"Everyone knows that this hiring dynamic is ubiquitous in academia. Most support it. I do myself, mostly." Can you expand on this a bit? What affirmative action policies do/don't you support and why?
Academia is truly a strange culture, I wonder what other cultures/subcultures have values that participants are expected to embrace but also penalize people for talking openly about the values they are supposed to embrace. It's a weirdly gnostic orientation - yes there is a secret gospel of secret knowledge but jeez you can't just go around talking about it with people!
Shocked that cultthink once again causes a group to burn itself down to keep warm.
Academia is basically ruined at this point. Even maximum prestige hard science departments at places like Harvard are full of people faking data (and have been for decades). Most science seems to fail replication if anyone can even bother to try. Modern academia pretends it has any level of rigor but it's been rotten, especially in social science, for almost a century (at least). Advances happen in spite of academia as much as because of it, and in politicized areas they're basically all just writing fan fiction.
There are many concrete reasons my second career (after having a humanities degree) was in accounting. One of which is that it is a discipline that is by and large focused on competence. It is not something you can fake your way through for long without being exposed. Since basically all identity based hiring incentives hurt rather than help my odds of getting hired, choosing a field like this insulates me from at least some of that. It's a lot easier to live in a field where you are paid for your expertise and doing work you either can or cannot do with relatively little variance. Just trying to build up a fortress so I never end up jobless again.
"Everyone knows that this hiring dynamic is ubiquitous in academia. Most support it. I do myself, mostly." Can you expand on this a bit? What affirmative action policies do/don't you support and why?
Academia is truly a strange culture, I wonder what other cultures/subcultures have values that participants are expected to embrace but also penalize people for talking openly about the values they are supposed to embrace. It's a weirdly gnostic orientation - yes there is a secret gospel of secret knowledge but jeez you can't just go around talking about it with people!
Shocked that cultthink once again causes a group to burn itself down to keep warm.
Academia is basically ruined at this point. Even maximum prestige hard science departments at places like Harvard are full of people faking data (and have been for decades). Most science seems to fail replication if anyone can even bother to try. Modern academia pretends it has any level of rigor but it's been rotten, especially in social science, for almost a century (at least). Advances happen in spite of academia as much as because of it, and in politicized areas they're basically all just writing fan fiction.
There are many concrete reasons my second career (after having a humanities degree) was in accounting. One of which is that it is a discipline that is by and large focused on competence. It is not something you can fake your way through for long without being exposed. Since basically all identity based hiring incentives hurt rather than help my odds of getting hired, choosing a field like this insulates me from at least some of that. It's a lot easier to live in a field where you are paid for your expertise and doing work you either can or cannot do with relatively little variance. Just trying to build up a fortress so I never end up jobless again.