From a conversation with a friend on a recent Facebook post. A memory of a memory, #academic ghosts haunting the dusty rooms of my brain.

I once spent a very enjoyable afternoon in the #University of #Minnesota #Biostatistics department library reading through century-old bound volumes of #Biometrika, which is now a somewhat obscure #journal, but was in its day instrumental to the development of #statistics. All the great names were there—#Yule, #Pearson, #Fisher, et al.—and it was a clubby little world back then. Everybody who was anybody in statistics knew everybody else.

Just like today, they used a lot of space in their papers refuting each other's papers. But the writing style was completely different, much more personal: many of the papers read more like conversations than the structured, pedantic language of modern journal articles in practically every field. "First I tried this, but it didn't work, so next I ..." "Like I said to so-and-so in a recent letter ..." "According to whosit, such-and-such is true, but frankly, whosit is an idiot."

Well, I recognized what they were doing: forming #cliques and having slow-motion #flamewars. Everything old is new again. Sometimes I wonder if we wouldn't be better off stripping out the modern pretense of detachment.