It's all imposter syndrome

technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.

@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-

Okay as much as I dunk on academia one thing I really need you all to take from me right now is this: you can read The Problematic Theory Book. you should, fundamentally, always, read the fucking source. You do not have to approach the source context-less, but you should be prepared to read it and make a genuine attempt to comprehend what the argument is without resorting to performatively dunking on it (yes, I get a bit silly with it when I liveblog, but I do actually do my best to understand what's being said. I don't like it when queer theory is bad? I thought it was supposed to help people). If you can't make a genuine effort to comprehend the text, then if the text truly has bad takes, you won't be able to adequately argue against why Thing Bad besides "well thing bad!!" you need to be able to construct a fucking argument. You need to be able to create a framework your worldview is built on. You need clarity of mind. Another thing ALSO alongside this is sometimes you will read The Problematic Theory Book and you will see things that you agree with. You will see analysis in there that has potential. This is actually super normal and something people do in academia is that they identify these nuggets of Actually Good / Potential Filled Takes and they try to expand upon them. Salvaging the potential of Problematic Theory Book does not mean that you implicitly agree with Problematic Theory Book in its original entirety. It means you saw someone going somewhere, saw them swerve into a fucking tree, and went to yourself, "okay, well, they were on the highway before this, so let me try and see if I can steer the car in the right direction. Let me see if I can try and use the work they laid the foundations for and build something actually revolutionary upon it, or otherwise use it for my own, better, more intentionally progressive and inclusive theory." Like, that's actually one thing that academia does that is good. you have to be in conversation with past work and you have to be able to see when an author was saying some shit that had potential, and identify where they fucked up and where they might've had something, and then build on it. you can't reinvent Ur-Theory from base principles in a vacuum and expect it to be good. you can't create theory that is Morally Pure Only Based On Works You've Deemed Morally Pure because that too is a vacuum, and at that point you're treating theory and like, science, as a fucking religion. It's not a religion. You are not going to go to hell if Judith Butler or Andrea Dworkin or bell hooks or Kimberlé Crenshaw, like, breathe on you the wrong way. You can read people who you fully disagree with, understand that at some points they may have been cooking, understand that at other points they were Absolutely Not Fucking Cooking, and try to see what you can take from their work and how you can create something that is NOT a recreation of the original fucking thing but, like, your own new thing that attempts to address real world issues. stop being afraid of The Big Evil Bad Book or suggesting that people shouldn't fucking read books. read the fucking book. engage. be an academic about it, goddamnit.

This is very correct and actually generalizes outside political theories. The further back you go in any field, the more you're going to deal with the fact that the people who originally had a really clever, useful idea also had a bunch of ideas that were ass.

Hey, so this may be a weird place to put this, but if your college or school uses Canvas, it was likely affected by the recent data breach. As of right now, the most likely personal information swept up in this hack is names and email addresses. Login and financial information were not included in the breach (as far as we know).

Want to add that mirrored sites are a very likely avenue of attack here. If you receive a legitimate-seeming e-mail telling you that you have to log in to a given account and take some action, navigate to the website for that account through your browser and do NOT click the link. It's fairly easy to create a perfect simulacrum of a website and only redirect you to the legitimate website after obtaining your login credentials in order to avoid arousing suspicion

“There are experimental studies showing that men's qualifications, talents, and achievements shine brighter and provide a better fit with the demands of a nonfeminine job - even when identical to those of a woman.

the thing they dont warn you about learning statistics is that you can never be sure if a medicine is working ever again.

Yeah I wouldn't know how to reply to that either. Not every college instructor has the time to teach all their students how to manage reading 30 pages on their own time either, but surely the regular academic resources for help still exist? Like a writing center or a college advisor or ....anything? School librarians?? Tutors? The TA during office hours?? It seems like high school isn't teaching them how to study/synthesize texts at all and then they just...aren't asking any other resource for help except AI.

Also, while I'm procrastinating on my own draft, let me share my best piece of writing advice. I call it 'robot mode'.

you try to do functional analysis and it hits you with the complexity zoo.