aella’s obtuseness toward academic writing, part II
this writing is so bad that it is inspirational, i.e. my day has actually been improved by reading it:
“I feel a pretty deep (as in, I know the principles of how the math is done and can rotate this in my brain from different angles) intuitive grasp of stuff like correlations, p-values, p-hacking, and standard deviations. I think I understand anova tests, confidence intervals and likelihood ratios, but need more putting-it-into-practice to be sure. I have a poor/light understanding of stuff like factor analysis, regressions and controlling for variables. I mean poor understanding as in, I understand the principles, but not at all the gears of how it’s done, and am unable to rotate the problems in my head. I also have a light understanding of failure modes besides p-hacking, as in occasionally read articles where people explain how stats can fail, but I don’t think I will understand those deeply until I make (or narrowly avoid making) the mistake myself.”
1. uses the “rotate shapes in my head” metaphor twice in one paragraph
1.a. “rotate shapes” comes from the wordcel/shape rotator twitter meme
1.b. the “rotate shapes” meme is based on a misunderstanding of IQ tests, so it is both alienating/exclusionary writing and a metaphor that makes people less informed about what it means to understand something, or even just less informed about IQ tests
2. uses the industry term “failure mode”, which she got from her overwhelmingly tech fanbase, as a smart-sounding metaphor to mean the much more plainly stated “ways to fail”, and is a nerdy way to write in an exclusionary style much like the “rotate shapes” metaphors above
3. confidence intervals are taught in an introductory statistical methods course.¹
3.a. additionally, here is what is taught in part II of a course called “Advanced Quantitative Research in Music Education” at Indiana University @ Bloomington: “(a) extensions of ANOVA (b) discriminant analysis, © regression approaches, (d) factor analysis, (e) path analysis, and (f) structural equation modeling”²
I don’t think graduate students in music education have fulfilled some high bar of prerequisites.
3.b. I was able to figure out what course this is taught in by simply googling “syllabus” + the terms she says she doesn’t know well. it took me less than 30 seconds to find this information.
4. this is a clause from the same article: “When I’m trying to do Srs Research” — on some level she considers herself doing real work, and the article is a defense of that.
5. texascollegesalaries tells us the annual salaries of professors. it is reasonable to assume a math/stats professor will make around $80,000. the author of this article makes a conservative estimate of $100,000 per year and at one point made $100,000 in a month in income from onlyfans. this is more than enough to pay any professor, such as the one at Indiana above, to create you a course taught over zoom. there is no “going rate” for this, but I highly doubt a professor would decline e.g. an extra $10,000 to create a two-semester, off-the-books, one-on-one course in statistics.³
6. the author has been doing this sort of thing for two or three years, possibly more. in insisting to learn this on her own, she is at least 0.5x but perhaps even 0.3x or worse as efficient if she had just consulted someone else to learn by-the-book.
7. this is later in the article, “[…] from my perspective, despite me having similar or better quality population and samples than published academia, people are more critical about my samples, more overconfidently assume my data is useless, and think I’m making way stronger claims than I am, compared to the way I see people talking about academic research. My guess is that because I’m not wearing the metaphorical white lab coat and because I don’t use academic language, people don’t perceive me as carrying authority, and thus don’t trust my research as much.”
I and others have tried to explain to this person, time and time again, that this is not an aesthetic marker, nor does it depend on shibboleths, nor is it about “sounding smart”; they do not understand, and seem determined on not understanding, the importance of citation and methodology.
the “guess” is wrong. it’s because the methodology of this work is weak, and because you could learn most of it in 12 months or less if you truly cared. instead, this person has stomped their feet like Veruca Salt for somewhere between two to four years in defense of not understanding this principle.
it is the IRL-academic version of both the Phoebe Teaching Joey meme and the Patrick Star’s Wallet meme:
*** “now, say it with me”
— “okay”
*** “your research will be evaluated by your methodology”
— “my research will be evaluated by its methodology”
*** “professionals will criticize my work if I don’t know methodology”
— “professionals will criticize my work if I don’t know methodology”
*** “it is wise to enlist the help of an academic in the field so you do not make key mistakes and are less wrong in general”
— “the only purpose of going to college is so academics won’t think I’m stupid and the only reason I’m criticized is because I don’t sound like an academic”
but, per the first line of this post, it has been inspirational to read this.
if writing this bad can get 7,800 subscribers on substack — or at least this is what the website insinuated her number was — then the degree to which I’ve been affected by imposter syndrome is crippling and the extent to which I think I need to wait on something before publishing it is overkill.
