Every Grant is also a Bounty | Applied Divinity Studies

The people you see have a reputation. Some of them are high-status, some are low-status. Some have their reputation conferred upon by a higher power, some have cultivated it for themselves. What you might not realize is that reputation can be taken. Their reputation could one day be yours. When I look out over the internet, I don’t see faces. Just a turbulent ocean of bounties waiting to be harvested. This is the art of the takedown piece. It can be something highly targeted like Guzey’s masterpiece “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors, or my own Austen Allred is Consistently Deceptive. It can be about misrepresenting research (see Stuart Ritchie on Johann Hari), or just a series of theoretical arguments. By criticizing someone more prominent than yourself, you sap their life force, attempt to take their reputation for your own, and challenge their high standing. For the modern public intellectual, shelf life is nasty, brutish and short. This comes to a particul

The people you see have a reputation. Some of them are high-status, some are low-status. Some have their reputation conferred upon by a higher power, some have cultivated it for themselves. What you might not realize is that reputation can be taken. Their reputation could one day be yours. When I look out over the internet, I don’t see faces. Just a turbulent ocean of bounties waiting to be harvested. This is the art of the takedown piece. It can be something highly targeted like Guzey’s masterpiece “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors, or my own Austen Allred is Consis