Global Strategy - blog

In recent times, there has been a lot of discussion about the questionable practices of scholars, universities and publishers. In a related fashion, the economist Ronald Coase once said that "if you torture the data long enough, Nature will confess." He referred to a common research practice of flexibly changing one's model, collecting more data and using different measures until you find interesting and publishable results; it is likely that at some point you will find statistically significant results purely by chance. For a qualitative researcher, flexibility is a good thing. In fact, going back and forth between data and theory is the primary mode of doing qualitative research. However, in quantitative research, flexibility is somewhat counter-intuitively considered a bad thing. Let me explain.

Frederick V (1723-1766), King of Denmark, financed the first Western expedition to Arabia in 1761-1767. This is what Thorkild Hansen's (1962) account of the project taught me about the social dynamics of the 18th century academia.

After spending considerable time inside in the company of books and mostly theoretical articles, one may easily become a bit of a book-worm. That is, lose the 'touch' on things. The world (I said it, uh) becomes something not only seen through theoretical glasses, but one in which theory really matters, almost all the time. Therefore it was a real delight to actually do something, for once (articulated in structuralist-mythological language this 'doing' could be expressed as something like a series of utterances in a zero-order language). The task was to take part in this year's vendimia.

Attending a talk last week about contingency in science (held as part of CPNSS project ‘Contingency and Dissent in Science) left me rather confused. As I found it, the concept of contingency, at least at the LSE, seems to be a name (or a subset-not in a strictly set-theoretical sense!) of the nowadays quite classical realism-antirealism debate. That is, I found no references to Rorty. Although quite understandable, it still seems odd to pass the ‘practical turn' of the 1980s in one sentence, just slightly overlooking some significant parts of more recent developments in philosophy. On the other hand, the bent is quite reasonable considering the institutional traditions.

A weird thing has taken place a couple of times now... I have been to a very weak lecture and asked some of my peers their opinions about them. To my surprise, I generally get totally contrasting views of my own. People tend to be extremely fascinated about those lectures I mostly dislike.

Last week, after few ‘nothing scheduled' days, my overly planning-oriented mind had already begun to show symptoms of anxiety. There was, quite understandably, a fair amount of ambiguity concerning my future studies. No student handbook, no precise timetable (later I learned there was, but I had been looking in all the wrong places). Then, on Thursday, the induction circus finally commenced here at LSE.