I actually enjoy service. I enjoy organizing events and troubleshooting climate-related stuff. It helps me feel connected and relevant. However, I have become increasingly aware of the different lifestyles between people who “see problems and try to solve them” versus people who “do not see problems”. I’d like to record some of these differences and…
Academic jerks and the active harm done by their toleration
If you live in the real world, you would have encountered jerks at some point in your life. (If you don’t think you have… you might just be the jerk.) Jerks exist everywhere and academia is no exception. However, I think that academics are especially reluctant to call-out rude behaviours. Some of this might be…
Another great book | another project | help me with something too please
Another great book In my last post, I talked about Kate Manne’s book Down Girl. What got me into that book first, however, is another great book. It’s a great book on stress management written by a pair of twin sisters. I listened to it on Audible, of course. The authors performed the Audible recording —…
Down Girl: a summary and a gentle nudge
This post is my brief summary of Kate Manne’s book Down Girl: the logic of misogyny and a gentle nudge for you all to go read it. In this post, I will primarily focus on what I take to be the core of Manne’s view. If you’d like to see her arguments and real-world case analyses,…
Course Idea: Historical Method in Philosophy and Science
I think a lot about how and why philosophers of science do historical research. I am working on a series of papers about the relationship between the hows and whys of a particular kind of philosopher of science–those who want (something like) a theory of scientific methodology so as to guide to contemporary practice. However, this…
A case against talents
I went to a career workshop recently. The theme was that we should identify our strengths through some paid questionnaire service and structure our careers around them in some way (we didn’t get to the career part). In general, I’m not a big fan of this sort of career testing because I don’t think the…
Is data special?
This post is inspired by a twitter thread on whether you should trust a summary statistic (mean/ standard deviation/ Pearson’s correlation coefficient) without seeing a plot. Most people voted “no”, which seems to be motivated by a sentiment that accepting summary statistics without seeing the plot is trusting too much. See the full thread below.…
Multi-Disciplinary Mindset and Cross-Disciplinary Claiming
I’ve been doing a bad job posting regularly. Part of this is due, I think, to expecting too much of my blog posts, so to counteract this I will be writing only short posts for a while (<300 words). I’ve been reading a lot about interdisciplinarity recently, which has forced me to think more carefully…
What make the PhD process easier/harder for me
I’ve recently encountered a lot of disciplines/areas of research that I didn’t think existed before but, after thinking about it, I’d think “of course someone needs to figure that out”. It’s an interesting experience — and a sobering one, regarding what we take for granted. In any case, one such area I discovered today is…
“the fundamental lexical hypothesis”, universal personality traits, and umami
The universal trait hypothesis Like many other psychology students, I was taught that “the various human traits and characters can be captured by five basic traits: conscientiousness, extroversion, emotional stability, openness-to-experience, agreeableness.” As someone who is not, by nature, very reflective, I never questioned what “can be captured” meant or how this caption was done.…