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Organized religion ordains priests to read the sacred texts (papers, theses, books) and then anoints them to be the only ones allowed to do ministry and theolog

by nimish 2y ago

Organized religion ordains priests to read the sacred texts (papers, theses, books) and then anoints them to be the only ones allowed to do ministry and theology. Then they fight among themselves to be allowed to get resources and rise up the ranks of the church. The analog is with forcing promising researchers to go through 5-10 years of thankless "training" to be granted a doctorate, so that they can be taken "seriously" by granting institutions, and have them fight among themselves so they can get resources and rise up the ranks of academia. It's the same institutional structure, not anything to do with the content, and this is by design since academia and the Church were one and the same centuries ago! Of course the idea that you don't need institutional approval to do something is alien to someone steeped in this worldview, but this is the news site for YC, most famous for telling people no, in fact you don't have to waste a decade working before doing something interesting.

MattPalmer1086 2y ago
Hmmm. You are describing pretty much any human organisation where people have to compete for limited resources. I disagree strongly with describing learning what we currently know (or think we know) as reading sacred texts and being annointed as the only ones allowed to perform scientific research. Scientific texts are very much not sacred. Yes, there are orthodoxies which most people believe, and if you are going to go against them, you better have damn good evidence. But you absolutely can challenge them, which is how science progresses and is the key difference between religion and science. Since I just had a paper published in a computer science academic journal last year, (and I'm very much not an academic), I also challenge the idea that only people within the "priesthood" are allowed to practice the discipline. Obviously this will be rarer than people whose day job is doing this, but there is no license to practice science required from an anointed priesthood. So forgive me if I really push back on that analogy, as it obscures the absolutely critical differences between them.

by nimish 2y ago

MattPalmer1086 2y ago

Hmmm. You are describing pretty much any human organisation where people have to compete for limited resources. I disagree strongly with describing learning what we currently know (or think we know) as reading sacred texts and being annointed as the only ones allowed to perform scientific research. Scientific texts are very much not sacred. Yes, there are orthodoxies which most people believe, and if you are going to go against them, you better have damn good evidence. But you absolutely can challenge them, which is how science progresses and is the key difference between religion and science. Since I just had a paper published in a computer science academic journal last year, (and I'm very much not an academic), I also challenge the idea that only people within the "priesthood" are allowed to practice the discipline. Obviously this will be rarer than people whose day job is doing this, but there is no license to practice science required from an anointed priesthood. So forgive me if I really push back on that analogy, as it obscures the absolutely critical differences between them.