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The question that most puzzles me is who gives grants to these obviously nonsense humanities academics to do their work and why? I guess this is a pretty cheap
by narrator 6y ago
The question that most puzzles me is who gives grants to these obviously nonsense humanities academics to do their work and why? I guess this is a pretty cheap area of research to fund, but why bother at all?
I imagine there's a delusional rich person, or academic running a foundation who wants his confirmation biases satisfied. I figure there's got to be more to it than that though.
- tristor 6y ago> The question that most puzzles me is who gives grants to these obviously nonsense humanities academics to do their work and why? I guess this is a pretty cheap area of research to fund, but why bother at all? For the same reason that academics spent a lot of time researching tobacco and producing results saying that it wasn't harmful, until that shifted, there are some fields which exist primarily because they're predominantly politically motivated and funded on that basis. It's not always an easy ride, but if you follow the money, it's very rarely altruistic how anything gets funded in any aspect of life, perhaps least of all in academia, which is one reason why rigor is so much lower outside the hard sciences where it's harder to unambiguously disprove BS. As my initial example points out though, the hard sciences are also not immune to money influence.
- Fellshard 6y agoMoney influence, but also the allure of power.