And now for something completely different ..

[James Coplin]

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… ;)



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.



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.



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.



James R. Coplin



*From:* music-bar-bounces at lists.music-bar.org [mailto:
music-bar-bounces at lists.music-bar.org] *On Behalf Of *Peter Korsten
*Sent:* Friday, August 03, 2012 3:36 AM
*To:* Music-bar
*Subject:* Re: And now for something completely different ..



Um, James...

2012/8/2 James Coplin <james at ticalun.net>

The other thing to consider is the massive Eurocentric assumption of the
author.  Even if there was a massive conspiracy of Western hegemons
controlling academic research (one that I as a Western academic would of
course fall under and therefore my observations are of course suspect and
in keeping with the power structure's aims), there are lots of other
people not in the Western world who are also smart academics.


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.


 In fact,
there are far more of them in the non-Western world than in the Western
world.  If 1% of the population on average is of genius level IQ, the
Chinese have more geniuses than we have people in the US.  India is right
behind them.


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.

However, both the Chinese and the Indians should have more geniuses than
North America and Europe combined.

- Peter
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