At the CBC in Toronto, Sarah Kapoor, who did a story about the Shangri-La Diet, started what she called “the OJ group” — OJ meaning Ordinary Journalism. Journalism about ordinary life, like The Hunt.
Were formation of the OJ Group a chess move, I would give it two exclamation points. 1. It points out a major problem with standard journalism: Too much of it is about famous and powerful people doing boring things. 2. It gathers support. It is a way of persuading others and learning from them. 3. It criticizes by creating — as Michelangelo advised. My self-experimentation — about everyday concerns such as sleep, mood, and weight — might be called Ordinary Science. It is science about ordinary life using methods of ordinary life.
In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen argued that we care enormously about status display. The upper (leisure) classes display their status by conspicuously avoiding useful work (e.g., long fingernails) and by conspicuous waste (e.g., hood ornaments). Academics display status by avoiding work on useful questions. Such work is dismissed as “applied”, in contrast to “pure” research. The status of scientific work also depends on dimensions that Veblen doesn’t mention: 1. It is higher status to have someone else do something than to do it yourself. 2. Expensive research is higher status than cheap research. Thus my self-experimentation had three strikes against it: low-status topics, low-status participants (I’m not ordering anyone around), and low-status cost (cheap).
In journalism, like everywhere else, there is status by association. Writing about high-status people is higher status than writing about low-status people.
Seth,
I agree with you about the journalism, but maybe not about academic work. Applied work is important but, ultimately, theory has the potential to be longer lasting–a theorem is forever.
Veblen had other academic examples. He said that academics used big words and long sentences for the same reason: To impress others with their status. This was a very amusing claim in a book full of big words and long sentences.
Fascinating. I’d love to see someone write a book about status in academia, the economic motivations behind the existence of academic fields, and the requisite epistemologies and mastery of knowledge that flows out of that.
– Linguist Robin Lakoff says the complexity of academic writing grows from undergrad to grad school and reaches a peak in the Ph.D. dissertation and then gets gradually simpler as people become assistant profs and get tenure…
– I know that much is made of “bringing money into the department” in psychology at Berkeley — it’s a tenure consideration.
– It’s fascinating (and depressing) that distinguished psychologists would dismiss self experimentation because it “can’t be trusted” when it takes most people a few hours to confirm that light-tasting olive oil (or sugar water) dramatically reduces hunger. There are many effects that cannot be so confirmed, but that one can be. It’s almost comic that very smart people would be so wrapped up in their scientific ideology that they cannot see or do this. There is an implicit belief that hypotheses and intuitions are in and of themselves trivial since everyone has lots of them and they may well be wrong; and all that matters is hard scientific data and explanatory theories based on the data. But what if a hypothesis about weight loss that can improve the health of millions of people can be confirmed in the period between breakfast and lunch?
– I’m exasperated by the intellectual narrowness of academics. I was in a social theory group years ago with Berkeley sociology grad students, many of whom now teach social theory. They could discourse grandly in big historical terms about society drawing from Marx, Max Weber, Durkheim, Foucault and other thinkers, but none of them knew basic social psychology, and findings about group behavior, findings about what might influence their concrete behavior in the group. All sociological explanation comes down to psychological processes and they knew very little empirical psychology.
– A famous literary scholar, Elaine Scarry, who holds an endowed chair at Harvard, delivered some prestigious Gifford lectures on beauty that she turned into a small book. They are full of psychological theorizing and speculation that she treats as sacred truth; she claims to reason her way into psychological truth. There is much in empirical psychology that is relevant to her claims, but she is utterly ignorant of it. She could sit in on an intro psych course and find a lot that applies. The book is, from my perspective, embarrassing. It’s as if a Ph.D. in literature is a license to ignore whole fields that are relevant to one’s claims…
Thanks, Tim. You can read more about academic status diplays in Chapter 14 of The Theory of the Leisure Class, which is available full-text on the web.
Does Robin Lakoff agree with Veblen about why academic writing is complicated?
She thinks needlessly complex academic writing is driven by status insecurity, at least in American academia; once you are secure, you don’t need to put on airs as much and seek to intimidate. It’s interesting though; Bob Blauner, who taught in the Berkeley sociology dept for many years and is now retired, said that when he was a grad student, everyone felt in the same boat and spoke freely to other grad students about ideas without much fear. When he became an assistant professor, he said there was a lot of fear in interacting with other assistant professors, as if they were afraid their ideas would be stolen, or afraid the other guy was smarter than they were. Once he got tenure, all that changed a bit. I’m sure there are sub-cultural variations in the departments and fields…
Thanks for the additional details.