Responding to TigerHawk on academics and business

Note: I wrote most of the post below on Jan 17th, but didn't get around to finishing it until now (Jan 25th). It's an elaboration of a comment I left at Tigerhawk.

http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-do-professors-deplore-enterprise.html

I'm half-listening right now to a science show on radio. What strikes me is how enthusiastic the scientists are about their cool discoveries, insights, etc. There are a tremendous number of discoveries being made in quite a few fields right now, due to access to data (via sensor networks, robots, etc) that simply weren't available before -- on the ocean floor, on Mars, in large trees, etc. Similar in engineering and business. Any market is being challenged by the ongoing tech revolution, encouraging people to try to do impossible things with occasional success, and to do possible things better. This is fun!

OTOH post-modernism it seems to me has run out of ideas. It's shallow, it's not fun. Academics have to argue that their variant of a speculative theory is better and the other variants are worse. It's rhetoric not substance, and all the big ideas have been picked apart ad nauseum. No fun, just backbiting. Perhaps some of the anti-business bias (not to mention snobbery and disdain) is due to resentment.

I hope that academics in the humanities and social sciences throw out their frameworks and rediscover the joys of poring over and puzzling out the data in their fields. As a side-effect of having more fun in their own fields, they would probably see the fun in other areas -- such as business -- as well.