In a message dated 5/23/2003 2:25:14 PM Central Daylight Time, billroh@churchofvirus.com writes:

You are right, that was a strong choice of words - and we do have
varrying skills. But we have very few, if any, doctorate level
participants - and very few discussions that ever get that deep. You
don't talking about serious details very often. We make good
businessmen, students, programmers, geeks, ex-military, we have a lawyer
and a Dr of Pharmacy and a lot of in betweens. But we don't have any
anthropologists, sociologists, chemists, biologists, doctors,
physists... We have a lot of people with a lot of reading and a little
experience.

[Jake] As the lawyer, I would also like to claim my background in sociology.  I started out as a sociology major in undergrad.  After a few years of it, I abandoned the field in disillusion and widened my major to Social Sciences in order to get a better background in history and political science.  At the time, and as far as I can still tell sociology continues to be a waste of time field driven more by ideology than any scientific basis.  The only thing worthwhile I got out of it was a basic understanding of statistics, an area that sociology has no monopoly over.  The rest of it was just a spewing of liberal ideology.  As a liberal myself, I have no real allergy to the ideas, but I was a bit disappointed in the pretense of scientific basis that the field claimed for this agenda.  To me memetics, as a biologically based mythology about sociology and culture is at least more ideologically neutral and intellectually honest and many of its adherents do not hold to any pretenses of its supposed scientific foundations.  Some do, of course, but I find them in the minority of self-proclaimed memeticists.  Often the "more serious" scholars, doctorate level etc., are simply the more indoctrinated and deluded.  What I find more refreshing is a serious commitment reason and rational criticism.  Many of the more serious participants in CoV do have at least a Bachelor's degree education, and have somewhere along the line achieved more appreciation for reason and rationality than many post graduate level educated people.  I still hold a bit of respect for people with more education in the more real sciences like biology, chemistry, physics etc. (though many physicists have now descended in a lot of pseudo-science themselves as research opportunities in their own field has dried up in the last 20 or so years and their dreams scientific priesthood have more or less been flushed down the toilet).

The lack of doctorate level indoctrination in our ranks does not cause me any real despair.  The diversity of real world experience, the ability to intelligently articulate our ideas, and our capacity for and/or openness to rational criticism in my mind makes our community more intellectually exciting and open to possibility than many of the more indoctrinated communities I have encountered or participated in.  Sure, there are some hard hitting academics that I would love to see participating here, but there are plenty more who are simply deluded by their own credentials and indoctrination whom I don't have the time of day to waste on.

I don't think that we have ever held ourselves out to be any more than a community with an interest in science and religion and a dedication to reason, empathy, and vision.  As such I have been far less disappointed in it than I have been in other more academically indoctrinated communities.

This thread seems to capitalize on some people's insecurities about lack of higher (post-grad) education credentials.  As such I think it is definitely not important.  More often than not, those who go on to get such credentials do so out of their own lack of sense and drive to make real world accomplishments out of their more basic education.  The ivory towers are largely full of people who are hiding from the real world for whatever reason.  If that is the "lack of experience" we are talking about I certainly don't miss it.  I will take real experience over that.

Love,

-Jake