#advanced degrees

Traditional sexism has historically been manifested in treating the default human as male while women show up as “human + gender characteristic” or “human + sexuality” (thus the only-recently-rejected norm of using male pronouns by default). I’ve become a lot more conscious of this issue in the past several years. Recently I was struck by Douglas Hofstadter’s apologetic discussion of why he used only male characters and pronouns in Gödel, Escher, Bach where he apparently thought that introducing female characters would inherently make them sexualized and so distract from the point he was trying to make. This is still kind of baked into our culture today to the extent that I consciously noticed only the last few years how many if not most people (including myself at the time) have a tendency to refer to an unknown particular person as “he” before knowing their gender. (To be fair, I noticed this in the context of discussing things happening in the math community, which is heavily male-skewed, but if anything that only means that more harm can come from this bad habit.) I would argue that phenomenon is one of those things that comes nowhere close to being neatly classified under “male privilege” but is insidious because anything that treats the genders very differently without justification is harmful.

Anyway, with the Dr. Jill Biden thing we have a writer who is completely dismissive of her credentials on the grounds that nobody should call themself doctor unless they practice medicine. He “supports” this by basically attempting to delegitimize the entire doctoral dissertation process at universities (in the good old days it was actually hard to get a doctorate, you see) but for some reason half the time he spends railing against non-medical people with the Dr. title is to sneer at honorary doctorates that universities give out to celebrities and wealthy donors (fun fact: the writer himself has one of those honorary doctorates! I had to look this up to believe it). He mostly names white men among the celebrities not deserving honorary PhDs but does slip in a few snide remarks about them being given to black women for political purposes -- he’s clearly very anti-PC but I have a feeling not many of the people outraged at his article know that about him or read that far into this particular piece.

Instead, all the outrage I’ve seen about this article is that its author, Epstein, has revealed himself to be a misogynist who wants to dismiss the credentials of a woman holder of an advanced degree. A lot of this outrage is coming from PhD-holders who don’t seem to mind that Epstein, you know, spent a bunch of paragraphs on his main thesis making out that advanced degrees nowadays are just a joke and shouldn’t be respected at all (mostly using men as examples). Not that titlism (looking down on non-PhD-holders) should be the alternative, of course, which ironically is what a couple of people seem to be emulating in their criticisms of him (actually referring to Epstein as just some loser who only has a BA). No, all that matters is that Jill Biden is a female doctorate-holder and so the whole article is an attack on women who use the title.

NEW POST! 22-Year-Olds Don't Belong in Grad School

In my day job at a major technology company, I mentor a lot of young adults. Most of them are college-aged interns and recent graduates.

You’ll be shocked—shocked!—to learn that my mentoring sessions are popular because of their “no bullshit” vibe. If we’re getting coffee for thirty minutes, we’ll spend two of them introducing ourselves and making pleasant chit-chat about the weather. That…

This isn't to say it's not valuable or worth listening to. You aren't wrong because you don't have an advanced degree, nor should your knowledge be dismissed.

But it's vital that people understand that academic research is not the same as reading a lot on the topic. It's doing the work. What someone with an advanced degree has done that is not something you can get from reading is actual experience doing the work. If they work in the sciences, they aren't just reading studies, they are designing and performing studies. If they work in history, they aren't just reading the primary texts, they're writing analysis, they're talking to other people who have spent their whole lives on the subject, they are getting expert peer review on their ideas, etc.

This does not make those people never wrong. Advanced degrees tend to be on very narrow fields, and you may have done reading that they haven't done if you stray even a little outside whatever sub-sub topic they work in.

You may well have researched a topic enough to be an authority in it. That does not make you the same as someone with an advanced degree. They have worked in the field in a way you haven't, and have access to things you don't. Your knowledge is valid and worthwhile. In some cases, it may even be preferable. But it's not a replacement. It does not serve the same function or do the same things. Yes, it is unfair that academia is gatekept in the way it is. Yes it is classiest and ableist. Yes it has blind spots because of those issues! Unfortunately, the fact that it's unfair doesn't make the alternatives equivalent. Just because someone is unfairly denied the ADHD medication they need doesn't mean caffeine is the same as Adderal. Speaking from personal experience on that one.

Thanks for your support and reassurance!

have you found it hard to find a potential life partner who is similar to you intellectually?

I would say yes, but not in the ways you're suggesting. I've noticed that at least in online dating I have no trouble running across profiles of women who seem to have a similar level of intellect and who share some of my intellectual interests, and while getting matches in general is very slow and requires patience and working my right-swiping muscles quite a lot (on profiles of women whose intellects I typically can't grok from the profile), when I do get matches that lead to dates, they tend to be with women that I would consider to have a similar intellectual caliber and usually some interests in common. I think there's a reason for this: the fact that it's apparent from my profile, and even more apparent within the first few messages, that I have an advanced degree and a job that reflects it, probably gives me a ton of credit. I've gotten a strong impression with several of my dates that they only considered my profile in the first place because it indicated that I'm some sort of professor somewhere; one of them even told me this straight-up to my face (she thought my profile pictures "sucked" but her top priority was finding a highly educated, academically minded man).

As a relevant aside: there's a lot of talk nowadays about how younger men are having a harder time finding partners and just doing badly in general, and while some of the particular younger male circumstances difficult for dating do apply to me (like not being tall or in the upper 10-20% in terms of superficial attractivenss), the circumstance of not having a degree (apparently more women are getting college degrees than men nowadays and tend to seek men with similar-level degrees) thankfully does not apply to me. Which makes me wonder how much of an even worse situation I'd be in if a few things earlier in my life had been tweaked and I'd never finished my PhD, and I hate thinking about how this must be the case for a huge number of equally intelligent/intellectual men.

But anyway yeah, I seem to have no particular trouble finding women who strike me as on a similar intellectual level and with some intellectual interests in common, relative to the trouble I have with "finding women" in the first place. (And by the way, I don't know who you are, but in this general region of Tumblr there are a good number of people I perceive as marginally my intellectual superiors, and I can't imagine that I'm very much smarter than, let alone twice as smart as, anyone here.)

However, this is not all of what makes for intellectual compatibility, and this I do feel I have a ton of trouble finding, to the point that I feel pretty discouraged. The other part to intellectual compatibility is having reasonably similar... ways of perceiving the world, philosophically and socially, I guess you could say? (Which is just a slightly more raw way of saying "reasonably similar worldviews", I guess.) I think someone who's followed this Tumblr for long enough probably gets the impression that I model events and behaviors in very particular ways. I'm not saying that two people in a relationship should see things in exactly the same way, which first of all is impossible and secondly is a recipe for intellectual stagnation and sinking into a two-person echo chamber. I'm also not claiming that my way of perceiving the world is necessarily any more intelligent than someone else's which isn't compatible with mine, just... There are visibly extremely intelligent people who, in a serious relationship, are regularly going to espouse values and interpretations and ways of thinking that I will react to with a strong feeling of irritation or frustration, and that will eventually erode the health of a relationship for sure. It's probably partially my own problem to deal with within myself, I suppose.