I’ve always been fascinated with the process of scholarship. As you know, I’ve spent much of my career in physics research (with a minor detour into crypto research). I can’t claim to have been very good at this - decent enough, I suppose - but I certainly feel privileged1 to have been part of the whole process of the generation of new knowledge.
I have, at times, shamelessly “bigged myself up” whilst desperately hoping that my audience wouldn’t catch me in the lie. Things like promotions and pay rises kind of depend on the judicious application of bullshit.
By the end of my time in industry I was thoroughly sick of the whole process. Our “performance” reviews took a couple of weeks of detailed work to prepare. We had to, amongst other things, demonstrate how our work aligned with the company “values” and provide supporting “evidence” - usually by writing pleading emails to our (internal) “customers” to help us out, hoping that they’d write something nice that would suitably impress some HR-bot. It was a fucking farce.
One of the company values was “heart”.
Yes. Really.
That last equation I managed to solve? My God, will you just look at the heart on that.
The HR weirdos had obviously been transported into some self-important fantasy land of corporate speak.
For my last performance review I declined to participate. It was something HR didn’t know how to deal with. They’d never before had someone who simply didn’t want to play the game anymore. But, but, but, you won’t get a bonus this year!
And?
I suppose when we’re younger we’re not too bothered about trading bits of our soul for a paycheck, but by the time I left my job in industry there wasn’t a whole lot of my soul left, and I decided enough was enough.
The thing that really drove me was figuring stuff out - and if I managed to figure something new out, then so much the better. The whole process of publication was a tedious necessity, but I got a bit disenchanted with that, too.
One of the last papers I wrote (before I left the university I worked at after my time in industry) got rejected for being too “simple” and “not new”. I’d figured out a way of using an entropy inequality to say some general stuff about quantum correlations which required only high school algebra. None of the results were new - but they’d all previously been derived by very tortuous and complicated maths.
It’s still one of my favourites of all the things I’ve done - but it remains unpublished. I’d kind of lost the drive at this point to chase the issue and enter into endless arguments with referees.
I probably suffer from a lack of self-importance.
This scholar, however, does not.
Take a look at this Twitter thread, reproduced in full here
Dr Monteiro is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers and is interested in the racial past of the US. You can get a flavour of her work from her award-winning essay criticizing the musical Hamilton.
Her review essay in The Public Historian, titled “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton,” argued that despite its celebrated multiracial casting, the play reinforces the idea that the United States’ past was populated solely by white people, thus normalizing and legitimizing white power in the present.
What’s fascinating to me, here, is the difference in approach between something like physics and the approach implicit in that Twitter thread.
You see, in physics we work very much according to meritocracy. It isn’t just about the people though. Perhaps we could re-state the whole enterprise of the scientific method by describing it as
“The Meritocracy of Idea”
In physics, it isn’t just that people (like Einstein or Feynman or Clauser) rise to the top - and very, very, very deservedly so - it’s that ideas do, too.
Ideas that are shit (they don’t match observation, for example) are discarded.
It might take some time for us to figure out that an idea is wrong, and there are human flaws and foibles (and careers) invested too - but eventually, physics, because of the scientific method, has a built-in self-correct mechanism.
It’s a very specific form of idea meritocracy, though. The ‘metric’ for meritocracy applied here is that the ideas are correct2.
In the humanities certain ideas have risen to the ‘top’ and seem largely uncontested at this point - it’s a different kind of ‘meritocracy’ in operation, though. It’s a political and emotional meritocracy. Thus we have ideas like white privilege, or whiteness, or white supremacy, and that white scholars “take up the space” of black scholars.
Stuff like that - which are unverifiable hypotheses. You certainly can’t quantify any of this shit, can you?
Perhaps we should introduce a new unit to measure how much “white supremacy” there exists in some individual or an institution. We’ll call this unit a Lynch. Individuals may have only accrued a few Lynches of white supremacy in their lifetime, but large institutions can amass several thousand Lynches.
Once you actually try to quantify these notions you can readily see how useless they really are, in practice.
I should clarify that last statement; these unquantifiable ideas are extremely useful if you have a political agenda. They’re utterly useless in terms of advancing our knowledge and understanding.
Dr Monteiro is (I think) criticizing people who might actually be considered to be “allies” in this thread. I think she’s having a go at people who find the sins of the past and current “oppression” to be fascinating. These people are “publishing our pain”, she says.
The big sin isn’t that these people are studying past oppression and that they are (probably) supportive of the notion that the US is some racist hellhole of current oppression and white supremacy.
No. Their sin is simply that they have the absolute fucking temerity to be white and to be talking about this stuff.
It’s an entirely different approach to “knowledge” than the approach dictated by science. Only those with the right colour skin, obviously, have anything worthwhile to say. And, if you’re white, you’re just “taking up the space” of those people who do have the right skin colour.
I did like the bit where Dr Monteiro suggests that those who recount their individual experiences should be “paid for their labour” - it does rather seem like she’s advocating that people should be paid for whinging.
But what shines through is the self-importance on display.
In the final Tweet we are told that she “cannot allow such positions to take up space”.
My word, the space monitor hath spoken.
It is undoubtedly my whiteness and my lifelong infusion of patriarchy juice that leads me to being unable to recognise this approach to “knowledge” as being legitimate. It’s pretty much antithetical to everything I’ve ever stood for as a scientist.
In a more old-fashioned sense of the word privilege - like in those movies where the military heroes are about to make their last stand; serving with you, Sir, has been an honour and a privilege.
Or, more accurately, they have not (yet) been falsified by the evidence. We can never declare some theory to be ‘correct’ - only that it has so far passed every test we currently know about.
I have been lucky in life to work at a few wood shops/fabricators where there were still 'guys in the shop' (and a few women). I remember one stupid meeting where they had gathered everyone in a room to discuss workflow and improvements. After about an hour of bla bla discussions one of the shop guys just stood up and said, 'Hey, what if everybody just did their job? That would solve most of the problems.' No one could argue with that and the meeting was ended.
Replace "white" with "juden", it's all you need to know who they really are.