In academia, it's very common to think that you could have done more: work more efficiently, work better.
This perpetual guilt plagues all of us, particularly those of us on the job market, but even people with tenured positions (which Covid-19 has also made less secure).
Closely related to this idea that you could always have done more is the notion that you should optimize the time you manage to carve out for research. Job market consultants advise grad students and others on the job market not to waste their time doing such things as writing book reviews and other things with low CV value. You should be writing single-authored papers for top generalist philosophy journals!
To this, I want to offer a bit of pushback. A bit of inefficiency and wastefulness is good. The idea that we should be hyper-efficient and streamlined is revealing itself as a failure on the level of society. In this article in Aeon, Barry Schwartz explains why efficiency is a dangerous idea:
Why hadn’t we stockpiled key supplies and machines, built up hospital capacity, or ensured the robustness of our supply chains? The reason, of course, is that it would have been seen as inefficient and profit-robbing. Money spent on masks and gowns gathering dust in a warehouse could always be put to more ‘productive’ use in the marketplace. Likewise, employing more people than needed under ‘ordinary’ circumstances, or making products yourself rather than relying on international supply chains, would have been seen as inefficient. One lesson, then, is that to be better prepared next time, we need to learn to live less ‘efficiently’ in the here and now.
However, if you look at biological organisms and their components, which have been under the whittling effect of natural selection, you see a very different picture than just-in-time and hyper-efficiency so prized in society. You see redundancy, inefficiency, such as T-cells standing on guard doing basically nothing, should they encounter the disease the body conquered before again.
You see wastefulness in many other areas too. Ants, the paragon of industriousness? Turns out up to 40% just sit around doing nothing. But those inactive ants are a vital reserve force for the colony, springing into action when the population dwindles, for example. This increases the robustness of the colony, its ability to deal with population fluctuations which would be impossible if every ant were optimally working its hardest.
The reason that some inefficiency is good is twofold: it builds in robustness and it allows for serendipity. Hyper-streamlined systems are more vulnerable to a component that might break down. A system with some redundancy, by contrast, is more robust against shocks. Serendipity are the Bob Rossian "happy little accidents that might happen". You need to have some things in place so the luck can play out.
Note here, for instance, the story by Kevin Zollman on how he got to co-author a popular trade book on parenting and game theory. The book's long history starts when Zollman was asked to write a column for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a kind of "Dear Prudence", but with Game Theory.
As he explains:
It would have been easy for me to say no. I was still pre-tenure. This wouldn’t go on my CV, it wasn’t paid, and it wasn’t particularly high profile. The Post-Gazette is a nice paper, but it’s not going to get national attention. Beyond all this, I could have passed it off as something for someone else with more stature. I wasn’t even the most senior game theorist in the philosophy department at CMU, much less at the university or in the city of Pittsburgh. If I wanted to say “no,” I had plenty of excuses. On the other hand, I wanted to connect with people outside of academia. This wasn’t the way I initially imagined doing it, but it was an opportunity. I decided I wasn’t too afraid of my colleague’s potential criticism. This seemed like fun. So I said “yes.”
Long story short, the column led to the book. And, as Zollman demonstrates, "My story shows that small things lead to bigger ones."
I concur with Zollman's judgment that saying yes to things or taking time to do things that may seem a waste of time (and might well turn out to be), is important. Not everything you do like this, because you are interested, because you are intrigued, because you just want to do it, will give such big dividends. Most of them won't. But some will. Hence, even taking the time to write this blogpost is a good idea. It might seed some ideas further on, someone might read it and get a good idea. Who knows?
A Cocoon reader recently asked the following
This might be a silly question but here goes. What would you think of a philosopher publishing fiction in addition to publishing philosophy? If their work has philosophical themes – if a character was a philosophy professor, or if characters explicitly discussed philosophers' work – would you think that was evidence of un-seriousness or lack of dedication to really doing philosophy? Would you assume the work was autobiographical? Would peers or mentors or hiring committees care? I studied creative writing in college and have been working on fiction projects in my spare time on and off since then and there's one I want to publish. But if there's even a little chance it would hurt my prospects in philosophy, forget it…
There's always a risk that committee members would think less of you for doing something you love that is philosophy-related.
But I think that the consideration how one is perceived as a job candidate is not the only consideration in wondering whether, all things considered, writing some fiction is a good idea when you're on the job market.
The other consideration is: what is the value for you of this practice? If you enjoy creative writing, and if you value it, you should definitely go for it!
Creative writing is a form of wastefulness that, I think, demonstrates the principles of robustness and serendipity particularly well.
First, robustness: through creative writing, you will also learn to be an overall better writer. Philosophers often write very difficult prose, strewn with jargon, dealing with the highly abstract. Can you get an audience to follow your story, just because they want to know what happened? Can you write in a way that it isn't a chore to follow your writing? Creative teaching can teach you ways how to. I currently teach creative writing to grad students, and they tell me how writing this way is a very useful exercise for them. In this way, you become a better writer, and thus also a better job candidate.
Second, creative writing generates serendipity. I am co-editor of a forthcoming book of philosophical SF stories (with Eric Schwitzgebel and Johan De Smedt), and without my interest in creative writing and actually doing it, I would not have ended up with this volume. The cover is also drawn by me, and without my interest in visual art and my hobby of drawing, that picture would not be there.
A lot of the inefficiency we might build into our lives never comes to anything. This was the case the several years I was on the job market, and it's the case now. But some of it does.
You will note how I have focused on the instrumental value of some inefficiency.
Maybe even doing that buys into this notion of hyper-efficiency, namely, what I am saying could be construed as: to be really efficient, you need to put in place some multiple paths which may seem inefficient in the moment. We might need a different conversation to discuss doing things for their intrinsic own good. Trying to free ourselves from the notion that we are productivity-machines. This is a good conversation to have and I'm interested in having too.
But the point is, even if you focus just on what we can do as philosophers, within the context of a capitalist productivity-focused environment, it is good to go out on a limb sometimes, it's good to pursue things just for their own sake, even if many will come to nought.
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