答えのない問いにこだわる理由

I pretty rapidly realized that the App Architecture group knew even less than
I did about macros. At least, I had talked to a handful of macro developers
and some Excel old-timers to get a grip on what people actually did with Excel
macros: things like recalculating a spreadsheet every day, or rearranging some
data according to a certain pattern. But the App Architecture group had merely
thought about macros as an academic exercise, and they couldn't actually come
up with any examples of the kind of macros people would want to write.
Pressured, one of them came up with the idea that since Excel already had
underlining and double-underlining, perhaps someone would want to write a
macro to triple underline. Yep. REAL common. So I proceeded to ignore them as
diplomatically as possible.

    -- Joel Spolsky
    -- "Two Stories" ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/TwoStories.html )

I disagree with your generalization that physicists are smarter than
professors of French Literature.

Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the
professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn
how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French
literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original
physics papers. If they fail, they'll be shot. Which group is more worried?

We have some evidence here: the famous parody that physicist Alan Sokal got
published in Social Text. How long did it take him to master the art of
writing deep-sounding nonsense well enough to fool the editors? A couple
weeks?

What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody
of a physics paper published in a physics journal?

    -- Paul Graham
    -- Re: What You Can't Say ( http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html )