Calliope

unless you are working on an actual natural disaster and frankly sometimes even then,

don't take pride in doing quality work under terrible conditions. don't show off to your boss or your clients how you're such a spunky little scrapper that you can work with half-broken equipment, you can work all night to meet any deadline, you can maintain professionalism in the midst of chaos.

the lesson they will take away from this is that you never need functional equipment, sleep, or organizational support. (and that your coworkers/colleagues don't either. so if you can't summon up enough respect for yourself, do it for them.)

you have to let things fail sometimes. give me an impossible deadline, I'm missing it. schedule twice as many appointments as I can handle, I'm canceling half of them. put me in a work situation where the only way for me to win is to kick in my own time or money, then guess what, buddy, I'm losing and that means we're losing together.

understand, the flip side of this is that with adequate supplies and time I will put them to good use. this isn't spite, it isn't a threat to sabotage businesses. it's merely saying that if someone sabotages their own business, their employees are not obligated to save them from themself.

no more super worker. this is the decade of getting exactly as much worker as you paid for.

Due to the absolute shit show that had been happening behind the scenes, I was once told in a brusque email that I had XYZ changes necessary for an article and I had less than a week to get those changes in.

I admit I briefly considered upending my entire life to get those changes in. But I decided no, this wasn't my damned fault. So I told them that just wasn't happening.

Their response was, in essence, "ok. Get it in as soon as you can."

I think in the end I was only a day "late" anyway but still. The absolute stress of not having that one day would have made it all worse.

I'm a bit disappointed that the article doesn't talk about the problem in the humanities as well, but A: the author's background probably isn't in it and B: you can just about scrub the word "science" out and scribble in "humanities" and it reads just about right.

There are some obvious differences, mostly in data collection -- not in empirical evaluation, as both are equally empirical (say something happened in the book that didn't and you're just as wrong as if you fudge numbers in a lab study). Data in the humanities comes in many forms, from the novel you're discussing to receipts found in a grocer's, but one thing that's true is that you're supposed to know all the stuff that's already been written on the topic.

That's obviously fairly untenable. But more importantly, it's evaluated just the same way. The article uses an example about studying people watching dog videos. A reader can say "this only makes sense if cat videos also have the same effect" and suddenly you're faced with either fudging your numbers or running a totally separate study that will take as long as the first one did. This happens all the time in the humanities.

I think nearly every paper I've published, and a few I haven't, did this. The last one, the one that's sort of got me suffering burn out from academic writing at all, was on chaos magic, Lovecraft, Moorcock, and fandom. I was made by the editors to talk about topics that were totally off topic, but to source them I had to use the editors' own papers, since they were the only people to write about them.

I was once told that my paper on Gibson's sprawl trilogy needed to discuss all his other books. When I submitted that version, a new reader said the paper felt unfocused and should talk mostly about the sprawl trilogy. I was once accused, in yet another paper, of thinking something referred to the occult because I didn't understand gothic fiction -- as some of you may know, my literal degree is in gothic fiction, and also the line in question was "Farewell to all occult adventure; the farce is played." Definitely not related to the occult right, particularly when you consider the speaker is a member of a secret society of thieves and occultists who do bizarre rituals of an evening.

One of the problems with peer review generally, from what I have been able to see, is that the readers are not engaged in the process -- they may be, but they are not required to be. So they are not obligated to help one make one's research any better.

Imagine if you accepted a student's paper and said it was wrong because it didn't look at enough research -- but you didn't say what the research should be. And yes, I know some people do that. I don't, though. If the missing research is in finances, or budgets, or psych studies, I say that. My very first academic submission was turned down because I hadn't read a particular article about the novel, but the reader did not say what that article was. Given that I'd read everything I could possibly find on that novel, this comment was not going to make the article miraculously appear.

This is sort of why I do things like reread gothic novels on cohost. I could be spending that time polishing the three complete academic papers I have saved to my hard drive, including one that was sent back with a revise and resubmit request. But what's the point? I'm out of the job market hell, through an accident of fate (my job is still shit and underpays, but my family unit finances are ok now, and that's another post, how a significant amount of college education is subsidized by a partner who makes more money). No one will ever comment on the articles, if anyone even reads them. Why not do pretty similar work that reaches people? Maybe I'm not innovating in my field, but I'm reaching interested parties who can go on to a greater appreciation of the material.

In other words, if I don't suffer the slings and arrows of the faulty peer review system, I can actually teach