Education and Decision Theory A Personal View

Abstract

First of all, in the grand tradition—and spirit—of Murphy, Parkinson, and Sod, I want to offer you a law: the “law of disciplinary myopia.” It goes like this: Each academic discipline possesses a limited number of key insights into the world and how we can come to know and understand it better. The number is usually greater than one but rarely more than two or three. These key insights are documented, embroidered, stretched, qualified, and paraphrased until they are all but lost to many students, even specialists (perhaps most of all specialists). But that is not the law of disciplinary myopia, just an academic manifestation of Parkinson. The law of disciplinary myopia says that in its own operations (organization and teaching), a discipline will ignore, deny, and betray its own key insights.