Adequate mental conditioning ends with inability to think.
Adequate social conditioning ends with inability to speak?
Haha
2026-05-28 at 11:07 pm
My approach to the Ivory tower
Since I was a child, business done by ordinary people has seemed trivial. I thought, all of us can do it, and it is not something to be considered hard. At 43, I still have this view.
But around the age of 16, I developed an appreciation for cultural anthropology. This arose from recognising that communication is hard, and that its hardness is structural, but rarely impermeable. In college, I considered a traditionally academic life, but I found my peers and professors all to be ... insufficiently ivory ... too commercial, perhaps. So, I made a point to practice anthropology by living with them, while attempting to be ... ivory enough ... in my spare time. It was a period which I have always been grateful for. I considered stopping halfway through the program, but decided to finish it for convenience.
Then around 22 I turned my attention to collecting commercial experience, which I viewed as necessary, in order to be credible in such society, even though I did not find such society intrinsically interesting. I lived among them until I was around 39, taking only about a year out of 17 to be uncommerciably academic.
Now, attempting a decade of academia, I am not sure that I do a clever thing. But I am rarely sure that any of the things I do, are clever. TBF mainly they are simply interesting.
2026-05-27 at 6:46 pm
the university and its daemons
And AI will increasingly become good enough to facilitate university level discourse, coaching, and grooming. This was always going to happen. Just a question of when. The university as a machine proceeds, with its goals, though methods may change. Maybe goals will change as industry changes also.
Top universities are fundamentally about political laning, not knowledge, anyway, though the two are related. Only one of the two pays, so the payers have it.
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