[geeks] Re: [rescue] It's official, the U.S. is screwed for

[Dave Fischer]

velociraptor at gmail.com writes:

>> James Clark had a nice quote about academia versus business along
>> those lines. Something about only having to impress real people
>> who buy hardware...

>Perhaps in some respects, but in my experience, working in academia,
>even IT is far more political than you might imagine.  The wrangle
>in/with Nature over the "global warming" data is proof that even the
>"hard sciences" suffer from politicization of arguments/conclusions. 
>The biggest problem I had with liberal arts was that the work was not
>challenging enough.  And I mean "not challenging" in terms of
>intellectual issues, not politics--politics in liberal arts is very
>difficult to deal with.  To make matters worse, plenty of people tried
>to obfuscate their work to make it *seem* more challenging.

Yeah - the Clark quote is from when he was leaving Stanford and
starting SGI. He prefered the cold hard reality of the marketplace
to the politics of academia.

Personally, I hate academia (I'm a college dropout) but I can't
stand the computer industry either. I enjoy working with computers
too much to do it as a job.

------ David Fischer ------- dave at cca.org ------- http://www.cca.org ------
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