Writing Papers with Pandoc

At Daily Nous, there's a discussion of Tech Advice for a New Philosophy Grad Student.  There's some dispute about whether or not it's worth learning LaTeX.  I recommend pandoc instead for those who are on the fence.  You write in markdown, a simpler and more readable plain text syntax (compare *markdown italics* to \emph{LaTeX italics}, for example!). But it subsequently uses LaTeX to produce good-looking PDFs.  Or it can just as easily convert into other document formats, such as Word .docx, if needed.  It's very flexible.

What Should Editors Ask of Referees?

I've previously discussed how frustrating confused referee reports can be for the author, and how the system might actually be made more efficient by allowing authors to (briefly!) respond to these reports before a verdict is reached.  But I think there's a more systematic problem, in that too many referees (seemingly) base their verdicts on bad criteria, such as whether they can think of an objection to the paper. (One otherwise-brilliant philosopher once told me that he has a deliberate policy of rejecting any paper that he disagrees with!  Few would explicitly endorse this, I imagine, but many more may follow a similar rule de facto.)  So I've been wondering what steps a journal editor could feasibly take to try to counteract this.  In particular, are there particular questions that it would be worth asking referees to explicitly address in their report, that would better reveal the truth about a paper's merits?

What if Authors could Respond to Referee Comments?

I'm sure any academics reading this can relate to the following experience: despite one referee's glowing report, your paper is rejected on the basis of referee 2's confident "devastating objection," which in fact involves a simple misunderstanding that you could easily correct in a sentence or two, if given the chance.  But of course you are not given the chance: the top journals are overloaded with submissions, so tend to outright reject any paper that doesn't receive uniformly positive peer reviews.

It's a frustrating (and frustratingly common) experience for the author.  But it also contributes to the systemic overburdening of journals, as the author now needs to (perhaps make minor tweaks and then) send their paper out to a new journal, which must find all new referees.  It would've been more efficient if the original journal could have disregarded the confused report, and just sought the one replacement referee.

Academic pay cuts vs job cuts

Hopefully the financial situation for universities next year will turn out to be less dire than many fear. And hopefully what cost-cutting measures are needed can largely be achieved by cutting down on non-academic "bloat" together with temporary reductions to discretionary budgets (turning research "travel" virtual, etc.).  But suppose that this isn't enough, and your department needs to spend less on academic salaries.  How should this be done, to minimize harm?

Beneficent Retirement and Academic Successorships

In 'The Paradox of Beneficial Retirement', Saul Smilansky argues that "for a great many people, the best professional action that they can currently take is to leave their profession" (337) -- on grounds that they could reasonably expect to be replaced by someone better (!) -- and, moreover, that the personal costs they'd thereby incur (especially if eligible for a comfortable retirement) would be much smaller than the costs otherwise borne by the un- or under-employed.

In the academic case, I suspect that a similar conclusion may follow without the need for invidious comparisons.  Even supposing that one is above average in philosophical mettle, productivity, and so forth, so long as one has already enjoyed a long career in the discipline, it's likely that in most cases (not all, of course!) one's most valuable contributions have already been made, and the discipline would benefit more from hearing new voices.  (This seems especially likely given the hyper-competitiveness of the job market in recent years: we all know that there's an immense amount of philosophical talent out there, struggling to secure stable academic employment.) 

Comparing US vs UK Academia

Having been back in the US for a full year now, it's interesting to compare how differently academia works here compared to in the UK (where I worked for the preceding 4.5 years).  I much prefer the US system, personally, but will try to offer an even-handed overview here.  Others are of course welcome to contribute their own observations in the comments (or email me if they'd prefer their comment to be posted anonymously).  I especially welcome any corrections if my observations aren't representative in some respects.

The Value of Academic Research

Michael Huemer argues that "the benefits of the vast majority of academic research are tiny at best, possibly negative, and much less than the costs."  While I don't dispute his claims (in section 3) that universities are prestige-chasing institutions, I think his framing of the issue leads him to overlook the main sources of value that can nonetheless emerge from these highly imperfect institutions.

"Should I do a Philosophy PhD?"

Will MacAskill is seeking feedback on the 80,000 Hours advice page he's written for those who ask the question: "I want to make a difference. Should I become a philosopher?", with a full profile evaluating the PhD in Philosophy (from an "effective altruist" perspective) here.

It seems generally pretty accurate to me.  The one thing that really jumped out to me is the mere middling score currently assigned for "job satisfaction".  Will rightly stresses that it's incredibly difficult to secure a permanent job in philosophy (which I assume is reflected in its receiving the lowest possible score on "ease of competition").  But for those of us fortunate enough to make it, I really do think it's the best job in the world.  I certainly can't imagine anything else I'd rather do, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. (See, e.g., the comments in this thread.)

I also think he may be underestimating the possible impact of teaching.  Even if it's true that most philosophy students will eventually come across Singer's pond argument, etc., regardless of who their teachers are, I think it can make a difference how these things are taught -- whether it's approached as a merely intellectual puzzle, or in a more practically engaged way that really challenges us to reflect on our values and how to live in a way that's (more or less) consistent with those values. I suspect that having a supportive faculty member may make students more likely to set up a local Giving What We Can chapter, further spreading and normalizing "effective altruist" ideas.  And there are often opportunities to speak to wider audiences -- for example, I just gave a couple of mini-lectures on this material for our recent University Open Days, and had multiple parents approach me afterwards to express their interest in learning more about effective charities, etc.  Hard to know how much of an effect any of this has, of course, but it's at least encouraging.  And none of this requires being a research superstar: it's stuff that any ethics lecturer can easily do.

So, that's my 2 cents.  What do you think?

Must Research Talks present Work in Progress?

I gather the norm is that research talks (colloquia, etc.) are meant for presenting unpublished work; work that is, at least nominally, "in progress".  But is there a good reason for this norm?  Just off the top of my head, I would have thought that research talks served two main purposes: (i) feedback, and (ii) dissemination.  Moreover, "read in advance" workshop-style events aside, I expect the main benefits for all involved stem from the latter: the audience gets exposed to (hopefully interesting) new ideas, and the speaker gets to disseminate her ideas, perhaps build up her academic reputation slightly by becoming better known to the audience members, etc.

And while opportunities for feedback are no longer such a priority for published work (though it surely never hurts to hear new objections, etc.), I would think the benefits of dissemination would be all the greater when it comes to presenting one's published work, as selection effects mean it is likely to be of higher quality than one's current work-in-progress. The audience would benefit more from being exposed to your most interesting ideas (assuming you aren't so famous that they'd heard it all before), and you too would presumably benefit more from disseminating your best ideas rather than simply your most recent ones.

So, why doesn't this happen? (Or, if it sometimes happens, just without my being aware of it: why not more often?)

Questioning Political Dogmas

There's an interesting thread over at Daily Nous asking whether there's a problematic lack of political diversity in academic philosophy.  I don't think this is something that can be answered in a value-neutral way.

In particular, one cannot just assume that the spectrum of views in the general populace is privileged and ought to be reflected proportionally in academia, (or anywhere else, for that matter).  As we know from history, morally abhorrent views can enjoy substantial popular support.  There was once widespread support for slavery, fascism, etc., amongst certain populations. Otherwise decent and "reasonable" people held, and advocated for, these abhorrent views.  That doesn't mean that they were actually reasonable in doing so, or that the views are ones that (ever) merited representation amongst the intelligentsia.

Implicit Bias in Academic Service Expectations

I recently came across Brian Weatherson's excellent post from earlier in the year on "very junior [female] faculty doing demanding administrative tasks [...] at the level of workload of being a chair of a search committee."  He continues:

It is possible in principle that these faculty could be getting enough teaching relief that they have as much time for research as any other junior faculty. Even if so, I think it would be better to be teaching than doing admin. Teaching advanced courses is good for research, teaching lower level courses gives you re-usable teaching materials, and generally teaching is good training for teaching. No one cares how well you administrate; they do care how well you teach. In short, generous teaching reductions would make these administrative assignments less horrible, but wouldn’t I think make them acceptable.

There has been a growing awareness in recent years of the harms done by gendered implicit bias in academic hiring/recruitment. It would be good to see this awareness extend further in scope, to encompass the (all-too-familiar to many) harms of gendered implicit bias in service expectations and workloads.

Dear Philosophy Departments: Next Time Please Use AcademicJobsOnline.org

Some observations on the philosophy job market from my wife Helen:

Almost every single school that does applications online uses the same (horrible) software. And yet for every single school, you must create a new username/password, and fill out the same forms over again, and upload all the same documents.

This is outrageous, not primarily because it's so damned cumbersome, but because there already exists a centralized jobs site: academicjobsonline.org

AcademicJobsOnline is an extension of the centralized service created by the American Mathematical Society, which is open to academics in any field. You upload your documents and personal information once. After that, it takes about 30 seconds to apply to a job. You just check the boxes for the materials you want to include (and have the option of uploading more materials), check the boxes of the letters you want to include, and presto!

Additional benefits to candidates: You can be notified when your letters are uploaded, and it's easy to tailor what you want to send to specific schools (e.g. if you want to send extra teaching letters to certain schools but not to others, all you have to do is check an extra box).

There's also a huge potential benefit to departments: Currently the poor person in charge of sending out letters has to upload letters for (number of applicants) x (number of letter writers per applicant) x (number of schools applied to per applicant). Maybe 2000 letters?? If departments all used this already existing service, this would be cut down to a maximum of (number of applicants) x (number of letter writers per applicant) = maybe 50ish? And I suspect that it could be cut down even further with this service, since it has a box you can check if someone is uploading letters on behalf of the writers, potentially allowing for all the letters to be uploaded in a single bundle.

Seriously, philosophers, the mathematicians already created the service! Let's give [our department administrators] (as well as the applicants) a break!

Having done a quick search of recent JFP listings, let me just say kudos to Duke, Tufts, Yale, Stanford, Tulane, Oregon, and Washington Tacoma, for leading the way. Hopefully next year many more philosophy departments will join them in doing the sensible thing here!

New Jobs Listing site for Philosophers

... at http://phylo.info/jobs:

Phylo Jobs is a free listing of job openings for academic philosophers. Listings are accepted from department or search committee chairs (or their authorized representatives) and verified for accuracy before appearing below. To find a listing, enter any information the search box below, or use the advanced search to filter listings based rank, AOS, or other criteria. For unofficial, user-provided information on the status of a position, please visit http://phylo.info/jobs/wiki.

Since the old JFP is completely dysfunctional, I hope departments will take advantage of this new (and greatly superior) option for getting word out about the jobs they're offering!

Update: And now there's PhilJobs (from the good folks at PhilPapers).

Too many options! Either looks great, though, and a huge improvement on the status quo, so I guess we'll just need to wait and see which one departments end up gravitating more towards...

APA Wishlist

There are lots of good suggestions in this Leiter Reports thread on what the APA could be doing better. To summarize my favourites:

Outsourcing Lectures

Interesting stuff in the NYT:

Some imagine a situation in which the bulk of introductory course materials are online, as videos or interactive environments; students engage with the material when convenient and show up only for smaller seminars. “In an on-demand environment, they’re thinking, ‘Do we really need to show up face to face at 8 a.m. with 500 other students to take Psychology 101?’ ” Mr. Schonfeld says. [...]

Mr. Schonfeld sees still more potential in “unbundling” the four elements of educating: design of a course, delivery of that course, delivery of credit and delivery of a degree. “Traditionally, they’ve all lived in the same institutional setting.” Must all four continue to live together, or can one or more be outsourced?

Jobs for Philosophizing

Tuomas writes:

[I]f all you care about is getting a high paid position at a top university in the US, then listen to Leiter. But if you’re looking to do philosophy, the kind of philosophy that you want to do, then you’d better think in terms of the best possible supervisor for you rather than the placement record of the program.

Maybe I'm misreading him, but here Tuomas seems to be focusing exclusively on doing philosophy during grad school. This seems short-sighted: many of us are looking to do philosophy, not just for five years, but for the rest of our lives. Getting a job at a "top university" (or top liberal arts college) is instrumental to doing philosophy. The truly dedicated may still find time to do research on top of a 4/4+ teaching load, or even a non-academic job, but it's gotta be more difficult that way.

Peer Review for Open Access Textbooks

I'm a big fan of open-access publishing: Philosophers' Imprint, NDPR, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are all wonderful resources.  I only wish that we could add to this list a respected source for open-access philosophy textbooks.  One can always self-publish, of course, but then readers lack the quality-control assurance that selective publishers provide, and the author won't get as much professional credit for their efforts (e.g. at tenure review time).  I can see a few possible solutions:

The Future of Academic Publishing

This is somewhat old news, but it's never too late to note that John Holbo is a legend:

The book is published by Pearson Asia (that’s a story in itself) and will be available in paperback by mid-August. They’ve been bringing out nice, inexpensive draft versions for my students in Singapore (that’s why I have an Asian publisher.) For this first general release I insisted on extending the deal I had insisted on for my own classroom use: I reserve the e-rights and so have a free hand to try manner of cool free e-stuff. I’m hoping one reward for my virtuous ways will be that some folks will want to adopt the book for classroom use. (Free e-availability is a big pedagogic bonus, I think.) And will then see to it that copies of the book are in school bookstores, so Pearson (and I) get paid a little. That seems fair.

You can check out the free online version here. I hope more philosophers start to do this sort of thing -- or, better yet, write unrestrictedly open-access textbooks.

For a striking contrast, I just noticed that Springer is trying to charge $100 for the Kindle version of a 'Time and Ethics' anthology. I wonder who they're thinking will pay that? (At least they have university libraries as a captive market for the $150 print edition.) Am I missing something? It'd seem far more sensible to lower the e-book price and maybe actually sell a couple of copies.

For the rest of us, it'd be even more sensible to just share our papers online (you do want to be read, right?), and do away with commercial anthologies altogether.

Feedback on Prospective Students' Writing Samples

I was recently struck by the thought: professors carefully read and assess the writing samples of (at least) those prospective graduate students to whom their department offers admission. So why do they not write up their assessments (including constructive suggestions for how to improve the paper), and offer this to the prospective student along with the offer of admission? What better way to signal your commitment to helping the student develop as a philosopher than to provide such help before they even arrive?

It seems individually rational for departments to start doing this, since it seems likely to give them an advantage in recruiting the top students, relative to departments that don't make such an effort. (At least, I imagine I would have been influenced in my grad school choice by receiving useful, detailed written feedback on my work -- it would make me look much more favourably upon the school in question. I assume other students would respond similarly.) Since professors care about attracting the best students, it seems likely to be well worth their while to write up such feedback, at least for the students they want most to recruit.

It also seems globally desirable that this become standard practice. Given plausible assumptions, it should help match up students with the professors/departments that are most likely to help them develop as philosophers. This is obviously good for the students, and what's good for grad students' development is good for the discipline. Further, it also seems good for the professors to be able to increase their chances of recruiting the students they want most among the admitted class (at the cost of reducing their chances of recruiting admitted students who are desired more strongly by competing institutions).

And, quite apart from the assortive benefits, it's just intrinsically desirable that all this reading and evaluation, on the part of some of the top minds in the field, not go to waste. I'm currently revising my old writing sample, since I rather like the paper, and I'm struck by the thought that I could have received helpful comments on it from experts at seven top schools. Moral philosophers at those institutions read the paper carefully enough to decide that they wanted me to spend the next five years studying with them, so presumably they also had various thoughts on how the paper might be improved. But this invaluable information was never communicated (at least in writing -- I can't remember my visits well enough to recall whether it came up much in discussion; I would have been too flustered to absorb it then anyhow). What a shame!

Has anyone had this idea before? Is there some reason why it isn't as desirable as it prima facie seems to me? (If not, here's hoping the idea starts to catch on!)

The Medium of Philosophy

A couple more questions of information architecture: What are blogs good for? And what is the ideal medium for philosophical discussion? Here some form of pluralism seems plausible, since there are many different kinds of valuable philosophical discussion (from brainstorming ideas to the highest levels of rigorous critique), and people differ in whether they prefer, e.g., oral or written communication. But I think some general observations may still be possible. In particular, I want to undermine the common prejudice against taking blogging seriously as an academic medium.

On the traditional picture, philosophers may go through any or all of the following steps: (i) get together at the pub to exchange rough ideas, (ii) go home and write up a paper, (iii) pass it around their friends for comments, (iv) perhaps present it at a colloquium or conference to get a bit more feedback, before (v) submitting the final paper to a journal, where it stands as their "official" contribution to the ongoing discussion in the literature.

Blogging might be understood conservatively as an expansion of the first (brainstorming) step, though I think it also has a fair bit in common with conferencing, and - don't forget - is a form of publication in addition. This combination of features suggests some potentially radical implications. In the long run, I expect that the distinction between 'work in progress' and 'publications' will become increasingly porous, as academia slowly comes to grips with the 'publish then filter' information economy. (Dennett noticed the start of this trend over a decade ago, in employing his famous "multiple drafts" metaphor.) But I also want to say something about our more immediate circumstances.

In particular, I want to suggest that blogging, as a medium, is very well-suited for (much) philosophizing. Indeed, I personally find it to be my favourite philosophical medium, at least for many purposes. I add the proviso because my absolute best philosophical experiences have been in small, well-focused seminar classes, where everyone has done the readings and actively participates in stimulating discussions. That, I grant, is even better than blogging. But in general, I find that blog discussions are often more philosophically valuable than, say, colloquia, conference talks, and similar 'general audience' presentations.

Of course it depends on the participants (so I have in mind a good quality blog like PEA Soup). But it shouldn't be surprising that blogs, as a written medium, may be conducive to higher quality conversation -- at least when all else is equal. After all, asynchronous discussion frees interlocutors to spend as long as they need to reflect carefully and craft their responses. Competitive pressures also help: without a captive audience, "speakers" with nothing particularly worthwhile to say will soon find no-one listening to them. (If only we could leave a boring talk, or skim past an obtuse question, as easily as we can on the Internet!) Thirdly, the space of potential interlocutors is much larger, as overcoming geographic boundaries creates many new opportunities for conversing with wonderful philosophers from all over the globe. [For example, one of my favourite blog discussions (quoted here) was with Jamie Dreier (Brown) when I was at ANU, half the world away.]

So I think blogging is in principle -- and often in practice -- superior to conferencing and colloquia, as a "mid-level" philosophical medium. This claim strikes me as fairly straightforward. More controversially: I'm inclined to think that even "high-level" philosophy, i.e. journal articles, would often be better in (something like) blog format. Granted, some papers really do need all those ten thousand words to make their point. But most often, I think the core insight could be easily captured in an 800 word blog post, and the rest is just tying up loose ends, or repetitive exposition for struggling readers -- stuff that could easily be delegated to separate - hyperlinked - pages, rather than bloating the main work.

Overall, I expect that current academic practices will at least be significantly supplemented (if not supplanted) by new media. Eventually. But I hope to see these improvements implemented sooner rather than later. So helping others to see the opportunities for improvement is perhaps a first step. Your thoughts?