Venkat

I tried to deal with this more fully (and with a single example) in an essay a couple of months ago which can be found here.
http://knol.google.com/k/derick-harris/where-in-the-world-is-here/36gjd7zkgxvbe/16#.
Derick Harris
Hawaii

That said, I have no comment to make on the quality of his intellectual output overall, or on inferences that can be drawn from a person dropping out of a PhD program (though you may or may not be right in what you are implying). Living the life of a credentialed scholar is far from being the only, or even the best (or even among the top 5) ways to contribute intellectually to culture and knowledge, and I tend to err on the side of favoring the work of blaze-your-own-path maverick intellectuals outside the academy over the routine, dull dreck at academic conferences which comes with the full comma-phd attached. Especially when it comes to fostering works of broad synthesis, like JS attempts, the academy, frankly, sucks (a few daring souls like E. O. Wilson aside).

I guess I am saying I can imagine, and empathize with, the frustrations that would lead someone to drop a Yale PhD and pursue attempts to contribute by (say) writing for the New Yorker instead . Though my own doctoral experience was very positive, and I finished and had fun in the process, I can clearly see it’s limitations too (and know plenty of people who hated it, and finished when they should have dropped out and found something better to do with their lives). That’s one of the reasons I write this blog, though I do occasionally continue with more traditional “scholarly” stuff.

Venkat

I have to admit, the New Yorker style of self-assured, faux-authoritative rhetoric annoys me in general, and particularly in this case. Surowiecki is much too confident about his ability to represent and interpret academic work. I lost my faith in his inferences when I read the bit, somewhere in the middle of the book, about traffic behavior and automated highway systems, a subject I studied at a fairly detailed and technical level during my PhD, which was on the related problem of formation flight. His treatment of this particular theme is somewhere between simple-minded and plain wrong.

OMG you hit the nail on the head. I’ve always found his je ne sais quoi grating, even when he was lobbying for unionization rights when a doctoral candidate at Yale (I was also there at the time; he did not finish), but you found the words for which I could only muster vague moodiness.