Feeling like a pariah, even when you’re not
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
I think there is an implicit belief in the scientific and technology communities that rational investigation can be free from bias. But social bias is simply part of the reality of being human and ignoring that bias becomes much more dangerous and damaging than acknowledging and mitigating it.
The most effective propaganda I've seen seems to be highly emotionally charged.
Political parties and religions are our most prominent organizations that depend entirely on evangelism, and I don't see many examples of them thriving through appearing to appear purely logical and unbiased.
Well done propaganda (framed to appear unbiased to its audience) is not even noticed as such by the reader. The effectiveness of this can be seen right here on HN in the hundreds/thousands of culture-war themed posts where people will quote newspaper articles that are written (intentionally or not) in a loose/ambiguous/leading way that facilitates significant interpretation of the words, so different readers will form different conclusions, and neither can be deemed wrong as they can all be using perfectly sound logic. When someone posts such an article as proof of their viewpoint, predictable heated arguments ensue, with both sides typically believing themselves to be right.
The harder ones to spot will always be the ones that align with your own interests and ideals. The best way I've found to get some perspective on those is to occasionally go to the "fair and balanced" site specifically to get the other take on an issue. It soon becomes obvious that there are actually different takes on the issue, but neither side is giving even lip service to the other sides position, instead just putting up straw men to knock down.
It's a lot harder for these sites to claim being unbiased successfully while having a lot of bias when you have more information than they assume you do, so that's one good way to spot it (but it requires a lot of work and vigilance, so is hard to keep up).
While vices like those having to do with sexual depravity (and the resulting mental blindness it causes) are ubiquitous, pride and envy are especially central here. They produce the same contemptuous attitude that leads such people to hate the masses and suppose that if they believe something, then it must be false. It also explains the politics of today.
Research and science will at their heart always be a fundamentally human endeavor and we ignore that at our peril.
Couple that with the fact that most people don't feel comfortable with the topic of 'science,' they choose to mentally defer any interpretation of evidence/facts to some authority, it's incredibly easy to mislead the population.
You can present an alternative view without accusing other people of bias.
Maybe at some point in the distant past. It's all industry shills now.
The above resonated with me. One of the hard lessons I've had to learn in life, is that you will simply never be given a fair chance by some people. We would love to live in a world where we can face our accusations head-on, and after rebutting them, never have to face them again. 99% of life does not work this way though.
Key well-connected influencers may decide they don't like you for completely arbitrary reasons. And other people who know nothing about you, but trust the influencers, will take their side by default as well. No one is going to come out in the open and make concrete accusations against you. They will just silently embellish minor transgressions, or take things out of context to paint you in a negative light... and do most of this in private conversations where you don't even have a chance to respond to any of it. The end-results are very tangible and negative of course, but the means are completely under wraps and nearly impossible to fight against.
Ultimately, you can't fight against it any more than an ant can fight against its colony. If you find yourself in a system that has a vendetta against you, your best bet is to simply leave and find a different system that does value you. Or try your best to ignore them, respond only to the most vocal criticisms, continue focusing on your work, and let your success be your shield. Winning over the critics is a fool's errand - you're better off simply accepting that you will always have critics who dislike you. As the old saying goes, haters gonna hate
And it doesn't really require embellishment. Context is everything in this case. The difference between a small joke meant to be endearing and an attack can be entirely in the eye of the beholder. Even something as inane as "working hard or hardly working?" can be taken negatively if you're already primed to expect it that way.
It's very, very hard to get back to even neutral with people that have negative assumptions about you. Even if you point out that some initial interaction that gave them a negative impression was entirely mistaken on their part or unfounded, it's not like people go back through all the interactions after that point which they interpreted negatively because of that, so these self-reinforced opinions are very hard to shake for people.
It really brings into perspective that old adage, "you never get a second chance to make a first impression."
For me two thoughts help keep my spirits up:
- I was the same person before the rejection as I am after it. There is nothing changing in reality - only my own view, my own feelings. This is all mostly self-inflicted.
- "If you don't feel rejected every day, it means you're not trying hard enough."
We were doing a white water kayak course. At this school it was tradition at the end of each day to paint one of our fingernails for each time you capsized. First day, our group was kind of smug about the fact that we only got maybe one or so each, while another group had basically both hands painted already. So we said something to that effect to our trainer, and he just says 'Yeah, because they are trying way harder to push their limits.'.
He was right of course, and the next day we took way more risks as well. Made the whole thing even more fun, and it was definitely a good lesson.
The reality being that members of my own species choose not to be with me or work with me. I am unwelcome.
Repeat that many times over many years.
If every member of our species choose not to be with or work with you it would be a major problem, but probably not an insoluble one.
if everyone else is an asshole, you're the asshole.
It's a feedback loop and the less in control you are, the less in control you are. Until you hit rock bottom. Which might not happen, and where you might bounce off, or not.
It is hard, and runs over into all the usual self-help, but the one thing that has pointed me in the right direction is when I realized that I choose how, and what, I show to the rest of the world, and if I want a positive feedback loop, it starts with me.
You are always in control of your end of the loop. Always. No matter how it feels otherwise, You Always Have The Choice.
It took me a lot to learn that, and I'm still working on it.
If you don't know you're in control, you're not in control. It's as simple as that. In my ideal world, one who has lost their self-control or self-awareness would be helped by one's community to regain them. In reality, when normal people see your self-control faltering, they will either try to protect themselves from you or to take advantage of you. Maybe not murder you outright, but definitely get rid of your presence, which is only going to amplify the disconnect.
That is a positive feedback loop, in the pure physical sense: the more alienated you are, the more alienated you become. It's like pointing a microphone at a loudspeaker.
Any system, including your emotional well-being, generally needs a negative feedback loop: when you get too much of something, you start getting less of it, and when you get too little of something, you start getting more of it.
This is complicated by ideological hijack of the signifiers "positive" and "negative". When they say "positive", they mean "thanks for accepting our groupthink as self-evident, you will be favored". When they say "negative" they mean "you have no right to be critical, you will be disregarded". I consider this use of language untruthful and abusive.
> I choose how, and what, I show to the rest of the world, and if I want a positive feedback loop, it starts with me.
I can't even tell if this is supposed to be 1 or 2 insights, but I can tell you're right about running into the usual self-help territory. To me such sentences are quite intentionally devoid of meaning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...), and following them to their logical conclusion would take one right back where one started, which is the ultimatum we're all born to: embrace the nonsense or perish.
The self-help thing seeming to blame the victim is real, but I think it is possible to skirt that problem by setting aside blame and switching to something like: Something very bad is happening here, and I need to see what levers are available to me. I have much more power to change myself than to change society.
stoicism, as opposed to raw control issues.
I'm trying to break that feedback loop, and be a source of more positivity, knowing that there's a sea of chaos out there.
I didn't mean to suggest it would be easy, and if you know a better way to start trying to turn things around I'd like to hear it.
But I believe that our society claims the responsibility of helping its most vulnerable members to their feet? If that's the case I'm pretty sure someone would come up with a better way to do that than "a miracle", if we'd just all put our minds to the question of how to help people regain self-control, rather than leaving them to figure it out all on their own.
The first step would be coming to terms with just how much we all rely on each other's helplessness.
There were strong political jousts, like everywhere else. This was unfortunately coupled to an inherent lack of money (and low salaries), and enormous egos that were growing as people were getting higher diplomas or positions.
This is one of the reasons that made me left because I saw that either I jump into the cage and bite my way up (putting actual research on the side), or always get sided.
The time where I was finishing my PhD and working at the same time (and therefore I was completely independent financially) was great - I could just flip the finger to the fights and concentrate on research and on teaching (which I loved and still love very, very much).
Academia is no different that other groups of people with common or conflicting interests.
Sayre's Law: "'In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.' By way of corollary, it adds: 'That is why academic politics are so bitter.'"
I would say that the second population was good to brilliant, but somehow unfit for the real world (that was theoretical physics, mostly). The latter was usually quite good, and especially aware of their capacities.
The first one was a disgrace to science. I had exchanges at levels I am ashamed of (a professor told me once that my field (modelization, that was in the early days of neural networks) has nothing to do with science and is for wimps. To what I told him that it indeed requires a minimal amount of intelligence, so some just do not get it). "Quelle ambiance, quelle ambiance" as we say in France - we had a few more of these exchanges, between the God Of The Dept and the slimy PhD subhuman that I was :) In retrospective, that was a good training.
ce.qui-ne-te-tues-pas-te-rends-plus.fr
This is why it's important to have at least a few influential friends who can advocate on your behalf.
Sadly, this playbook of ostracization is a generally successful one. The people who are successfully sidelined by this kind of behavior become actual pariahs.
Their isolation is so complete that people have a tendency to explain this as "academia working as intended".
I have maybe too many reactions to put into words, but the thing I wrestle with most about the phenomenon he's pointing to is why isn't this more fully acknowledged by the community, however you define that? It's the strangling silence about these types of phenomena that is maybe the worst, at a number of levels. When you're going through it, I think part of the problem is that there's no inputs to provide a different perspective, to show you "hey this looks this way but it's not". It's not even within someone's abilities at that point at some level, as you're lacking any sort of realistic social inputs. Then, at another level, why doesn't, say the academic community come to terms with how common these sorts of pathological dynamics are, and how dominant they are in outcomes? Why isn't the broader nonacademic community more aware of these kinds of problems?
I don't think these sorts of issues are without consequence either. For example, this story isn't really about the same thing, but I do think it starts to involve related social problems, that had worldwide implications for COVID, measles, and tuberculosis: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu... . To me one of the worst problems with politicization of COVID science is how unrealistic both sides seemed to get, with one invoking strange conspiracy theories when typical academic politics is trouble enough, and the other seemingly in denial about any sort of problems in academic science.
The reason there isn't more acknowledgment by the community comes down to a variant of survivorship bias. The people who have remained in academia are largely oblivious to the existence of this kind of treatment mainly because it is so effective.
Anyone on the receiving end of this kind of political assassination (or even just willful ignorance) doesn't survive in the academic community with a high probability.
Even if they do (as we can see from this article and the one it is about), there is no strong incentive to stand up for people who didn't survive it. Those people are no longer in academia and so are not immediately important to anyone still in the academic community.
It should not be a surprise that there are some who might feel threatened by people who want to challenge the status quo in search of the truth or constantly push their mental and physical limits.
And yet so many of my classmates from graduate school (mathematics) prefer to live through "visiting assistant professor" hell than make the transition into technology, where they would do very well!
I never really thought of it as a matter of courage, but maybe it is.
Perhap as Martin Luther King once said, in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.
How do we know our critics are unjustified unless we can feel free to word them out ? To me the issue was the bad reflex for people to speak in the back to put it simply. And not to blame Jessica, there's also the natural reflex to feel stuck in shock when facing people who clearly are not speaking their minds. In that case I'm sure a little habit of "what." to those people can quickly stop the toxic game.
That's why I thought it requires most people to be a bit tougher and yet softer and have a natural or trained desire to confront things. It's a strange game of having empathy about our weaknesses and yet not letting them spoil the place.
Also was the other person really unfriendly or detrimental to the group or was it somehow subjective/ego driven (threatened by a newcomer) ?
Ego driven? Certainly. I don't think there was any fear of newcomers, but was more about loyalty.
Many of these people had worked together previously, and would coordinate to enforce what they wanted. Eventually they moved in mass to another company, killing our eng department. They rinsed and repeated at the new company.
I had an HR rep tell me they felt like there was little they could do, because of their culture of silence, and how profitable they were.
At one point, he published a paper and someone from one of the drug companies wrote a scathing rebuttal, which caused him countless problems. Because his research was called into question, he couldn't get funding, and his lab shrunk from maybe people to only a few.
So he had to do a lot of extra work to re-prove all his assertions and a couple of years were lost.
If there ever was a more vile phrase...