A quick heads up about spam email – Asymptotic Philosophers

I am currently trapped under two cats–hence unable to move for the foreseeable future–so why not write a quick blog post on something annoying about academia?

Get ready for the spam email. Doubly so if you are in philosophy of physics.

I get (almost) daily spam messages, now that I have publications. These come in many varieties: predatory journals, pay-to-play conferences totally outside your area, typesetting nightmares from cranks who have either “solved” quantum mechanics or reduced relativity to “insoluble” “paradoxes,” or, my personal favorite, “generous” offers to turn a paper you’ve already written into a book so that “the public can know of all the wonderful work you’ve done”–they’ll even do all the writing for you!

Oh, and you’ll also get things that aren’t quite spam as soon as you start teaching, especially so if you use a big publisher’s book. I get regular messages telling me about “great” new software, books, and other miscellaneous crap related to teaching. On the bright side, however, most of these can be unsubscribed to after the fact, unlike the above spam, and those that can’t are coming from a sales rep whom you can (kindly–they’re working, too) ask to remove you from their mailing list. It’s worth noting that I never signed up for any of these emails. In fact, many of the emails are from companies I’ve never heard of.

My guess is both sorts of clutter are worse in the US, given its “who gives a crap” attitude toward the sale of user data, but I know the former happens elsewhere with some regularity.

So, have fun cleaning out your inboxes–resp., finding important emails in your spam folder–for the rest of your life! 😬

(Note: I think the latter sort is worse for me because I taught introductory math courses, which publishers love to target with their online stuff. While these can be a lifeline for adjuncts especially, there are free options out there, so do take a look. They’re not as good, if I recall correctly, but your students would probably thank you. You can also write fairly easy programs to generate problems, which gets even more manageable when you’re using mastery grading, i.e., have specific problem/concept types you want students to solve.)

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Chris Mitsch

Chris studies the history and philosophy of science and mathematics. He is currently translating several works by Hilbert, Nordheim, and von Neumann as part of a project on the philosophy of mathematics that informed early quantum mechanics formalisms. He is also interested in: historical method and how this should inform general philosophy of science; the cognitive foundations of mathematics; and the construction of identity in (especially American) politics. Chris posts under the banner "Method Matters".