First Impressions
Stuff is a book by Daniel Miller. Caroline mentioned it last week during our discussion after ‘Making Day’. I’d heard of it, but couldn’t place it. I ordered a copy from World of Books and it came today. I haven’t even finished the Prologue and it has stimulated a lot of thoughts, emotions and reactions already.
His writing style varies from the vernacular to the academic and maybe this comes from the fact that this book is made up from several articles and perhaps they were aimed at different audiences. In the first paragraph he had my hackles rising with the sentence, “But personally I have always had a horror of what I think of as pedantic semantics. “Then he starts the next sentence with, “To try and …” I am a pernickety pedant, so he pushed my buttons three times in two lines!
A bit later in the Prologue he discusses accessing research grants and says, “Any social science or natural science of the person, such as psychology, that proceeds through hypothesis testing will tend to focus upon some small element of predictability.” Psychologists do this (my wife studied psychology, so I have some insight) and for that reason I’ve always considered social science to be an oxymoron (my own prejudice, perhaps). The scientific method is supposed to be by observation, examining how an unknown variable changes when a known variable is changed and THEN deriving a relationship between them, not putting forward a suspected relationship and statistically testing it. However, I did agree with him in that applicants with research proposals with suggested and testable outcomes were more likely to be funded, but less likely to find something new and/or interesting.
My mind started wandering here to my own experiences in applying for research funding in the UK and EU and I found it difficult to concentrate on the book for a while. It wasn’t easy to be awarded a substantial grant for ‘blue sky’ research unless you had already a reputation in that field of research. Most grant awarding bodies only cover a certain area and are broken up into distinct fields, e.g. Natural Sciences, then Physics, Chemistry, etc., then (in Physics) Nuclear Fission, Nuclear Fusion, Heat Recovery, etc. A call would go out for research proposals every year, say, but your particular niche might only be mentioned every three years and then only narrow sections within your field will be available for funding. This means, contrary to the public impression of university researchers sitting in ivory towers, looking out their windows, and doing research in anything that pops into their heads, that well-funded research is heavily controlled as the awarders have to justify, by getting expected, or positive, results from the research to validate their funding of it – the bean counters rule! Even then, only 20% were funded in my field. Enough of all that, I could go on all night, back to the book.
Everything reminds me of something in the past, I can see a theme trying to peep through.
