Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion MDC & gifted hostility

That's good to know. I know that I had a mentor at the forensic career I had and it was very much like a Doktorvater situation. I had such a great relationship with him that we still keep in touch even though it's been 10 years since I worked there. I will have to keep this in mind if I ever go get to grad school (which I've been thinking about).

So I'm guessing that starting an "Ultimate Brag Thread" @ MDC would be out of the question? (I suspect heads might explode.)

For me, both forums have provided valuable insight and I will be disappointed should we lose one of them.

I have heard about it and would agree with it.

Many fields are being "socialized," ie subordinated to norms based on social objectives rather than purely objective criteria. In Physics much of the problem is due to the single-payer nature of funding. Once a particular fad captures the funding process, its very hard to break.

Another example is the requirement in most humanities programs to cite "Social Justice" in ones' work. I know an Ivy League professor in Literature who sends me some interesting emails she gets from others in her field. The lockstep conformity is very oppressive.

Fortunately, the internet is breaking up the monopoly on publishing information and gathering of like minds. The funding issue is a big one, still. But the open nature of publishing of data allows for enterprising minds to use the data in ways not intended.

This is a good point.

Quite true.

Von Neumann's biographer put Johnny in the Craftsman category. Someone would have the insight and Johnny would make it whole.

Add male misogyny into the mix. If you poke around a bit, you can find that many women who do science blogs will have one or more academic "stalkers" who do really weird things to sabotage them. Add to this the real world colleagues who do the same thing.

Lee Smolin touched on sexism, too. He said that it's particularly bad in physics and that as someone who'd sat on hiring committees over the years, he was willing to vouch for some of the nasty things done behind closed doors.

Val

I've read about universities ranking scientists and candidates based on the journals their stuff is published in and the types of grants they get. So this could mean (my numbers here) you would get a 10 for a Nature paper and a 0.5 for a paper in, say, the Western Grafton County Journal of Biology. The content is irrelevent: even if the Grafton County paper provides useful information and the Nature paper is later found to be kind of close, but not actually right, it doesn't matter.

I look at this stuff and think, "No wonder people fabricate results."

Plus there's the whole thing about getting along with the senior people....

Painful.

Val

This is one of the most significant discoveries - small science, but stunning. And virtually unknown.

http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/comets/smallcomets.html

I, myself, have never been to the MDC board but sad to read all that is going on over there. Their lose is our gain: Welcome to all our new members!

This board is great and you don't get all the bickering that you would in the more generic boards, probably because this one specializes in gifted, period. But, I too, have wants and needs to reach out to the general public and have another board I use. Though I am a moderator on that board, I have mixed feeling about it because it has many groups on it including gifted but with the fact that it attracts so many types of people you don't get the deep topics that you find on this board and with that is a guarantee of some hostility of people that stumble on the gifted group. Typically they get a warning about their bashing and if it continues they get kicked from the group. It is one thing to have constructive criticism but another to be attacking someone for the idea of gifted.