This will be a very short post, but sometimes I feel that saying things, even small things, can force us to treat them with adequate weight when looked upon in the future.
In my recent consumption of literature, I've been already exposed to a dazzling array of concepts ranging from the sensible to the insane. Academics are extremely creative people (contrary to the popular perception of the stuffy old professor living in the past), and the results can be absolutely mind-boggling.
In many of the ideas I've run across thus far, there is always a little bit of an air of "ad-hoc"-ishness about them. There is a particular problem or set of problems, and we develop solutions to address many of them in as succinctly a manner as possible.
The result often times is a feeling that these solutions will only address these particular problems, and when other related problems crop up the presented solution will fail to account for them appropriately. Fundamentally, it is an issue of scalability.
What's more, we try to give our solutions a theoretical basis so that we can more adequately defend them against charges, and hopefully allow us to use this theoretical grounding to address the aforementioned problems yet to be conceived.
The results we create are what I've termed "Brilliant Bullshit," creative and intriguing answers to difficult questions seemingly dragged out of mid-air that may or may not account for even slight modifications or additions to the original set of problems the solution was intended to address.
In my recent consumption of literature, I've been already exposed to a dazzling array of concepts ranging from the sensible to the insane. Academics are extremely creative people (contrary to the popular perception of the stuffy old professor living in the past), and the results can be absolutely mind-boggling.
In many of the ideas I've run across thus far, there is always a little bit of an air of "ad-hoc"-ishness about them. There is a particular problem or set of problems, and we develop solutions to address many of them in as succinctly a manner as possible.
The result often times is a feeling that these solutions will only address these particular problems, and when other related problems crop up the presented solution will fail to account for them appropriately. Fundamentally, it is an issue of scalability.
What's more, we try to give our solutions a theoretical basis so that we can more adequately defend them against charges, and hopefully allow us to use this theoretical grounding to address the aforementioned problems yet to be conceived.
The results we create are what I've termed "Brilliant Bullshit," creative and intriguing answers to difficult questions seemingly dragged out of mid-air that may or may not account for even slight modifications or additions to the original set of problems the solution was intended to address.
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