New doctoral thesis proposes Buckminster Fuller was a 'charlatan'
research.aalto.fi
research.aalto.fi
Intelligence agencies like to study and understand the propagation of false information.
Except that Fuller wasn't a scientist and did not contribute in any way to science.
> In this day of rampant pseudoscience and distrust of scientists
Time would be better spent figuring out how evolutionary psychology manages to seem real today. We already have works on the phrenology of yesteryear.
> Intelligence agencies like to study and understand the propagation of false information.
I had no idea the CIA had an introspection department. Good for them!
It also doesn't mean that the Author particularly enjoys or finds the topic that interesting. I've often heard that if you have a favourite topic, you should at best find a thesis topic that is adjacent or related, and I'd tend to agree.
> such comments surfaced once more following the publication of Fuller's latest biography, in 2022 – most intriguingly, considering its author's assertion that Fuller was, indeed, a genius
Strange, then, that the two should disagree. You say that this biography agrees with OP article, but OP article disagrees with the biography. Did I misunderstand?
Edit: I just searched an epub version of the biography for "genius" and they all seem to reference other people talking about Fuller rather than editorial judgment. I'd have to read the thesis to see the author's fuller (ha!) interpretation of the bio.
Fuller was awarded a huge number of patents on his inventions- and although mostly impractical, they are quite certainly new inventions of his own design.
I think it is quite likely that he was as narcissist, in that he worked hard to project an image of himself as a certain type of person, but I also think the type of creative out of the box thinker he actually was, tends to be labeled as a charlatan by people with authoritarian personalities.
Without context, that can be inspiring. But that doesn't make it meaningful.
For me his most functionally useful and inspiring ideas have been in the realm of philosophy of engineering- he has a process for thinking about problems that avoids a lot of pitfalls that cause people to reject new or weird ideas.
His ideas are concrete, specific, and very well thought out- he is a brilliant guy. If you've read his books and they seem like Chopra mixed with math jargon, and you can't see how they are useful for real world engineering problems, you are simply not understanding him.
Which is a bit sad. My thesis is available online. Which might be sadder.
These people are rewarded for publishing.
Fuller was over the top in many ways, yet one cannot have witnessed a remnant of his works (Biosphere 2 "lungs") and deny his substance was genius. Whatever his essentricities the man delivered on vision.
He is cited commonly in a dozen ways to this day. I still say "trim tab".
This so called intellectual is the jealous fraud.
However, the dissertation defense was held against Jonathan Woodham, who's a noted scholar of 20th-century architectural history, so there's likely something there, even though without the dissertation to read the abstract seems exceptionally combative and audacious.
> In his working life, Fuller seems indeed to have been a charlatan whose career was mainly based on fabrication, misappropriation, pseudoscience, pretense, and imposture. The study suggests that his actions and behaviour are best understood via his fractured and grandiose personality [...]
While academics & scholars might (not an expert; didn't read the dissertation) be correct to call him a "charlatan", he sounds to me rather like modern CEO material.
Outlook II:
From a peek at his Wikipedia page -
> Buckminster Fuller was a Unitarian, and, [...] Unitarian minister. Fuller was also an early environmental activist, aware of Earth's finite resources, and promoted a principle he termed "ephemeralization", [...]
> Fuller was a pioneer in thinking globally, and explored energy and material efficiency [...]
> Though Fuller was concerned about sustainability and human survival under the existing socioeconomic system [...]
For those unfamiliar with Unitarianism - there's something of a "classic university town" Unitarian Minister stereotype here. At least historically, many highly educated and well-to-do Unitarian congregation members would expect their minister to be (or seem to be) a leading intellectual in many important-feeling fields. No mere mortal could actually do that...but if one was a fast-thinking, xenophilic, and workaholic polymath, one could keep faking it well enough to get by. More or less.
(No, this stereotype does not describe all Unitarian ministers. Especially not in the the modern era.)
It did help me develop some immunity to the conspiracy theorists who claimed that this or that invention was suppressed by "those forces" that wanted to thwart progress.
The dymaxion car redefined both aerodynamics and space efficiency in vehicles. It inspired the VW bus, and lives on today in cabover vans and buses around the world, which efficiently transport a lot of people by allowing nearly the entire footprint of the vehicle to be used for passengers.
It was in no way a practical vehicle itself, but it showcased a huge number of new ideas that were later incorporated into vehicles- it was a 'concept car' with a huge impact.
Actually a person can be both. I think Elon Musk is one such person.
But seriously, we all knew Bucky was a lovable kook.