"the hardest thing in this world is to live in it"
Classes and coursework.
I’m reading through a pile of documents several inches thick, for a certain project I’m working on, and I came across the most baffling term: postmodern terrorists.
The hell? Are they sitting around discussing Derrida until the very thought of post-structuralism causes them to strap a bomb on?
I’m very tired. All humour aside, I only got about two hours of sleep last night, and right now it doesn’t look like I’m going to get any tonight. I’m trying to push through the tired, but one of the problems of this deep tired is that my brain gets stuck. Right now I’m stuck on the idea of expectations, and specifically how badly I react when people say something like “I’ve heard so many good things about you!” or “so’n’so’s really been talking about you a lot, you’re apparently awesome” and so forth.
Believe me, if you ever want to see me react badly, that’s a good way to go. I just… I get very flustered, but also uncomfortable and awkward. And my brain apparently decided to stick here, tonight.
I think, however, there’s a very reasonable rationale behind the discomfort. The more people praise you to others, the more chance you have to fall flat on your face, fail, be a disappointment. I think I’m simply afraid that people are going to talk me up so much, there’s no way I’ll be able to live up to the expectations.
I don’t like failing. I had a marriage dissolve because of mismatched expectations, and I don’t want the same thing to happen professionally.
I am full of awesome. Why?
Well, today, I lost my boss. We all lost my boss, really. It was very distressing.
You see, we had this small thing called a Nor’easter that covered us in several feet of snow. It disrupted traveling. Including the traveling said boss was doing. I spoke with him for less than 2 minutes at 2pm EST, and he’d said he’d call me back… and then nothing. Concerning.
I knew what airline he was flying, and looking at their scheduled flight times, he should have been on the ground hours ago. Very unlike him to vanish like that. I was, frankly, getting a touch worried. Was he sleeping under a seat in an airport somewhere, exhausted and forgotten? Had he wandered onto the tarmac by mistake, or worse – been captured by neocons in some debate, with no end in sight?
It was around then, chewing idly on my pen, that I realized there was another button to click on the flight schedule. The actual schedule. Accounting for time zone shifts, I quickly started eliminating flights – he couldn’t have been on them, he was on the ground, on the phone with me. I found the first flight he would have been able to get on, with the restriction of being free to talk to me at 2pm EST. It had landed about an hour before, which meant that he should have been free of the airplane, and their archaic and inane cell phone rules.
And this is why I am full of awesome. Because I actually, accurately reverse engineered, from less than a 2 minute phone call, the most likely flights for my boss to be on… and I was right.
I was back at Wikipedia’s bioethics “talk” page this evening, looking for a quote someone had made about secular bioethicists being baby eating commies (or somesuch, it wasn’t that extreme, but only barely), and got to wondering if I am close enough to the discipline that I would be considered, by Wikipedia guidelines, to have a conflict of interest. So I asked Michael what he thought. His answer? I think you have too much valid information. Sadly, according to the CoI guidelines, he’s probably right and I probably do.
This is probably best for my blood pressure, though.
It does lead to an interesting question, though. How can Wikipedia be a place where experts contribute to the discussion with lay people, when experts are not allowed to participate in the creation of articles, because they have conflicts of interest by being in the field? Of course, in the CoI guidelines, they say that, for example, an expert on climate change is welcome to contribute to articles on that subject, even if that editor is deeply committed to it. However, it also specifically says that if you work with the people or institutions being talked about, you should probably not work on the page.
It might not be an issue if it were something like gardening, but bioethics is controversial. Just take a look at the talk page! Although it hasn’t been edited for a few years, it’s clear that the people discussing it are pretty divided.
And on top of it, as Crooked Timber noted a few weeks ago, you get into a situation where the expert does know more than the lay person, yet by Wikiepedia rules you have to keep both opinions there – and the laity has as much say as the expert. Don’t we have experts for a reason, though? I agree that they should be more accessible, but aren’t we doing everyone a disservice when we give the 17 year old high school student the same credence and weight of word as we give the person who’s been an expert in their field for 30 years?
The Scientist has a neat article on Hollywood’s take on heredity and genomics, going through a quick review of movies dealing with the potential of human nature and science – with science almost always unleashing the beast and the bad. In and of itself, it’s an interesting list of movies, and an interesting question: why does science fiction always portray a rather dystopic future, especially when it comes to genomic modifications? The technology is almost always portrayed as possible, but morally problematic.
I answered this question, briefly, a few years back, arguing that we weren’t afraid of the future but the now. It looks like another stab has been taken at explaining it, and this one is a book talking about the genome in popular culture, and the almost spiritual tone scientists use to describe the genome. This would bring about interesting conflict – we have a pretty embedded notion that we should not profane the holy, and wouldn’t manipulation of the holy be the ultimate in profane, to move it away from what is intrinsically holy?
I’d like to read this, it sounds interesting. But I’m also a touch sad – this is very similar to a project Phillip (Thurtle, my former adviser) was working on the last year or so I was at the University of Washington. To my knowledge, his book hasn’t been published yet, and it would have been nice to see him receive groundbreaking credit for something that he’s been working on, both alone and with his students, for several years.