The Ignorance of Crowds

(or, a Series of Widely-held Wrong Beliefs)

I always cherish Festivus season, which provides me time to reflect on what is wrong with the world. As I catalogued my complaints, I found that many of them pertained to just how wrong people are. Not only that, but they are wrong about things that they are quite certain are correct. That’s fine, people are wrong about all kinds of things. What I find particularly pernicious about how academics are wrong, however, is that they tend to communicate their wrong opinions in such a way as to make you feel bad for holding a different opinion.

You see, academics are among the most insecure people I encounter, hiding behind credentials and positions to make them feel useful and powerful. This leads to gatekeeping and abuses of power, because it is important to them that not everyone has whatever good stuff they managed to get. They also, by and large, are people who have been told that they are smart and have good ideas. And they often are and do! But it also means they have an inflated sense of correctness of their own views and the degree to which other people want to hear about them. That is why so many academics write blogs.

Now that I got my cheap shots in, I want to be clear that this post is not—despite appearances—about me being correct and everyone else being wrong. It is about how academic crowds will often rally around an idea or a particular view in such a way that stifles dissent, and sometimes even makes it risky. We need more dissent, more disagreement with received wisdom, and more push back on widely-held beliefs that just might be wrong. This post is intended to open up space for such dissent.

So here is my airing of grievances for the year, academic style.

“This is more of a comment than a question.” I don’t know if anything gets academics more worked up than the “more of a comment than a question” business. There is even a podcast named after it. Somehow, people have convinced themselves that asking questions is the only legitimate form of scholarly discourse, and that making comments inspired by a speaker’s presentation is somehow disrespectful or narcissistic. And anyway, most comments are essentially questions because the commenter is usually interested in the speaker’s reaction to their comments (i.e., there is an implied, “what do you think about that?” at the end). The problem is that people are confounding comments with grandstanding and making a talk about yourself. Those behaviors are clearly bad, but can just as easily be communicated when asking more of a question than a comment. If your comment is inspired by, builds upon, or is otherwise directly related to a presentation, then please comment away.

The plural of anecdote is not data. This one is so funny to me because it is just literally wrong. The singular form of data is datum, which means an observation or piece of information. An anecdote is a datum, and more than one of them constitute data. Pulling this one out to refute someone’s personal experience is just a classic self-own.

Annoying academic turns of phrase. The ways in which…Indeed…Moreover….People just love to hate on all kinds of phrasings used in academic writing. Such people are typically shitty, boring writers. Dynamic and engaging writing requires varied forms of expression and well-placed adverbs. Note that I am not referring to excessive jargon or intentionally obtuse language, which is objectively bad, but rather stylistic choices to make your writing more interesting. Please make your writing more interesting.

Using SPSS for data analysis is clown car, bro. Ok, maybe this opinion is correct…I kid, I kid! This one is interesting, because it highlights how the opinion could be reasonable or terrible, depending on the rationale. Reasonable takes on why SPSS should be avoided include that it is expensive, people have limited access to it, it is tough to know the details of what is “under the hood” for many analyses, and the way most people use it (i.e., point-and-click using the menus) does not lead to reproducible, documented analyses. Those are pretty compelling reasons. Construing SPSS users as less serious scientists or somehow uncool are pretty terrible reasons. If you like SPSS then go ahead and use it and don’t let people make you feel bad about it, but you should paste all of your code into a syntax file, run the analyses from there, and save that code for future use. 

Collaborators must always make direct edits rather than leaving comments. I get the spirit of this one, but it is so incredibly wrong. There are at least three reasons why commenting might be preferable to direct edits: 1) you are unsure whether the edits are good ones and will be well-received by the collaborators, so you don’t want to spend the time writing; 2) you are a minor author and don’t want to hijack the paper in your own vision; and 3) you are a supervisor commenting on the work of an advisee, who would benefit by learning about why something needs to be revised and how to make the revision, which will improve their writing. When I leave comments on collaborative manuscripts drafts, I usually also leave a meta-comment that I am happy to make any direct edits they agree with, and they should just assign the task to me if they wish.

GRExit will increase equity in graduate admissions. Oooh, now I’m wading into some real controversial waters. GRExit, of course, refers to the widespread movement to drop the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) as a requirement of applying to graduate school. Let me be clear: I am no great fan of the GRE or standardized testing. Nevertheless, I generally agree with others that the GRE is likely the least biased component of graduate applications, compared with letters of recommendation, GPA, schools attended, research experience, etc. Anyway, the reason I include this one is that it is an example of an intervention hastily applied to a problem, and everyone just seemingly agreeing that it was the best intervention available. Dropping the GRE from graduate applications is not the only intervention available to address the problem of equity in graduate admissions. It is, however, the easiest option, which makes it very attractive to academics who prefer simple solutions to complex problems, especially with respect to equity and diversity.

Requesting letters of recommendation only for finalists. While I’m on the topic of application processes…I fully recognize that my stance on this reform is unlikely to be popular, so feel free to rain virtual blows down upon me. The idea of requesting letters only for finalists sounds like a really good idea, but in practice I have found it to create much more work. Previously, I would have clear deadlines of when to submit letters, provided via a spreadsheet created by the applicant, allowing me to organize my time efficiently. Now, I receive a chaotic stream of ad-hoc requests for letters with tight deadlines (from a few days to two weeks, typically). But wait, it gets worse: now some places, especially for faculty hiring, think it is a good idea to call me and have a conversation about the applicant, which is perhaps the least desirable work-related activity I can imagine. Like GRExit, this is one intervention applied to a problem among many possible, and once again is the easiest to implement, but perhaps not the most effective.

“Leaving academia.” I really dislike this phrase. Getting a PhD is schooling, you can also think of it as training if you want, but it is not intended to be a direct path to a career in academia. Getting your PhD and then consulting, working at a non-profit, doing data science, working for a tech company, or whatever, is not “leaving academia,” it is “getting a job.” It has long been the case that the majority of PhDs do not go on to have an academic career. And yes, I fully understand that a) there are generally not enough academic jobs for those who want them, b) some supervisors and departments send implicit and explicit messages that academic careers are the only worthy pursuit (hisss), and c) PhD programs needs to do a better job exposing students to different career paths. My issue is specifically with the “leaving academia” phrase, as it unintentionally reinforces the idea that one ought to be in academia. It is a tacit endorsement that an academic career is the preferable option, which is simply not the case for many people.

These ended up getting progressively more questionable….again, my point is not to say that I am correct. My point is that we tend to have a problem with thinking about complex issues in complex ways, allowing space for disagreement in the face of early apparent consensus, and questioning our strongly-held beliefs.

So please, join me in the annual airing of academic grievances, and push back on widely-held beliefs that just might be wrong.