Won't that just discourage people from changing their mind? If they can change position while rationalizing that they really were right to start with they might, but to make someone stand up and say why they were wrong seems unlikely to encourage revision of views.
Why can't they act like normal people and agree with whoever has the most grant money?
I have no idea. It was told to me as "we spend a lot of time training our new faculty into our warm, supportive culture, and so we've formalized some of the rules to really get our point across."
heebie-geebie's post convinced me that I have no idea what stereotypes the second part of heebie-geebie's post is trading on.
What is the scope of this rule? Only during formal faculty meetings I presume?
I thought it was a good idea, but then SP convinced me that it was a bad idea, which was my idea to begin with.
5: And in the second part does "just the science people" actually refer to just the science people, or does it refer to the science and math people.
5: At Heebie U, faculty from SOME departments repeat themselves endlessly and get off topic and become endlessly rapt in debating stupid shit. Not all faculty from these departments, but critically many. In OTHER departments, everyone has their eyes on a common goal: get through the meeting as fast as possible. Things get done much more quickly.
I'm not subtle enough to get what is being implied about the science/math people versus other people distinction.
Despite the incomprehensibility of the post, and seeming pain in the ass of the rule until someone convinces me otherwise I think we should adopt the rule for this thread. If not the whole blog.
Maybe this thread and just the threads for neb's posts.
6: I'd guess so? And committee meetings. But it probably spills over to social situations.
9: Wait, no one drags out your department's faculty meetings with endless repetition and off-topic discussion and stupid shit? Huh.
I've pretty much completely stopped going to faculty meetings since I realized no one was going to give me a hard time about not showing up.
Don't they stick the frustrating, pointless tasks on people who don't show to meetings?
heebie-geebie's comment 9 explained what heebie-geebie's post had left me confused about. Having never gone to a faculty meeting, this is not a distinction that would have occured to me, I guess.
Also, I've been adopting the "if I just delay replying to this for a few weeks, it'll be moot" approach to a lot of my emails. My becoming a bad citizen: let me show you it.
A rule compelling anyone to speak up would exacerbate the problems described in 9. That is, I agree 100% with SP.
essear's point about the uselessness of faculty meeting has convinced me not to go to any faculty meetings unless I have to, which I bet will be pretty easy to arrange as I'm not faculty.
15: My department is so goddamn efficient that our chair cancels our monthly meeting all but maybe 2 times a year. I love our chair very much. Granted, it's a small department - 8 fulltime people - but still.
Monthly? Jesus. You don't have any openings with my current teaching load, do you?
essear has hourly faculty meetings. They're where the espresso machine used to be, and generally last an hour.
Essear takes the limit as the frequency of faculty meetings approaches infinity.
6: faculty meetings, workshops, sex
Essear has -1/12 faculty meetings per day
JP Stormcrow's stupid comments in this thread have changed my opinion about him in important yet complicated ways.
I know philosophers are the ones who delight in arguing and debating, but I wouldn't think they were typical of the "non-science" category.
It's not exactly delight in arguing - it's more that they care passionately about stupid nuances and rare situations that can be dealt with individually, when they arise once a decade, and word choice, and things like that.
In the math/science faculty meetings, people care about word choice, and will speak up and change things, but they don't care that much - it doesn't get territorial. Another person will concede the point, or not, and either way everything will keep moving forward.
29 is only about Heebie U. I'm not being universal.
@4
"we spend a lot of time training our new faculty into our warm, supportive culture, and so we've formalized some of the rules to really get our point across."
Watch out. It sounds like mandatory hugs will be instituted next.
31: Only if they're properly formalized. Right arms high, heads to the left, or the other way around?
"Jim's support for the proposal has changed my mind about it, because he's been wrong about everything for as long as I can remember."
I'm not being universal.
Localized professor has one weird trick.
32: we'll have to stick with the social science side hug, thanks.
29: A classic example of the idea that the fights are so bitter because the stakes are so small.
In my house, when you are wrong, you have to say "You were right. I was wrong. How could I have ever doubted you?!?"
37 is a charming house rule. It would be hilarious if applied in academia. I can't imagine the hives and twitching that would accompany the sentence "I was wrong."
My humanities department has had, I think, 6 meetings since I started working there two and a half years ago? Two of those were to hire someone.
Apparently our efficiency stems from a feud among now-retired faculty, who couldn't be in the same room with each other without exploding. So we stopped having meetings, and then people realized how nice it was not to have meetings, so even though we all get along now, we still don't.
Why don't you start a feud with a colleague about your age because if there isn't a specific reason not to, somebody will try for a meeting.
I mean, at this point the whole department is definitely on team no-meetings. We gloat to all of our other colleagues. The real threat is that someone in the administration will notice and decide to care.
38: Indeed, I first imagined heebie talking about putting such a rule in place for talks. You know, academic talks that people give in various departments, and which one attends all the time (if an academic). It would be pretty shocking to expect anyone to say, all of a sudden, "Speaker's point about [x] in this talk convinced me that I've been wrong."
Mostly, I think, at least in philosophy, because you'd need way more time than the duration of the talk to come to that conclusion. More consideration is needed. Obviously. Admitting wrongness is not a lightly undertaken task.
I'm sure it's nice enough, but just to be safe, start comparing somebody to Goebels or Mao or Kurt Russell or something.
I don't have tenure yet, so probably safer to stealthily foment a feud between a few of the older faculty.
That guy from No Country for Old Men convinced me that if the rule brought me to the point of being killed by him, what was the utility of the rule? Then I shot him because I don't like to admit I'm wrong.
I've been adopting the "if I just delay replying to this for a few weeks, it'll be moot" approach to a lot of my emails.
I know the feeling. Auto theft gets a lot of calls along of the lines of "what's going on with my case". Nothing, that's what. If we'd found your car we would have called. Maybe now your dumb ass knows not to leave your running car unlocked in the driveway with the keys in it. (no joke, loads of our car thefts during the winter are from people warming their car up in this fashion)
(no joke, loads of our car thefts during the winter are from people warming their car up in this fashion)
I knew tons of people who did this in Michigan, and they did it so casually that I assumed it was some safe anachronism. Guess not.
The real cherry on the sunday is when they leave a loaded AR15 in the car (this has happened more than once). God I hope one of these times the thief comes back to the scene and shoots the victim in at least the leg.
9 and 29 get it exactly right, 30 notwithstanding.
I was going to ask how you put a cherry on a day but I guess when you have an AR15 people don't give you shit about where you want to put your cherry, wackadoodle.
Good thing Texans don't have to warm up their cars.
49: People do it up here a fair amount too, because remote start is expensive. Shortly after I moved here there was a story in the local paper about a kid who stole a car this way and went joyriding. (They caught him right away.) I assume it also results in more serious car thefts.
In the old days around here (and perhaps still, how would I know?), there was a product that consisted of charcoal briquettes in an aluminum foil pan that you would light on fire and slide under the engine. Or maybe people just made their own. Anyway, apparently it didn't often lead to cars exploding. (This was for when it was actually too cold to start even the hardiest of beaters, not for when you're a wimp who can't keep your car going once it has started.)
One of our locals who (allegedly!) likes to take cars. We were looking for him all weekend then found out he'd been in the hospital for three days because his baby mama (allegedly!) ran him over with her car. We missed him at the hospital this afternoon by like five minutes.
55: These days people tend to use electric block heaters for that, at least up here.
Right, people used and I assume still use those too, although then you have to mess with the extension cord and what not.
I once knew a guy who would spray hot water under his frozen car -- while it was running -- rather than doing the usual trick of pouring the water over the windshield. I would worry about flooding the engine, but then I know little about cars.
The interesting thing is that this very car -- that of the fellow I knew -- was actually recovered from a flood and reconditioned for sale. You wouldn't know the difference if you didn't sniff around inside it, and I guess it must have passed inspections. But anyway, there was ample room for flood puns, even though I was just a boy.
55: common practice on the Arctic Highway in Siberia; you have a bloke at each truck stop whose job it is to a) keep the fire going all night under each truck while b) making sure it stays away from the fuel line, because explosion.
I thought you needed some heat to get to the fuel or it would gel. At least if it was diesel.
Fucking heat transfer, how does it work?
I mean, I've always assumed that your normal slow drip of crankcase oil is just not going to be explosive enough to be really dangerous, and I suppose if it is cold enough, there is a reasonable maximum amount you can heat the engine that is well below what would cause the fuel to explode through heat alone. But I'm with text in knowing so little about all of the practical considerations that it is all mysterious to me.
The line I've heard is that you shouldn't smoke around gasoline, but you could put out your cigarette in diesel fuel.
66: An opportunity for some amateur science!
Because paying a guy to throw a lit cigarette into gasoline is a crime.
The wikipedia article for "flash point" has a nice explanation. Gasoline has a low flash point (-55F!), unless it's really really cold out a spark is going to light it on fire. Diesel's flash point is 126F, so unless it's really really hot you're not going to set it off with a spark. Conversely gasoline has a high "autoignition temperature" while diesel has a low "autoignition temperature" so you can use Diesel in a totally different kind of engine which doesn't use sparks.
I remember as a kid we got gasoline to gently burn. We just threw a match into a glass cup of gas. Possibly because it was a cold day, it didn't blow up. Then we used the cup of burning gas to write flaming letters on the road.
Anyway, of the serial-killer troika, I only missed bed wetting. Which seems like the one to miss if you can only miss one. Unless you like animals.
Yeah, we had a lot of dubious boys with gasoline action. Never had any real access to diesel fuel, however. Fun fact: if in a water show you want someone to dive into a flaming pool, the appropriate amount of gas to throw on top the water is very, very small.
You can add some motor oil, if you want a nice sheen.
