Eira TanseyDecided that effective immediately upon a request for a review of an academic manuscript, I will no longer be a manuscript reviewer for a fully paywalled journal unless I already have access to it through a professional association. I no longer work in academia, and so the gift economy of peer review already is difficult for me to justify in my current role, but the fact that I can no longer access journals due to institutional paywalls is all the more reason to withhold my labor.
Also: I fucking hate the tenor, style, language, and pseudo-authority of most academic writing. But the largest crime of most academic writing is that it's BORING. I'd rather offer to be a second pair of eyes for a friend writing an explosive blog post than something that might get a handful of citations on Google Scholar over ten years.
Anyway, once again as someone who is now outside of academia, I maintain that _THE_ most interesting intellectual discourse is happening outside of academia, often in newsletters and podcasts. A lot of people with the most interesting or thoughtful or well researched intellectual projects are ex-academics or failed PhDs. They are adjacent to the world of academia but not in it. I feel like a perfect example of what I'm talking about is the Know Your Enemy podcast.
Harish Narayanan@TeamMidwest So, so boring.
@harish the longer I am outside of academia the less patience I have for it. I still barely have a grasp on "epistemic" and the thing that triggered this vent was an invitation to review something that had five different mentions of epistemic in the abstract alone. I just can't.
@TeamMidwest I’m glad you’re standing up and saying no.
ShadSterling@TeamMidwest I once had a roommate who was in grad school and talked about writing a paper so people could understand it, and getting penalized for not using enough inscrutable academic terminology. I understand using lingo for specificity, but intentionally making things hard to understand is just bad all around
@TeamMidwest maybe the least boring paper I’ve read is Edwin Hall’s original publication of the Hall Effect, in the late 1800’s. Much more like a narrative of the discovery, almost reads like a mystery. Used it as a reference for one of the papers I wrote for the class about how to write academic papers, and the contrast was striking. Some of the standardization of the structure of a physics paper is good, but we’ve definitely lost something I’d rather have kept
@ShadSterling oh there are definitely some terrific papers out there! i think the fact that they are such a pleasure to read is what makes them an outlier, because they are the exception, not the rule.
@ShadSterling my hot take on having known many professors who were dumb as hell is that many of them have such unoriginal or boring thoughts that if they were forced to speak in plain language it would be obvious how mediocre they are, so they use academic jargon as smoke and mirrors to make themselves sound smarter than they are
@TeamMidwest that’s disheartening. I got degrees at a state university with no prestige, in a very small department, and was surprised at how good everything was. Not that I didn’t see any room for improvement, but none of the professors needed smoke and mirrors to seem knowledgable.
But then, in my first attempt a college, I had a math professor who said he couldn’t answer one of my math questions because he was a math teacher, not a mathematician. So there’s that.