Posts
Comments
Fair enough; I had wanted to say that but don't have sufficiently intimate awareness of every academic field to be comfortable doing so. I think it works just as well to illustrate that we oughtn't confuse passing flaws in a field with fundamental ones, or the qualities of a /discipline/ with the qualities of seeking truth in a particular domain.
One: Protons and neutrons aren't oppositely charged.
Two: You're using particle physics as an example of an area where experiment is the final arbiter; you might not want to do that. Scientific consensus has more than a few established beliefs in that field that are untested and border on untestable.
I don't know if this tactic has a name, but it should.
I've heard it called "Wine In Front Of Me" after the scene in The Princess Bride.
Surely a consequentialist could come to a conclusion about book-burning being bad and then write an outraged comment about it--the potential negatives in the long-term of the burning of such a library are debatable but the potential positives in the long-term are AFAICT non-existent. Such a catastrophic failure of cost-benefit analysis would be something a consequentialist could in fact be quite outraged about.
Incidentally,
Compared to other events of the time, piddling for human "utility."
...it seems self-evident to me that this is not in any way an interesting or meaningful comparison to ask people to make (ETA: in light of the above, anyway). It's "good" rhetoric but seems to be abysmal rationality; it's a "there are starving children in Africa, eat your peas" argument.
That being a large portion of academia, this presents at least a partial argument for the present state of affairs wrt academia being publicly funded.
It seems to me that the extent to which B C D E will be able to get more money is to some extent dependent on their ability to plausibly precommit to rejecting an "unfair" deal... and possibly their ability to plausibly precommit to accepting a "fair" one.
Emphasis on "plausibly" and "PIRATES."
At minimum, if they can plausibly precommit to things, I'd expect at the very least CDE to precommit to tossing A B overboard no matter what is offered and splitting the pot three ways. There are quite possibly better commitments to make even than this.