Knowledge comes from practice. Humans always did things first before they gained the knowledge. Think of apprenticeship and the natural sciences for example.
What I have a big issue with is today’s notion that application follows knowledge. A top down approach where academia is isolated from the feedback of the real world. What the hell do I mean by that?
A business or an artist goes bust if they do not perform well, they have direct risks attached to their work. While we can produce ‘knowledge’ (institutional knowledge), new (made up) economic theories, new (un-replicable) psychological explanations and so on, without any apparent problem. The natural selective feedback is missing. Academia is gamified, most researchers know they could be doing more useful research, yet their grants and prospects of publications don’t let them.
So when I hear reason and understanding casually thrown around, I smell scientism (the marketing of science, science bullshit if you will) and not actual science. Because no peer review will be able to overrule what time has proven in the real world. And traditions are such things that endured. Usually someone realizes and writes another paper, disproving the previous one, advancing science.
Don’t get me wrong, there are and were many unambiguously bad traditions by modern standards, and I’m sure there will be more. But we, the people are the evolutionary filter of traditions. We decide which ones are the fit ones, which ones of the ones we inherited will we pass down and which to banish into history.
Knowledge comes from practice. Humans always did things first before they gained the knowledge. Think of apprenticeship and the natural sciences for example.
What I have a big issue with is today’s notion that application follows knowledge. A top down approach where academia is isolated from the feedback of the real world. What the hell do I mean by that?
A business or an artist goes bust if they do not perform well, they have direct risks attached to their work. While we can produce ‘knowledge’ (institutional knowledge), new (made up) economic theories, new (un-replicable) psychological explanations and so on, without any apparent problem. The natural selective feedback is missing. Academia is gamified, most researchers know they could be doing more useful research, yet their grants and prospects of publications don’t let them.
So when I hear reason and understanding casually thrown around, I smell scientism (the marketing of science, science bullshit if you will) and not actual science. Because no peer review will be able to overrule what time has proven in the real world. And traditions are such things that endured. Usually someone realizes and writes another paper, disproving the previous one, advancing science.
Don’t get me wrong, there are and were many unambiguously bad traditions by modern standards, and I’m sure there will be more. But we, the people are the evolutionary filter of traditions. We decide which ones are the fit ones, which ones of the ones we inherited will we pass down and which to banish into history.
Traditions also make it harder to change problematic practices despite sufficient knowledge.