My concern here is that I think engaging with the public creates certain obligations/responsibilities that many academics aren't willing to accept. In particular, a responsibility to give an accurate perception of at least what you believe your expertise supports on topics you engage in or near and that includes a responsibility not to selectively omit views on subjects you address. If you are willing to accept that responsibility, that's wonderful but I think people should consider it before jumping in.
In particular, I'd argue that once one starts engaging in public commentary you have a duty not to do so in a selective way that helps create misunderstandings. For instance, go back to the pandemic if you were a health expert blogging about risks who had mentioned the risks from participating in earlier protests I think that created a duty on your part to speak up and say that BLM protests were also a health risk. It would be wrong to -- as many public health officials did -- suddenly go 'shit if I say something about this people might think I support the wrong team' and shut up.
The less direct the connection this weaker this argument but I think it particularly relates to philosophy blogging in a number of ways. For instance, I think you can reasonably make it clear you aren't going to ever talk about philosophy which relates to anything about race, gender etc etc but if you publicly discuss related issues it creates a responsibility not to selectively avoid the places your view might be controversial (see below). It erodes trust in academia generally and in aggregate makes you part of a misinformation/compliance machine. After all, there will always be some people who believe even crazy things and if you let them be the only expert voices heard I think you end up kinda intellectually laundering the accepted view rather than challenging it when wrong.
I think you generally do a decent job with this but I think it's important to be upfront about this because I think academics got themselves into trouble because they didn't think about that duty before they started blogging and when it came up they realized they weren't willing to take that risk so ended up undermining public trust.
--
For example, on Facebook I remember a discussion on a philosopher's page where someone essentially used the argument that since race was socially constructed one could exclude the possibility of robust differences in average intelligence by race. Now I think we have empirical evidence suggesting any such differences will be small and aren't the cause of differential outcomes (racism is empirically unjustified) but that's still obviously a bad argument yet suddenly all the philosophers who had been discussing things declined to comment and I don't think that's ok.
I'm generally wary of positing obligations that incentivize doing nothing over imperfectly doing at least *some* good. I agree that exacerbating misunderstandings is bad; but I think it would be unusual for the total effect of one's public philosophizing to be net-negative to public understanding, in expectation. So, while I'd certainly *encourage* folks to be braver about correcting popular as well as unpopular misunderstandings, I don't know that I'd go so far as to say that it would be better for them to remain silent than to only engage selectively. But maybe it depends on the details. (I agree that public health officials did a lot of damage in their selective criticism of public protests during covid. And I also think that just robustly steering clear of social justice issues is a very reasonable strategy for most academics, in light of the overwhelming social conformity pressures.)
I figured I’d already written enough so I didn’t get into this. However, I agree that ultimately what matters is the net effect of getting involved and whether this will make things better or worse but it’s also a place where it’s easy to be biased into not taking the harms seriously enough.
I guess I’m making a judgement here about which seems like the greater risk of harm at the moment and how voicing my concern is likely to influence people and I think the problem of selective silence is pretty bad currently*. And while it’s good if academics do better outreach and communication we did seem to do fine for quite awhile without much of it while I fear that distrust of expertise could be truly disastrous.
—
*: For instance, I fear it has helped create a perception on the left that SCOTUS is acting totally illegitimately rather than just acting in ways that aren’t that far outside of historical norms (if in different directions) which they, and often I, might strongly disagree with. I’m skeptical that greater understanding of the law that might be gained by said outreach can outweigh the big risks this creates to the stability of our government.
Great post -- and thanks for the generous call-out! I agree with basically everything. Some complementary thoughts on why blogging is a good form of philosophical cognition here:
Hi Richard. I've been tossing around the idea of creating videos for every paper I publish. The videos would be short-ish presentations of the core ideas of the paper published to YouTube. I tend to think that if this were a norm in the profession, many good things would come about, some of which include: philosophical ideas reaching a wider audience, perusing videos a means of doing light research and exploration (think of the YouTube algorithm suggesting people's work), getting feedback, engaging with others, making one's technical ideas easier to digest, potentially making it easier for others to teach these papers... There are more potential benefits, I'm sure, and probably some downsides, but the point is that I think we can realize the spirit of your "supplementary idea" in more than blog writing (not to undermine blog writing at all).
Yes, absolutely! I've been meaning to do something similar. Loom (www.loom.com) is really convenient software for desktop streaming; could be perfect for that sort of thing.
Almost completely agree! Though rewarding blogging professionally would probably remove the factors you point to for why people who blog are more likely to be good academics:(
Daily Nous yesterday began a post ( https://dailynous.com/2024/09/17/bjps-introduces-letters-to-the-editor/ ) by asking "Has this ever happened to you? You read a philosophy paper, have one brief, specific point to make in response, realize that in order to make that point in print you have to write a whole full-sized article, and then wait for it to be refereed and accepted—and then you decide not to bother?" This was supposed to be introducing BJPS's letters to the editor, but before it even got there I was like, "this is why we blog!"
One unfortunate thing is that it seems the pressures to write are precisely the opposite of what they should be. Writing about interesting and controversial subjects might be bad for your career--I'd certainly be worried, when applying to grad school, if people found my blog and all the outrageous things I've written. As a result, philosophers are encouraged not to start blogs, and if they do, to not write about anything too controversial.
I know you address this in the footnotes, but I'd like to see a shift away from career advancement and prestige centering so much on publishing in journals and it instead involving a more diffuse and holistic approach to evaluating someone's contributions. Blogging can take a lot of work, and that work should be recognized and rewarded.
Blogging isn't the only way to engage with other academics or the public, either. Kane B has an excellent YouTube channel on philosophy, and some people even discuss philosophy on TikTok.
I am puzzled as to why this is so rare, though. Why are so few philosophers blogging, creating videos, or debating online? Sure: it's not incentivized, but...well, so what? There are lots of passionate and motivated philosophers who I would've thought would enjoy blogging, streaming, etc. even without incentives.
I would guess because of what you noted above: that it takes an enormous amount of work and time when many academics are struggling with increasingly diminished time resources. And also, because it takes a certain amount of courage and confidence to put yourself out there and commit to producing work outside the familiar structures, which could be read and judged by anyone.
"I'd like to see a shift away from career advancement and prestige centering so much on publishing in journals and it instead involving a more diffuse and holistic approach to evaluating someone's contributions."
At least in moral/political philosophy, I worry a wholistic evaluation system would devolve into each ideological camp just hiring their own people. That's already occurring to some degree, but it would become much worse. Maybe OP talked about this in footnotes but didn't read.
I'm just a beginning philosopher but a couple of quick thoughts on this:
> Most papers contain a lot of bloat; converting the central idea into a blog post of 1/10th the length creates something that is much more worth reading.
This seems like a problem on the academic side. Does an academic have 10x the tasty content? Or is the rest just boilerplate.
I've been blogging a little about some newbie philosophy ideas and I usually blog in a fun style. The one time I tried to use an academic style instead, the essay became longer and boring.
What do academic essays and papers gain from being so stodgy? Who benefits?
The problem is that the peer review process effectively forces a kind of defensive writing style, to placate bad referees (who seem to believe that a paper should be rejected whenever they can imagine a possible objection to it; this incentivizes authors to try to pre-empt all the possible objections they can think of, carefully distance themselves from every possible misinterpretation, etc.).
David Reinstein is doing some interesting stuff with Unjournal, mostly in economics -- "journal indepedent evaluation of impactful research" https://www.unjournal.org/about
Some of the extra material is recapitulating the last several moves in the dialectic to show where your work fits. Some of it is addressing objections that some fraction of readers will consider, which is very helpful for the people who do consider those, and often helpful for others too. Some is giving further examples and applications of the idea. A lot is duplicative between papers. Some is helpful to see the author’s idiosyncratic views of the field. Some papers really feel like they are just padded out. It’s a mix.
I very much appreciate the effort and message here, but sadly I suspect you may be shouting down a well. One of the biggest reasons I left academia was that the overwhelming cultural bias is against truly public discourse. Most academics would intellectually agree with your opening statement that "The core job of an academic is to produce and disseminate knowledge," but there's very little natural inclination to follow through on the "disseminate" part of this. In my time in the academy I repeatedly encountered pathological anxiety against sharing work with the public, such as by streaming conference presentations. Defenses included claims that the work would be "misunderstood" by the public if it was widely distributed. Frankly, I think a lot of academics are producing useless drivel to check boxes in the journal system, rather than being driven by actual intellectual passion, and they're painfully aware of it. Which ultimately is how we end up with philosophy specifically being overwhelmingly represented by guys in the tech industry whose main skill is dressing up far-right fascism with fancy words. Keep fighting the good fight, but what's needed is a vast cultural turn - and as you point out, the lack of structural incentives makes that nearly impossible.
I'm not sure what you have in mind when you refer to "philosophy specifically being overwhelmingly represented by guys in the tech industry whose main skill is dressing up far-right fascism with fancy words"? That doesn't match my impression of public philosophy at all.
Maybe I'm too morbidly fixated on my own topic of study, but the ascendancy of Peter Thiel-funded silicon valley right-wingers (on platforms including Substack) is very much public philosophy for way, way too many people. Obviously the actual professionals with a commitment to public work (shout out Brian Leiter) are not what I'm referring too, but the "rationalist" rightoids are taking up a lot of space left by those professionals who aren't contributing to the public sphere.
I only discovered this beautiful blog today, but I am glad I did because I have already read a couple of really interesting and insightful articles like this one. I am a fan of philosophy and rational thinking and I love to discuss ideas. Now I will look for more of these engaging articles! My sincere thanks to the author! https://spiritualseek.online/
very interesting idea, I'm thinking to create a blog after few years creating YouTube channel for my seminars and talks. It consume more and maybe seduce to go after algorithms attraction: increasing likes in sake of visibility.
Going to unashamedly promote my philosophy substack here - https://laurenlevine.substack.com/ Written in precisely the spirit of this post (55 posts and counting!) Please check out!
I'm so against the background of "public philosophy". It just sounds so disconnected from philosophy. There's no philosopher that was not "public", if you have ideas then your ideas are "public". There's absolutely no exception to that. Besides that, you have explicit condemnations to philosophy being private and even ivory tower-reduced. There's never going to be philosophical ideas that are purely academic. It's just not possible. Those are something entirely different as in they serve some other cataloging goal or something. A philosophical idea is universal. It applies to a lot if not everything and you would know it does.
That and maybe I'm wrong but I have not seen "public philosophy" add anything to any discussion. You have zizek, you have chomsky as in these people engage with people. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground.
Yes, this is a good idea, but more primarily, I'd say that Philosophers need to get trained in things like Public Policy, Law, Journalism etc. and enter the material public life, where they can put what they learn to practice...
My concern here is that I think engaging with the public creates certain obligations/responsibilities that many academics aren't willing to accept. In particular, a responsibility to give an accurate perception of at least what you believe your expertise supports on topics you engage in or near and that includes a responsibility not to selectively omit views on subjects you address. If you are willing to accept that responsibility, that's wonderful but I think people should consider it before jumping in.
In particular, I'd argue that once one starts engaging in public commentary you have a duty not to do so in a selective way that helps create misunderstandings. For instance, go back to the pandemic if you were a health expert blogging about risks who had mentioned the risks from participating in earlier protests I think that created a duty on your part to speak up and say that BLM protests were also a health risk. It would be wrong to -- as many public health officials did -- suddenly go 'shit if I say something about this people might think I support the wrong team' and shut up.
The less direct the connection this weaker this argument but I think it particularly relates to philosophy blogging in a number of ways. For instance, I think you can reasonably make it clear you aren't going to ever talk about philosophy which relates to anything about race, gender etc etc but if you publicly discuss related issues it creates a responsibility not to selectively avoid the places your view might be controversial (see below). It erodes trust in academia generally and in aggregate makes you part of a misinformation/compliance machine. After all, there will always be some people who believe even crazy things and if you let them be the only expert voices heard I think you end up kinda intellectually laundering the accepted view rather than challenging it when wrong.
I think you generally do a decent job with this but I think it's important to be upfront about this because I think academics got themselves into trouble because they didn't think about that duty before they started blogging and when it came up they realized they weren't willing to take that risk so ended up undermining public trust.
--
For example, on Facebook I remember a discussion on a philosopher's page where someone essentially used the argument that since race was socially constructed one could exclude the possibility of robust differences in average intelligence by race. Now I think we have empirical evidence suggesting any such differences will be small and aren't the cause of differential outcomes (racism is empirically unjustified) but that's still obviously a bad argument yet suddenly all the philosophers who had been discussing things declined to comment and I don't think that's ok.
I'm generally wary of positing obligations that incentivize doing nothing over imperfectly doing at least *some* good. I agree that exacerbating misunderstandings is bad; but I think it would be unusual for the total effect of one's public philosophizing to be net-negative to public understanding, in expectation. So, while I'd certainly *encourage* folks to be braver about correcting popular as well as unpopular misunderstandings, I don't know that I'd go so far as to say that it would be better for them to remain silent than to only engage selectively. But maybe it depends on the details. (I agree that public health officials did a lot of damage in their selective criticism of public protests during covid. And I also think that just robustly steering clear of social justice issues is a very reasonable strategy for most academics, in light of the overwhelming social conformity pressures.)
I figured I’d already written enough so I didn’t get into this. However, I agree that ultimately what matters is the net effect of getting involved and whether this will make things better or worse but it’s also a place where it’s easy to be biased into not taking the harms seriously enough.
I guess I’m making a judgement here about which seems like the greater risk of harm at the moment and how voicing my concern is likely to influence people and I think the problem of selective silence is pretty bad currently*. And while it’s good if academics do better outreach and communication we did seem to do fine for quite awhile without much of it while I fear that distrust of expertise could be truly disastrous.
—
*: For instance, I fear it has helped create a perception on the left that SCOTUS is acting totally illegitimately rather than just acting in ways that aren’t that far outside of historical norms (if in different directions) which they, and often I, might strongly disagree with. I’m skeptical that greater understanding of the law that might be gained by said outreach can outweigh the big risks this creates to the stability of our government.
The perils of audience capture!
What about Chomsky or zizek? I'm not sure what the expectations are?
(Also you can't assume that because some elements in a category are biological that the category itself must be biological. That's a category error)
Great post -- and thanks for the generous call-out! I agree with basically everything. Some complementary thoughts on why blogging is a good form of philosophical cognition here:
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2015/04/blogging-and-philosophical-cognition.html
Hi Richard. I've been tossing around the idea of creating videos for every paper I publish. The videos would be short-ish presentations of the core ideas of the paper published to YouTube. I tend to think that if this were a norm in the profession, many good things would come about, some of which include: philosophical ideas reaching a wider audience, perusing videos a means of doing light research and exploration (think of the YouTube algorithm suggesting people's work), getting feedback, engaging with others, making one's technical ideas easier to digest, potentially making it easier for others to teach these papers... There are more potential benefits, I'm sure, and probably some downsides, but the point is that I think we can realize the spirit of your "supplementary idea" in more than blog writing (not to undermine blog writing at all).
Yes, absolutely! I've been meaning to do something similar. Loom (www.loom.com) is really convenient software for desktop streaming; could be perfect for that sort of thing.
Almost completely agree! Though rewarding blogging professionally would probably remove the factors you point to for why people who blog are more likely to be good academics:(
See the final footnote!
Whoops, I'm too lazy to read😅
I totally agree. My blog posts have been read so much more than my academic papers.
Daily Nous yesterday began a post ( https://dailynous.com/2024/09/17/bjps-introduces-letters-to-the-editor/ ) by asking "Has this ever happened to you? You read a philosophy paper, have one brief, specific point to make in response, realize that in order to make that point in print you have to write a whole full-sized article, and then wait for it to be refereed and accepted—and then you decide not to bother?" This was supposed to be introducing BJPS's letters to the editor, but before it even got there I was like, "this is why we blog!"
(You already know my blog, but for those who don't: https://loveofallwisdom.substack.com/ )
One unfortunate thing is that it seems the pressures to write are precisely the opposite of what they should be. Writing about interesting and controversial subjects might be bad for your career--I'd certainly be worried, when applying to grad school, if people found my blog and all the outrageous things I've written. As a result, philosophers are encouraged not to start blogs, and if they do, to not write about anything too controversial.
I know you address this in the footnotes, but I'd like to see a shift away from career advancement and prestige centering so much on publishing in journals and it instead involving a more diffuse and holistic approach to evaluating someone's contributions. Blogging can take a lot of work, and that work should be recognized and rewarded.
Blogging isn't the only way to engage with other academics or the public, either. Kane B has an excellent YouTube channel on philosophy, and some people even discuss philosophy on TikTok.
I am puzzled as to why this is so rare, though. Why are so few philosophers blogging, creating videos, or debating online? Sure: it's not incentivized, but...well, so what? There are lots of passionate and motivated philosophers who I would've thought would enjoy blogging, streaming, etc. even without incentives.
I would guess because of what you noted above: that it takes an enormous amount of work and time when many academics are struggling with increasingly diminished time resources. And also, because it takes a certain amount of courage and confidence to put yourself out there and commit to producing work outside the familiar structures, which could be read and judged by anyone.
"I'd like to see a shift away from career advancement and prestige centering so much on publishing in journals and it instead involving a more diffuse and holistic approach to evaluating someone's contributions."
At least in moral/political philosophy, I worry a wholistic evaluation system would devolve into each ideological camp just hiring their own people. That's already occurring to some degree, but it would become much worse. Maybe OP talked about this in footnotes but didn't read.
There are risks but that doesn't mean we should stick with the current system, which is terrible.
I'm just a beginning philosopher but a couple of quick thoughts on this:
> Most papers contain a lot of bloat; converting the central idea into a blog post of 1/10th the length creates something that is much more worth reading.
This seems like a problem on the academic side. Does an academic have 10x the tasty content? Or is the rest just boilerplate.
I've been blogging a little about some newbie philosophy ideas and I usually blog in a fun style. The one time I tried to use an academic style instead, the essay became longer and boring.
What do academic essays and papers gain from being so stodgy? Who benefits?
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/the-black-and-white-room
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/the-greatest-happiness
The problem is that the peer review process effectively forces a kind of defensive writing style, to placate bad referees (who seem to believe that a paper should be rejected whenever they can imagine a possible objection to it; this incentivizes authors to try to pre-empt all the possible objections they can think of, carefully distance themselves from every possible misinterpretation, etc.).
See also:
* https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/evaluating-philosophy
* https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/contestable-vs-question-begging-arguments
David Reinstein is doing some interesting stuff with Unjournal, mostly in economics -- "journal indepedent evaluation of impactful research" https://www.unjournal.org/about
Some of the extra material is recapitulating the last several moves in the dialectic to show where your work fits. Some of it is addressing objections that some fraction of readers will consider, which is very helpful for the people who do consider those, and often helpful for others too. Some is giving further examples and applications of the idea. A lot is duplicative between papers. Some is helpful to see the author’s idiosyncratic views of the field. Some papers really feel like they are just padded out. It’s a mix.
I very much appreciate the effort and message here, but sadly I suspect you may be shouting down a well. One of the biggest reasons I left academia was that the overwhelming cultural bias is against truly public discourse. Most academics would intellectually agree with your opening statement that "The core job of an academic is to produce and disseminate knowledge," but there's very little natural inclination to follow through on the "disseminate" part of this. In my time in the academy I repeatedly encountered pathological anxiety against sharing work with the public, such as by streaming conference presentations. Defenses included claims that the work would be "misunderstood" by the public if it was widely distributed. Frankly, I think a lot of academics are producing useless drivel to check boxes in the journal system, rather than being driven by actual intellectual passion, and they're painfully aware of it. Which ultimately is how we end up with philosophy specifically being overwhelmingly represented by guys in the tech industry whose main skill is dressing up far-right fascism with fancy words. Keep fighting the good fight, but what's needed is a vast cultural turn - and as you point out, the lack of structural incentives makes that nearly impossible.
I'm not sure what you have in mind when you refer to "philosophy specifically being overwhelmingly represented by guys in the tech industry whose main skill is dressing up far-right fascism with fancy words"? That doesn't match my impression of public philosophy at all.
Maybe I'm too morbidly fixated on my own topic of study, but the ascendancy of Peter Thiel-funded silicon valley right-wingers (on platforms including Substack) is very much public philosophy for way, way too many people. Obviously the actual professionals with a commitment to public work (shout out Brian Leiter) are not what I'm referring too, but the "rationalist" rightoids are taking up a lot of space left by those professionals who aren't contributing to the public sphere.
I only discovered this beautiful blog today, but I am glad I did because I have already read a couple of really interesting and insightful articles like this one. I am a fan of philosophy and rational thinking and I love to discuss ideas. Now I will look for more of these engaging articles! My sincere thanks to the author! https://spiritualseek.online/
very interesting idea, I'm thinking to create a blog after few years creating YouTube channel for my seminars and talks. It consume more and maybe seduce to go after algorithms attraction: increasing likes in sake of visibility.
Going to unashamedly promote my philosophy substack here - https://laurenlevine.substack.com/ Written in precisely the spirit of this post (55 posts and counting!) Please check out!
I'm so against the background of "public philosophy". It just sounds so disconnected from philosophy. There's no philosopher that was not "public", if you have ideas then your ideas are "public". There's absolutely no exception to that. Besides that, you have explicit condemnations to philosophy being private and even ivory tower-reduced. There's never going to be philosophical ideas that are purely academic. It's just not possible. Those are something entirely different as in they serve some other cataloging goal or something. A philosophical idea is universal. It applies to a lot if not everything and you would know it does.
That and maybe I'm wrong but I have not seen "public philosophy" add anything to any discussion. You have zizek, you have chomsky as in these people engage with people. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground.
Yes, this is a good idea, but more primarily, I'd say that Philosophers need to get trained in things like Public Policy, Law, Journalism etc. and enter the material public life, where they can put what they learn to practice...
Socrates would *not* do it. He didn't write *anything* that we're aware of.
Plato totally would though.