It’s a Good Thing I Don’t Care What You Think
Over the past several years, I’ve learned that no matter what you write, some people have a problem with it. This isn’t as obvious with purely academic writing, because most academic papers get 0 responses (other than the referees). But when you write on the internet, you find out that there is no message that won’t draw outrage, ridicule, or scorn.
Often, it’s surprising what people go after. Very often, they miss (or simply don’t want to discuss) the main points and complain instead about an irrelevant side remark that you happened to drop in. Sometimes they complain about the specific way that you accidentally phrased something, or the specific example that you randomly chose to illustrate a point. (Other times, of course, they reject the whole message.)
One time, a reader expressed the wish that Huemer wouldn’t write confidently about things that he’s done little research on. I thought, “I bet you don’t want that. I bet you wouldn’t be reading my messages if they weren’t written the way they are.”
If you’re reading this, then you have some appetite for intellectual discussion. At the same time, you could be reading an academic journal, but you’re not. They’re very intellectual. Why aren’t you reading one of them now?
Here’s one reason: because academic journals are tedious and very, very not interesting. Even most academics don’t like to read them and only read them so they can get their own articles published. When they retire, academics often give away their academic books. What does that tell you?
Okay, right, obviously. But why is academic prose so tedious and boring? One main reason is this:
Pretty much anything interesting that you have to say is going to be strenuously objected to by some people. Usually, multiple people will raise multiple different objections.
Most academics care what other people think about their ideas. They feel uncomfortable when they know lots of people disagree with them. That’s because they are relatively agreeable people. Therefore, they try to adjust what they say to minimize that discomfort.
The way to minimize that discomfort is to:
Take out the controversial parts,
Weaken your claims with lots of qualifications,
Add thorough discussions of each objection that you can think of, acknowledging how different factions of intellectuals might think about the issue.
All that stuff makes you boring.
Basically, anything interesting is something that a lot of people are going to hate. All the ways of mitigating the hate make your text boringer. So, that’s probably why you’re not reading an academic journal right now.
Anecdote: I once commented on a (co-authored) academic paper that I found really interesting (https://holtz.org/Library/Philosophy/Epistemology/Disagreement%20as%20Self-Deception%20About%20Meta-Rationality%20-%20Hanson%202002.pdf). I raised some objections to it, and the authors also got feedback from many other people. After a while, they came out with a revised version of the paper (https://ppe.mercatus.org/system/files/Are_Disagreements_Honest_-_WP.pdf). The second version addressed more objections, was more cautious and qualified in its claims, and much harder to object to. I also liked it significantly less. It was less bold and less interesting after taking account of all those objections. Then I felt bad for contributing to worsening the paper.
Luckily, I don’t care what you think. If I did, my blog would probably be written like an academic journal (if it existed at all, which it probably wouldn’t). So you probably wouldn’t have ever heard of it, and wouldn’t be reading it even if you had.
A question
Wait, let’s go back to a point at the beginning: most academic work gets 0 responses. (Sometimes, when I tell people some amazing, controversial idea or argument, such as a decisive refutation of egalitarianism or a solution to all the paradoxes of the infinite, they ask me what the academic responses to that idea or argument are. Usually, I have to then explain that there are at most a few brief academic mentions of it. Unless your name is John Rawls, it’s very hard to get anyone in the academy to pay attention to anything you have to say, however interesting and important it may be. That’s what happens when you have a field publishing tens of thousands of books and articles every year. See https://fakenous.net/?p=920. But I digress.)
Since most academic work gets 0 responses, how do the writers come to feel the psychological pressure that drives them to borify their writing?
The answer is that it mostly happens in the process leading up to publication. The author might show the paper in progress to some of his colleagues. He’ll at least have to read a couple of referee reports. He will then “fix” the paper by making it more acceptable to those colleagues and referees. Furthermore, this academic will have already been trained for years in the art of responding to other people’s criticisms. First, as a student, they had to please their professors. Then, in their early years as a professor, they had to please referees. In most cases, this person’s natural way of writing is now pre-borified. He just naturally thinks and talks in small, overcautious terms -- overly cautious about offending other people or drawing criticism from influential intellectual factions.
In short, academic writing is bad because academics are trained to write to avoid criticism, not to draw interest.
Aside: This is similar to why legal writing is terrible. It’s terrible because it is written to avoid loopholes that could be exploited by dishonest readers, not to communicate clearly.
What to do?
What, if anything, should we do about this?
1) We could eliminate peer review. In this case, the journal editors (with the help of a paid staff) would have to referee all the papers. This makes more sense with philosophy than with the sciences (in which technical expertise is more often needed to understand a paper).
How could this be good? In the current system, there is not very much difference among academic journals, because all journals basically use the same selection process. They all send the papers out to miscellaneous, random experts. These experts have no stake in the journal and so don’t care whether it publishes boring work or not. If all evaluations were made by the editor (and perhaps a staff trained by the main editor), then (a) there would be more of an incentive for the evaluator to think about what will make the journal better, what will attract more readers, etc.; (b) there might be a more consistent style to each journal. In that case, there could then be clearer competition among different styles.
2) We could keep peer review, but eliminate the phase of adding responses to referees’ objections (other than minor fixes of objective mistakes). The paper gets accepted as it is, or rejected. If there are objections to be made, someone can publish those later, and the authors can respond if they want.
3) We (academics) could try to judge research by how many people read the work in question and get something out of it. Maybe we need a system for recording readers’ ratings of philosophical articles.
4) More blogging, less journal writing. Maybe after writing an academic article, one should write a blog-post version of it, which would have the good parts without all the extra verbiage and digressions.
5) We could continue the status quo. Almost everyone just keeps ignoring almost all academic writing. It is left to a small number of people who are especially resistant to social pressure to write the somewhat interesting stuff. Maybe this is the best ‘solution’.