You Should Go To Graduate School If:You Love to Read….
You Love to Talk (And You Talk To Win)….
You Love to Write….
You Are Strongly Self-Motivated….
You Participate in the Happy Delusion that Intellectual Work Matters….
If You Are an Intellectual.
Minds Like Knives//: Why You SHOULD Go to Graduate School.
You should read the full post if you want to get the whole argument, but let me just say that I desperately hope that none of my students who are contemplating graduate school read this. If nothing else, they need to understand that even if applicants believe such things about themselves, they should certainly never say so in a statement of purpose. “You should admit me into your graduate program because I love to read, I love to write, and I’m an intellectual” — that is most certainly not what admissions committees want to hear. Graduate school in most fields is training for a profession: people who teach in such programs want to admit people who understand that and are willing to undertake the necessary disciplines, not people who are looking for venues to explore their passions. (And yes, you should be passionate about what you study, if you’re going to be good at it and make a difference to others, but your passion is not a qualification for admission.)
More important: You do not need to go to graduate school in order to read, to write, to debate, to do intellectual work. You do not even need to go to graduate school to learn from brilliant scholars, though that would be a much better reason to go than any cited in this post, which, oddly, never mentions professors, scholars, or learning. If you want to read, write, and debate, you can do all that for free, and while you’re earning a living and putting money away for retirement. Why should you give up years of your time and earning potential to do what you can do right now, on your own? — and that’s in a best-case scenario, in which you’re getting full funding and therefore at least not hemorrhaging money. But what if you’re not getting that funding, and doing graduate study only by incurring crushing debt?
There are very good reasons for some people to go to graduate school, in some circumstances, but they aren’t listed in this post. This advice only encourages a shallow romanticism about graduate education, and we don’t need any more of that. And Lord help us, the very last thing we need is more people in academia who “talk to win.”
Yes, of course, everything about us, from the simplest sensation to the most elaborately constructed sense of self, requires a brain in some kind of working order. Remove your brain and bang goes your IQ. It does not follow that our brains are pretty well the whole story of us, nor that the best way to understand ourselves is to stare at “the neural substrate of which we are composed”.This is because we are not stand-alone brains. We are part of community of minds, a human world, that is remote in many respects from what can be observed in brains. Even if that community ultimately originated from brains, this was the work of trillions of brains over hundreds of thousands of years: individual, present-day brains are merely the entrance ticket to the drama of social life, not the drama itself. Trying to understand the community of minds in which we participate by imaging neural tissue is like trying to hear the whispering of woods by applying a stethoscope to an acorn.
At midnight tonight I will leave the internet. I’m abandoning one of my “top 5” technological innovations of all time for a little peace and quiet. If I can survive the separation, I’m going to do this for a year. Yeah, I’m serious. I’m not leaving The Verge, and I’m not becoming a hermit, I just won’t use the internet in my personal or work life, and won’t ask anyone to use it for me.Depending on your perspective, you might be completely shocked that I’d even attempt such a thing, or you might be completely unimpressed. For me personally, the decision felt like a big, crazy idea at first, and now it’s started to seem a perfectly natural evolution of my life with technology.
Goodman D——: Adventures in New Testament Greek: Nous
Goodman D——: Adventures in New Testament Greek: Nous
By Scott Cairns
You could almost think the word synonymous
with mind, given our so far narrow
history, and the excessive esteem
in which we have been led to hold what is,
in this case, our rightly designated
nervous systems. Little wonder then
that some presume the mind itself…
In our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited. The gossip column is one side of the medal; the cobalt bomb is the other. We are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, “What can I know?” we ask, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.
Maharastra - Au-dessus de Bombay, Karli, caverne Bouddhique aménagée vers le IIè siècle.
See?
All of these are awesome. Thanks to Luke Neff.
If we could use digital tools to estrange ourselves from our books, to defamiliarize what we think we know, we might learn something new about how they were made and how they are used. People keep pointing out to me that we are in the incunabula age of digital texts. We are. And that’s what makes it so exciting.
The smartypants of old used the obelus to call out chunks of text that might be somehow wrong, whether as a result of translation errors or info that was just plain bad to begin with. For example, there’s some debate about the Gospel of John’s Pericope Adulterae — the story where Jesus saves an adulteress from stoning by making her would-be punishers remember that they too have sinned. Although the story is one of the more famous of the New Testament, its authorship was questioned by the third-century scholar Origen, who marked the passage with an obelus. And yes, there is a certain irony to him being the one to find fault with the passage that gave the world that famous line, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
It should be noted, however, that it wasn’t always the ÷ that was written. A simple line could also be an obelus, as could the dagger symbol, or even the sign ./., which is sometimes called a lemniscus and which somehow evolved into the ∞, or the infinity symbol. (This symbol is properly called a lemniscate, and I wrote about it in a previous “word of the week” post.) In fact, there seems to be a great deal of overlap, both in form and name, with the division sign, the infinity sign and the symbols people use to say “Hey, this passage is wonky.” I am not clear why.