Caveat Lector

You know, the posts I expect to Start Stuff never do. I must be stultifyingly boring when I’ve got my dukes up and am spoiling for a fight. Conversely, when I do seem to Start Something, nine times out of ten it’s not something I especially want to finish.

This is the tenth time. So call it a rampage, and feel free not to read any further.

Yup, I’m tendentious and repetitive, weak of understanding, and all that. The Morlock pleads guilty, your Eloi-ships, but she asks for no clemency.

First, let’s demolish a straw man or two. My picture of academia contains a great many lovely, brilliant people. C. Clifford Flanigan, a man I can’t write about the way I’d like because I all but worshipped him, and my agnostic’s soul doesn’t wield the vocabulary of veneration at all deftly. Andrew Sihler. Allen Renear. AKMA and Naomi. And I’m quite aware that for a few people, academia provides a pleasant, constructive environment to work in. Kindly grant that my portrait of academia is nuanced, however polemical it seems at times.

But I just can’t read stuff like this and not howl. I can’t do it (though I freely admit I’m not clear on Alex’s attitude toward the conversation he recounts). Guard your idea like Smaug the Arkenstone, lest some small burglar make off with it. Don’t share. Don’t get input. Don’t credit anyone else for thinking along the same lines as you if you can possibly avoid it. Thoughts and ideas are secret, individual, so invaluable that they must be locked away. How utterly horrible, in an institution nominally dedicated to knowledge!

Or this, for that matter. We all know the system sucks, but we are complicit in it and you damn well will be too. Mm, yes, free exchange of ideas, pursuit of excellence, and all that fun stuff.

And the drones. Ah, yes, the drones. Yes, they’re everywhere, Jeff and Liz, but we poor shiverers outside the great ivory tower have never to my knowledge pretended otherwise. Can the ivory tower say the same? More to the point, where do drones come from? Who or what creates them, maintains them? What were they before they were drones?

Can I talk about my dad for a minute? Let me talk about my dad. He’s retiring this year after thirty years in academia, some twenty-five in the same place. I honestly can’t remember a single nice thing he’s ever said about his students, his colleagues inside or outside his department, his department, his university, or anything else related to his job. I pass over in silence years of politics, fights, hatred, anguish, that poisoned my childhood as surely as did alcoholism. What a way to spend nearly half his life! (More, if you add in the years of grad school and tooling around in search of a tenure-track position.)

He’s a drone. Has been for years and years; he used to let nine-year-old me giggle at his student essays. Back when I started TAing, he proudly showed me his latest assignment to his Anthro 101 students. It was a thinly-disguised passive-aggressive airing of his departmental grievances, inflicted on bewildered undergraduates who weren’t in any way involved. I didn’t at first realize why I was so appalled; I just was. Then I got angry on behalf of the students, who emphatically deserved better. Then—and more shame to me that it took so long—I got angry on behalf of my father.

I want an explanation. From you Eloi, since I am only a Morlock and obviously incapable of formulating a correct explanation myself. I want an explanation for what happened to him, what he became. For why he defends the institution that warped him, even to savaging his elder daughter. And anyone who dares say my dad must just have been wired to be a drone… look, just don’t even, mmmkay?

And then there’s my mom, an equally typical story. Never got the Ph.D, and it embittered many years of her life. When I dropped out of grad school, during the just-mentioned savaging my dad held her up to me—“you don’t want to be this, do you?”

Y’all Eloi care to justify what happened to my mom? How about my dad’s opinion of her? Is that warranted, from an academic perspective? (I will say nothing of the tortured spousal relationship so revealed—unless you really want me to ask questions about what academia does to its practitioners’ interpersonal relations. Hm. Didn’t think so.)

See, my challenge to the people I am highly disrespectfully calling Eloi is pretty simple. Come up with a narrative, a characterization, of the institution of academia that doesn’t brush aside me, my mother, and my father, much less the complaints you yourselves have voiced publicly and privately. You’ve denied me the stature to do so (yes, Jeff, that is what I felt you doing); so do it yourself.

There are just too many skeletons in the closet to keep ignoring. Liz just got tenure, and yay her for doing it. How many lecturers or adjuncts in your department, Liz? What are they paid? How about TAs? How many tenure-tracks in the last decade or so haven’t made it? What happened to them afterwards? What’s the graduate attrition rate, while I’m at it, and what happens to them?

I don’t ask these questions because I hate you, Liz, or anybody else for that matter. I don’t ask them because I’m jealous, or because I think I’m somehow superior; heaven help me, if I hadn’t gotten kicked out I’d have more than likely become a drone, because I am easily swamped and academia has swamped far stronger, smarter, and better people than I. Not to mention that my dreams are finally within reach now.

And I certainly don’t ask them because I want to dismantle the ivory tower, slab by slab. I ask because from the bottom of my sad dark twisted Morlock soul I want there to be something better. For me. For my dad. For my mom. For the many, many people who have responded to my history with their own terrible anguish. For Liz and AKMA and Jeff and Naomi and Alex and everybody.

Do you Eloi truly believe you live in a Panglossian paradise? Can you? Or is the problem that one must be as blinded as Pangloss to take it for paradise?

Back at work today, but a mite less than fully coherent. Fuzzyheaded, even. I’m sure the solution to the Visual Basic problem I’m having is staring me in the face, but I can’t at the moment get past it, so back to good old mindless data entry for me. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get it.

In the meantime, Bill Simoni tweaked me gently about my frequent IANAP protestations, seeing as how I know that “baz” comes after “foo” and “bar.” Yes, well, talking the talk is one thing, but…

I ought to point out that both Sam Ruby and Joe Gregorio gave Cheetah rave reviews. I downloaded it, and we’ll see how it goes. The new textartisan.com is highly unlikely to be up when I had first hoped—but as the date was initially set by way of tweaking my ex-employer and his non-compete agreement, I am not considering the delay a major problem.

I also want to give a couple of people a virtual wave, longtime CavLec readers who simply never fail to drop me an email when I’m more than usually mean to myself. Neither has a blog (as best I can tell; they may have anony-blogs somewhere), and I won’t use their names unannounced, but I think they’ll know who they are. They’re both remarkably nice people, and I am grateful to them.

Not least because I can’t be all bad if CavLec attracts people like them.

I don’t often do the linky-linky thing, but… what he said. Every prospective grad student ought to have to read this and sign it.

Say nice things and be ignored. Gore people’s oxen, and they may not like you for it, but they sure as heck respond.

Sorry, no oxen gored today. Indeed woke up feeling less than perfectly perky. (See post title.) Could probably have dragged self to work, but have sick time to burn, so why not burn it?

And you people who read computer books when you’re sick are just weird, ’k? There, that’s the best ox-goring I can do today.

Gee, bad mood much, Dorothea?

Sorry, people. No reason for it. Some control somewhere just got stuck on “pissy” today.

On the other hand, I could be getting sick. Everybody else in my office is or has been, and for the last hour my throat has felt sore. I hope that’s not it. No time for that right now.

It doesn’t matter. No excuse for how I’ve been ripping on people. I’m sorry.

Just ’cuz Liz seems to be under the misapprehension that I’m not an equal-opportunity complainer…

One of my coworkers is now under treatment for tendinitis so bad she can barely pick up her new kid. The doctor’s already told her she needs to lay off the keyboard. But our jobs are data entry; what is our boss supposed to do?

I accepted a long while ago that I’d never be able to play tenor recorder again. Causes too much pain. I’ve done what I can to make a typing job hurt less, but some days, you know what? I still hurt.

I just cannot believe it’s not possible to do better than this. How many people has keyboard work crippled, partially (like me) or completely?

I can’t quite manage to see this as a sexism issue, as men are overwhelmingly computer programmers, and computer programmers get repetitive-stress injuries in nearly the numbers secretaries do. I don’t think I’d be stretching too far to tie it to social class and money, however. It won’t matter until some CEO is in too much pain to answer his email.

I’ve been meaning to toss some thoughts at Leigh for a few days now. He asks “When would I use RDF in preference to a non-RDF XML vocabulary?”

As usual, there can’t be a hard-and-fast answer to that. I do see a few glimmerings of ideas, though, and as usual I’ll toss ’em out without worrying much whether they’re any good.

First. If you must end up with something XML-valid, don’t bother with RDF. Just don’t. Yes, you can restrict the RDF/XML you produce to a specific syntax form; you just can’t expect anything you receive to be similarly restricted, because RDF/XML-generating tools can’t be made to give a damn about which form they output of the many possible syntax forms of a given set of RDF/XML statements.

(Is this a problem? Yeah. Will the RDF working group ever admit it is a problem, and privilege one RDF/XML syntax form for XML interchange? Doubt it. The only compromise I can think of is somehow building an RDF/XML editing tool capable of respecting both a graph and a DTD or schema. I don’t know how feasible that is.)

RDF/XML does come as close as anything yet to allowing namespaces to live together in harmony, which I find to be a significant achievement. You can build an intelligible RDF structure out of six different namespaces. Try that with straight XML. So if I wanted to incorporate bits and pieces from here and there, at least in something that’s recognizably data and not document, I would honestly try RDF before rolling my own XML structure. That goes double if any or all of the namespaces I’m stealing from are widely-used in RDF circles already, Dublin Core being an obvious case in point.

RDF/XML may also do better for open-ended structures that need to remain (at least to some extent) backwards-compatible. Building extensibility into a validatable XML structure is tricky. The OEBPSWG ran into serious problems with the package file. Stuffing more—well, stuff— into it meant a stark choice between changing the DTD and making some implementations (not to mention publications!) based on that DTD unusable—breaking backward compatibility, in other words—or working through an incredibly creaky extension system.

Eventually they took the break-backward-compatibility route, and one of the results thereof was XPackage, itself based on RDF/XML. (As best I can tell, by the way, the PSWG is moribund, if not actually dead. Too bad. We did some good work in our day.) XPackage is syntax-constrained, but I tend to believe that over time the constraints would have loosened.

XPackage never enjoyed the full support of the working group, some members of which clung to dumping the problem on somebody else (“modularization”) as the solution. I, in near-total ignorance, backed the RDF-based design, and now that I know much more than I did then, I must say I think I did the right thing. The only other feasible option is allowing package-file readers to ignore whatever they don’t understand, but that implies that the working group would never again develop deal-breaker markup for the package file, which seems unlikely.

Anyhow. RDF is good at playing nice with others and at coping with open-ended information sets. What it isn’t, and what the SemWeb people too often seem to think it is, is magic pixie dust.

Okay, so I have this code in a block of RDF (Shell, kick me if I get this wrong; I’m a wingin’ it):

<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.example.com/spam">
<foo:bar>baz</foo:bar>
</rdf:Description>

Which, translated into English, says “Something that has been identified by the string http://www.example.com/spam has a foo:bar of baz.”

Whoopie. Be still my heart. If I don’t know anything about foo, bar, baz, example.com, or spam, this statement cannot be anything but pure gibberish. It doesn’t matter that I know the relationship between the parts of the sentence. It doesn’t matter that I can draw a pretty graph. That’s where the SemWeb stuff falls down, even if you toss in ontologies (which might tell you, for example, that foo:bar can only have “baz” or “bacon” as values).

Computers only know what you tell ’em. They don’t automagically know foo from bar any more than humans do. Inference only gets you so far. Sure, it might be further than we’ve been yet; I’m inclined to think so, myself. At some point, though, somebody’s got to know what the bits of the vocabularies mean, and all the inferential power in the world won’t get that across.

Did any of that answer your question, Leigh?

A curious set of posts from Alex Halavais (here) and Liz Lawley (here) remind me yet one more time why I must bless fate for steering me out of academia.

I mean, these are two people with their heads on pretty straight. And yet the system has warped them such that they both get a twinge when somebody else comes out with a perfectly good idea, just because they didn’t come out with it first.

Silly me. I thought the ideas were the important stuff, not so much who had them; certainly not who had them first.

This doesn’t happen to the same extent in, say, the LazyWeb. Somebody else wrote the code I wanted to write first? Well, cool, that means I can go write some other code. It’s not a dis on my code-writing ability; it doesn’t take away from me at all. It’d be just plain weird to go into a corner and sulk about it.

I’ve read the stuff on reputation systems in open-source, yeah, and I’ve seen some of the fights over it. I think the analogy only goes so far, though, and the chief difference is that in the ideal case, everyone who contributes to a piece of open-source software gets credited, whereas academia sticks to the thoroughly stupid and bizarre notion that only one person can really have come up with any given idea. (Even multiply-authored papers have a first or primary author!)

Deeply sick and sad system. I’m so glad I’m out of it for good I couldn’t begin to tell you.

I mean, imagine a grant system in which when two similar proposals are received, the grantor calls both authors and says “Hey, you guys are on to something. Why don’t you work together on it?” instead of stamping a big red OK on one and a big red NO on the other. Wouldn’t that just rock?

On the bright side, the end of Alex’s post indicates he’s willing and able to go on searching for the next bright idea, no hurt feelings. Good for him. It’s hard to buck the system.

I watch what’s going on at Fatshadow lately, and I can’t help laughing. Rather bitter laughter, but nonetheless.

I used to be very active on the Usenet newsgroup alt.support.childfree, until the tone became so negative it dragged me down with it. For a while, though, it was a jolly, intelligent, enjoyable group of people.

Until the Raving Yabbutters hit. Yeah, you don’t have to have kids, but I just couldn’t live without mine. Yeah, not having kids is okay, but my kids are the most important thing on earth to me. Yeah, you can make your choice, but I’m so very happy with mine. Yeah, this is a space for people without kids, but you just have to hear what mine did the other day…

The Raving Yabbutters regularly turned a jolly, intelligent, enjoyable group of people into a mob of nasty vicious intolerant madmen. Honestly, it was that bad.

What is it about some people that they can’t seem to cope with “Go be happy about your choice somewhere else, please”? Who instills in them the unstoppable urge to invade in order to proselytize? How do they forget how to accept, even value, difference? Who failed to teach them that you don’t witness for Christ in a synagogue?

Henry? I won’t say this in Tish’s place, but I’ll say it here. You’re a jerk. Go away and meditate on that. Then come back and talk to Tish, since she was kind enough to invite you to—but kindly do not repeat your mistakes on Big Fat Blog and elsewhere.

Update: Grrr, and now I have to read the same crap from Alex Halavais, who ought to know better than to use the word “inherently” in such a context. Strike one, sir; try again.

Another request in email: that I talk a bit more about my attempts at personal transparency. The requester was intrigued, but the notion scared him. (If this email-a-topic thing keeps up, I may never have to think of a blog subject again!)

I don’t know that I can explain what I mean by it better than I already have, here and here. I’m happy to entertain questions, but I don’t know what to add without them.

I can talk about fear, though. That I can do.

Yes, the ramifications of personal transparency can be unpleasant. This has always been so, regardless of how easy or difficult it is to accomplish personal transparency in the first place. Blogs do make it easier, but that is not the same thing as changing the risks. By and large, I think we all know this. It’s what scares us.

Thing is, there are risks to façades also. I daresay most people have more resilient personalities than I do, but it so happens that I do take on aspects of my surroundings—more, that I can be swamped. I only swamp faster if I try to hide (or give in to pressure to hide) aspects of what I feel to be my genuine self.

This doesn’t mean I’m one of those obnoxious people who excuses every fault with “Gee, it’s just me; live with it.” For one thing, I’m reasonably good at acknowledging my own faults as faults. For another, I don’t mind modifying inessentials to get along better with others; my polite and gracious Peruvian coworkers got annoyed with me for not greeting them in the morning (being already absorbed in computer screen), so I apologetically started being scrupulous about doing so.

It does mean that for me, the risks inherent in disguising parts of myself or closing them off altogether so that I can adopt a series of useful façades are generally greater than the risks of not having the façades to fall back on. I’ve tested this a time or two; it does seem to hold.

But it may not hold for you; there’s the rub. If you have a core of personality that you’re true to, and whatever you do in a moment’s expedience doesn’t threaten that core, why open the core for inspection? If you cannot manage without a given façade, you lay yourself open at your peril; that is the point of the hoary Internet-era advice never to write anything you wouldn’t want your boss (mother-in-law, significant other, whatever) reading.

Moreover, the dangers of lacking a façade are typically more immediate and more tangible than the dangers of submerging the self. We’ve all heard about the lost jobs, the ticked-off families, the deluge of angry email. We don’t often read about the loss (much less the recapture) of self; it’s much harder to write about, for one thing, sometimes difficult even to recognize.

In my case, it hasn’t been long that I’ve had a persistent self—which sounds odd but is true. I was swamped by a couple of very forceful personalities until I hit college. I didn’t rid myself of some of the last clinging tendrils until I wiped out of grad school. There may even be a few left, but my sense of myself is that most of that is gone. What emerged from underneath is what I try to present here.

I am stupidly optimistic enough to believe that I can manage, that employers and friends and family will find something valuable about me despite my laying bare a lot of cruft and pique and just plain ugliness on Caveat Lector. That I’m not so worthless or ugly as to cause folks to recoil in horror from me. Thus far, the experiment hasn’t had bad results, though there may be tests ahead I can’t guess at.

I also believe, on firmer ground, that someone so turned off by Caveat Lector as to deny me an opportunity or an interaction probably isn’t someone who will be well-served by interacting with me. Nor would I be the gainer, in the long run; my last job offered significant material benefits but even more significant clashes of personality and ethos, and I fled in less than a year, helpless to do otherwise.

This post feels unutterably tendentious and moralistic. I’m sorry about that. I’m not sure how else to answer the question, though.