Re: Geekery, education and high-powered brains ...

On Jan 25, 11:58 pm, kmd <k...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

So P went on. Ok, see, they can't really ask me about my work because,
well ... none of us really understands what the others do. I could
tell them something about my work, and they'd just have no way to tell
if I was lying or not. There's about 12 or 13 people in the world who
could check my claims about my work, and none of them is going to be
at the same university as me. We're all so specialized at this level
of math; our peers are almost never our colleagues.

Yes, that's perfectly normal in academia. The whole point is that
people do highly specialized research that isn't being carried out by
anyone else. If it were, there wouldn't be any point in employing
them.

[quoting mathematician]
Oh, no, I didn't choose this specialization. I chose an advisor. I
chose someone who I could work with, someone who was excited about
what he was doing and who got me excited.

Yup, that's generally how it works, although I was a little different
- I learned about my specialism via a friend and then found a
supervisor in my institution who I could work with. But I think I was
unusual.

[grinz] I can't tell you how much this made my day. For a lot of days.
My friend (who is a wonderful, gentle soul btw) is in this world
that's so high-powered that you have to rely as much on who someone is
as on what they can do.

Seems fairly normal to me. For the last few jobs I've done I've had
little or no relevant experience. Do you really think that having run
a newsagent's qualified me to do telephone number porting?

Guy


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