Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 38, No. 166.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2024-09-30 07:55:34+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: a reminder

Kindly be aware that if a posting you have sent to Humanist does not
appear a day or two afterwards, it has simply been lost among the large
number of bounced messages I receive. I sift through these, looking for
postings buried among them--and, I'm afraid, must sometimes miss them.
If yours is one of these, please send it again.  Be assured that all
genuine postings are sent out, none censored except for the rare
commercial advertisement, obvious scam or the exceedingly rare message
likely to cause the equivalent of a twitterstorm. By 'exceedingly rare'
I refer to the perhaps half-dozen instances since 1987 when I intervened
to prevent such a storm, and always in those cases I've written to the
individual concerned to explain my reasons. Humanist is edited.

We all communicate differently nowadays, having many more opportunities
to get our words into circulation. But what we seldom do online is to
ask research questions, venture wild ideas, take the sort of risks
academics are in fact called to take. That's what Humanist is for, to
engage in what Gadamer called "genuine conversation". Some time ago a
colleague said to me that he had to get his ideas into print before
someone else 'scooped' him, as journalists say. I fear all too many of
us think like that and so are stumm until copyright protects them.
Perhaps that's why so many academic articles are so mechanical, so very
dull. Now we have ChatGPT and other stochastic parrots for that, so we
can do better, yes? The means are to hand.

Cheers,
WM

-----
Willard McCarty
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews;  Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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