reality-based fields

[nibot]

In the last two minutes of my flight to Atlanta, my neighbor began eagerly chatting with me. I don't know what brought on the change in him exactly. For the last four or five hours I had been happily ensconced in my Princess-Leia-like headphones and he had been very much unconscious. We got to talking about the usual air-traveler topics: where we were from, where we were going, and what we did.

"Physics," I said. "I'm looking for black holes. We use lasers to measure distances very precisely, looking for distortions in space caused by spinning pairs of black holes."

He said this was very interesting, etc etc, mentioned the Coast to Coast AM late-night radio programme (target audience: conspiracy theorists), and said, for counterpoint: "I work in a very concrete, reality-based field."

"What field is that?" I asked.

"Financial services."

I laughed inside.

Comments

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Funny how that term has been misappropriated by some people at times. I don't think I ever heard the phrase "reality-based" until that famous NYTimes magazine article where Matt Bai wrote about the Bush administration and quoted some anonymous individual as distinguishing the "reality-based community" from the "faith-based community" or something. I think the original idea was supposed to be that the Bush administration didn't need to worry about what reality (ie, the reality of international politics) was like, because they had enough power that they could change all that if they wanted to. But of course, it slipped very easily into all their attempts to deny or ignore reality in so many other fields as well, so it was a great description to make the relevant distinction.