Consequences

[koganbot]

I have a whole bunch of notes written down that didn't make it into my most recent Department Of Dilettante Research thread (which you should look back at, since byebyepride made a couple of late comments that I've been thinking about).

(1) What's the reward for teaching well and for understanding? What are the consequences for failing to teach or to understand? --When I wrote those questions I was thinking of how they would apply to an actual dep't we'd set up. Any answer would have to take into account what sort of thing the dep't is, e.g. an actual funded dep't somewhere or a message board or a magazine or a bunch of conversations on the town green or an itinerant group of marauders who "intervene" in some or all of the aforementioned. BUT actually when I glanced at the questions just now I interpreted them as applying to the world in general, not the Dep't in specific. What are the consequences for failing to teach or to understand? Like, in one's life.

If success and failure were its own rewards, then "departments of dilettante research" would have emerged all over the blogosphere. I wonder if the loose gaggle of economists blogs I've been reading - mostly by academics, a few by those in the financial industry, a few by journalists - could actually be considered a de facto Department Of Dilettante Research. Presumably the academics read each other's papers. Or I would like to think that they do. But they also have the ongoing financial support of institutions, and some of them get paid for columns and - presumably - for their blogs. (I don't know this, however.)

(2) Potential ways of creating "courses": (a) A central question, with each class being a different entry into (or growth out from) the question; e.g., my question about taste. "Since most people base their immediate likes and dislikes of music on what I'll loosely call 'visceral response,' how is it that taste tends to cluster along class lines - and what do we or should we mean by 'social class'?" We could get a bunch of people who've thought about such q's in very different ways (a bureaucrat, a sociologist, a member of a street gang; or, anyway, people who have thought a lot about bureaucracies or sociology or street gangs) each teaching loosely related "courses." (b) We could just have people teaching their specialty - astrophysics, greco-roman wrestling, cumulative advantage - but they get to take my course and I get to take theirs.

(3) "Institutionally," where do we start from? (a) We start w/ a band of colleagues-investigators-understanders who look for or create a space for the dep't, and also we work on opening up that space to outsiders. (b) We start with an already existing open conversation, big space, and within that open world those who want to will pair up or cluster into ongoing "courses," taking each other's "courses," and whoever else shows up enriches or complicates the interaction (this doesn't mean we can't have rules of behavior or toss people out: figuring such things out is part of the enrichment/complication). (Again, the question arises why this hasn't happened already, spontaneously?)

Comments

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

1) It's not very dilettante if all they research is economics, surely?
2) The moment we talk about people taking courses we get issues of authority, a sense of someone being The Expert - this may be what you want, but my ideas of this are that there should be more hallway in it than this seems to imply, that it should be more mutual and less top-down.
3) How could this not be done as a moderated message board? Possibly members only, I'm not sure. "Courses" could become threads, or better still each could be a series of threads. You set out some thoughts on class and taste, we argue for a while, you start a new thread with outgrowths from that or further related matters or whatever, we debate some more. (I was trying to think of something I could lead in this sense, and haven't yet. "Let's all talk about 15th Century Japanese Zen Buddhist monochrome ink landscape painting" or "Thoughts on the real reasons for the suicide of tea master Sen no Rikyu" are not likely to get thousands of responses, and are clearly too specific.)

I'm not actually suggesting that a message board is the best way to do this, just that it seems to at least potentially fulfil a lot of the requirements and is at least not costly to set up, and you have enough people to get it going, I think. Having something to show might help attract others, and it can develop from there. The chances of your getting funding for something more formal, something that earns money, based on some LJ posts, however well thought out, are negligible, I would think.

[koganbot]

(1) Well, there can be all sorts of ways of doing economics, and different ways of doing it that you bring to it from, say, psychology or physics or sociology or political science. I don't know if sociologist Duncan Watts (iirc he started in either biology or physics) and economist Paul Krugman pay much attention to one another, but they both think about cumulative advantage and I would very much like to learn more of what they know. My point about the economics guys are that they're paying attention to each other, fairly detailed attention when necessary. "Dilettante" could be a gimmick to get them to pay attention to people like me, even if they'd have to hold my hand or hire me a tutor to get me through the math parts of their courses. I'm someone who has no concentrated expertise in any recognized "discipline" (I don't mean that as self-denigration; I think people who know about me and aren't paying attention to my ideas or asking my input on theirs are missing a whole lot; but nonetheless, I'm not the one to ask in order to get an overview of current opinion in sociology or music theory or anything else, even classrooms and hallways, even music criticism; yet I still think people should be taking my "courses"). I'm looking for models - any models - of people helping to push each other's thinking forward.

(2) Well, my frustration has been people's unwillingness to take the authority either to think through their ideas or to communicate them, and take the authority to comment on mine in any sustained ways...

(3) ...which is why message boards haven't worked so far, though they certainly do seem to fit (at least they could be one of the tools the "dep't"). My fanzines starting back in '86 were in effect "message boards" on paper, though with "posts" and "comments" every six months rather than every day. (By the way, do you know much about chaos theory and cumulative advantage and things of those sort?)

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I have a reasonable understanding of chaos theory (but not as it relates to economics, which I imagine it does), and a special interest in the related complexity theory, particularly how it might apply to evolution, but I know almost nothing about cumulative advantage - nothing really any more useful than "the rich get richer" and similar phenomena.

My problem with zines as a medium for this is that the authority is totally in one person's hands - I used to do zines myself. That's fine, but the moment anyone is presented as the authority on anything, there is a tendency to treat them differently from others in the same conversation. It used to amaze me when I was a comic editor, how much people respected my opinions. The person who is probably the most successful comic writer in the anglophone world these days submitted his first work to me - he told me a while later that if I had rejected it, he would have concluded that he was no good and given up. I also recall one guy coming up to me at a comics convention and saying that he had shown me his portfolio the previous year, and he'd been working hard in the year since on following my advice - I didn't even remember him, and probably spent no more than two minutes looking at his work. I like sharing what I do know, but I get worried if people are giving what I say too much respect.