I was reminded of something I'd bookmarked a long, long time ago, about an elaborate hoax that Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at NYU, had done...and it reminds me of an ongoing debate about humanities and the sciences (and to an extent, social sciences also fall in this category), the latest discussion of which I saw on the New York Times.
Another take on the Social Text affair is here.
In the same vein, I also found the following.
The Post-Modernism Generator
The Computer Science Paper Generator
There are two things lately that have lead me to think about this.
One is that I see some field grade officers who have the technical skills in one or more disciplines, but utterly lack the intellectual underpinnings of why they do what they do. Those who can only visualize according to their own models are, from my own observations of general staffs over the last few years, not very much goddamn value added to their organizations.
The other is my coursework towards a Ph.D., which is challenging, to say the least, but makes me wonder how we can make detailed study and analysis appealing enough (or at the very least, accessible) so that its knowledge is part of the public memory. I don't care much for Tom Clancy's writing, but if it leads someone to study engineering, or military theory, or even history, then it has value as a catalyst. I find that particularly compelling after working a combat assignment where intellectual rigor came at a premium, and then returning to the American Idol universe, which I find stultifying in a really dangerous way.
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