on the street and they'll give you a litany of ways to improve society, most of which will be contradictory with what you would hear from any other such random interview. What makes my situation unique, then, is that I am saying that a deviation from the ideal is something that many people treasure and defend vigorously.

But I digress. To get back to my central point, my ideal of a scientist is one that recognizes that all of human experience is, in principle if not in practicality, amenable to the methods of science. As the methods of science are rationality, skepticism and the primacy of evidence, I feel justified in my curious degeneracy, insofar as I am justified in considering the asymptotic approach to idealism.