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Because, as we all know, politics plays no part in faculty hiring, and who you know, who your advisor was, who your drinking buddies were, have no bearing on those decisions, and it is all dependent solely on the objective merits of your work and expertise.

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Good work is the key to good fortune

Winners take that praise

Losers seldom take that blame

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This can be used to point at both victim-of-circumstance "losers" and it-was-all-me "winners", depending on your viewpoint.

The outcomes of human-social-status processes have never been epistemological evidence of anything except how humans allocate social status.

That is a fascinating sentence. So fancy and yet it conveys such a simple point. I have no doubt that you would fit right into an elitist, self-important, overly status-conscious academic environment where prestige is more important than actually achieving something on an intellectual or practical level.

That's still just the social and environmental part, of course. You'd still have to have some chops. But if you're anywhere as close to as smart as you think you are, that won't be a problem at all.

You're right; I got too caught-up in academia-speak.

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