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--></style></head><body lang="EN-US" link="blue" vlink="purple"><div class="WordSection1"><p class="MsoNormal"><font color="#1f497d" face="Calibri"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">You assume I meant Americans, I meant my army of clones in my underground bunker I have been working on for years. There are more Chinese geniuses then I have clones. Of course, since they are clones of me, that would go without saying… ;)</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font color="#1f497d" face="Calibri"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"> </span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font color="#1f497d" face="Calibri"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">I will agree with Jay here on one point (not a point he’s deliberately raised in this discussion but one he has at other times), there are gatekeepers and limits to the freedom of academic research due to built-in assumptions in Western science and socioeconomics that definitely hem in and limit certain avenues of inquiry. These aren’t any sort of a conspiracy, but a manifestation at an institutional level of certain cultural biases based on Western science. It all comes down to funding. I need money to support my research and unless I can manage to come up with 10s of thousands of dollars out of pocket, I need someone else to give it to me. I also need over a period of many years so I can’t just get lucky once and convince someone. I need to convince a whole host of foundations and institutions again and again to give me money. Add to this the fact that I am a historian, a relatively cheap field to fund. My needs are basic – airfare and lodging around the world while I conduct research. If I am in the sciences, my financial needs are extreme to say the least. Without funding, research simply becomes impossible in many fields. </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font color="#1f497d" face="Calibri"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"> </span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font color="#1f497d" face="Calibri"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">So how does this limit research? It is clear on an individual level that this could cause problems but how does this interact at a field level? Let’s take Jay’s case. Suppose I want to look into in a serious scholarly way the connection between UFOs, Egypt, and ancient Mayans. First off, I would never get in to grad school with this as a topic. No advisor would touch me as it would put their career in an awkward place. Suppose instead I came in as a Mexican history specialist focusing on ancient Mayan religion. No problem, I’m in. Now I want to start work on my real project UFOs. Again, my advisor and committee would squash me like a bug. On the one hand, this can be seen as intuitional narrow-mindedness – Jay’s stuck in the box. It however a reasonable response on their part. There is no evidence – only the most tenuous connection in architectures with no linguistic or cultural similarities. My response on a graduate student’s committee or as an advisor would be the same. So now I can either leave the academy and pursue my theories on my own or suck it up and get my PhD in some aspect that still has legitimacy in the eyes of the academy and wait until I have tenure to do my real work. If I leave the academy, I am instantly and fairly permanently cut off from a whole host of infrastructure that is designed to support research. Even beyond the financial aspects, this is a killer. So, now I have achieved tenure (an almost impossible thing any longer but that’s pretend) and I am really going to get to work on this UFO thing. Now I need to convince all these foundations to give me money to research UFOs. I can tell you now it isn’t going to happen. The same thing would happen if you were to say you wanted to research the reality of witchcraft, not as a folk religion, but as an alternate physics underlying the physical universe. It is a reasonable question in many ways. However, you won’t get enough funding to anything.</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font color="#1f497d" face="Calibri"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"> </span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font color="#1f497d" face="Calibri"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">Basically, Western sciences are built on an intrinsic set of assumptions that limit what sorts of questions you can reasonably ask and which avenues of research are open. </span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font color="#1f497d" face="Calibri"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"> </span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font color="#1f497d" face="Calibri"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">James R. Coplin</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font color="#1f497d" face="Calibri"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"> </span></font></p><div style="border:none;border-left:solid blue 1.5pt;padding:0in 0in 0in 4.0pt">
<div><div style="border:none;border-top:solid #b5c4df 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in"><p class="MsoNormal"><b><font face="Tahoma"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif";font-weight:bold">From:</span></font></b><font face="Tahoma"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif""> <a href="mailto:music-bar-bounces@lists.music-bar.org">music-bar-bounces@lists.music-bar.org</a> [mailto:<a href="mailto:music-bar-bounces@lists.music-bar.org">music-bar-bounces@lists.music-bar.org</a>] <b><span style="font-weight:bold">On Behalf Of </span></b>Peter Korsten<br>
<b><span style="font-weight:bold">Sent:</span></b> Friday, August 03, 2012 3:36 AM<br><b><span style="font-weight:bold">To:</span></b> Music-bar<br><b><span style="font-weight:bold">Subject:</span></b> Re: And now for something completely different ..</span></font></p>
</div></div><p class="MsoNormal"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"> </span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">Um, James...</span></font></p>
<div><p class="MsoNormal"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">2012/8/2 James Coplin <<a href="mailto:james@ticalun.net" target="_blank">james@ticalun.net</a>></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal">
<font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">The other thing to consider is the massive Eurocentric assumption of the<br>author. Even if there was a massive conspiracy of Western hegemons<br>controlling academic research (one that I as a Western academic would of<br>
course fall under and therefore my observations are of course suspect and<br>in keeping with the power structure's aims), there are lots of other<br>people not in the Western world who are also smart academics. </span></font></p>
<div><p class="MsoNormal"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><br>That goes without saying, of course. Presuming that IQ (for what that measure is worth) is distributed equally over the globe, but that's a topic I won't even tough with a ten foot pole.<br>
</span></font></p></div><blockquote style="border:none;border-left:solid #cccccc 1.0pt;padding:0in 0in 0in 6.0pt;margin-left:4.8pt;margin-right:0in"><p class="MsoNormal"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"> In fact,<br>
there are far more of them in the non-Western world than in the Western<br>world. If 1% of the population on average is of genius level IQ, the<br>Chinese have more geniuses than we have people in the US. India is right<br>
behind them.</span></font></p></blockquote></div><p class="MsoNormal"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><br>And here you get your maths mixed up. If 1% of the population would be genius (it's more likely to be 0.1% to 0.01%), then the Chinese would have about 12 million geniuses. There are about 300 million people living in the USA. 25% of the population would have to be a genius before you even reach the break-even point.<br>
<br>However, both the Chinese and the Indians should have more geniuses than North America and Europe combined.<br><br>- Peter</span></font></p></div></div></body></html>