Ah, I see now. Still, you see my point. Apparently, philosophers themselves do not see any question as laid to rest in any sense of the phrase. THAT is the problem here. If anything can be brought up for debate and any idea considered worthy regardless of its status in other areas of inquiry (such as resolved problems in the sciences), how could honest consensus ever be established? It can't, except thru fiat (the victory of "schools of thought" through mere agglomeration). All that is (I think) the reason behind the rejection of the 5-year rule you mentioned.

As the old joke goes: the physicist needs a lab and tons of equipment; the mathematician needs only a chalkboard, chalk and eraser; the philosopher doesn't even need the eraser. :)

By negation perhaps :p. I'm sorry, philosophy has many functions, but "establishing the bounds of reality" is something it has rarely (if ever) actually done.

That's probably true, but unless you're going to suggest (ha!) that philosophy fills that role, I fail to see how that's relevant to the matter at hand. I imagine neuroscientists (of which I am not one) are probably far more capable of speculating about such things than philosophers.

Nah, I wasn't taking it personally, though my tone did come off that way (for which I apologize). Thanks for the clarifying post though. I later read another post of yours (farther down the thread) to which I responded much more positively (without realizing it was you again). Strange how that works sometimes.

Having said that, you have yet to address the second part of your thesis: "Most academics don't write with the goal to let others learn, they write to impress fellow academicians from the same field.

While I freely acknowledge (but didn't do such a good job of pointing this out) that papers can be written badly, it does not necessarily follow (nor is the idea rooted in fact) that this is because they are "trying to impress their fellow academicians". And this is especially not true in the physical sciences (if for no other reason than that the format for those publications rarely, if ever, supports that goal). My reference to the humanities was to distinguish between it and its complement at the outset.

Ach. My english teacher would have backhanded me for that one :p - my bad.

Ok, I have to ask - exactly where do you folks find these alleged incompetents? And why do you not do anything about it? There are department chairs, instructor evaluations and a host of other venues to complain about this. Clearly, these schools are such mountains of rot that they are accumulating these bad seed professors like flies on garbage. I appear to have been extraordinarily lucky in my choice of schools - something I'm more and more grateful for every time I see a post like yours. This isn't high school we're talking about - where the teachers are generally authoritarian pricks. This is college - where you can call out the bastards if they're wrong and they have to sit there and fucking take it!

Wish I had mod points! Excellent summary. Thread over I'd say :)

Because (and I'm not being snarky here), philosophy is not bound by the laws of reality. The Sokal hoax (full snark ahead) should have destroyed any remaining illusions of that, eh? All that means is that philosophers are free to dredge up any old idea and treat it as if it were a matter of debate. For instance, you still have dualism-monism debates, when neuroscience has long transcended those feeble paradigms. Examples abound.

In other news, 99.99% of ACs are full of shit. See how easy it is to puke meaningless statistics. Next time, try to give it at least as much thought as you'd give to deciding on what to have for dinner.

Uh uh! When I imagined the scene where he drowns that poor girl, there was a giant, glowing, purple duck in the background, staring sadly at the spectacle (and quacking mournfully at the vicissitudes of fate =(). That oughta make me at least 2% correct =).

/Inane banter aside, I obviously agree with you =)

Let me guess - you're not in the physical sciences (NTTAWWT - just bugs me when even academics aren't upfront about their field, choosing instead to say "academia". If I were in a worse mood, I'd almost suspect it's a camouflage mechanism =)). What you allude to is the one thing that I absolutely hated about the sole philosophy class I took. We talked endlessly about history - i.e. who had what ideas and when. The actual ideas are (for some reason) so revered that incorrect ones are still discussed as if they had merit (again, just a different opinion). Of course, I shouldn't be taken too seriously in this regard - perhaps they actually knock down bad ideas in higher-level courses? Just seems like a waste of paper when certain ideas have been shown (empirically) to be rubbish, to consider "opposing viewpoints" with such delicacy. *shrug*

And you say this from your exhaustive experience in ... every single academic field :p ? Try not to make such blanket statements - they give you away as a drive-by poster. If you've ever read a single paper in the physical sciences (also a part of "academics"), you will see how ridiculous your statement is. You may have a point in the (imo overly verbose) humanities, but since I have little personal experience with it, I will refrain from stating such a thing categorically - something you might want to think about yourself.

You're probably right :p (even though the top10 appellation is a matter of context).

Speaking from experience, here are the 3 extremes: If you want great teachers at the undergrad level, go to a good (but not top) liberal arts school with no research program. If you want excellent peers who can challenge you and who you can learn from, go to a big research/liberal arts school (doesn't matter which one, they both attract the kind of people you might find intellectually stimulating). If you want research experience, go to a big research school.

In reality, you'll want to balance these three aspects (according to your own needs - level of independence, motivation, interests) to pick the "top10" school for you.

Also, regarding parent's main point - no, I have not found "95%" of teachers (imo you quotified the wrong thing :p) in physics and math like that. Did my undergrad in physics at a relatively obscure midwestern liberal arts school - excellent teachers, in every sense of the word. Piss-poor peers (hey, it rhymes!). Doing my PhD at a huge-ass top-tier school on the west coast. Again, excellent teachers. I have found time and again that teachers in lower level courses frequently get rated much higher than those in upper level courses when the student body is mediocre and vice-versa when the student body is what an average person would call "overachieving" (whatever that means *eyeroll*). Parent appears to have been singularly unlucky (or non-objective - I don't really know him/her) to have found such a high percentage of mediocre teachers.

That's fascinating. I wonder why that is though. Perhaps on some basic level, weather patterns are like the classic Feigenbaum diagram - well-defined cycles in some regions and utter, battshiat chaos in others. I wonder you happen to live smack in the middle of a chaotic window :). *sigh* I wouldn't mind that at all.

Levity aside, I'm definitely gonna look into whether this sort of glaring difference in predictability has been studied (it surely must have been!).

Since I would intuitively expect such regions of order/chaos to be functions of phase space variables (rather than merely geographic location), I suspect (a wild speculation I agree) these regions might actually be moving around so that if you looked at historical records for Cambridge, the degree of regularity of the weather changes over time.

LOL. I'd buy that on a bumper sticker ;)

I agree (about my last line). I completely forgot about the unwilling victims in this tragedy - the poor kids of these idiot parents. As if I wasn't mad enough already :( *retch*