"Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love."

One of the greatest minds of our time.

I honestly can't make heads or tails of it. It implicitly makes sense when you read it, but upon closer inspection it makes no sense logically. It's the worst kind of analogy, and analogies in general should be punishable by public whipping.

I guess that makes journalists the selective sluts of knowledge, then.

A tries to be B, everyone knows it's not, many like to pretend it is anyway, A is pig disgusting while B is virtuous.

How doesn't it make sense?

Literally no one believes, thinks or pretends prostitution is love lol. Majority of people don't even think free sex is love.

as an auto-didact, i like this quote

But I don't want love when I do the prostitutes. I want to be milked by a professional cunt.

A guy who thinks we should drop the entire field of statistics

He was trying to trigger you and succeeded

>I want to be milked by a professional cunt
youre referring to academia right

same

All STEMshit should be dropped.

He's right

Of course Emily Dickinson undercuts even Taleb: 'Publication is the auction of the mind of man'.. --If this applies as well, then NT's comment's neither here nor there: whoredom becomes unavoidable, and purity (being in fact the moral equivalent of absolute silence) a 'dumb' myth.

Prostitution / love:
>The institution (prostitution) peddles a product (sex) through certain hired purveyors (prostitutes) to a wide audience (clients). The product is a superficially tantalizing but ultimately worthless paid-for substitute for a rare and valuable thing (love) which is got by merit. Insofar as the product is presented as the valuable thing, it is a fake. Insofar as the purveyors or the audience think themselves to be trading in or receiving the valuable thing, they are desperate, deceived, and in fact getting further from it.

For the case of "academia / knowledge," the institution is academia, the purveyors are academics, the audience is students/the public/etc., and the valuable thing is knowledge. The product is whatever it is that academics peddle which the quote wants to denigrate as failing to amount to knowledge. I don't know what exactly. Academic theory?

Smart user. I should think its also a disparagement of credentialism

Yeah, it occurred to me while I was writing it that there were probably more dimensions than I was thinking of.

I just changed my mind about this. It's not that the product might be confused for the valuable thing and thus be a fake (although I guess there is that too at least in part); it's that the product might mislead you into thinking that, in the sphere in which it operates, it is all you need--whereas in fact it is not valuable on its own but only in conjunction with the valuable thing. For prostitution and love the sphere is intimacy, and for academia and knowledge the sphere is the intellect.

You pay for the dubious privilege of joining in with a kind of conspiracy doomed to be in a state of radical paranoia over whether a sufficiently totalizing conspiracy is still a conspiracy or can and perhaps should be described as something else.

If you read Taleb and think that, you missed something. He thinks we should stop using PREDICTIVE statistics. It's the same reductive fallacy people had with Fooled By Randomness that he talks about in Antifragile: people read it as "everything is random" when he means "it's more random than you know". Most of his arguments are statistically based, in a way. He still believes in minimizing risk and maximizing gain. However he doesn't think we should try to model what we can't understand, but instead try to build it to withstand more than we can understand.

Yes, you're right. But we pretend that academia is rigorously proving and researching things out of a genuine curiosity, when they have so many other incentives that muddle the picture.