The New Atheism movement

[Sethomas]

The Ivory Tower isn't immune to the caprice of fashion. Really, that's all there is to it. I think the main reason why Oxford and Cambridge were so conservative until recently is that they didn't want to dirty themselves with Continental ideals, which by and by were quite liberal for their time. Like, I doubt that Darwin would have been sanctioned and ridiculed so heavily if his ideas weren't so heavily influenced by French Enlightenment-era thinkers. Sad as it is, intellectualism is defined by fashion mentality. I went to a school synonymous with minimally obstructed capitalism (the "Chicago School of Economics", being not the school itself but the movement fostered by its faculty) yet I had more socialist professors than I did conservative ones. However, the socialist ones were tenure-hunters and the conservative one was already a celebrity, but still.

FUNNY STORY: My Marxist history professor was so egalitarian that he wouldn't give advice on papers for his class because that would instill an unfair advantage against those students too lazy to ask for his help.

Back to the aforementioned, a fellow board member showed me an article talking about people finally venting their frustration at string theory. The argument is that too much attention is being given to it because it's fashionable, when in fact it's astronomically improbable that we'll see any applications of it for the real world during any of our lifetimes. As a result, we're wasting our time on useless knowledge that we can't possibly prove to even be true. I argue to the contrary that the quantum revolution would have been slowed down substantially if medieval Arab mathematicians hadn't wasted so much time discussing imaginary numbers for which they had no application.

In the end, I think that most respectable institutions have acquired the discipline to always maintain a diverse intellectual palette. Intellectual fads will linger and abound, but when they're translated to mass media their importance is bound to be overstated. Going back to string theory for an example, real string theorists spend most of their time analyzing hypothetical messenger particle interactions and reformulating mathematical identities to look for similarities along different models. However, this all gets turned into headlines like "SEXY BRAIN BRIAN GREENE SAYS WE LIVE IN 11 DIMENSIONS, HOLY FUCKING SHIT".