i mainly reblog things, feminist stuff, things that make me laugh, fandom stuff, awesome ladies mostly and basically anything that holds my attention for more than 5 seconds
There’s a scientific journal called “Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List”.
In 2005, computer scientists David Mazières and Eddie Kohler created this highly profane ten-page paper as a joke, to send in replying to unwanted conference invitations. It literally just contains that seven-word phrase over and over, along with a nice flow chart and scatter-plot graph.
An Australian computer scientist named Peter Vamplew sent it to the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology in response to spam from the journal. Apparently, he thought the editors might simply open and read it.
Instead, they automatically accepted the paper — with an anonymous reviewer rating it as “excellent” — and requested a fee of $150. While this incident is pretty hilarious, it’s a sign of a bigger problem in science publishing. This journal is one of many online-only, for-profit operations that take advantage of inexperienced researchers under pressure to publish their work in any outlet that seems superficially legitimate.
there may be some more modest form of psychoanalysis but the way it appears in Theory is just too much. it’s just a bunch of just-so stories that prompt me to ask “you really believe this shit?”
My favorite art is first sentences of scientific papers, I love reading sentences like “movement is of integral importance to animals” or “snow has long been recognised for its ecological importance” fuck yes so truee
there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. like i just picture a bunch of nerds at podiums & one’s like “of course there was a paleolithic bear cult in Northern Eurasia” and another one just looks him in the eye and says “i’l kill you in real life, kevin”
I heard a story once about two microbiologists at a conference who took it out into the parking lot to have a literal fistfight over taxonomy.
have i told this story yet? idk but it’s good. The Orangutan Story:
my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?
wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.
background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.
so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—
then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”
some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.
much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.
so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.
my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. the panel moderator suddenly stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:
Abstract: In this paper we present T. rex fossils as disruptive objects that can drastically influence the actions and reactions of humans that encounter them. We present a vision of the T. rex as being a key node within a web of human and object associations that ultimately produces, first, extreme desire in humans, and then a breakdown in human relationships resulting in disagreements, disputes, lawsuits, and the committing of crime. From there we bring these T. rex fossils into the concept of desirescape which sees a network of object/object and object/human reactions provoking irresistible desire in humans. We argue that this desire can push humans to violate law or social norms or, in several T. rex cases, sue each other. How then should we humans approach T. rex and other disruptive objects? Cautiously, and with the knowledge that these objects may be more powerful than we are.
So there are a lot of posts on this website about how humanities are important because the dumb STEM people somehow don’t know that Nazis are bad or don’t know what a logical fallacy is or whatever; and, as someone with Master’s degrees in both physics and literature, I think that this genre of post is mostly just cope.
However.
I think that they are trying to get at something real, namely, that the humanities (and social sciences) train you to look at society systemically, whereas STEM disciplines, as a rule, do not. So there are some features of society that a STEM person would just look at and take as a given, whereas someone who’d studied the social sciences or humanities, particularly at a more advanced level, would know how to interrogate this in more detail. So, for example (tw for racism), certain North American STEM people of my acquaintance look at the genocide in Gaza and just say “Well, the Middle East is always at war. Those People ™ have been killing each other for thousands of years, so it’s nothing we need to get worried about.” As if (1) “Middle-Easternness” essential quality, unaffected colonialism or orientalism or any other sort of historical or economic legacy, (2) mass murder is an intrinsic aspect of Middle-Easternness, and (3) there is a categorically different type of person who possesses Middle-Easternness and They are not Us, so we don’t need to worry about it. Whereas, I think most people who’d studied humanities or social sciences beyond a surface level would know to ask questions like, “Well, have They really been at war for thousands of years, or is that just how it looks from the outside?”, “Haven’t We also spent a substantial portion of the last several thousand years at war?”, “Isn’t it a terrible coincidence how the region of lawless barbarians incapable of refraining from murder just so happens to be the same region from which We want to extract oil?”, “What exactly is the history of this conflict? What exactly is the history of ‘the Middle East’ as a category?” and “Don’t you think that our nation’s habit of providing bottomless quantities of weapons and diplomatic support to only one side of this conflict might have something to do with the current genocide?” And if you have spent years being taught, as STEM education generally does to some extent, that human culture is an externality or a superstructure on the natural and logical processes that are what’sreally going onin the world, then all of these questions can seem irrelevant.
This isn’t even just applicable in the cases of notably right-wing politics. I know many people, doctors especially, who look at antivaxxers and just say “well these people are stupid”; and, indeed, it’s very easy to fall into this. They are self-destructively wrong in a way that is trivially obvious to anyone who with a detailed knowledge of epidemiology. But it’s also not productive to think of them that way! It’s a thought-terminating cliche: why do they think this? Well, because they’re stupid. Case closed. Hopefully enough smart people will be along soon to shout them down. But like…why do they believe this? Why do some people who are demonstrably intelligent believe things that can be empirically demonstrated to be wrong? How do people in general form their opinions? How does propaganda and the structure of the media play into this? Who benefits from large numbers of people believing things that are wrong? How do the history and economics of pharmacology affect trust in scientists? What role does public education play?
Now I want to clarify that this is just a tendency; it doesn’t apply to all scientists, and indeed, many biologists (for example) have done some of the best work on critiquing claims of hereditary IQ difference. But I have found it quite noticeable.
I would say that a lot of our current fiction is written in such a way to omit this focus on systemic issues, which doesn’t help any. We need more books like Les Miserables and less of this “hero’s journey” crap.
Another thing that I will say about the humanities (and to a lesser extent the social sciences) is that they make you more comfortable with ambiguity. This was a major thing for me to learn as a physicist. Not every is reducible to a few simple principles and that’s okay; you can still study it productively. Don’t try to hammer society flat until it fits into a hole made for subatomic particles.
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