Glimpses of other lives.

Last month, I had glimpses of two paths in my life that didn't happen (I prefer to say it that way instead of "paths that I didn't take," since in many ways a lack of family wealth made each path difficult if not impossible to follow, rather than something that I had choice over).

The first was a committee meeting for a board that I was asked to join.

The agenda somehow wasn't much, but it still took almost two hours, even though by the end of it everyone was just cracked out and ready to leave.

That would have been my life, in government!

It made me so happy that I spend my days walking around and talking with people, at my assisted living jobs.

The second was a text from a colleague with whom I'd collaborated on a paper before I chucked it  along with trying for any academic jobs.

He had picked up the research and moved it forward in a slightly different direction, and I'd read drafts and shared my perspective and comments, and he'd gotten a "revise and resubmit" from a major journal.

So, he did that, and the editors seemed fine, and then Reader #2 raised some new points that weren't raised in the first round of feedback but could have been given then and incorporated in the revision, as well as making some quibbles that really weren't true but sounded like they were devastating, alongside their making a flatly inaccurate statement about the paper (that it failed to mention one text, when that text was actually mentioned in a footnote).

And, the editors backed out and turned down the paper, after all of that work.

What a crazy disorganized process and a waste of time!

Academia really is appallingly inefficient.

It's like a friend said who's now a tenure track professor but had done a post doc with a VA hospital research project, that that kind of weirdly timed feedback that causes wasted effort simply wouldn't be tolerated in granted projects in the VA system.

The more you look at it, the more that academia looks like a bunch of disconnected elites who play their little games with each other, with very little sense of mission of education and research.  The big players are insulated by wealth, so they play games that take up time and fill their days with bullshit.

It really does make you wonder why we push public funds to it, when this kind of stuff goes on.