Part of the challenge is how individualized the struggle can be. There are certain common trends you can find across a large population of grad students, but the details an individual is confronted with have to do with their subdiscipline and relationship with their advisor and their department.
Then there’s the issue of the fact that the core requirement of the PhD — developing a new idea with merit — is just hard. It takes a lot of time and work to do that in the best circumstances. I liked my department and my advisor and felt that they did the best job they could given their resources, but I was still pushed to my breaking point at times.
Any attempts of reform are immediately met by faculty calls for the protection of academic freedom. They believe their position is so special, they're beyond reform efforts.
I remember when faculty tenure review at a major academic institution was being modified to newly include "student success activities" as part of the review process. Essentially, tenured faculty would now be assessed on how much they positively impact the lives of their students. The amount of pushback from faculty on this new criteria was insane and demonstrated the self-centeredness of most tenured faculty. The crying about "academic freedom" would make your head spin.
They were right.
All of the institutions where the ratings come back to the professors / staff have had a detrimental effect on academic rigor: need to earn the grade is out the door, easy programs / lessons, get the good assessments, move on.
It should be possible for a university to ensure that "student success activities" include more than just good grades. Hope that's what's done in practice.
Particularly when juxtaposed with public schools. It seems like partly a difference in values and partly an accident of history that teachers of children have a powerful union and a lot of societal support, but many teachers of adults need to rely on welfare programs.
I feel like people outside universities just don't care (because why should they?), and people within universities, at least the one's I've been in, are very, very, aware of this toxic culture, but pretty much powerless to do anything about it.
I'd also add that within universities and national labs, survivorship bias obscures these problems to many higher ups. Many simply have no experience with the problems, or even worse, they dismiss the problems as trivial based on their own success stories of climbing the ladder. From their perspective, it is hard to see how these problems could be fatal to your career, since they are the survivors and never have encountered anything fatal to their career by definition.
This happens in virtually every work environment where your worth is measured by something immaterial like “creativity”. Because the output isn’t empirically measurable, your personality is what sells your worth and guess what types of people are best at that, assholes
It was going so well before the sexist and racist shoehorning of 9, especially considering the whole plot of Hereditary is that the matriarch's goal was to murder and sacrifice her entire family.
Meh it's ok, the default white-man-bad trope is indeed tiresome and unimaginative but a slight fail in the context of a clever article is really not a big deal. It's also ok to poke fun at us now and then as well.
I chuckled out loud at that interpretation of Hereditary. It's a good point that the matriarch was horrifyingly evil but come on... that guy was by far the most boring character in that story. Also it's hilarious to think of anybody as coming out "on top" in that situation.
And let's be open to the possibility that it feeling like a trope might be an indicator of the situation being truly widespread. When you hear lots of people saying the same thing there's basically two responses: "oh, they're all infected by the same meme" or "hmm... maybe they all really have gone through similar situations..."
Most disturbing movie I've ever seen, by the way. Gave me nightmares for a solid week or two. For about 2 years after I would randomly flash onto a couple vivid scenes and it noticeably affect the rest of my day.
I have the same feeling with other horror movies. Which is why I stopped watching them around age 10. Is this the reaction you are going for? Or do you find them otherwise so enjoyable that this is the price you’re willing to pay?
Horror’s a wide genre. There are tons of sub-genres that can be anything from cheer-at-the-impressively-gruesome-practical-FX over-the-top-kills slasher, to Star Trek levels of symbolism and metaphor that aren’t meant to be “read” literally, to art film stuff that uses horror tropes and elements but may not even be scary, to cringe-to-your-bones body horror, to deep existential horror that makes all but the most jaded kinda wish they hadn’t watched it. And more.
Also, outright comedy horror, which works so well because scares are often adjacent to laughter. Similar tension release, which is what a lot of fans are there for.
You should spend ten minutes on Gab and see what tropes they have there. Hopefully they won't make you go "hmmm..." like the contemptible white male trope does.
I see your point, thanks for bringing it up. I guess what you're saying is that my position could be basicaly be interpreted as the old "well, maybe there's truth to the stereotype" line of reasoning, which is obviously very problematic. I guess the difference boils down to me believing that we white men are indeed privileged and you perhaps not believing that? Because that single belief really changes everything about the discussion. It's one thing to make this comment about myself from an assumed position of privilege, another to make it about others who are not usually bucketed into a position of privilege. Also, it seems to change the meaning when you quote me as "hmm..." versus the full quote, which was "hmm... maybe they all really have gone through similar situations..." There's a lot to unpack here but I've gotta get my day going and will have to leave it at that.
Hereditary’s one of the few widely-beloved horror films I’ve thought was kinda bad (I watch lots of horror). Most of it was really boring, except the last 15 minutes or so, which were laugh-out-loud hilarious, which I don’t think is what they were going for.
I loved the concept and a lot of the imagery but yeah the ending skewed towards funny for me rather than scary. in the same vein, i loved annihilation for the same reasons but that ending was funnier than it was disturbing.
Annihilation didn’t do that to me, but I can definitely see how it might if your head-space slips outside just the right range near the end. A lot of that could certainly read as funny, in that case.
I think Hereditary would be a great movie if the ending were completely different. I was never sure exactly what was real and I really enjoyed that. Then that ending pops up like it was spliced from something else. I'm not sure if "jumping the shark" or "showed the monster" fits better.
At this point I just chuckle through my moustache and recall the times it happened to me as I swirl some brandy and admire my hunting trophies from my studded leather armchair. Harrumph!
It's the same braindead mode of thinking that led Disney to re-interpret Snow White with the men in the movie being creepy and to deemphasize the main plotline where the stepmother is evil and sees her step-daughter as her competition.
Men, especially white men, are by-default bad and women have no agency unless they're overcoming men.
To be clear, you’re talking about Snow White and the huntsman, in which Snow White isn’t even the main character in favor of action huntsman Chris Hemsworth?
If you think a two-hour Mattel commercial is where the feminist discourse is right now, then feminism is off in the wilderness.
Then again, women are still overwhelmingly the largest consumer spending group and the CEO of Mattel is still a man.
Referencing the Barbie movie wrt feminism is about as laughable as the people who think Star Trek is some post-racial utopia -- even though the bad guys are still mostly dark-skinned and virtually every alien race is a monoculture.
Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Jem'Hadar, Ferengi, The Kazon, maybe the Hirogen.
All of these _villain races_ (which already is a wow conceptually) are portrayed as being dark-skinned.
The list of other prominent villian species is quite small, especially when you have to exclude the Borg, Changelings, Tholians, the Breen.
And I'm not making this argument out of nothing. People have been big-upping the show for being racially aware and talking about that context of the show for decades now.
Appeared in eight of 79 episodes of TOS, and weren't, as a group, “bad guys” (heck, even though they were antagonistic to the Federation , they weren't even the bad guys in some of the episodes thet were in in TOS) in later (in setting) series.
As a series, they are a little more dense in Enterprise, and in Discovery, deapite being setup in the pilot as the main adversary, they end up not being that even in the seasons set pre-TOS (the first season prime adversary is... the alternate Universe Terran Empire.)
> Romulans,
The Romulans are, like Vulcans, predominatly white; exclusively so on screen in TOS, though later shows had occasional non-White Vulcans and Romulans.
> Ferengi, The Kazon, maybe the Hirogen.
Not particularly dark skinned.
If you actually look at who the bad guys in episodes (not who the Federation or United Earth’s astropolitical opponents are) if there is one where skin color is even a concept (often there either isn’t one, or its not a being where skin color is an issue), they are usually White.
> And I'm not making this argument out of nothing. People have been big-upping the show for being racially aware and talking about that context of the show for decades now.
A bad argument made for decades doesn't become better for it.
Vulcans and Romulans have basically the same look (in TOS they were distinguished largely by the Romulans distinctive garb and the fact that Ronulans were only encountered on Romulan ships, in TNG and later shows the Romulans often had ridges, but not all individuals did.)
That they looked identical (except for the ridged Romulans) because of their shared origin was a quite important point from their introduction.
Some of them do. But mostly they look like aliens and any attempt to contextual is it as a race thing is about as poorly warranted as the Heredity link that you were (reasonably) shitting on.
And yet the bias towards an end of the spectrum in skintones for the villains is still overwhelmingly there in the choices made by the costuming and makeup departments.
> And yet the bias towards an end of the spectrum in skintones for the villains is still overwhelmingly there in the choices made by the costuming and makeup departments.
The range and distribution of coloration for races that are mostly antagonistic vs those that are mostly found aligned to the protagonists, at least geo... well, astropolitically, doesn't seem that great, well, except maybe for a bias in the use of blue specifically for Federation aligned races.
I don't know how contrarian I am but I thought the movie was about an upside-down world where the women held all the power and the men were oppressed, and when the men tried to change things, the women reasserted their oppression as the rightful thing to do. To me, it's quite a tongue-in-cheek interpretation of feminism actually.
I felt they had to dumb down the ending for audiences and gave it an unnecessary homage to the creator.
My read was similar to yours. At least on the film I felt they actually wanted to make and instead only got to hint at. While the primary storyline is there about a woman’s struggle to promote feminism only to be told she’s disparaging the cause of women; I think the second story is more pessimistic. The scene where the men ask for a share of the political power and are explicitly denied is jarring and frankly outrageously unattended to in the end of the film.
The Ken’s are a metaphor for women and the feminist movement. The Barbies are the men. Which kind of fucking brilliant imo. But they decided to water it down and make the ending about Barbie’s individuality and a joke about her vagina.
On the most abstract level, trashing your moment in the sun to ditch your actual plan and instead make a joke about your pussy is pretty meta feminist though. /s?
Everyone who saw it and has basic comprehension abilities can hopefully understand the basic premise which is awkwardly explicitly stated: that bickering around the right and wrong way to do feminism is bullshit, harmful discourse.
Accusing a movie‘s portrayal of women of being sexist, especially a movie written by the person behind a billion dollar film about a woman trying to empower women who gets accused of being an icon of sexism, is well within the current dialogue of feminism.
It is in fact, a humorously ironically relevant argument.
Only if you're in that middle-class, ultra-consumerist "girl-boss" demographic that the movie is marketed/trying to appeal to. That message is largely lost at the margins, as is typical in "pretty, white feminism". You're ignoring the elephant in the room -- any empowerment message takes a back seat to the goals of selling tickets and "buy our shit".
It’s kind of crazy how many cliches you’re spouting that are directly addressed by the movie almost verbatim as if to imply that the movie was trying to pretend didn’t exist
It is incredibly relevant, because the specific criticism you had about the conflict of using Barbie as a consumerist symbol for feminism from a company run by men was a central part of the film.
Once upon a time, a woman accidentally pricked her finger over some fresh snow. Observing the sight, she thought, "how gruesome! But Snow White seems like a nice name, nevermind this completely irrelevant scene of blood on snow..."
Exactly. The previous points were interesting and I was about to share the article to an East-Asian friend that started a PhD recently. But being a White guy that point would just make it awkward to share it with her.
Fellow white guy here. Sharing the article might be a signal to this person that you're open to one day talking about race with them (when some kind of race-related situation inevitably comes up) and also that you can poke fun at your own position in society (or at least how many people view our position in society). The fact that you like this article enough to consider sharing it but are hesitating just because of #9 is a yellow flag to me. Obviously I don't know your history or situation but HN is all about honest inquiry and I humbly suggest this might be something worth looking into more.
Fellow white guy, are you aware that you're speaking form a position of privilege, that few will actually receive that signal as you intend, and the vast majority of "non-whites" will actually view you as foolish for making such comments because their native cultures teach self-respect? I think you need to do some research into how "white people" willingly denigrate themselves and contribute to their own mental health crises.
Definitely aware that I'm speaking from a position of privilege. Definitely aware that there's a chance that my intention is different from my impact. Still don't regret taking the risk to challenge the ideas in this thread.
> I think you need to do some research into how "white people" willingly denigrate themselves and contribute to their own mental health crises.
Thanks for the suggestion. I am aware of this idea but am open to looking at the situation more from this lens. What resources do you recommend for learning more?
Fair enough. You do say you're interested in honest inquiry, so I'll give you a few resources.
A first step is considering that difference can be accepted. "The Illusions of Egalitarianism" by John Kekes is a good place to start in understanding where an egalitarian approach falls short. Because many people in the world are religious, and religious belief shapes much action, you might also want to understand differences between religions, so I recommend "God Is Not One" by Stephen Prothero.
The subject of white denigration is itself polarizing among "white people", which demonstrates a certain white fragility, I suppose. One polarizing book which examines white denigration relative to other groups is "White Identity" by Jared Taylor. In my experience, polarizing books usually get at important points without fully arriving at the main conclusion, so I would recommend you read it carefully yet avoid prejudgement one way or the other until the very end. While I've skimmed its content out of curiosity, I haven't given it a careful read myself, so I'm not endorsing all its conclusions. That said, the main points appear well-sourced (over 1200 citations).
Grasping social understanding is important to understand the relationship between stereotypes and accuracy. On this, I recommend "Social Perception and Social Reality" by Lee Jussim. A key quote from that book is: "[According to the social science literature,] When a self-fulfilling prophecy occurs, perceivers’ expectations lead them to treat targets in accord with those expectations, and targets respond to that treatment in ways that confirm the originally erroneous expectation."
I don't understand why it would have been awkward. Whatever the flaws in the institution as a whole I'm sure she doesn't blame you for them personally. You have no reason to feel self-conscious about satire.
I can see it. Especially if he does have some romantic interest in her. There’s the worry if the subtext is that the reason I’m sending this whole article to you is about #9.
Just not enough upside for the potential downside.
Nobody said anything about a romantic interest. Most people’s relationship with people of the opposite gender are not romantic at all. Why would this be relevant to bring up?
It's relevant to bring up because he said it would make him feel awkward to send it. You'd be right if he didn't think it would be awkward to send and he had no romantic interest, even less awkward if he knew she had no romantic interest. But at this point the only thing we know is that he did feel awkward about sending it. Hence the relevance.
i see the relevance, but i don't see the problem, especially if he himself isn't in academia. he could convincingly argue that he isn't part of that mess and especially won't benefit from it.
I was trying not to spoil too much but the demon Paimon is a demon not a mediocre white man, the supposedly contemptible white male dies in pain and horror and his body is then used against his will, hardly a triumph.
for the purposes of satisfying the conditions this article is trying to adhere to it doesn't matter that it's the demon in the body now instead of the man, it matters that the male body was chosen over others.
however, if we do consider the demon, the movie has this to say about it:
1. A sentence underlined in pencil reads: "Paimon is Male, thus
covetous of a male human body."
2. ... We’ve corrected your first body and give you now this healthy male host. ...
maybe the author is trying to say something about the demons masculine preference (it is covetous of, not dependent on - it was in Charlie first) & how that relates to theirs and others experiences in academia when it comes to preferential treatment; and that just male-ness seems to be important absent of any other qualifiers? after all the women in the movie more or less do all the work to appease Paimon - wouldn't the greatest reward as a devotee be to act as his host? maybe i'm crazy but it's been interesting to think about.
> 7. A barely articulated sense of dread follows you wherever you go. Others cannot see it, and it may exist only as a curse, but it often manifests as the presence of an old white person.
That one’s all about living with trauma (sexual trauma, especially, but it generalizes decently) and dealing with that alongside lingering childlike immaturity and innocence (that little-kid-like picnic scene in that one kid’s back yard, oof, that hit hard) and accepting and empathizing with that trauma in one’s friends and partners, so yeah, it’s kinda just about life.
As a postdoc, it now feels like somewhere around the 7th sequel to Friday the 13th. Boring and tired, but the writers haven’t gotten bold enough to get really wacky and send me to space yet.
It's difficult to make ranging generalizations about academia for the same reason it's difficult to make them about society at-large: massive variation of experience. Still, we can try.
A HN commenter once wisely stated: "Building things [in academia] is fine, but of course it's not academic research - which is defined by the creation of game-changing concepts and philosophical structures, some of which happen to be mathematical."
I agree. Academic research is not expensive. Today, most research performed in academic environments is about building things. Why? Federal grants (NSF, NIH, DoD, etc.) drive the vast majority of academic research efforts these days. The department with the most federal grant dollars pay their students the best, so you can easily have a history doctoral student getting a $20k/year stipend while a biomedical engineering doctoral student getting a $39k/year stipend. Most (not all) university research being performed today should be performed in structured, professional research institutions, not in academic research labs led by a professor.
A good deal of faculty dislike working on federal grants, but financial pressures from the university demand their participation in the system. This situation creates a feedback loop of frustration, narcissism, and negativity. Perhaps the federal government is exploiting the academic environment by using it as a source of cheap labor. Problem is, the output is often shoddy and takes way longer than it should. Similar to the hospital systems, there's little incentive to fix it from the inside because many people financially benefit from the broken paradigm.
If you're unfamiliar with the Dark Triad [1], it's a psychological theory of personality included three traits: Machiavellianism, sub-clinical narcissism, and sub-clinical psychopathy. I've been left with the impression that the modern academic environment naturally selects for Dark Triad personality traits.
A solution which should help fix the culture is: (1) universities significantly reduce their total number of incoming doctoral students for the next twenty years, and (2) universities immediately pay the existing doctoral students better. Of course, this approach has financial risk for the university, so the political cost of implementation may be too steep for some.
I was about to post something similar. A lot of the issues emerge from bad incentives. As the saying goes, "form follows finances", and once you understand the finances here, you can understand how it can go wrong.
In short, the funding agencies incentivize PIs to just get as much funding as possible and to assign the research to lowly paid students and postdocs. Students and postdocs largely have no funding of their own and are in a vulnerable position here. The PIs have little time to conduct research of their own since they have to spend a lot of their time writing grant applications, etc. PIs who can get the most funding are rewarded the most in this kind of system, since ultimately they are not conducting the research themselves and what matters in the short term is getting a lot of peer-reviewed papers published to appear productive (quantity over quality). It also leaves them with a lot of power over their subordinates, who depend on the PIs for almost everything and cannot readily disagree without jeopardizing their careers.
That said, in my experience, most PIs behave honorably and are decent people, but given the incentives I just discussed, the current system readily attracts PIs who are only good at getting a lot of funding (and not that good at research, experimental design, interpersonal relations, personnel management, developing a unique and narrowly-focused research program, etc.). I intend this criticism to be directed towards the system as a whole and not at any one individual. I think that if the system were different, even the problematic PIs would behave better.
Agreed. I know of a single academic faculty who leads engineering research efforts with 40+ research faculty, 4 dedicated administrative staff, and 200+ doctoral students. Most students rarely interact with the PI and are really advised by research faculty. This one lab houses close to half of the doctoral students in that department. Now, I've never talked to the PI, but I imagine he's a decent enough person.
I have a strong feeling that academic research will lose its way since financial incentives attract money-driven faculty and disincentivise the pursuit of fundamental, academic research questions.
On the other hand, you'll get poorly-baked fundamental ideas from the faculty, like the idea that Wikipedia is the best source of knowledge because social consensus is the best way to figure out the truth, an idea which is explicitly advocated by a tenured faculty member at a major university and is clearly false because people are capable of lying. Empirical validation of mathematical models is actually the best way.
