[lbo-talk] posh as fuck

[// ravi]

On Dec 5, 2011, at 6:47 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
> This is not entirely true. You can learn a language, math, science...
> 
> But you know, in the startup I worked for we used to have wine at work on Fridays, and nicely lubricated non-business chat would stretch out for a few hours after that. Nearly all of these people were educated at the ivies or the top UC schools. I listened and listened and I decided finally that what I heard was neither wiser nor smarter than chat in general. These people were not particularly more curious or better read than most. I have been to many of their houses, and many have no books. But as a result of their education they shared certain commonplaces that were trotted out and displayed to establish a common identity, a reassurance that they belonged to a special set. And a lot of the conversation was just about that ritual claim to this corpus of ideas/prejudices/cliches etc.
> 
> Now, of course, most of them were pretty smart and had put in several decades of work in programming....so they did have analytical skills, etc. But that was the result of the work they did after college, not of college itself.

[Sort of jumping in at a random point into this long-running thread, so excuse repetition, ignorance, etc.]

College seems to help reinforce that analytical [or] systematic/systematised = scientific = all there is to be learnt/known. As well as the meritocratic ranking. This underwrites the sort of libertarian, minimalist, reductionist style favoured by techies when discussing non-technical affairs (unsurprisingly, tech stuff itself gets finer consideration since it is the material that they actually work on with their “hands”, rather than just sit around theorising about). A recent example is the spat (in NYRB or LRB) between the brilliant, genial (if precocious) neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran and the philosopher Colin McGinn. It’s the arriviste/precocious/embarrassing familiarity with unexamined concepts, underwritten by academic pedigree/rank, that, well, rankles, no?

Alan (IIRC) seems to have taken Michael Smith’s point rather personally, but pointing out the gatekeeping and ranking function of academia doesn’t necessitate that academics are plotting and scheming this stuff up in their tenured towers, yes?

	—ravi