timscott

Wow, very powerful stuff. This article rapidly expands from indictment Noam Chomsky as linguist to indictment of modern academia. As a parent about to pay large sums to one of these institutions for my son's education, it depresses me more than a little.

I don't know anything about linguistics, but the argument hangs together pretty well. It's consonant with what I know about Chomsky as political prophet and myth-maker.

I notice that this article, a decade old, also indicts science in general. The author was perhaps ahead of his time:

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-re...

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-t...

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-feynman-201...

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20131027,0,122...

http://www.livescience.com/27262-psychology-studies-question...

Engineers, of which I am one, tend to see the world in pure dialectics, so they often have very difficult time understanding why accomplishment is not purely evaluated by some rational universal force and recognition made manifest commensurately.

Self promotion is a skill that we all need, and do not think for a moment that people like Einstein were not well skilled in it.

As for claiming credit in higher proportion to one's contribution, that is evil in proportion to the exaggeration. However, perception being limited as it is, no one, not even the other contributors are in a good position to judge.

As for outright lies, they are, well, outright lies.

I've recently been learning all this the hard way.

1. Documented API. Failing that...

2. HTTP client fetching structured data (XHR calls). Failing that...

3. HTTP client fetching and scraping HTML documents. Failing that...

4. Headless browser

I recently found myself pushed to #4 to handle sites with over-complex JS or anti-automation techniques.

What caught my attention was the use of "analytic tools" as a euphemism for "surveillance tools." One could dismiss it as corporate-speak or techie-speak, but it rings in my head more like newspeak, and you know the purpose of that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

I agree with almost all of what you said. I'm a coder, agilist, craftsman, blah, blah who has worked on a startup more than once. On the last one I wrote almost no unit tests. The whole thing was so experimental from the start that I never go around to it. I explained it to myself that I was being a hustler. I'm okay with that.

However, I gotta say it. If unit tests are making it harder to restructure your code, you're doing it wrong. The opposite should be true. The greatest purpose of unit tests is to add comfort and safety (and thus speed) to very big refactors and restructuring. If your system behavior changes, yes, your tests gotta change, and that takes effort. But if you restructure your code (e.g., break it apart to add an intermediate abstraction) and unit tests slow you down because you got get all up in 'em, then brother you got yourself some bad tests. Those should not have written.