[lbo-talk] churchill: wow

[Gar Lipow]

On 5/20/06, info at pulpculture.org <info at pulpculture.org> wrote:
> [1] sounds weird, right? Gut instinct is to say, "Oh, the elitist snobs!"
> But that isn't really what's going on. It's that, in order to condense
> complex scholarly work into a format that a trade publication will deal
> with, you often have to eliminate all the little things academics do in
> order to make it really really clear that their conclusions are tentative,
> that there is more work to be done, that other people objects and this is
> why, where you take on your critics in an analysis that, frankly, a lot of
> regular readers could give a shit about. Not b/c they are dumb, but because
> such material is _for_ those in the scholarly community who care about the
> generation of knowledge in that area of study.
> Bitch | Lab
> http://blog.pulpculture.org
>
Hmm.  So if you are an academic, you lose points if you explain your
work to a popular or non-academic professional  audience. Ruddiman
has a maverick view on global warming (not a denier; he thinks human
climate modification goes back to the invention of fire. Most other
climate scientists think he is most likely wrong, but consider it an
interesting  hypothesis that could be correct; in other words it  is
not the majority view, but not crackpot.)  Knowing it would be of
interest to public right now  he has written and had published a
popularization - basically he took an average lengith scientific
paper, and wrote a book length explication for a popular audience.
Does he lose points for that? What if he produced an  800 word
simplification for E magazine?

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