By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health<\/p>\n
Naked Capitalism as an island of good sense in a heaving sea of nonsense.\u00a0 We have all learned much from the regular team of contributors \u2013 Yves Smith, Lambert Strether, Nick Corbishley, Conor Gallagher, plus \u201choisted\u201d comments from IM Doc and others \u2013 but just as essential to the vitality of NC is the Commentariat Essay-in-Parts.<\/p>\n
If you are already persuaded that Naked Capitalism is a worthy cause but you have not yet gotten around to donate, please first go to the Tip Jar to give your support and then return!<\/p>\n
My first contribution to NC was a review of The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM)\u00a0 The comments addressing EBM led us to a continuing discussion here of the corruption of Biomedical Science into what I have called \u201cBiomedicine.\u201d \u00a0From Ghost in the Machine:<\/p>\n
I worked in biomedical research as a grad student, then post doc, then research faculty for just shy of 20 years. When I left, more colleagues were entering into agreements with companies for contract research. With NDAs of course. Most knew it was bad, but it was a matter of career survival. Also, the stories I heard from people coming back to academia from Pharma research. Ugh (A common question following the relaying of disappointing results to management: \u201cWhy are your experiments not working?\u201d)<\/p>\n
Their experiments are not working because scientists of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) generally cannot distinguish between Biomedical Science, the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and their performance as adjuncts of Biomedicine (Big Medicine plus Big Pharma).\u00a0 Those NDA\u2019s (Nondisclosure Agreements) are the tell. \u00a0A scientist has completely lost the plot when the research becomes \u201cprivate intellectual property.\u201d<\/p>\n
The PMC was introduced to us by the late, great Barbara Ehrenreich (PhD in Cell Biology, Rockefeller University nearly fifty years ago and their growth as a \u201cclass\u201d is described perfectly in Virtue Hoarders: the Case Against the Professional Managerial Class by Catherine Liu, a \u201clittle book\u201d that repays re-reading. \u00a0The Commentariat Essay-in-Parts began with GG:<\/p>\n
\u201cPerformative\u201d is a key word throughout. The PMC isn\u2019t so different from the aristocracy of feudal times, which anxiously validated their own position in society via performative means: \u201ccorrect\u201d dress, speech, comportment, etc\u2026.Today, you must perform at work and in life to justify your meritocratic privilege: from using the correct corporate buzzwords and methodologies du jour to having the correct progressive-yet-not-radical liberal beliefs on social issues\u2026Your living itself is a performance. From how you raise your child to what leisure activities you do and how you present these performances to your audience via social media.<\/p>\n
This Essay-in-Parts continued with PlutoniumKun, Michael Fiorillo, Thuto, Carla, ElViejito, Ignacio, and others on wokism and class:<\/p>\n
I would add that my own personal theory of the rise of \u2018wokism\u2019 is that as the PMC now has more children trying to enter the PMC than there are jobs, there is now a frantic competition within that class to focus on insider class markers..<\/p>\n
Wokism is a way to separate and elevate yourself, culturally and in terms of age, and advertise your special grooming, outlook and style of moral vanity.<\/p>\n
[T]here is a technological dimension to this. First AI came for the factory floor jobs and the PMC were put by the ownership class at the coalface of culling labour as the proverbial bearers of bad news. Now the technological shift is thinning the ranks of the PMC\u2026with the result that the anxiety the members of this class feels about the future and the creeping precarity they thought would never encroach on their \u201csecure\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n
The remainder of the PMC, their children now working as baristas and Amazon warehouse hustlers, may turn their gaze once again to cutting the ruling class down to size.<\/p>\n
I think that \u201ccaste\u201d is more precise than class. I have seen very few but good examples of company managers, general managers, that didn\u2019t adjust to the PMC description.<\/p>\n
This Commentariat Essay-in-Parts on our current predicament that was as lucid as anything anywhere on how being woke has obliterated any appreciation of class as the analytic construct that explains our world, despite the aversion of the PMC to the very notion of class.<\/p>\n
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The modern distemper exemplified by Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin was the subject of a recent book that raised hackles among the usual suspects: Hannah Arendt & Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity by Kei Heruta of Aarhus University.\u00a0 I was reminded of this recently when someone in The Spectator (naturally) started a piece with importance of Isaiah Berlin and his \u201cnegative freedom\u201d that allows people to do as they please by justifying their social and political prejudices.<\/p>\n
DJG, Reality Czar started the off the Commentariat Essay-in-Parts with:<\/p>\n
Hannah Arendt makes one change one\u2019s views. Maybe that was Berlin\u2019s \u201cissue.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arendt is remarkable for retaining a certain affection (if that\u2019s the word) for humankind and for human needs. (Albert Camus, another nearly indispensable writer, shows the same affection for this fallen race.)\u2026The Human Condition is worth reading\u2013at times, it gets complicated\u2026with many ideas in play: If I recall, there is wealth versus simply being rich, and work as opposed to labor. Among others.<\/p>\n
Some discussion followed about whether CIA fronts paid Berlin and Arendt.\u00a0 Granted proof of the matter, there is no doubt Isaiah Berlin, Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory and fellow of All Souls, knew the source of the money, as he lived his thoroughly connected life as a wit while Dr. Hannah Arendt lived by her wits as a sometime professor in US universities and on royalties.\u00a0 The Commentariat Essay-in-Parts continued with Rob Urie, Cat Burglar, LifeLongLib, and JBird4049:<\/p>\n
Both Arendt and Berlin were paid by the CIA to create their views.\u00a0 They could have refused the money.<\/p>\n
It is worth remembering that many of the CIA-adjacent intellectuals were ex-members of Marxist-Leninist groups, and veterans of bitter factional infighting\u2026they saw taking the money as a way of continuing that fight\u2026And the money must have been good, at a time when they felt few options existed.<\/p>\n
\u201cpaid by the CIA to create their views\u201d\u00a0 Or to write what they were going to write anyway. \u00a0If they did know who was paying them they were probably laughing all the way to the bank.<\/p>\n
Do not forget that the CIA did not advertise their support\u2026as much as one should not accept payment from the enemy, small things like food, clothing, and shelter especially for one\u2019s family can be very persuasive counterarguments.<\/p>\n
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Our Loss of Science in the 21st Century and How to Get It Back is a broad discussion of the work of Nancy Cartwright, who is one of the few modern philosophers who \u201cgets\u201d science, in the sense of what scientists and scientific workers actually do on a daily basis in professional lives (compared with a Bruno Latour, for example).\u00a0 As she notes: (1) There is no (one) scientific method, (2) Rigor is altogether the wrong notion as the sole virtue of science, and (3) The usual notion of objectivity \u2013 the correct application of pre-agreed procedures for pre-agreed ends \u2013 is not good enough for science.\u00a0 Science is messy and contingent, but when properly practiced it does lead to an approximation of truth, but only in matters that are amenable to a natural scientific approach.<\/p>\n
PlutoniumKun, Etrigan, funemployed, and others began the Commentariat Essay-in-Parts with:<\/p>\n
One key topic that\u2019s so often overlooked in science is just how radically different the perspective of different specialties can be, looking at the same problems.\u00a0 This can be healthy, but it can also throw hidden biases within the scientific method into stark contrast.\u00a0 Climate scientists, for example, often build in an assumption of linear climate processes, while geomorphologists are very familiar with evidence of extremely rapid and catastrophic climate changes within the Holocene \u2013 nobody who has studied lake sediment cores in northern climes can feel as relaxed about climate change as some physicists seem to be.<\/p>\n
I have talked with scientist and engineer friends about this a lot\u2026It has sometimes felt as if there is a large consensus\u2026that this resistance to complexity is an alien force coming from supervisors, organizations, managers, and below the highest levels people have to grouse in private but play along or else.<\/p>\n
As an intellectually inclined person born in the early 80\u2019s, I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that true spirit of scientific inquiry is about the best way a person of my generation could ensure that we would never sniff a penny of actual research funding, and never get the apprenticeship and mentorship experiences that are utterly essential to learning the craft.<\/p>\n
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Following PK here, it has always been clear that assumption of linear change in anything of the natural world is a fool\u2019s game.\u00a0 Are we seeing this with anthropogenic climate change\/global warming right now?\u00a0 Probably (linked here on August 23, 2024).\u00a0 Perhaps it\u2019s not just the weather, as a member of this community makes the case ahead of time once again.\u00a0 The Rev Kev and others:<\/p>\n
I am going out on a limb here and say that what really undercut science the past few years was when politicians weaponized \u201cscience\u201d and told us to trust it. And that meant that science became faith-based and if you did not believe the latest pronouncements, (masks are dangerous, if you get vaccinated you will never get sick, etc.) that you were almost an unbeliever.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Finally, another example of the NC Commentariat being ahead of the curve from our discussion of local effects of climate change as an approach to making climate change real to people.\u00a0 \u201cDriftwood Beach\u201d on Jekyll Island on the coast of Georgia is a popular tourist attraction.\u00a0 But these trees are not driftwood.\u00a0 They have been killed in situ by rising seawater on inundated land that was high ground forty years ago.\u00a0 One may doubt that this is due to rising sea level, but that is not the way to go.\u00a0 Clueless optimism is not a plan.<\/p>\n
As Eclair notes in the Commentariat Essay-in-Parts, local effects are everywhere for those who will pay attention:<\/p>\n
Chautauqua County New York, stretching from Lake Erie, south to the Pennsylvania border, covers four USDA Climate Zones. In the ten years since the 2012 zone list was published, each zone has bumped up into the next warmer zone. The two warmest zones run parallel to the shores of Lake Erie, always a prime area for grapes and cherries. The new zone there, 7a, eliminates the winter temps below zero degrees F. The Jamestown area has warmed from 5a in 1990, to 5b in 2012, to 6a in 2023. Last week, a conversation with an \u2018oldest resident\u2019 (94 and still going strong) family member, had them shaking their head and admitting that they just didn\u2019t know when to plant the tomatoes anymore:<\/p>\n
\u201cUsed to be we\u2019d put them in after Memorial Day, but now, the neighbors are planting them in a coupla\u2019 weeks earlier.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yet another member of this commentariat telling the truth as it exists on the ground, ahead of the experts, in clear prose that does not attack anyone or call anyone names.<\/p>\n
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The original promise of the internet was that information would become available to anyone with a connection.\u00a0 Despite its thorough crapification, this is still the promise.\u00a0 Justin Early in his book The Common Rule: Habits of for an Age of Distraction, notes that one way to handle it is to cultivate practices of media curation by pointing out that \u201cwe don\u2019t choose our stories as much as they choose us.\u00a0 Should we do nothing, someone else\u2019s stories will curate our lives for us.\u201d (quoted from Deep Reading by Rachel B. Griffis, Julie Ooms, and Rachel M. DeSmith Roberts).\u00a0 Maryanne Wolf in her Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, argues that \u201cthe way internet reading is designed assumes a distracted reader and thus provides few demands or opportunities for people truly to give themselves to a text and practice the kind of sustained attention required to \u2018[Take} on the perspectives and feeling of others.\u201d<\/p>\n
NC is the place where we can curate our approach to the world as part of a vivid community of equals, and the only way to keep this community thriving is to subscribe or contribute! As Rev Kev said, those snow leopards don\u2019t feed themselves. So give them a healthy meal via the Tip Jar. <\/p>\n
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