The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf]

"Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity and the less they are deflected by considerations of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times."

Very smart guy. I bought the print copy of this essay here: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174761/th...

As a mostly recluse myself, I made.my.peace with world. The world is led by men who think the faster we arrive at utility the faster money can be made. True. The falacy on that way is to assume that people like Maxwell, Oersted and many more mentioned in the article would prefer working in teams which is shoveled these days into the fabric of academic collaboration. It's not. Genius people prefer working alone and their discoveries did and do happen while they are left alone. Out society will lose and already lost a lot with the current requirements of collaborarion in academic work. Venture capital provided by prolific no-knowers is also detromental.

"The mere fact that they bring satisfaction to an individual soul bent upon its own purification and elevation is all the justification that they need."

This is by the founder about IAS (aka (Turing's) [*Bazaar-]Cathedral) founding between war & depression, while it was still at 20 Nassau St

Further Quaker background by Freeman Dyson's son George who wrote that book having grown up there

https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2009/george-dyson-tavern-and-meeti...

*IAS was an open-maxxed Bell Labs

https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/700.php

>Dyson misses the point somewhat about virtual machines and cloud computing, which are much more about relocatable and rescalable computing — rather than having to house and maintain computers to handle the peak computational load, we can run software remotely as a service, and purchase resources on an as-needed basis; the providers of these services can reroute and reallocate resources in real-time without any intervention by or impact on their customers. There’s something here in Dyson’s statement alluding to parallel processing...

Paradoxes for outwitting the uni-context..