Diversify the thinking
Two weeks until my Transfer report is handed in. I am feeling the pressure, but I think in a good way. I am thinking clearly, or at least finding my voice. So, when I read the attached at 6am {here} – a story of Rishi Sunak seemingly wanting his positivist mathematical brain to become a population of the same – my writing awoke before I did. Some “unquantifiable” part of me was awake – and I think it offers a reasonable rant. I will park it here. I will be back in August…
…
Wrongheaded “having or showing bad judgement” is a term that springs to mind. My journey back into academia has been via the scientific and quantitatively orientated project world. But it’s philosophy and the social sciences I now seek to apply.
If I pass my first year of my PhD (it’s definitely an if not a when) I will have achieved something different. I’m attempting to introduce a different perspective into a space. Heidegger and social psychology in a project management place. Built from what industry thought project management should be: an industrial complex that saw answers from the industrial military complex, to turn all that was innovative into optimisation of cost. Well, maybe that was wrongheaded, too.
I certainly came about this all wrongheaded. I took my degree (a pass but a failed attempt towards the sea) and went into industry. I learnt to insure projects. Sat with those managing and enabling projects. Learnt enough over thirty years to realise what I saw is broken. So I came back to academia for other perspectives: “Wrongheaded me perhaps needs a new head”
But academia seems broken, too. Another place serving an industrial complex that saw answers from the industrial military complex (and turned all that was innovative into optimisation of cost). And most all of what is broken is the standardised metrics and positivist positioning that underscores that same optimisation. If you want new ideas, don’t expect the automatons to find them. Wrongheaded.
So all is wrongheaded here. A non-sense:
— Optimising. Maximising profit. Minimising cost. That includes turning university into a sausage machine, to then wonder why sausages don’t sizzle on their own. Wrongheaded.
— Nonsense and nonsensical thinking that includes:
- society level claims to be scientific, yet blind to the evidence of all going wrong.
- a politics advocating free choice and then cutting off both the funding and possibility of different thought.
- industry scaling back to zero its part in building the space. Train young people into those industrious automaton needed; alongside not instead of means to be creative.
Wrongheaded x3
I am reading all there is available about project management; and how it connects to the wider academic discourse. Now I read all the practical applications it connects to. I see the contemporary academic is being encouraged to think differently, apply methodology anew, or find alternative perspective. Yet, most-all quantitative learning (positivist positioning) seems now out there in the world. Why are we so sure mathematically derived answers will find different reasoning? Or are we so very sure mathematically driven answers is all there is? Wrongheaded.
Maybe it’s time to let university experiment differently. Humanity 2.0 needs more than one head. That’s rightheaded
…to be continued