It wasn’t carefully chosen. It was the term used by the commenter I was replying to. I was a little frustrated, because it was another example of a truth-seeking enquiry by Milena getting pushed down the track of only-considering-answers-in-which-all-the-agency/wrongness-is-on-the-university side (including some pretty unpleasant options relating to people I’d worked with (‘parasitic egregore/siphon money’).
>Did Oxford think it was a reputation risk? Were the other philosophers jealous of the attention and funding FHI got? Was a beaurocratic parasitic egregore putting up roadblocks to siphon off money to itself? Garden variety incompetence?
So I just did copy and paste on the most relevant phrase, but flipped it. Bit blunter and more smart-arse than I would normally be (as you’ve presumably seen from my writing, I normally caveat to a probably-tedious degree), but I was finding it hard to challenge the simplistic fhi-good-uni-bad narrative. It was one line, I didn’t think much about it.
I remain of the view that the claim is true/a reasonable interpretation, but de novo / in a different context I would have phrased differently.
One other observation that might explain some of the different perceptions on ‘blame’ here.
I don’t think Oxford’s bureaucracy/administration is good, and I think it did behave very badly at points*. But overall, I don’t think Oxford’s bureaucracy/behaviour was a long way outside what you would expect for the reference class of thousand-year-old-institutions with >10,000 employees. And Nick knew that was what it was, chose to be situated there, and did benefit (particularly in the early days) from the reputation boost. I think there is some reasonable expectation that having made that choice, he would put some effort into either figuring out how to operate effectively within its constraints, or take it somewhere else.
(*it did at point have the feeling of grinding inevitability of a failing marriage, where beyond a certain point everything one side did was perceived in the worst light and with maximal irritation by the other side, going in both directions, which contributed to bad behaviour I think).
It wasn’t carefully chosen. It was the term used by the commenter I was replying to. I was a little frustrated, because it was another example of a truth-seeking enquiry by Milena getting pushed down the track of only-considering-answers-in-which-all-the-agency/wrongness-is-on-the-university side (including some pretty unpleasant options relating to people I’d worked with (‘parasitic egregore/siphon money’).
>Did Oxford think it was a reputation risk? Were the other philosophers jealous of the attention and funding FHI got? Was a beaurocratic parasitic egregore putting up roadblocks to siphon off money to itself? Garden variety incompetence?
So I just did copy and paste on the most relevant phrase, but flipped it. Bit blunter and more smart-arse than I would normally be (as you’ve presumably seen from my writing, I normally caveat to a probably-tedious degree), but I was finding it hard to challenge the simplistic fhi-good-uni-bad narrative. It was one line, I didn’t think much about it.
I remain of the view that the claim is true/a reasonable interpretation, but de novo / in a different context I would have phrased differently.
One other observation that might explain some of the different perceptions on ‘blame’ here.
I don’t think Oxford’s bureaucracy/administration is good, and I think it did behave very badly at points*. But overall, I don’t think Oxford’s bureaucracy/behaviour was a long way outside what you would expect for the reference class of thousand-year-old-institutions with >10,000 employees. And Nick knew that was what it was, chose to be situated there, and did benefit (particularly in the early days) from the reputation boost. I think there is some reasonable expectation that having made that choice, he would put some effort into either figuring out how to operate effectively within its constraints, or take it somewhere else.
(*it did at point have the feeling of grinding inevitability of a failing marriage, where beyond a certain point everything one side did was perceived in the worst light and with maximal irritation by the other side, going in both directions, which contributed to bad behaviour I think).