[ExI] abandoning hope

[Amara Graps]

giovanni santost <santostasigio at yahoo.com>:

>Any time I meet Italian scientists at a conference I'm saddened by 
>their tales of all sorts of problems they encouter in their life in 
>the Italian scientific world and in particular how little they are 
>paid.

The money reflects the value that the culture places on science though.
The problem is much bigger than their salaries.

>And still, Italy manages to be a leader in many fields of science 
>and technology...

Italian scientists are very resourceful out of necessity.

>Maybe the family network compensates so well for the problems you 
>talked about that Italians in the end are extremely attached to 
>their country and it is difficult for them to leave.

If, or when, the family network is no longer able to subsidize (heavily,
like now) the scientists, then Italian science will die.

>I would say the quality of life is superior in many ways in Italy.

If you've been away for while, then maybe you've not experienced the large
time spent in daily life trying to have 'normal' services. Nevertheless,
with the family support so that their financial expenses are manageable,
my colleagues have a fair bit of free time to enjoy their lives.


>It can be interesting to reflect on how Italy went from a center of 
>knowledge and innovation during the Renaissance to a much more 
>stagnant and peripheral place today. Maybe there are important 
>lessons there, in particular from the point of view of 
>transhumanism. Renaissance had a lot of point in common with the 
>vision of the world of transhumanism.
>What went wrong?

Whatever it was, it was a complete break from the past. There doesn't
seem to be any link from the time of da Vinci and Galileo to now in the
culture for the value of science and technology. They lost it all. The
Italian public today views the scientists by-and-large as wastes of
resources and money. That's worse than the low salary, I think.


>Most of my knowledge of what is going in Italy right now comes from 
>talking to my family and the news on the web. Almost every day there 
>are several news that talk about people from Romania, Albania and so 
>on being arrested for some horrible crime. Maybe the media are 
>guilty of some discrimination, but up to a point.

I noticed differences with what the media reports here, and what I saw
and experienced in my weeks of queues at the Questura. Beppe Grillo
might provide another useful source of information for you. He has his
own slant, but there's usually a grain of truth to what he says.

Amara