1) Create a community around obsessive enjoyment of something 2) Community becomes productive & high status 3) Wages & status attract careerists to the field 4) Signaling games arise to separate careerists from real obsessives 5) Careerists find this stressful and complain
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Cameron Harwick 🏛 Retweeted J. Nathan Matias
"Do what you love" was never very generalizable advice. But the backlash – which amounts to "loving what you do perpetuates toxic signaling games" – is stifling. If you don't love talking about social science, maybe social science isn't for you. (2/7)https://twitter.com/natematias/status/1210613105862041600 …
Cameron Harwick 🏛 added,
J. Nathan Matias @natematias^ What I thought were informal catch-ups & chats about the news were actually scholarly conversations with people who were constantly asking how the things they encountered in the social world interacted with the state of their understanding of social science theoryShow this thread2 replies 9 retweets 57 likesShow this thread -
And that's ok! Obsessive communities aren't for most people. The whole point of the signaling games is to suss out non-fungible and not-directly-observable qualities (like obsessiveness, or the lack thereof) in order to direct people to their most productive employments. (3/7)
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Cameron Harwick 🏛 Retweeted J. Nathan Matias
"Being interesting" is one of those games in academia, bc there are huge complementarities when you put obsessives in the same workspace. It's ok not to be interesting to (or interested in) everyone, but bizarre to think shop talk is a problem. (4/7)https://twitter.com/natematias/status/1210621044190527490 …
Cameron Harwick 🏛 added,
J. Nathan Matias @natematiasSo true! If you & your ideas are being evaluated, then it's easy to come away from a conversation with the sense that you've "messed up." And in many settings, the onus is paradoxically on the less senior person to figure out & play the game https://twitter.com/beausievers/status/1210618889979039744 …Show this thread1 reply 8 retweets 32 likesShow this thread -
But we've become allergic to saying "maybe this field isn't for you" out loud. So the signaling looks "toxic", we cut down the tall poppies to create space for careerists, squander the complementarities, and waste huge amounts of human potential. (5/7)
1 reply 10 retweets 61 likesShow this thread -
This process has already played out in tech. Venture capital's fighting the battle right now. It's a slow burn in academia. But the pattern is clear: political and demographic wedges are being used to dismantle effective normative communities. (6/7)
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Fight back. Preserve space for productive obsessiveness, and the boundaries necessary to maintain it. Civilization probably depends on it. (7/7)
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I’m imagining paul erdos’ department head warning him that he’s setting a bad example of work-life balance
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Replying to @literalbanana @C_Harwick
19 hours a day, 365 days a year, strung out on speed does seem a little much. (I doubt those heard numbers are true. But they're probably surprisingly close...)
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If you haven’t read it already, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers is an excellent book on his life. And it comports with those numbers pretty closely.. wildly obsessive
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