Or as Australian ad man John Singleton once said, “The public is this big blobby mass and all you can really do is stand in front of it and just throw things at it.”

I knew some excellent female copywriters but it’s true they never advanced into any top level positions – mainly I think because advertising is a very blokey, chest-beating and headbutting culture – where you’re only as good as your last hit and where developing personas such as French’s swashbuckling lad or hypertense and/or eccentric genius copywriter is seen as a way to cut through and get attention and promotion. And many of the women I worked with in advertising found this rather self-conscious emphasis on selling yourself as a “character” or”personality” pretty boring if not actually repellent.

It’s basically an industry all about shouting. Shouting about products, shouting rounds, shouting about your talent and shouting down rivals.

Historically, there are little-to-no quality control checks done on their work – nobody knows why or how well most advertising campaigns succeed, or if they fail, why they fail – any idiot with half a brain would have realized that the disastrous campaign for McDonald’s Arch Deluxe sandwich was foredoomed, and why – you’d have thought, but obviously plenty of them didn’t.—Or realize that multiple variables in a rollout campaign were going to corrupt the results.

Moreover, ad agencies are notoriously sloppy and careless in their work, because after all it’s not their money they’re burning. They really do believe that throwing money at problems is the best solution, rather than “measure twice, cut once,” or the prepress/proofreading equivalent thereof.
—I say this as a 10+ year veteran of the printing industry, and ergo someone who has put in her time and then some, fixing the mistakes of ad agencies…not to mention the stories I’ve heard from my colleagues and peers in the field!

“Topology is just about collections of open sets which doesn’t really require geometrical intuition “

Point-set topology is about collections of open sets, but algebraic topology isn’t. A geometric intuition is a great help in algebraic topology, and indeed—contrary to what you say—in most other parts of pure mathematics. One view of 20th century pure mathematics is that it is all about shape and structure—ie, a qualitative, not quantitative discipline—for which a geometric intuition is probably essential.

“But then, apparently, one of the major figures in early twentieth century statistics (Fisher, I think), supposedly relied entirely on geometrical intuition.”

Not only Fisher, but also Poincare, Hilbert, Kolmogorov, Eilenberg, Grothendieck, Nash, Smale, . . . Pick pretty much any leading mathematician!

I’ll take “made up sciences” for $50, please.

And which of these categories do you have to be in to make it to the top in advertising?

Psychmetricians argue that for biological reasons women are more ‘bunched’ around the mean—fewer retards, fewer geniuses.

Of course, if French had said THAT he would not only have had to resign—he would probably have been eaten alive!

Yes, he famously shortened Apple’s original “Think Differently” campaign.

Interesting that someone else seems to have noticed the idea of a joke job. Whenever both partners in a relationship work, especially if they have children, one of the partners has a joke job. It need not necessarily be the woman in the relationship who has the joke job. The clown (as it were) is the one who can most take the piss at work. Hiding behind gender, disability etc seems to be one of the methods of enabling this latent theft. If you want to know who has the joke job in your relationship … if the child is ill which of you drops everything at work and takes him to see a general practioner? Who does the internet shopping at work? Anyone else want to add to the indicators …

Of course, if you work for the state it may be difficult (impossible, even) for you realize this … what was Godel on about again?