The other interesting thing about my work this year is
that all of my various projects correct or build / noticeably improve on the
work of a broad swath of living major scholars, and a huge chunk of the dead
ones.
Like, they identified a big issue but couldn’t solve
it, and I come in and adduce new evidence and my answer is so right and obvious
in retrospect that you have to ask why people didn’t notice it earlier.
What a great way to make friends!
It really makes you realize how scholars have to talk
big about their own projects, but so often they’re shifting little piles of
stuff around in non-threatening ways, or at best they’ve identified something
that’s not been worked on and so it *looks* huge and new and important, but it
really is separate from what everyone else does and so people can praise it to
high heavens but otherwise just go about their business, because when you really get down to it, it doesn’t really change anything that anybody does.
In comparison, something that goes after a misguided
assumption that everyone is working with is truly important, but even if the
reason that they made that assumption is understandable and you present your
work as modestly and unassumingly as possible, you’re still going to threaten
the heck out of some people and they’ll batten down and start to resent you.
Like, one major scholar who does good work and who
runs a research center in a major country is known to be decently nice and to
share time and work, which he did with me when he sent me some of his articles,
but as soon as I noticed something that I was working on that clearly corrected
some stuff he did and I respectfully floated it his way – I mean, he was writing a
legacy-summing book and he was incorporating some of this wrong stuff as a
side-point, and I know that **I** would want that information if I was writing any
book, let alone that type of one! – he immediately got stern and coldly
respectful by email, and my entire sense was that he liked being approached and
consulted as a source of wisdom, but he did not like being challenged in any
substantial way.
(Fine, it's your book, have it be wrong in perpetuity if you want it that way. That's your choice, mister!)
After that, I made sure to adjust my verbiage to thank
him profusely in some article acknowledgement sections, and I also made sure to
**not** send his way any notice at all of an article where I build on his work
and come to an obvious-in-retrospect solution that corrects some proposed readings of his.
What nonsense, to reduce the flow of scholarly
conversation because of adverse personal reactions.
I also recently had to look up an article on the CV of
the one professor who got the job that I applied for after my first major
discovery. Immaculate CV with great previous institutional affiliations and great publication venues
and many many publications, but I’ve never seen anything that they did that
truly made decisive progress. It’s like the multiple rounds of vetting produced
someone predictable and status quo who flatters the stasis of a field but is
unable to push it.
Academia really is just a fundamentally stupid profession... It's like so many times, you can't talk about anything that matters.
