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> the other 99.99% of academics should reconsider their presentation style; the reason their papers don't spark such arguments is that they've given up on educa
by ilya_m 2y ago
> the other 99.99% of academics should reconsider their presentation style; the reason their papers don't spark such arguments is that they've given up on educating the ignorant the way scott does
I don't see how the second part of the sentence implies the first. The primary role of academics is generating new knowledge. Educating the ignorant is a public service that few are willing or able to do. Scott Aaronson deserves a lot of credit for dedicating so much energy to his blog, it does not mean that 99.99% of his peers are wrong in focusing on advancing the frontier of knowledge.
- kragen 2y agoit's a public service that nobody else is able to do, and if nobody does it, the result is catastrophe: legislating the value of pi, creationism in schools, prohibitions on glassware and borax and teflon, lynchings for witchcraft, acid attacks on girls for attending school, the ransomware pandemic, boko haram, the cambodian mass executions for wearing glasses or speaking french i won't go so far as to claim that this imposes an individual moral obligation on every academic—that would be a variety of consquentialism with many consequences i shrink from—but at least it would be good to figure out how to demarginalize what scott is doing