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Difference between revisions of "The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (The DISC)"
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The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (The DISC) (view source)
Revision as of 18:46, 14 March 2020
, 18:46, 14 March 2020→quotes from episode 19
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Okay. I want to talk about something I'm calling the DISC, the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex, and it has nothing to do with Richard Dawkins and peer review and Jerry Coyne and a bunch of other things that almost nobody cares about. It has to do with about a 50 year period in which great ideas got buried no matter where they occurred. Because great ideas were very likely to be highly disruptive to an institutional order. And between you and your wife, and me and my wife, three of our four theses ran into incredible problems, because they were trying to break really new ground. And the amount of delay that you suffered, I mean you're now 50 years old. This is a very late start in a career. You're coming from a very inauspicious place. You've been fitted with a story, which is “He's a sweet guy who stood up to a mob and that's his claim to fame” and you're not really understanding that you're not being taken fully seriously as a biologist. In part what Jerry Coyne is saying to you is, “Hey, you're really unknown to us. I'm at Chicago. Richard Dawkins was at Oxford.” You know, he was the Simoni professor for the - | |||
Eric: Look, you see the same thing with like string theory because none of the reporters are actually string theorists, so they're dependent upon this. You saw this with this woman alleging that she had the Epstein story three years earlier, but that the editors said, well, we might lose access to the baby pictures of the Royal grandchildren like, you know, you're seeing this with catch and kill. There's this, I mean, I want you to take this seriously. You're just showing a part of what I'm calling the DISC, the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex. We have 50 years of such stories, and it happens that in our family, three out of four of us created such a story trying to get a PhD. And the idea for me is that every time you have to go into some closed system, like, there's a committee meeting or there's a blue ribbon commission or there's a peer review process, or there's a, what do they call them, the panels—study groups, for grants. That's where the DISC lives. We know that it's localized to the things that protect the integrity of science. It's an autoimmune disease, where what we have is an ability to stop highly disruptive ideas from getting a hearing in the general population of experts, by virtue of the fact that a carefully chosen group of experts can stop publication. Because look, if you're wrong about this stuff, there's a cost. It's not, it's not cheap. | Eric: Look, you see the same thing with like string theory because none of the reporters are actually string theorists, so they're dependent upon this. You saw this with this woman alleging that she had the Epstein story three years earlier, but that the editors said, well, we might lose access to the baby pictures of the Royal grandchildren like, you know, you're seeing this with catch and kill. There's this, I mean, I want you to take this seriously. You're just showing a part of what I'm calling the DISC, the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex. We have 50 years of such stories, and it happens that in our family, three out of four of us created such a story trying to get a PhD. And the idea for me is that every time you have to go into some closed system, like, there's a committee meeting or there's a blue ribbon commission or there's a peer review process, or there's a, what do they call them, the panels—study groups, for grants. That's where the DISC lives. We know that it's localized to the things that protect the integrity of science. It's an autoimmune disease, where what we have is an ability to stop highly disruptive ideas from getting a hearing in the general population of experts, by virtue of the fact that a carefully chosen group of experts can stop publication. Because look, if you're wrong about this stuff, there's a cost. It's not, it's not cheap. | ||