Organizational intertia

At a recent large academic conference, my paper, for some reason, was given a wrong name. When I asked for it to be correct, I was told that the print program was out, so they could only offer a correction in the form of a leaflet inserted into the program - reasonable. But when I asked them to correct the entry in an online schedule listing, I was told that "since the online program is intended to resemble the final program we cannot make the change there either".

?!!

One would think that the very purpose of an online program is to be a better version of the printed one, particularly, one that can be easily changed to reflect changes to schedule... but as we can see from the above, some people still cannot adjust to the realities of the cyberspace (which is ironic because my paper is on an Internet-related subject :D).

Oh well. Being a lowly grad student I know better than to try to reform a major (academic) institution myself. Been there, tried, failed :)

Youth today... and the future

So I had my final lecture today (teaching university undergrads about "sociology of the family") in the summer class I was teaching, and as usual in my classes, the final lecture looks at the future. We watched a video of Kurzweil, and had a discussion about things like genetic engineering, life expectancy, aging society, the Internet and so on. At one point, however, I was shocked: vast majority of the students seemed very opposed to the idea of immortality (which is increasingly becoming a serious possibility according to some scientists).

Interestingly, theirs were not the arguments I was used to hearing in the past ("it's not natural/it's against the religion/etc."). No, this bunch was rather... very, very pessimistic. They talked about boredom ("why would you want to leave forever? you'll just keep seeing more human misery"), about how the future will be scary (citing sci-fi antiutopias - Huxley, Wells, etc.), about how we have to deal with overpopulation and scarce resources and how immortality is unsustainable, and they even considered (and roughly supported) the idea that the government should make it illegal for people to achieve immortality (!).

I haven't held enough discussions on this subject to know if this group represents an outlier, or is there some current of pessimism about the future that is surfacing about the modern youth?

Being a singularitarian optimist myself I found their pessimism unsettling. Not to want to see the wonders of the future, not to want to live one life's fully... that's what *I* find scary.