
The Latest Intellectuals - petethomas
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Latest-Intellectuals/234339
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lkrubner
Some of this overlaps with what Ian Stewart has written about the profession
of mathematicians. Ian Stewart has written a bunch awesome books about math,
and he writes in a classic 20th Century style of science/math popularizer,
believing that there is a "general" public out there that might find math
interesting. More about him here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stewart_(mathematician)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stewart_\(mathematician\))

From the essay itself, this part struck me:

"What I called the transitional generation, those born around 1920, entered
the universities, often late in their careers and without Ph.D.s. The Irving
Howes and Daniel Bells became professors but retained their allegiance to a
world of readable essays and small periodicals. The next generation — my
generation — came of age in the universities and never left them. The world
became specialized journals, monographs, and grant applications. This
generation wrote for colleagues. If they were intellectuals, they no longer
were "public" intellectuals; rather, they were academic or professional
intellectuals oriented toward one another and microfields. In the 1880s,
political science could claim one journal; now more than 40 populate the
discipline. The American Political Science Association recognizes more than 30
subfields. The larger culture, I believe, suffers when intellectuals turn
inward."

This is very much what Ian Stewart has lamented about the field of math. In
one of his books (I think "Letters to a Young Mathematician") he mentions that
there are now a vast multitude of journals that publish work about math, but
that the field now consists of narrow specialists who are unable to understand
each others work.

Considering that the whole field of science depends on math, and progress in
science often depends on progress in math, the breakdown in math is especially
worrisome.

I have the impression that what is needed is more people, within each field,
who are willing to play the role of cross - pollinator. These people would not
be "popularizers" in the old sense, since they would not be reaching out to
the "general" public, but they would be reaching out to various specialities,
and trying to unlock the knowledge in each sub-field. Sadly, there are not
many incentives for this. I have friends who work in academia, and they would
love to see more cross-pollination of ideas, but there is no reward to them
for doing so, and there are large penalties if they fail to make progress in
their narrow speciality.

~~~
adrianN
Besides the problem with the lack of incentive for the author, I also think
that it would be hard to get people to read these kind of publications. Quite
often there is more than enough published in your little niche that you could
read all the time and still not keep up. Building an argument for why you
should additionally read something about other fields is quite hard.

At my research institute we have talks for a "general" audience as you
described once a month. But they weren't popular at all until we decided to
also sponsor a lunch with each of these talks.

~~~
evincarofautumn
It also depends on the field. Most of the papers I read are in type theory,
and there are a lot of type theory publications because that’s where a lot of
theoretical CS work is being done. But the vast majority of those publications
aren’t relevant to my interests or my work, so I can get away with a pretty
short reading list. Whereas in, say, linguistics, I’m interested in pretty
much everything, so I have no hope of keeping up.

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craigjb
Wouldn't some of what this article describes happen simply because of
specialization?

As the knowledge in a field broadens, no one person, less so a person outside
the field, can read and keep up with the publications. Therefore a single
field can have 40 journals. And, some topics really are complex enough that
they cannot be explained in an "easy-to-read" format because they require an
enormous amount of context.

