/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.14829541]

Why is academia so soul crushing? I am just a dumb undergrad senior but having to wtrite a 3 page literature review to justify my basic machine learning project killed my mood
So much time looking at papers I don’t understand trying to cite something because it’s very important that this dumb basic information came from a source and seeing thousands of papers on the same subject but just slightly different totally kills my mood, the time I should spend learning I am spending on using Paraphrasing bots.

Fuck this shit. I smelled the aromma from afar and I am sick to my stomach can’t imagine how it must be for people who do this full time.

[Anonymous No.14830085]

>>14829541
They are trying to teach you academic standards. Because you're in a university, they have to assume at least some of the students intend to go into academia as a profession.
Of course right now it doesn't matter whether you have a source or not for basic, obviously true information. Of course right now, you don't understand 90% of the things in those papers. But if you went into research, your citations would be from papers you were familiar with, which were relevant to your research. They have to develop this habit now in everyone who might at some point do independent research.
Just treat it as one of those cases everyone gets in a course of study where you know for a fact that it is not relevant to your future work, but you need to do it for a grade or simply for the experience of knowing how things work in practice. For example, if I'm going into gene technology in two years' time I don't really need to know much about animal behaviour, but that might be my assignment and I will push through it regardless.

[Anonymous No.14830087]

>>14829541
In scientism/academia, truth and value are quite literally in numbers. "Many people believe X." "The consensus is X." "My colleagues agree." "There are a number of books on the subject." "I have received no complaints." "There is much support." Truth is by popular vote. The more Nature does it, the more right it is. It is the authority of DNA - the authority of the tradition of Nature itself. For the adherents of scientism, numbers represent the only real value, and these become the very substance of their life.

>People become numbers. The numbers become their horizon - their all. They are just copies.
- Kierkegaard

If you explain to these numerous fellows that they are constantly, in every waking moment, appealing to the fallacy of the number, you are wasting your breath, because they don't know anything except the number. They cannot hear you, because existence requires contrast. And for this same reason such people don't exist as individuals. They have no self, and no soul, since the soul is precisely the self, and is the genius in man.

Samuel Butler accurately describes this soulless culture - the culture of the number - in his novel Erewhon, when he visits the hallowed "Colleges of Unreason".


>"It is not our business," he said, "to help students to think for themselves. Surely this is the very last thing which one who wishes them well should encourage them to do. . . ." In some respects, however, he was thought to hold somewhat radical opinions, for he was President of the Society for the Suppression of Useless Knowledge, and for the Completer Obliteration of the Past.