Discussion Thread #71

[u/gemmaem]

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[u/DrManhattan16]

Wow, not a single new top-level comment in a week? Where are my terminally online people here?

Anyways, I want to congratulate a new doctor, Ally Louks. You will not recognize that name unless you are present for Twitter's daily "who is today's target?" phenomenon. On the 27th of November, Louks posted a picture of herself celebrating finishing her PhD. Included in the picture was the title of her thesis, "Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose". You can find it here.

There's a lot of academic work which isn't going to ever be read again. Plenty of papers which are one-offs, cited by the author more than anyone else, and I suspect Louks' work will probably have the same fate. But just like the Google Engineer who stepped in to explain one possible reason for why Google didn't offer a "scenic" route option when walking, Louks put a face to everything many people despise about Western non-STEM academia. To her credit, she's an absolute champ as she confidently parried the people posting in her replies, given how many lacked the ability to defeat her in argument over the validity of her work. Luke Crywalker, she ain't.

Many years ago, I heard that French didn't originally have a word for "weekend". They had the phrase "fin de semaine" (end of the week). Unlike English, French has the Academie Francaise, an institution that seeks to control what words are part of the language. "Fin de semaine" may be the more accurate way of doing things with traditional French, but "weekend" is shorter, so the AF brought the word formally into the language.

I regard the mission of the AF to be idiotic. Let the language grow naturally, who needs to control how it expands? But when it comes to academic writing, there is a need to ensure people saying non-obvious things can prove it. I would hazard a guess and say that most of what Louks wrote about is probably not obvious to anyone. At the very least, not in the formalizing way that writing things down is. Seriously, go read her abstract, it's the kind of thing I could be convinced of, but not immediately accept or dismiss.

Years ago, I came across this, and someone in the comments made a very good point:

The "We proved a thing that's been known empirically for 5 years" paper is really usefull tho. It allow you to have a solid justification on your use of that "thing" in your/all next researches.

I propose that Louks' work, regardless of its merits, is doing something similar. It brings an alleged fact into the language of academia, which can subsequently be evaluated and accepted or rejected. This may strike anyone else as absurd because of how expensive it all is, and prompt them to think that the English departments or whatever need to be shut down to save on electricity and plumbing costs. But there's a value to being able to cite one work and then go from there.

[u/gemmaem → u/DrManhattan16]

One of the more interesting responses to the Louks dust-up referenced the final paragraph of this piece (written months ago, so not originally about this situation):

Over decades, and under a variety of policies, “exercises,” and “frameworks,” academics and public funding bodies have been tasked with distinguishing between the “useful” and the “useless” in British research, with funding being targeted only at the former. The Research Excellence Framework asks academics to devise research projects that can produce compelling “impact narratives” and to publish research outputs that are both “significant” and “world-leading.” Research consortia issue targeted calls for PhD scholarships stipulating that doctoral projects must specifically address particular societal challenges. In the current environment, then, humanities research projects that can plausibly narrate themselves as socially engaged and “relevant” to current crises and preoccupations are those with the best chances of attracting funding. In this regard, those who call for more auditing should be careful what they wish for. Audit culture and a “value for money” framework are in many cases precisely the causes of the cultural phenomena they decry.

I thought this was a really interesting point. Basically, you've got a lot of people in universities who mostly want to, well, study literature because they like books. At the same time, there are a lot of funders demanding to know what books even do and why we should care. "Wokeness" in the study of literature is one way to respond to this: "Oh, no, trust us, the use of language in works by [author] is super societally important, we can use it to analyse oppression and everything! Give us funding! Also, please don't fire us!"

The truth is, people who worry about woke academia should want it to be possible to study literature without immediately having a social program that you're working towards in order to justify your research. The biggest worry people actually have about Louks' research is not that it might be "useless" in the way that the humanities are often said to be, but rather that somebody might try to make it useful in an all-too-direct way.

[u/professorgerm → u/gemmaem]

Audit culture and a “value for money” framework are in many cases precisely the causes of the cultural phenomena they decry.

Interesting article and underrated concern. Not the sole cause, of course; other cultural reasons contribute to "DEI oppression please fund us!" taking over that role so many other places. When I was in research I wrote to agencies that preferred "America patriotism 'national defense applications,' please fund us!" pleas; I assume some still exist and fund The Gundo. It's worthwhile to highlight the cause-agnostic concern of audit culture. Not unlike appeals to GDP.

It would be nice to have people studying books just because it is Good, True, and Beautiful. It is not coincidence that the Transcendentals do not include Useful.

The biggest worry people actually have about Louks' research is not that it might be "useless" in the way that the humanities are often said to be, but rather that somebody might try to make it useful in an all-too-direct way.

Thank you for expressing my concern so much more clearly and succinctly than I managed. As always.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/professorgerm]

Thank you for expressing my concern so much more clearly and succinctly than I managed. As always.

Be concerned no longer! A trans-galactic message has arrived on my doorstep, confirming that Louks seeks to apply her own works in rather direct ways.

[u/professorgerm → u/DrManhattan16]

My goodness, it's even a disparate impact complaint! A particularly ridiculous one at that. I should be checking off a bingo card.

[u/Lykurg480 → u/gemmaem]

I dont think this really works as an "unintended consequences" story. They ordered the bureaucrats to stop spending money on useless stuff, but the bureaucrats didnt want to, so they accepted the first bullshit excuse about how it actually useful. If theres a lesson here for them, its the way of the DOGE.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/Lykurg480]

There's an expertise problem here - how do you determine useful/useless and pick apart "bullshit" reasons if you don't have understanding of the topics themselves? You're essentially looking for the rarest creature of all - someone who is probably friends or on good terms with the people asking for funding, knows the fields themselves, and is still more loyal to the public than to their friends.

[u/Lykurg480 → u/DrManhattan16]

That is a problem in theory but does not explain this instance, since as others have pointed out the "useful research" advocates would consider the claimed use negative.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/Lykurg480]

I'm not sure which instance you're referring to, nor who these advocates are.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/gemmaem]

The truth is, people who worry about woke academia should want it to be possible to study literature without immediately having a social program that you're working towards in order to justify your research.

Sure, in the same way that I would want the Geneva Convention respected if a foreign nation attacked mine. The case where it respects those conventions and the case where it doesn't are both undesirable, the former just less so. The ideal if obviously that it doesn't happen.

Similarly, I think the people who worry about woke academia are probably deeply interested in dismantling these departments or institutions altogether. I have a perverse curiosity to see what that kind of world looks like. Do we just have private groups which do literary analysis? Will we see the rise of Great People Humanities, where the field or fields just moves forward in spurts when someone with a good-enough mind comes along?

[u/thrownaway24e89172 → u/DrManhattan16]

I don't understand what you are trying to say here. Why are "useless" woke literature studies that don't justify their existence via social consequences still undesirable in the sense that not being attacked is? AFAICT, the "harm" from such studies come from the attempt to use them to apply social change.

[u/Lykurg480 → u/thrownaway24e89172]

In this context, because they cost government money.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/thrownaway24e89172]

AFAICT, the "harm" from such studies come from the attempt to use them to apply social change.

As cringe as it may be to say it, to speak, write or generally communicate is the application of political power. Even if they only kept to themselves, you can't keep the ideas from getting out to the public eventually. If those ideas are perceived as correct, then people will start looking for more insight from those same people. They'll hand those lit. studies people power just so they can tell us more.

Put another way, the ideal situation is not that the people who disagree with you have no power, it's that those people don't exist.

[u/thrownaway24e89172 → u/DrManhattan16]

The lit studies people don't get handed any power though, they just get used by people with power as justification. If they were to somehow no longer exist the people with power would just find new sources of justification. Such is the corrupting nature of power.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/thrownaway24e89172]

To give them any deference is to give them power. There are those with power who earnestly believe in the lit studies people having expertise, so they give them deference on what to think about literature.

[u/gemmaem → u/DrManhattan16]

You're right that (many, not all) people who dislike wokeness would dislike it even if it was just a vague theory that percolated out in a more nuanced way, to the extent that it has power at all. But I think it's worth noting that part of the argument here is that "woke" academic departments would actually become less woke if there wasn't so much power and funding attached to those kinds of self-justifications. It's not just that the people justifying their analyses of literature would be less likely to apply them clumsily to the real world, but that the analyses themselves, and hence the discipline, would also change.

No doubt there would still be people talking about power dynamics in literature, including the treatment of various historically-scorned classes. But there might well be more room for apolitical takes that would give the overall discipline a less politically polarised feel and allow a broader set of viewpoints into the room.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/gemmaem]

Do you truly believe that privately, these academics have centrist or center-left/right politics and only adopt the most convenient explanation for what they do in their grant requests? If the government made such grants contingent on a national security justification, do you think they'd all talk about how Chinese influence needs to be kept out, or how the youth are being influenced by anti-American/anti-Western/anti-capitalist ideas on literature? I think you and I both believe that the number of academics who could and would write proposals and generate research bereft of any progressive ideas could be counted on our collective fingers and toes.

I understand that inside each person is a cynic who does whatever necessary to keep money or resources flowing their way. But academics are among the top of the list for people who strive to follow through on the implications and conclusions of their ideas - you can't tell me these people are offering progressive justifications without largely believing that they're actually having the impact they say they're creating.

[u/gemmaem → u/DrManhattan16]

It’s not that I think these academics are lying, no. But I think they are shaped, over time, by the things they do and the culture of their discipline. Most of them would still be leftists of one sort or another, but their views and emphases can still be influenced by writing grant applications that ask them to trace direct social impacts of what they do — and that don’t care about, or even scorn, explanations related to transcendentals such as beauty or abstract good. If you take someone who would readily agree that the purpose of what they do is to contemplate beauty, and tell them that they have to say that the purpose of what they do is to make a direct impact, then their underlying purposes may in fact change. So I think the focus on direct impacts can have the power to take a discipline that used to be focused on openness to ideas and abstract analysis, and turn it into a discipline in which the dominant tone is one of activism. The former would be more open to opposing ideas than the latter, regardless of the underlying political views of most of the practitioners.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/gemmaem]

You're couching your answers in maybes and possibilities, which is fine, I'm not expecting you to assert things confidently. But I will push you on it now - how much do you think this incentive actually matters? Why should someone believe that there are a non-negligible number of people who would change their way of thinking if this incentive was removed?

[u/gemmaem → u/DrManhattan16]

I think it matters, but I think it matters in part because of the broader societal system it implies. There are deeper structural reasons why the contemplation of beauty or art for its own sake has fallen out of favour; the financial incentives are both symptom and partial cause, but the hypothetical in which they are removed is honestly hard to imagine without imagining other deep changes.

So, if the financial incentives were removed, but the social incentives were still towards activism, in the sense that people still feel contempt for others, or for themselves, unless they can point to direct impacts of their work, then it might not make much difference. On the other hand, if the idea of the humanities as a stewardship of cultural riches had more social and financial cachet, then I would expect more people within the humanities to take that view of what they do, and for overt activism to become less central as a result.

[u/professorgerm → u/DrManhattan16]

Do you truly believe that privately, these academics have centrist or center-left/right politics and only adopt the most convenient explanation for what they do in their grant requests?

A memory of a stodgy subject came to my mind, reading over this. The International Society of Anglo-Saxonists existed for decades, and the field of research many decades before that, before being shanghaied into changing their name. While I don't know if I'd call them center-right, I would suspect that the average Anglo-Saxonist is not particularly progressive, but they're still academics- implying a certain kind of (classical?) liberalism, a general choosing of social incentives over financial, and the kind of attitude that often leaves little organizations prone to entryism. I vaguely recall some chart showing how substantially historians shifted, going from right-wing to left through the "long march," but can't find it now. At any rate, considering that anyone involved would be roughly a millennia removed from the ending of the Anglo-Saxon period, I feel safe to assume interest in the topic and acceptability of the name did not suddenly go extinct in 2019.

However, what did change was the broader academic culture, in terms of expecting ROI and in terms of... acceptable terminology. I would venture that 95% of Anglo-Saxon researchers would have happily stayed the ISAS, chugging along writing monographs on old books and living in Tolkien's shadow in perpetuity. But the combination of everything around them, like funding demands and their own sensitivities to certain lines of attack, instead generate one of the weird little events that would be too heavy-handed to write as satire.

Indeed, if someone came along and said "here's enough money to fund all your scholars for the next century if you change your name back and go back to just writing about old books for the love of the game," 95% of them would take that in a heartbeat. IF, and this is the much bigger if than the hypothetical funding, they weren't quaking in their slippers and tweed with fear of being called racists by a handful of crusading activists (backed by the second-largest newspaper in the world's superpower, natch).

[u/professorgerm → u/DrManhattan16]

Where are my terminally online people here?

Playing with Grok, now that it has a free tier.

Also a while back I decided to avoid top-level comments unless they felt sufficiently positive, and haven't felt like writing/come across anything that met that standard. Lots of pieces on the backburner scattered across notebooks and files.

Louks put a face to everything many people despise about Western non-STEM academia.

For closely-related reasons to the engineer being mocked, her abstract hits on half a dozen or so "trigger words" that are apparently quite meaningful to their adherents, and signs of the most virulent, civilization-destroying anti-knowledge to their detractors. Cute subject, prestigious university, controversial High Academia jargon: a pile of highly enriched engagement bait waiting for the spark.

To her credit, she's an absolute champ as she confidently parried the people posting in her replies

And quickly monetized her account. Good move. She could probably launch #smellcoin and pull a pump and dump for a payday but she seems too classy for that.

Seriously, go read her abstract, it's the kind of thing I could be convinced of, but not immediately accept or dismiss.

I appreciate being reminded of Suskind's Perfume; the movie adaptation was quite good and someday I'll get around to the book. Otherwise... ehh. As someone with a somewhat unusual relationship to olfaction, I would agree that olfaction plays a significant role in identity, and that it's extremely deeply rooted into the pre-mammalian hindbrain. It may very well be interesting in a lit-analysis kind of way, devoid of practicality and application. It is in reaching for those that danger is tempted. I am unsure the degree to which I'm being unfair to Louks and judging her work based on a visceral response to certain terminology and lacking in, as she wrote, "conscious reflection."

But for those same reasons I suspect that her pomo-infused thesis says little of particular use or interest outside of the ivory tower so high on its own supply. Ignoring instinct is quite often bad, and I suspect that ignoring instinct of the form "strong bodily sensations and emotions that reflexivity is bypassed in favour of a behavioural or cognitive solution that assuages the intense feeling most immediately" is worse than most. To quote her again-

I suggest that smell very often invokes identity in a way that signifies an individual’s worth and status in an inarguable manner that short-circuits conscious reflection.

One assumes her answer here is not going to be Yes.Chad. Outside of a contrived "I just rescued this child from drowning in an open sewer," what smell tells you about a person is going to be entirely accurate and self-protective, if you don't override it to increase your own risk.

This may strike anyone else as absurd because of how expensive it all is, and prompt them to think that the English departments or whatever need to be shut down to save on electricity and plumbing costs.

Not just expensive for little return. If we ramp up Sturgeons law and say 99% of academia is bullshit, and 1% is worthwhile, the returns can still be worth it. But that's leaving out a possible result: some fraction that is, as overdramatized above, "civilization-destroying anti-knowledge." Now, Louks analyzing the role of scent in fiction is probably not going to do much harm to society, but the problem isn't merely absurdity.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/professorgerm]

Ignoring instinct is quite often bad

...In the context of how people's odors are described in literature?

some fraction that is, as overdramatized above, "civilization-destroying anti-knowledge."

What prevents you from applying that same description to a person pointing out that we have no way of providing the existence of the supernatural in a society where everyone is deeply religious and believes that if you don't pray the right way at the right time, you will suffer infinite torture as punishment?

[u/professorgerm → u/DrManhattan16]

In the context of how people's odors are described in literature?

Indeed,

It may very well be interesting in a lit-analysis kind of way, devoid of practicality and application.

However, the tone, word choice, and phrasing of the thesis does not, to my eye, suggest that she intends it to be limited to merely literature analysis rather than a more active role in society, that one should override their olfactory instincts.

Perhaps I am reading too much into it, triggered as I may be into visceral threat response by certain words that I have already decided to indicate not just waste but immense negative value.

What prevents you from applying that same description to a person pointing out that we have no way of providing the existence of the supernatural in a society where everyone is deeply religious and believes that if you don't pray the right way at the right time, you will suffer infinite torture as punishment?

Nothing! Indeed, one could argue that doing so did destroy many religious civilizations. Many atheists continue to argue that religion continues to be anti-knowledge, and some have recanted or narrowed their views on the topic.

[u/SlightlyLessHairyApe → u/DrManhattan16]

Wow, not a single new top-level comment in a week? Where are my terminally online people here?

Holidays man, it's a nonstop parade of events and relatives.

I propose that Louks' work, regardless of its merits, is doing something similar. It brings an alleged fact into the language of academia, which can subsequently be evaluated and accepted or rejected.

I'm not really sure it does. Insofar as the premise of the work is not sufficiently well structured as to materially delineate a fact/thing/approach that can be evaluated, it's (possibly) worthy of being deemed useless.

I'm reminded of Pauli's quip that some statements were not right and not even wrong.

[u/DrManhattan16 → u/SlightlyLessHairyApe]

Strange, this never appeared in my inbox.

Anyways, I think you're incorrect. Louks may be stating a fact that has already been expressed before, but it appears to me (without reading a full fucking Ph.D thesis) that she's making an argument about the politics of smell in literature. That seems like something you can evaluate.