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I don't like being a grad student, but I really hate the constant pressure being placed on me to get results. My equipment--which I get a turn on once every month or so--is constantly breaking through no fault of my own. I can't conjure a working experiment from non-working equipment. Meanwhile, every other aspect of my life is suffering from work-life imbalance. Hence, few updates here. Here are a few thoughts that I haven't time to expand on now.
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The secular-minded folks would conflate evangelizing with marketing. They might throw in proselytizing for good measure, or perhaps suggest that proselytism is to a person's religion what marketing is to a person's spending habits, and that evangelism is the same thing as proselytism. Um, no. It's even more disturbing when Church leaders make this mistake, however.
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Given that "settled science" sometimes undergoes paradigm shifts, it becomes foolish to base defenses of perennial truths on it. Since philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, and ultimately the pursuit of these perennial truths from the vehicle of human reasoning, philosophy itself cannot be based only on science*--which might fairly be true even under the older meaning of science as "knowledge." It needs a firmer foundation than science can offer, which may also be why scientists are often such poor philosophers. He who marries the spirit of this age finds himself widowed (or more often than not divorced) in the next age.
*Based only on science: I mean here science as only human "knowledge," which may be disproven and is generally incomplete. Of course, since human knowledge is generally incomplete, we have to work with what we have, but I have seen a few philosophical arguments--even professionally published ones--which hinge ultimately on scientific "facts" which have turned out to not be so factual.
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The publish or perish mentality has done more to undermine the academic enterprise--to say nothing of the concept of a liberal education--than most more "systems" or ideologies could ever hope to achieve. The problem of publish or perish is an insistence on newness or (worse) novelty, which does not necessarily mean mastery of the subject at hand. I think it will also be the death of science as such.
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Meanwhile, we're slowly replacing science with engineering, and then replacing sound engineering with mere technology. This won't end well. And furthermore, computer science is not one of the natural sciences.
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The Black Friday Rule is this: the day after we pretend to be thankful for what we have, we go out and attempt to add to it. Because nothing says "gratitude" like consumerism and the desire for more stuff.
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