[Wittrs] Re: A corollary of the Peter Principle (Jeff's comments)

From: Martha Sherwoodpike <msherwoodpike@xxxxxxxxx>
To: CHORA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 11 Apr 2011 10:06:47 -0700
Jeff H.wrote:
" I have no idea what to do about some of the problems you're talking about. 
 People will be people."

I at least hinted at a way to address the problem when I ascribed its magnitude 
to boom and bust cycles that create huge disparities in the level of 
competition over time. Rapid exponential growth (in the case I alluded to, in 
American Universities) which overshoots and then abruptly crashes, is a 
phenomenon amenable to modification and is not the invariable result of human 
nature. If growth had been slower, at a more sustainable level, then the 
qualifications of the judges would more closely match, on the average, the 
qualifications of those being judged, and there would not be so many applicants 
for a position that those doing the hiring had the luxury of rejecting people 
on arbitrary grounds. The Peter Principle operates most strongly during the 
rapid growth phase (People get promoted into their level of incompetence 
because there is little or no competition) whereas the corollary comes into 
play during the retrenchment phase.

With respect to disseminating ideas on the internet when more conventional 
avenues of publication are closed, it's at best a partial solution. As a 
scientist, I can only go so far with an idea without having a position at a 
University or a research laboratory. Getting hard data requires a considerable 
infrastructure. It is not going to be much consolation to me if, years down the 
road, someone better situated is able to use my idea, even if they do 
acknowledge that I had priority. 

 Back in 1975, when I was a graduate student at Cornell, I gave two papers at 
the annual meeting of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (a major 
conference), one on the taxonomy of fungi that were the subject of my 
dissertation research and one a theoretical paper using models from island 
biogeography to estimate the numbers of fungal species. The second paper met 
with a negative reaction from some influential individuals - basically, that 
everybody knew that this was nonsense, and what was I, a graduate student, 
doing talking about matters theoretical - and I never pursued it. About ten 
years ago essentially the same analysis appeared in a prestigious forum, with 
established names attached, and it is now the last word on the subject. I 
actually think the authors of the more recent paper were probably unaware of my 
1975 presentation. I wouldn't have noticed it except that someone who had been 
present at the 1975 conference wrote to me
 wondering if I still had a copy of the paper. I don't. The only record of it 
is an abstract in a conference program. Like conference papers delivered 
orally, electronic media can have a pretty short shelf life if no one archives 
hard copy.

Martha Sherwood

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[Wittrs] Re: A corollary of the Peter Principle (Jeff's comments)

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