On Science and Salesmanship

Today I had to sit through three seminar talks given by candidates for a post at my institution.  The audience reaction is quite important to the hiring process here and so it is a duty not a pleasure, which is what seminars normally are for me.


The thing with seminars is that they have changed over time, and not in a good way.  Originally seminars were a discussion- the talk kicked off the questions and the questions kicked off the debate.  In some places this has degraded so that the only questions asked tend to be toadying ones, or occasionally, horror of horrors, there are no questions at all.  Frankly if I ever presented work where it roused no questions I would retire.  But luckily, where I work the spirit of the original seminar is alive and well.  There is often a debate.

I am well known for asking questions.  I once took my wife to a conference, partly to prove to her that it was indeed work not fun.  She was waiting outside a lecture hall with a friend of mine when a group of pale sweating students wandered past clearly shaken up.  when she asked what the matter was she was informed that they had had questions from me and needed to recover.  So today i was expected to ask questions.

I struggled.  It wasn't the 3 hrs pain racked sleep.  It wasn't that I didn't understand the subject.  It was simply that the only question I could think of was "What the hell was that crap?".  Because what I saw was bullshit layered thick and hard.

The problem is the insidious presence of advertising in science.  Of people selling themselves.  And not in an honest, up front prostitution type way.  Each talk started off with a gush about the areas of application.  Each one was about environmental/green/natural fallacy stuff.  And each gush was TOTALLY UNRELATED TO THE RESEARCH.  I mean for the love of god I bullshit for a living.  If you are going to sell me a line at least make it plausible.

In one of the films where he plays God George Burns has some advice for an evangelist, and I would like to paraphrase it for scientists.  If you want to sell something sell shoes.  Don't try to sell a line of bollocks in science.  It degrades the subject and it degrades you.