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Follow-up essay on why you shouldn’t go to grad school in the humanities

February 8, 2010 /

the big lie

Here’s the original essay. There was also a previous follow-up that I missed.

She was the best student her adviser had ever seen (or so he said); it seemed like a dream when she was admitted to a distinguished doctoral program; she worked so hard for so long; she won almost every prize; she published several essays; she became fully identified with the academic life; even distancing herself from her less educated family. For all of those reasons, she continues as an adjunct who qualifies for food stamps, increasingly isolating herself to avoid feelings of being judged. Her students have no idea that she is a prisoner of the graduate-school poverty trap. The consolations of teaching are fewer than she ever imagined.

Such people sometimes write to me about their thoughts of suicide, and I think nothing separates me from them but luck.

Scenarios like that are what irritate me about professors who still bleat on about “the life of mind.” They absolve themselves of responsibility for what happens to graduate students by saying, distantly, “there are no guarantees.” But that phrase suggests there’s only a chance you won’t get a tenure-track job, not an overwhelming improbability that you will.

Chronicle of Higher Education: The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind’

(Thanks David)

See also:

What’s a Degree Really Worth?

Can Ivy League education be provided for $20 a month?

Americans’ job satisfaction falls to record low

January 8, 2010 /

Even Americans who are lucky enough to have work in this economy are becoming more unhappy with their jobs, according to a new survey that found only 45 percent of Americans are satisfied with their work.

That was the lowest level ever recorded by the Conference Board research group in more than 22 years of studying the issue. In 2008, 49 percent of those surveyed reported satisfaction with their jobs. […]

Workers have grown steadily more unhappy for a variety of reasons:

– Fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting.

– Incomes have not kept up with inflation.

– The soaring cost of health insurance has eaten into workers’ take-home pay.

AP: Americans’ job satisfaction falls to record low

(via Cryptogon)

Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010

January 4, 2010 /

Basically we’ve got an emergent, market-driven global financial system that was all about a faith-based market fundamentalism. It was deprived of oversight for three good reasons (a) it rapidly brought
prosperity to billions (b) under globalization, money is inherently global while governance is inherently local (c) complete regulatory capture of the system — nobody but bankers understands how to bank. There’s no caste of regulators left anywhere who have the clout or even the knowledge to do anything usefully stabilizing. No, not even if you give them guns, lawyers, money and back issues of DAS KAPITAL.

Too big to fail. So, what can you do? Cross your fingers, basically. Make some reassuring noises. Cheerlead instead of reforming the infrastructure. And pawn what’s left of the credibility of government. […]

Some day this too will pass. “What comes after network culture?” We’re so enmeshed in network culture that it’s hard for us to envision anything outside it now. That’s dangerous. It’s like believing in contemporary finance to the point that alternatives become unthinkable.

Stewart Brand, years ago: “And the larger fear looms: we are in the process of building one vast global computer, which could easily become The Legacy System from Hell that holds civilization hostage — the
system doesn’t really work; it can’t be fixed; no one understands it; no one is in charge of it; it can’t be lived without; and it gets worse every year.” Does that sound familiar? It’s sounds plenty familiar if you’re talking about the global economy now, but that’s not what Stewart was talking about.

“Today’s bleeding-edge technology is tomorrow’s broken legacy system. Commercial software is almost always written in enormous haste, at ever- accelerating market velocity; it can foresee an ‘upgrade path’ to
next year’s version, but decades are outside its scope. And societies live by decades, civilizations by centuries…”

The Well: Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010

Matt Taibbi: Obamania

December 14, 2009 /

I was particularly struck by his analysis of the now-infamous video of Sarah Palin book-buyers explaining to a snarky interviewer how they support her despite the fact that they can’t really identify any of her positions. Greenwald notes the obvious parallel:

“The similarity between that mentality and the one driving the Obama [supporters] is too self-evident to require any elaboration. Those who venerated Bush because he was a morally upright and strong evangelical-warrior-family man and revere Palin as a common-sense Christian hockey mom are similar in kind to those whose reaction to Obama is dominated by their view of him as an inspiring, kind, sophisticated, soothing and mature intellectual. These are personality types bolstered with sophisticated marketing techniques, not policies, governing approaches or ideologies.”

I completely agree with Greenwald and I know that what he’s saying is true because I did exactly the same experiment the Palin interviewer tried — at Obama’s inauguration. I interviewed dozens of people and almost without exception the answers to the question “What specific policies do you expect the new president to enact?” were of the following character:

“I think he’s going to bring people together.”

“He really cares about us.”

“I believe that he’s going to help people.” […]

Anyone who wonders why the Obama administration seems to be bending over so far backwards to appease conservatives and industry leaders in the health care debate and Wall Street in the financial regulatory reform debate can find their answer there: those groups make Obama pay for their financial/political support with real actions and policy concessions, while Obama’s “base” will continue their feverish support in exchange for mere gestures and marketing hocus-pocus, for news about the new family puppy or an appearance on Jay Leno.

Matt Taibbi: Obamania

I suspect it runs a bit deeper than this – that everyone, including Taibbi and including me, chooses their politics based not on reason but on some calculus of social and cultural influence, personal preference, and individual psychological eneds and rationalizes it later (“what the thinker thinks, the prover proves,” as Bob Wilson said).

Wired article on disappearing

December 10, 2009 /

Most of us snuff out the question instantly or toy with it occasionally as a harmless mental escape hatch. But every year, thousands of adults decide to act on it, walking out the door with no plan to return and no desire to be found. The precise number is elusive. Nearly 200,000 Americans over age 18 were recorded missing by law enforcement in 2007, but they represent only a fraction of the intentional missing: Many aren’t reported unless they are believed to be in danger. And according to a 2003 British study, two-thirds of missing adults make a conscious decision to leave.

People who go missing do so with an endless variety of motives, from the considered to the impulsive. There are of course those running from their own transgressions: Ponzi schemers, bail jumpers, deadbeat parents, or insurance scammers dreaming of life in a tropical paradise. But most people who abandon their lives do so for noncriminal reasons — relationship breakups, family pressures, financial obligations, or a simple desire for reinvention. The federal government’s Witness Security Program provides new identities for endangered witnesses, but thousands of people who testify in lower-profile cases are on their own to face potential retribution or flee to a safer identity. So too are those trying to escape the unwanted attention of stalkers, obsessive ex-spouses, or psychotically disgruntled clients.

Wired: Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear?

(via Theoretick)

Culture Is More Important Than Genes To Altruistic Behavior In Large-scale Societies

November 3, 2009 /

Socially learned behavior and belief are much better candidates than genetics to explain the self-sacrificing behavior we see among strangers in societies, from soldiers to blood donors to those who contribute to food banks.

This is the conclusion of a study by Adrian V. Bell and colleagues from the University of California Davis in the Oct. 12 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Altruism has long been a subject of interest to evolutionary social scientists. Altruism presents them with a difficult line to argue: behaviors that help unrelated people while being costly to the individual and creating a risk for genetic descendants could not likely be favored by evolution: at least by common evolutionary arguments.

The researchers used a mathematical equation, called the Price equation, that describes the conditions for altruism to evolve. This equation motivated the researchers to compare the genetic and the cultural differentiation between neighboring social groups. Using previously calculated estimates of genetic differences, they used the World Values Survey (whose questions are likely to be heavily influenced by culture in a large number of countries) as a source of data to compute the cultural differentiation between the same neighboring groups. When compared they found that the role of culture had a much greater scope for explaining our pro-social behavior than genetics.

Science Daily: Culture Is More Important Than Genes To Altruistic Behavior In Large-scale Societies

‘Culture Of We’ Buffers Genetic Tendency To Depression

October 30, 2009 /

A genetic tendency to depression is much less likely to be realized in a culture centered on collectivistic rather than individualistic values, according to a new Northwestern University study.

In other words, a genetic vulnerability to depression is much more likely to be realized in a Western culture than an East Asian culture that is more about we than me-me-me.

The study coming out of the growing field of cultural neuroscience takes a global look at mental health across social groups and nations.

Depression, research overwhelmingly shows, results from genes, environment and the interplay between the two. One of the most profound ways that people across cultural groups differ markedly, cultural psychology demonstrates, is in how they think of themselves.

“People from highly individualistic cultures like the United States and Western Europe are more likely to value uniqueness over harmony, expression over agreement, and to define themselves as unique or different from the group,” said Joan Chiao, the lead author of the study and assistant professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.

In contrast, people from collectivist cultures are more likely to value social harmony over individuality. “Relative to people in an individualistic culture, they are more likely to endorse behaviors that increase group cohesion and interdependence,” Chiao said.

Science Daily: ‘Culture Of We’ Buffers Genetic Tendency To Depression

Conformists may kill civilizations

October 8, 2009 /

Robert Anton Wilson explained this years ago:

The capacity to learn from others is one of the traits that have made humans such a global success story. Relying on it too much, however, could have contributed to the demise of past populations, such as the Maya of southern Mexico in the eighth and ninth centuries and Norse settlers in Greenland 1,000 years ago.

Over-hunting, deforestation and over-population are well-worn routes to societal collapse. Now, Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and Pete Richerson of the University of California, Davis, have modelled how different learning strategies fare in different environments. They found that conformist social learning — imitating and emulating what the majority are doing — may also cause the demise of societies. When environments remain stable for long periods, behaviour can become disconnected from environmental demands, so that when change does come, the effects are catastrophic1.

Environments often change in unpredictable ways and over timescales from the seasonal to millennial. Rainfall and temperature change both seasonally and annually; populations of predators, prey and pests rise and fall; soil conditions change.

Biology News: Conformists may kill civilizations

(via Weird Fiction via Blustr)

Common good is best achieved through rewards, not punishment

September 9, 2009 /

To promote the common good, should helpers be rewarded, or should free riders be punished? Although the bulk of previous research has fingered punishment as the best enforcer, a new study published online today in Science found that rewards are more effective. […]

He and his team used a classic public goods game to study how groups of volunteers encouraged the best outcome for the most people. In a series of monetary interactions, individuals decided how much money to contribute to a common pot, and they could then decide whether to reward good contributors or punish bad—both of which would entail spending money.

Previous public goods studies had focused on one-time interactions and found that people were more likely to swindle or punish others. But in situations where interactions were repeated, people found greater success in reward-based structures—in which those that contributed were rewarded and those who didn’t were ignored—than those in which costly punishment was doled out to those who didn’t contribute.

Scientific American: Common good is best achieved through rewards, not punishment

(via Relevant History)

Can we transition to renewable fuels?

July 7, 2009 /

Jeff Vail concludes his series on the “Renewables Hump”:

It was my plan to conclude this series by answering (with pretty graphs, no less!) several questions like this. However, I fear that such an exercise is largely meaningless: I have been unable to come up with a verifiable proxy for EROEI measurement, and without that I would only be addressing hypotheticals. Worse, questions that will be permanently hypothetical.

Instead, I am left with only a confirmed sense of uncertainty. Perhaps that uncertainty is itself valuable. If I have poked holes in (what I believe to be) the widespread assumption that we can surely transition to a renewables-driven economy if only we make the decision to do so, then perhaps this series has been of value. If I shift the discussion (even only in my own mind) toward what to do in light of this uncertainty, then I will feel that this has been worthwhile. It is in answer to this last question that I am most excited: I plan to focus more in the future on decentralized, networked, open-source, platform-based systems that we can use to simultaneously build resiliency, address this fundamental uncertainty, and address the problem of growth by reducing the hierarchal nature of our civilization.

Jeff Vail: The Renewables Hump 7: Can We Transition?

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