Academic mellowing

I recall an anecdote about Rawls. Apparently he once had a PhD student who would get incensed by counterarguments to Rawls' thinking and presentations of alternate frameworks. Rawls would apparently council him to chill out and suggest that these papers deserved respect and close reading. This is a short entry about why I'm hopefully becoming more like Rawls.

This was the second image in a search for "relaxed academic" lol

I used to be a very angry academic. Most public commentary pissed me off, but that's normal. More problematic was that I thought many prominent scholars in my field were idiots and their papers terrible. Even where this was true (very rare), this attitude had numerous bad consequences. 

First, the rage would make me incapable of reading some papers carefully and I would consequently under-appreciate, misrepresent, and forget these papers. Not good for your literature reviews. 

Second, I would frequently succumb to what Rachael Meagre wisely calls the two subconscious goals of bad academic writing: self glorification and mockery. I would spend large chunks of papers trying to demonstrate how brilliant I am and how foolish my peers are. This dramatically weakened those papers. There would be tangents everywhere, laboured points, and unnecessarily long commentaries or barbs on single papers that I didn't like. The subconscious goals are always deadly because you aren't that smart and your peers aren't that dumb. 

Third, I was more prone to confirmation bias, self-serving bias, and other cognitive errors associated with insecurity. Just recently a graduate student that I was exchanging emails with gently alerted me that the way I was talking about a paper "might be misleading". In fact, I was egregiously misrepresenting the paper, I suspect because I liked what it said so much that I wanted to inflate it. Such misrepresentation is not only embarrassing but also quite dangerous. I've already written to one journal to try to amend a published paper. When you don't have an axe to grind you're more likely to see things in their limited reality. Anger and conviction have a way of dramatising everything. 

Fourth, you come across as desperate to be heard, which is not a good look. Good papers tend to be a bit shit to begin with. They then get refined, which is easier when you're humbly eliciting comments rather than trying to drop bombs. You are more likely to get constructive comments from people who you broadly disagree with (who will likely be peer reviewers at journals) if you present as a colleague working with them on a problem rather than a critic from a different school of thought. Ideas thrive in a nurturing environment and generating such an environment is a collective action problem. If people are all friendly to each other, you get a nurturing environment. But if just a couple of people are dicks, the whole thing turns to animosity. So don't be a dick. 

My mellowing has been triggered by a few things. One of the most important is that I've realised, in part due to good reviewer comments (few and far between to be honest), that my papers are also shit, especially the papers on topics that I'm most angry about. It turns out that controversial topics also tend to be hard topics to say anything smart about.

Relatedly, as time has passed I've realised how many errors there were in my early works and I've had my mind changed on numerous topics. By extension, I assume that if I calmly explain to some good academics that they're missing something or getting something wrong, they will usually change their mind. So there's no need to be angry - just say your piece instead and watch change occur. 

Another related factor is that I've come to more deeply appreciate something I always new: academia is a brutally negative occupation. You get one "yes" (like a journal revise and resubmit) for every 10 "no", and that's if you're a good academic. We should try our utmost to avoid contributing to that negativity by being angry and critical all the time. Most people are trying their best to do decent work. There are some snakes, but mostly honest scholars. If we are constructive with each other, everyone experiences a better work environment.     

Finally, I've come to more deeply appreciate the incredibly slow pace of academic work. A generation of scholarship - 40 years or so - is one turn of the paradigm crank in academia. There is a flood of papers all the time that makes it very difficult to keep up with things day to day, but the overall framework of thinking only changes every 20 years or so. My field is currently passing from one generation to the next (in part because the old guard are still working in their 70s, 80s and eve 90s!) and so most of the things I rage about will soon wash over the discipline organically. Nothing can be changed dramatically in academia; you have to slowly pour water into the dam until it breaks. 

So my suggestion to young scholars is to chill out and remember the most important lesson of Karl Popper's fallibilism: you could be wrong.