| I'll say it slowly point-by-point so you understand: Point 1: Fuck your "edification".
Grandma doesn't want to be "edified".
She wants to not starve. She isn't
starving because of fertilized crops. We have
fertilizer entirely because of the
Haber Process. That's REAL science.
Also known as "deployment", "engineering"
and "application". Point 2: The point of theory is to make
application more efficient. IE Tesla's
claim that knowing theory could have saved
Edison 90% of his labour. That's the ONLY
value it has, and the ONLY thing that makes
it different to eg Lesbian Poetry as a
discipline of study. But Lesbian Poetry sure
does "edify" Grandma. Point 3: Theory comes from application,
not from the fever dreams of the
publish-or-perish crowd. You get math
from trying to deploy a seige engine,
not the other way around. So real science
is application, theory is just documentation. Point 4: We don't force everybody in science
to go straight for application, because some
speculative theory may turn out to be useful
later, the way finite field arithmetic turned
out to be useful for RAID6 arrays. Most theory
without application turns out to be junk but
we could justify it having some salvage value
as insurance. Point 5: The publish-or-perish crowd have got
Point 4 backwards. That's your crap ideology too.
They treat theoretical junk as having the only
value and they give you more credit if you
write about something than if you build the
fucking thing. You've heard about the "idea guy"
who just wants a techie to build his "vision"?
In academia, that cocksucker is the one who's
valued. |