Once upon a time I wanted a career in academia. Now I thank God or whoever that I didn't. I've worked in a number of large and small companies since, in industries ranging from railways to telecoms to retail to banking. I've learned financial reporting and accounting, marketing, three programming languages and, of course, have an unhealthy familiarity with Excel, Access, SAS, SQL and computers in general. I've worked for CEOs who have gone to jail, who were in the Israeli Special Forces, and who were borderline con-men: I've also worked for large, institutional world-class companies.
And all I would have done for the same length of time as an academic was teach logic to a never-ending stream of undergraduates, thanking God when I got a bright one. I'm not academic superstar material - I might have had the looks but I didn't have the confidence and self-promotion. No best-sellers and television shows for me.
What has really disappointed me about academia has been the invisibility of the philosophers - which I would have been. Since I left university in the mid-1970's, there have been three high-profile "scientific causes", each one generating substantial grant monies, profitable commercial spin-offs, a great steaming pile of bullshit in the press and public arena, and which have been exploited by politicians and bureaucrats: AIDS; global-warming / climate-change; and the obesity / healthy eating campaign. Additionally, there is the misuse of statistics across the social sciences; the disaster that has been mathematical finance; the running sore of pharmaceutical research and epidemiology; string theory; cold fusion, and the continuing farce of economic forecasting. And that's just reading the headlines.
Where were the philosophers when we needed them? Why did it take a junior economic analyst (Bjorn Lomberg, The Sceptical Environmentalist) to expose the weakness of climate change "science"? Where is the measured methodological appraisal of String Theory we might have expected from Lakatos' students? Where is the controversial but measured book - perhaps co-authored by a journalist, a former technical journal editor and a philosopher - about the quality and reliability of published medical research? Why did it take a journalist (Gary Taubes, The Diet Delusion) to write a detailed expose the utter lack of science behind the current carbohydrate-heavy views on "healthy eating"? Why did it take a maverick options trader with a PhD (Nicolas Nassem Taleb, The Black Swan) to point out the flaws with the basics of the current theories of mathematical finance?
The philosophers might reply that they don't do nutrition, medicine or commenting on physics - except there's a branch of the philosophy of science called "methodology" which is about evaluating scientific theories - nor indeed do they do anything much to do with the daily world, and certainly not the Black-Scholes equation. As philosophers, they are concerned with a number of technical issues and that's it. This is pretty much the standard reply and they would be only the second generation of philosophers to make it. Previous generations of philosophers thought nothing of writing on the proper form of government on Monday, the theory of mind on Tuesday and the concepts of space and time on Wednesday. The Philosopher (Aristotle) wrote on everything from ethics to physics and from rhetoric to biology.
They could also reply that they don't want to say anything about these and other shortcomings. Their fellow academics have careers to make, and they have their reputations to consider. It's professional courtesy not to mention the King's New Clothes. Large corporate bureaucracies see that kind of behaviour as well, but it's all surface: no-one in The Bank says in public that the Operational Risk function is a farce (recently we all got stickers reminding us of what to do if we got a bomb-threat phone call!), but in private it gets no respect. This doesn't matter much because Operational Risk just mess up the lives of bureaucrats like me. But science-free nutritionists advising governments and writing pop diet books have created an overweight population, while the users of Black-Scholes equations have flushed many, many billions of everyone's pensions down the toilet. Letting pseudo-science run free through Whitehall and Washington is not harmless.
Which is one thing. The other is that philosophers aren't supposed to be courteous: they are supposed to upset people so much they get given a double brandy with a hemlock chaser. Descartes, Rousseau and Voltaire spent their lives slipping away at night before the Authorities caught them; Bertrand Russell served two jail terms (six months in 1918 and one week in 1949); Hegel had to write in an incomprehensible manner so no-one would notice he was an atheist left-winger; Socrates, the First Philosopher, was assassinated. Is anyone sticking their head above the parapet today? The French have had a good line in provocateurs but the last time I looked, none of them ever did time.
And you know what? I have many dissatisfactions with my current life. But at least I'm doing my job.
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