hello this is definitely me and not anybody else. i have an extremely nice face and the us gvernment in its infinite compassion has said esther is allowed to look at it in real flesh world and now she is here and forever (unless a bad thing happens to stop it.)

now i eat vegan thai food.

(This is another one of my promised nervous-energy nonsense posts)

I’ve had a lot of bad things to say about academia in this space.  I’m much happier in my current non-academic job than I was in grad school, and than I expect I would have been as a postdoc.

However, I do have to (grudgingly?) admit that grad school was a very useful educational experience for me.  It makes sense to me that employers in my line of work see Ph.Ds as important qualification, because I can tell I’m applying specific skills at work that I picked up in grad school.

What interests me here is whether these skills could be taught without grad school.  Usually when people talk about the transferable benefits of grad school, they talk about the years and years spent working on one subset of one sub-field, the way that it changes someone to immerse themselves in a single subject for that long.  @4gravitons recently said things along these lines:

Grad school is a choice, to immerse yourself in something specific. You want to become a physicist? You can go somewhere where everyone cares about physics. A mathematician? Same deal. They even pay you, so you don’t need to try to fit research in between a bunch of part-time jobs. They have classes for those who learn better from classes, libraries for those who learn better from books, and for those who learn from conversation you can walk down the hall, knock on a door, and learn something new. You get the opportunity to surround yourself with a topic, to work it into your bones.

And the crazy thing? It really works. You go in with a student’s knowledge of a subject, often decades out of date, and you end up giving talks in front of the world’s experts. In most cases, you end up genuinely shocked by how much you’ve changed, how much you’ve grown. I know I was.

But this isn’t what I’m talking about.  In fact, I don’t think grad school had this effect on me at all.  I had to do an undergrad thesis in college, and I got pretty obsessed with my subject back then; at one point, while writing my PhD dissertation, I looked back at that thesis and was almost startled by the similarity in thought processes and writing style, in spite of the seven intervening years.

And I don’t really feel like I came out of grad school with a deep, mature understanding of my subject.  It kind of felt the other way around, really: as the cliche goes, the more I learned, the more I knew I didn’t know.  My store of knowledge grew monotonically, but my feeling of mastery and comprehensive understanding barely budged, and in some respects even declined (as I lost the arrogance of the newcomer).

No, what I learned in grad school was how to engage with academic literature.

Not specifically with the academic literature on my chosen subfield – I’m doing entirely different stuff now, and the skill transfers just fine.  I learned how to read papers.  How to find papers.  How long to spend looking for papers, before just saying “huh, maybe no one has written a paper about this.”  How to do a lit search in service of a specific goal.

Maybe this, too, can only be acquired through years of practice, while “immersed” in a single little area?  But somehow I doubt that.  After all, one of the things I am so much better at now is leaping into a totally new area I’ve never touched before, looking into the literature on it, and getting a sense of the key landmarks without getting lost.

Some of this is just tacit knowledge acquired from reading a lot of papers – getting a feel for where to look, what’s likely to be promising, based on lots of cues that are hard to articulate.  But I do wonder if a lot of it couldn’t be explicitly taught.

Like, one thing that stands out to me – possibly the biggest single way I’ve changed – is that I’m less deferent to academic literature when I’m reading it.  I used to read papers a lot more closely, more raptly, assuming that anything in there I didn’t understand was either (1) a deep point I was too ignorant to grasp or (2) an error in a published paper, which, omg, such a big deal!

Now I have a much clearer sense of how the sausage gets made, how papers are produced as the awkward net result of multiple often conflicting pressures; how academics are often just bad writers, and how it’s better to “route around” the bad writing (just look at the pictures and equations, say, if it’s that kind of paper) than to scrutinize it for some deeper logic; how in every paper there are usually a few big punchlines, what the researchers actually found as opposed to how they’re framing it; that if the punchlines aren’t relevant to my interests, I don’t have to keep reading; that academics are always under pressure to make their findings look as important as possible, and that one must ignore the hype and boil each paper down to “okay, you tried adding a Fleeble to the Standard Blarnicator and that made one of the Good Numbers go up by 2% and another by 1.2%, in this one special case you tried, and who knows how many others you tried and conveniently didn’t report.”  Or the like.  That each sub-subfield has its own special terminology, sometimes contradictory with that of adjacent sub-subfields, and that I should figure out as quickly as possible what is really being talked about, yet without assuming that the terminology makes sense, since sometimes it doesn’t.  That sometimes academics will just say straight-up wrong things in parts of the paper they don’t care about but have to write anyway.

There is a kind of confidence involved here, and perhaps it can only be acquired – as true justified confidence, and not just the arrogance of youth – by doing a lot of research over the course of years and years.  But then, I wonder how much easier all this would have been to learn if someone had just told me all of it.  But no one did, and so it was a gradual process of unlearning the mindset I learned in 16 years of school and college, the mindset of taking classes and trying to deeply understand the assigned readings and to develop finely honed skills at well-defined tasks.

The usual narrative is that in grad school, you leave this bright comfortable world behind and enter a more muddled, adult world – the world of research – where everything is too deep and complex and incompletely known to be put between the covers of a textbook and mastered step by organized step.  And that’s true.  But having heard that narrative, I took my first steps into the new world with too much trust and too much expectation of awe.  The expectation that everything I read was itself deep and complex – or that if it wasn’t, this was some scandalous failure.

What I eventually learned, and what was immensely valuable, was a certain lack of respect for the world of research (including my own output, of course).  The ability to navigate the literature with a casual, readily dismissive touch, looking for specific things I want and not for any “deep understanding.”  The ability to read all this stuff about “state-of-the-art” this and “fundamental” that, of a thousand figures where the home team’s line soars above the opposing team’s line (unless lower is better, in which case it’s the opposite), and see it with an appropriately mercenary eye, always asking, “what did they really do, and what does it mean for my goals?”

Can this be taught outside of grad school?  Perhaps you do need to be immersed in a world before you can develop the useful kind of cynicism about it.  But what if we tried to teach it directly?

argumate:

trickytalks:

argumate:

what’s the doom for february

big doom

dark doom, show me the forbidden mood

Dr Mood

mishalak:

nitrosplicer:

do you ever bite into a piece of cheese on bread and immediately find yourself as a true and honest shepherd boy in the 1300s who sometimes steals apples but is overall hale and truehearted

Weird. I bit into bread and cheese and find myself mischievous knave from the 1500s as ready to drink an ale in good company as to cut the purse of a lord, but is an overall wastrel.

(via shabbytigers)

(This is the first of my promised nervous-energy nonsense posts tonight)

My basic opinion of Neil Gaiman is that he has some talent and wrote some good stuff early on, but then decided he liked being a celebrity more than he liked writing, and so for a very long time his career has been like 10% writing actual fiction and 90% doing other things in his capacity as “famous fiction writer Neil Gaiman,” giving interviews and invited talks and participating in fundraisers and writing introductions to fantasy classics and so forth

But at one point I was like, wait, isn’t Gaiman’s fiction all about how gods are basically celebrities, and how this is good and beautiful and is the true nature of myth or something?

In Gaiman stories, the gods walk the earth, you can touch them and talk to them, but they’re different from you and me in that their attributes are results of the stories told about them, rather than the other way around.  If I, a human, acquire some sort of power (say I acquire some weapon or other), then I have that power, and that’s a fact, and I can use it no matter who is or isn’t talking about me having it.  If you assume that gods work the same way, then Zeus was given thunder and lightning by the Cyclopes, and now he has them, and can use them whether or not there happen to be storytellers reminding us that he has them.

But as a Gaiman god, Zeus only has any power because he is venerated and because his stories are told.  Indeed, the stories can even be mutually contradictory, and their relation to any literal truth (Zeus really did get these things from the Cyclopes at such-and-such a time) is beside the issue, with the strange result that these gods walk the earth claiming powers and lineages and backstories, and (in some sense) really having them, without any of this having, so to speak, a “paper trail,” linking what they have to real facts about how they got it.

(In American Gods, several of the major god characters – sapped of their power in a country where few worship them – have become con men.  It’s easy to read this merely as characterization – perhaps, yes, we can see those gods slipping into that role – but do note how close any Gaiman god must be to a con man.  So much big talk, and you’re not supposed to look too closely for proof.)

I’m the furthest thing from an expert in mythology, but my impression is that this dynamic isn’t generally a feature of mythologies themselves.  We tell stories about Zeus getting his lightning, or Maui getting his hook, and these are supposed to be accounts of things already true, not incantations that cause their referents to become true.  Gaiman is putting his own spin on mythology, which is his prerogative as a writer – but his spin makes gods into celebrities.  They are – well, not exactly famous for being famous, but defined by being famous, and creatures of their fame more than of whatever got it started.

The “literal” version of Zeus is the king of the gods on Olympus and can control lightning, and his fame as “Zeus, the king of the gods, who can control lightning” is a downstream consequence.  The “Gaiman” version of Zeus depends on the fame, and is nothing without it.  If Zeus is a Gaiman god, it’s not by being able to zap you on command, or because you can go to Olympus and find him on his throne, in his palace – it’s because he’s publicly acknowledged as a big deal.  Considered pre-eminent in his field (whatever that means).  Gaiman Zeus has a Wikipedia page, and you’d better bet he’s verified on twitter.

So, when Neil Gaiman does appearances as “famous writer Neil Gaiman,” when he makes that his thing more than the writing itself – what for most writers that would be a failing is, for Gaiman, becoming the sort of entity he has always celebrated in his work.

He wrote stories in which being a god meant being a celebrity, and now he is a celebrity of storytelling, which is to say a (Gaiman-style) god of storytelling.  Whether he deserves his spot in the pantheon, on the strength of stories told by him to real people in real time, is (if this is a Gaiman story) beside the point: he is the Dream King, sung of by the seer Tori Amos, blurbed by Norman Mailer (another self-made mythic figure), personal friend of the legendary trickster Kathy Acker and the mad shaman Alan Moore, written up in all the papers as a preeminent storyteller and fantasist, and what sort of myth-illiterate hyper-rationalistic nincompoop would look at that and say, “but is all that, like, literally true?”

Such a person would not fare well in a Gaiman story, anyway.

fulfillment of the prophecy

Well over a year ago (December 10, 2016), Esther and I got engaged.  We’d already known for a while, by then, that we wanted to get married.  That’s always been the plan.

It’s been the plan for a very long time now, that we would not live forever in two different countries, connected only by Skype and by circumscribed visits requiring grueling and expensive trans-Atlantic plane flights on either end – that we would get married, and that we would live together under one roof.

In about a week and a half, after literal years of waiting and making arrangements and not ever knowing for sure when anything was going to happen – years of having to talk about our marriage like some prophesied eschaton – we are getting married.  In a week and a half.  (In a small ceremony at the courthouse; there will be a full wedding later on, when we’re actually able to give friends lead time to plan flights and stuff, without worrying about conflicts with the visa timeline.)

And even sooner – tomorrow – she takes one more of those grueling and expensive trans-Atlantic plane flights, and arrives in the U.S. without a departure date hanging over her head, and takes a taxi from the airport to the house where I live, which is also, now, the house where she lives.  Tomorrow.

Even under relatively benign conditions, getting a fiancee visa takes a very long time.  I think I kind of vaguely knew this beforehand, and could have known it in more gruesome detail if I had done more research, but in any event, I wasn’t really prepared for the sheer vastness of it.

There’s a whole pipeline with a lot of steps, and a lot of points in the pipeline where you’re waiting for the government to process something, and all you know it “this typically takes between [number of months] and [other number of months], and nothing is guaranteed.”  And even the parts that are under your control can be time-consuming in unexpected and sometimes bizarre ways.  (At one point, we needed a letter declaring our intent to marry, signed by both of us.  The signatures had to be original, not scanned copies – I called and made sure.  So – yes – that letter had to be mailed across the Atlantic, and then back again, before being mailed across the country to the appropriate government agency.)

And then there’s the whole business of moving from country to country: leaving your apartment, leaving your job, making sure everything is in order.

It has been a very long journey, and there was never any concrete date attached – there couldn’t be – and so, like I said, it began to feel like a prophecy of the next age of the world, foretold and precious but not concrete.

Now it is as concrete as “figuring out when I’ll have to leave tomorrow to get to the airport.”  Prophesy condenses into reality – except no, I’m still writing in this fancy pretentious way, in an attempt to convey the gravity of it all, but the real gravity of it all is that a thing is happening which is not words on a screen, is not “prophesy condensing” or any figure of speech, it’s just two people actually living together in the same house in the same room and hanging out and doing stuff and – and, like, buying groceries.  Figuring out which bus to take to go to the place we’re going.  Actual concrete real life, together, for the foreseeable future, with no expiration date, period.

I’m full of nervous energy and will probably post a bunch of unrelated bullshit on here later tonight and tomorrow morning, and then, after that, well.  We’ll keep you posted.

Humorous meta side note: On their way back to their $4.6 million homes in the Somerset area, many of the region’s untaxed sub-billionaires surely listen to the acoustic version of Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” on a lossless FLAC file while harping to themselves about unfilled potholes and other infrastructure insufficiencies.

In fact, Jaynes, who doesn’t technically exist, has been nominated for two Academy Awards: One for Fargo and one for No Country for Old Men.