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Here's another dose of philosophical-political sole searching for the morning. People often tell me to apply for things: jobs, postdocs, competitions, blind submissions of various kinds, and my default answer these days is 'no' unless there's a very compelling case for it. Why?
It seems like a perfectly reasonable request. I also thoroughly believe in my mother's maxim that 'shy bairns get no sweets', i.e., that one has to go out and ask for things, because they won't just come to you. However, most bairns don't have to fill out sweet application forms.
I spent 6 years applying for everything in sight, both in the philosophy world, and in the regular world, just trying to find part time work to get by on. I even tried setting myself up on sites like Upwork to get editing gigs, because this is one thing I have experience in.
I have never, in my entire life, succeeded at an interview. This is in part because I have had little practice at them, certainly not enough practice in any one area to know what implicit social norms the local grift imposes. I rarely get this far in any application process.
Yes, I am naive. My natural inclination is always to answer questions sincerely and to the best of my ability, and to admit when I don't know things. It took me a long time to realise just how strategically inept I am at basically every hiring process thus far designed.
I could talk about various examples here. The one interview I've had for an academic position, which in retrospect was an elaborate farce wasting 3 people's time to justify 1 local person getting hired. The application prefaced by an HR form asking me to describe my 'resilience'.
But the key point is this: every opportunity or gig that I've ever had has come from a personal connection. I landed one postdoc position purely because someone knew me, and took a risk on me, and I still feel bad for falling apart and blowing it (cf. https://deontologistics.co/2017/12/22/transcendental-blues/).
But I spent a long time shopping around postdoc applications through multiple departments in multiple institutions in multiple disciplines (even a business school) trying to find a route into the system through the many tiered processes that such applications pass through.
I've done similar things with job applications, desperately searching for any inside information that will let me custom tailor my research statement, CV, and every other piece of verbiage that will get thrown in the digital trash heap, in the hope it'll pierce the filter.
I also cannot tell you just how much time I've wasted sending out pieces of writing in the hope of getting feedback that would make it publishable. The only consistent thing I learned here is that everyone gives advice informed by their own personal trajectory (including *luck*).
This isn't to say this advice was all bad, just that if you give 10 people something that doesn't fit into the usual boxes you will get 10 different stories on why it doesn't fit and how you should revise it to do so. This made me so anxious about peer review I gave up on it.
I've spent most of my time in academia blowing people's socks off in person and then struggling to get authenticated by any system that channels information through the every expanding castle of HR, in which I include the REF, TT, and the many hells of other people (peer review).
This created an excruciating cognitive dissonance it took me a long time to identify, a heady mixture of self-loathing and learned helpless I'm still trying to disarticulate. The psychological flip side of this is a sometimes poorly controlled anger at every facet of this system.
But one thing that emerged out of this was a hard rule, necessary for my often fragile mental health: applications are opt-in, not opt-out. There has to be a good reason to apply to anything, because in all probably it is a fucking crap shoot with unpredictable entry conditions.
The current system doesn't just produce a lot of survivor's guilt in those people who make it through the protracted distributed hazing rituals the previous generation of scholars administer, but also a lot of survivorship bias. At least I know how little I know about what works.
All that I know is that I know nothing about what 'good philosophy' is supposed to be, at least insofar as this concept is encoded in the tangle of social networks, professional institutions, and scholarship metrics out of which the discipline is spun.
I demonstrably know a lot about the philosophy the discipline engages with. I'm an unapologetic generalist. I also have a pretty good reading on what @peligrietzer would call the 'vibe' of every region of the discipline I'm familiar with (e.g., https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/interview-wolfendale).
I see my understanding of philosophy in navigational terms. I try to build an overarching map of the whole dialectical space, such that I can then slowly fill in the details of any given region. This makes me very sensitive to people talking cross purposes, or reinventing wheels.
This is one reason I not only ignore but actively denounce the Analytic/Continental distinction at every opportunity, because it is quite clear to me that there are lines of thought in either canon that are closer to lines in the other than they are to their purported fellows.
But none of this translates into useful understanding of the social terrain and the associated tacit norms that determine publication or hiring. Absolutely none of it. Moreover, every ounce of time I have wasted trying to understand the latter has actively inhibited the former.
Here's a further important fact. Bipolarity means that my time does not work like other people's time. The general fallacy that a certain amount of time put into work produces a certain amount of intellectual product fails catastrophically in my case. Academic time hurts me.
To be a little Marxist for a second, the systems of resource allocation that allot research funding are essential about keeping time, and the last several decades have seen them ratchet the tolerances on the above mentioned regulative assumption to truly *absurd* heights.
As far as I can tell (but then again, I don't *know*), the ideal 'smart, ambitious, workaholic' young academic is someone who very reliably turns time into words that they don't care about, because care potentially conflicts with most implicit standards: https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1362477313573683203?s=20
And as I've been at pains to repeat, because venturing into these waters means saying very frank things that quasi-colleagues may find offensive, I have met many people who have moulded themselves thus who absolutely hate it, and wish they could write about want they want to.
This doesn't just lock people out of the discipline who can't bend themselves into the right shapes, it locks people in who have managed the contortion act, often at great personal and psychic expense. I have a lot of anecdotes here, even if that's not strictly data.
But this raises the question: what would data look like here? Does any of the vast quantities of information that this system encodes and traffics in tell us anything useful about these pathologies? What would it mean to extract a model of 'good philosophy' from its dynamics?
