Rant of the Week
I am lots of listserves about various issues and one of the things that really ticks me off is intellectual laziness. There are mucho requests via these listserves by people who have not even bothered to do a superficial search of the information available on the web. But no, it appears that either they are too lazy, too self-important, too stupid, etc. to even bother looking themselves. I feel like I am feeding pablum to Ph.D. students in training at times - they haven’t even bothered to do a cursory search themselves before begging for help, time, resources from the ‘experts’ in the field.
And the researchers that approach obtaining research ideas (and quotable quotes from the ‘experts’ in the field, I expect), are such brown-nosers. Their agendas are so transparent - can’t they do this in private (via email to their ’stars’ and ‘mentors’ and not subject the whole listserve to their abject supplication, not to mention subjecting a whole listserve of 200 or 300 people with their notions of self-importance , ‘current’ research ideas and supposed ‘requests’ for help).
At my age, this totally pisses me off. Like, don’t younger people even think these days, can’t they find out who the major contributors are in their field of enquiry and then pose relevant questions regarding this research (to at least exhibit that they have done some thinking about the area they are researching!) to the person in question.
And this is what happens - knowledge is appropriated as their own without research on their part and worse, without acknowledgment of the people who have actually thought about the issue (primary sources). Knowledge of an area becomes a Wal-Mart commodity and one that they ‘own’ as far as they are concerned, without acknowledging the historical progression of thought (and the people that have done the research or made suggestions) that have led to their opinion. We, the reader, are supposed to take this regurgitation of information and thought as original. As I say, I get tired of this.
