[WikiEN-l] Anti-intellectualism

[Jay Litwyn]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Phil Sandifer" <snowspinner at gmail.com>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 4:44 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Anti-intellectualism


> 
> On Dec 12, 2008, at 6:09 PM, George Herbert wrote:
> 
>> Even a superlative college paper is only rarely notable or significant
>> criticism.  Grad students' product might be, professors or
>> professional critics moreso.  But there are plenty of
>> out-in-left-field reviewers and critics who lie outside the body of
>> normal academic criticism et al.
>>
>> Our criteria for sources have to include enough guidance for filtering
>> that we can filter out random not-notable commentary.  What line are
>> we trying to draw - and why.  We have to draw the line, otherwise we
>> do become Cruftpedia.  We're not here to collect 101 million grade
>> school essays on "Are you there, God?  It's me, Margaret" in the
>> article on the book.
> 
> There certainly are loonies in the field, but I'd say more papers get  
> rejected from journals for being boring than for being wrong. Which is  
> to say, there's a lot of stuff that is very fundamental and obvious  
> that you'd see in college papers, but not in published essays.
> 
> Which is part of the problem. There's a lot of stuff that, in  
> academia, we just consider too obvious to publish.
> 
> -Phil
> 

That's about where my review of Mark Purdey's book  (about BSE) would go. Purdey's *remotely* plausible explanation of a mechanism is far shy of Occam's Razor, which is so strange coming from a guy who explicitly likes Occam's Razor. Heavy metal poisoning is a very old subject; Roman pathology. So, why all the complications about another metal falling into the category of having limits on exposure and causing [[manganism]]. I wish Purdey's brother Nigel well in preparing another edition of the book. Hoh boy. Yah...then I guess I should look a Brown's book, especially since I agree with him on the point that burning cattle might've been a good idea. Purdey (deceased) did not.