Interesting Things I've Read (or Watched) /
Some Interesting Things I’ve Read/Watched: Link Dump #2
Here’s another linkdump—a list of links to stuff I thought was interesting but likely won’t get to properly reviewing any time soon.1
I reserve the right to more fully review any of these article at a later date, of course. (Though at this point, it’s extremely unlikely to ever happen.)
John Warner, How to Read More Closely
This is by the guy who wrote The Writer’s Practice (a writing craft book I really dislike) and More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI (a book I think everyone should read). I read this article at the height of my “oh God, I have no idea how to read” crisis. Warner makes the argument here that just as writing is a skill that can always continually be improved on, there is no limit to how good you can get at reading. Then he recommends some books about how to read books.
Haley Larsen, becoming a close(r) reader
This is a series of articles I read in an attempt to learn how to do close reading. I found it somewhat helpful, but unfortunately, it is now paywalled. (I hate it when Substack authors do that, especially since there are very few newsletters that I think are good enough to even consider paying for.) I am still leaving it here for posterity, though.
Allison C. Morgan, Nicholas LaBerge, Daniel B. Larremore, Mirta Galesic, Jennie E. Brand and Aaron Clauset, Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty
Did you know that professors are 25 times more likely than the average person to have a parent with a PhD? Maybe there’s something to that claim that academia is a pyramid scheme. Anecdotally, I have observed that a concerning number of professors come from families where at least one parent was a professor. Here is a particularly glaring example, where out of a family of four, three people became professors at Harvard. Also, children of professors seem overrepresented in certain fields where there are few immediately visible prospects outside of academia. (Looking at you, mathematics.)
But here, I’ll let the academic paper speak for itself.
Faculty tend to come from highly educated families. Nearly a quarter (22.2%) report at least one of their parents holds a Ph.D., and 3.7% of faculty report both parents hold Ph.D.s. Across all eight disciplines, over half (51.8%) of faculty have at least one parent with a masters degree or Ph.D. (29.6% and 22.2%, respectively; Table 1. In comparison, among adults in the United States aligned to when faculty were born, on average, less than 1% held a Ph.D., and just 7.4% held a graduate degree of any kind.
Evan Barber, A Marriage Proposal Spoken Entirely in Office Jargon
What it says on the tin. I love, love, love McSweeney’s.
Deborah Ostrovsky, Task List of Emotional and Physical Labor Performed During Meeting With Your Academic Supervisor to Discuss Dissertation That You Desperately Need to Finish But Can’t Because Your Supervisor Believes That Students Represent a Pool of Potential Dates
More McSweeney’s, but darker.
Brandon J. Talley, Our Customers Demand Terrible AI Systems
The problem with this McSweeney’s piece is that it’s supposed to be funny but it’s honest instead.
Up until recently, the industry was pretty stagnant. We had been relying on outdated ideas like “ready for market,” “finished product,” and “works reasonably well.” We were all stuck selling products that broke only after a few years. Now, we’re finally innovating by cutting to the chase and selling products that are already broken.
If that doesn’t sound accurate to you, then I’m not sure which planet you’ve been living on.
Cory Doctorow, Tiktok’s enshittification
If you only ever read a single piece by Cory Doctorow, it should be this one. This piece isn’t really about Tiktok: it’s about Amazon, and Facebook, and Twitter, and pretty much every platform that held its users hostage while slowly deteriorating in quality to sell ads or increase profit. (Twitter is like, completely unusable now.)
And it has one of the best opening paragraphs I’ve ever read, too:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Jan Schaumann, Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating
This one comes in the style of the classic list of falsehoods, Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names.
Jan Schaumann, Semper Ubi Sub Ubi - Things They Don’t Teach You In School
Tl;dr: computer science =/= software engineering. Personally, I think the most valuable part of this article is this Venn diagram, which made a lot of ideas click for me.
Avalon Days, We Don’t Publish And Adapt Fanfiction Like We Used To
This is one of the most interesting takes on fanfiction I’ve ever heard. Abby’s blog is seriously underrated.
Avalon Days, Graphic Design Is Not A Fine Art: The Conflation Of Visual Media
Again, this is a very unique take on what it means to be trained in graphic design! Abby talks a bit about getting a “Bachelor of Science in Design” and about spending her first two years in school learning about design theory, which I think is interesting, since I have never witnessed a design education that attempts to be anywhere near as methodical as what she is describing.
Michael O. Church, There Are Five Academias
The person writing this is not an academic or affiliated with academia in any way, but it’s such a cuttingly good analysis of the dumpster fire that is academia that I think it should be mandatory reading for anyone planning on spending substantial amounts of time at any sort of academic institution. And I don’t just mean people planning to become researchers, I mean everyone.
Parents do not render $75,000 per year unto the tuition-industrial complex because they are expecting their children to have the most excellent teachers—they want adequate teachers who are world-class researchers—or, more accurately still, they want their children to have the employment opportunities that come from the social status implications of having been taught by world-class researchers, said researchers being optional.
There is a perversion of language in academia that allows people to claim the job has two halves: teaching and research. No. Most academics do the teaching for free; that is known to most people who understand academia. They also do the research for free. Grant grubbing is what they get paid for.
Michael O. Church, Monotactism: The Real Reason Neurodivergent People Get Fucked Over in the Workplace.
If I were retitling this piece, I’d call it “Neurodivergent people are bad at navigating office politics and this is why.”
Actually, that is a pretty terrible title, but it is a decent summary of what the article is about.
Monotropism is an asset in deep work, but it’s a detriment in most office jobs, where the cognitive demands are very low, but where one must possess the capacity to maintain a pleasant demeanor at all times while handling large quantities of incoherent tedium. The emotional needs of executives that are the real underlying cause of initiatives X and Y, which led to projects A, B, and C, which produced tasks FZN-137 and SQPR-1144 and FKJRA-101, are not truly random, but might as well be, because there is no utility in engaging with said agents or their emotional states, unless one intends to manipulate them, which people with autism spectrum conditions are (no surprise) rarely adept at doing.
You know, when I first started doing internships, one of the most shocking realizations I had is that a lot of being good at one’s job is really just knowing how to navigate office politics. And I keep learning this lesson, over, and over, and over. I like this blog post so much because it explains the nightmare that is the political nonsense in such a clear and explicit way.
Cory Doctorow, Proud to be a blockhead: The true economics of creativity and communication
These are the most salient facts of the copyright fight: creativity is a non-economic activity, and this makes creative workers extremely vulnerable to exploitation. People make art because they have to. As Marx was finishing Kapital, he was often stuck working from home, having pawned his trousers so he could keep writing. The fact that artists don’t respond rationally to economic incentives doesn’t mean they should starve to death.
In this article, Doctorow talks about why he writes Pluralistic, but somehow manages to also slip in an analysis of why artists are particularly exploitable.
Zachary C. Lipton, Heuristics for Scientific Writing (a Machine Learning Perspective)
This professor has a collection of one-liners about scientific writing that he has decided to collect and explain to the reader. I think these make a lot more sense to me now than the first time I read the piece. This one, in particular, seems worth pointing out:
A reader should understand your paper just from looking at the figures, or without looking at the figures.
My research last summer was very math-focused, and math doesn’t tend to have a ton of figures, so I didn’t really understand this. But these days, every once in a while I watch my advisor open a research paper and scroll directly to the figures. Which makes me think that maybe I should try to get better at reading figures.
That being said, the article also contains this, uh, interesting quote:
If your paper is completely abstract and has no bearing on the real world, then it should be evaluated as a work of pure mathematics.
Ah, yes, computer scientists taking pot shots at pure mathematicians. What else is new?
Shomir Wilson, Guide for Scholarly Writing
This is just a bunch of very useful advice for scientific writing that I really should keep pinned somewhere. The author also has very good reasoning for why people in STEM fields should care about writing quality, from which I’ll quote here:
Your writing skills set a ceiling for how your work will be judged. Great ideas that are communicated poorly tend to be less successful than modest ideas that are communicated well. Writing that is awkward or careless interferes with a reader’s understanding of content, but writing that is clean, intentional, and elegant lets the content reach its full value.
Personally, I find it painful to give feedback on poorly written documents. If the writing quality is good, it makes it much easier for me to focus on helping the author improve their ideas. If the writing is clunky, I might not even be able to decipher what their actual ideas are.
David Jurgens, Reflections on Successful Meetings with Undergraduate Researchers
This article has a lot of good advice for making the most of a meeting with a research advisor. I should probably make a list of key takeaways from it at some point. The tl;dr is to be proactive and organized and drive most of the communication with your advisor.