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Comment by SiempreViernes | Hacker News Reader

Summary: it was academic and she didn`t like it, finding it too abstract and disconnected from the real world.

I don`t see much else, sure there is the section on sexism, but she spends more time talking about how boring her chosen subject was.

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You left out the combativeness, the fact that hardly anyone will read your work, the unnecessary inaccessibility of the field, the low pay of post-grad work and poor odds of getting tenure, and the academic equivalent of pagerank gaming to gain notice.

Even by an analytic philosopher’s standard, your summary is rather uncharitable and reductive.

I would characterize that as the standard “I didn’t like it” for academia, listing its well known problems. More interesting would be a discussion about why the support systems in place didn’t protect her from them, but this is simply a list of common problems.

Sure, but you might be surprised how many undergrads go in not realizing how common these are.

Sure, but the primary point of her article was the abstract nature of academia which they should have expected going in.

And the fact that you can spend 2 years writing a dissertation that 3 people will read and maybe fewer will understand or connect with.

That's common for many kinds of specialised work of any kind I feel, and certainly for academia. Or just in general actually, how many man-years of work aren't floating around unread on the bottom ends of amazon book lists for instance?

Also, the number of people that have to read it should be more like 5: yourself, your supervisor, and the examination committee that is at least 3 other people.

You're assuming the committee actually reads the dissertation.

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