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Daily Archives: March 10, 2014

Science is Aesceticism

10 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by bwkeller in research, science

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Tags

funding, grad school, society

I think a lot of the
sturm
und
drang about the current state of science and
academia in general comes from the fact that the reality of science today is
wildly different than what we are told for our entire lives (duh). Society,
education, whatever, says that being a scientist is like being a
priest/priestess. We think what we will do is discover arcane secrets,
entering into a class divorced from the world through its connection to deeper
truths. The reality of being a scientist is that you are a monk. As much as
the job involves the priestly craft of divining ultimate reality, what it
really involves, day to day, is aesceticism. To be a scientist in the age of
austerity is to take a vow of poverty, promising to forgo the worldly
posessions of the middle class that could easily have been yours years ago. It
means self-mortification, flagellating yourself daily with the scourge of
stress, self-doubt, and overwork. So we have a generation of young scientists
who don’t realize that the great ritual at the altar of Truth has a sacrifice
at its centre, and that sacrifice is you.

March 2014
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Ben’s Tweets

  • RT @OJ_Astro: A blog post by physicist Syksy Räsänen (@SyksyRasanen), who has published with us twice, about why overlay journals are an an… 1 day ago
  • RT @JokesAstro: If the Islands of Hawaii were very massive stars, Kauai would be going supernova soon. https://t.co/NEboP6FRWd 2 days ago
  • RT @AnicaSeelie: @gauravmunjal Imagine if there was a duck but it had human ears 2 days ago
  • RT @jfmclaughlin92: Friendly reminder that if you're at a public university, your institutional email can be searched basically whenever. B… 2 days ago
  • @rcrain_astro Academia has a lot of problems. Precarious employment, massive overworking of junior researchers, poo… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 days ago

Nicholas’ Tweet’s

  • RT @michielsdj: New paper! Retrieval-augmented models are expensive. Make them faster by partially pre-computing passage representations. W… 5 days ago
  • RT @michielsdj: New paper! We propose FiDO, an improved version of Fusion-in-Decoder with faster inference and better performance. Work don… 1 month ago
  • @_julianmichael_ @LukeZettlemoyer @emilymbender @nlpnoah @ssshanest Congrats! 5 months ago
  • RT @michielsdj: Now accepted to @iclr_conf! 🎆 1 year ago
  • @mjskay Yeah, I feel a major point people were missing is that an endless spiral into the drain is actually the perfect visual metaphor. 1 year ago

Top Posts

  • Basic Data Plotting with Matplotlib Part 3: Histograms

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Blogs We Read

  • Bad Astronomy
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  • Rationally Speaking
  • Terry Project (UBC)

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