I have a tangential comment that doesn’t really fit into either subthread, but I still think is worth making. Namely, you say:
One of the things I loved about studying liberal arts is that you actually got to know your professors. They would discuss their personal experiences in a topic (“Here’s what I did during the feminist movement..”), you might get slide shows from their vacation in the country of study, or even invited to their house for a group dinner.
In my experience, these kinds of contacts in your life can be dangerous, because they may provide you with very bad advice that you end up believing with high confidence.
On the one side, you are faced with accomplished, impressive, high-status people who are friendly to you and who don’t seem to have any ulterior motive, so you’ll be inclined to trust and value their advice. On the other side, however, even when people themselves believe they’re giving honest good advice, it takes a very extreme degree of altruism—normally displayed only towards immediate family members and very close friends—to focus on a real no-nonsense perspective and avoid falling into signalling behavior. This may easily lead to a situation where high-status people dispense advice that is by all realistic standards horrid nonsense, while basking in the glow of its great signaling qualities—and honestly believing that they’re doing you a favor by giving it.
The general lesson is that if you have a chance to hang out with high-status people, by all means do so, since it’s enjoyable and has numerous potential benefits—but make sure to take their advice with a grain of salt. They may be honestly friendly to you and fond of you, but you must be aware that it still doesn’t make you a member of that tiny and exclusive inner circle of people with whom real insider knowledge is shared.
I have a tangential comment that doesn’t really fit into either subthread,
There actually is a meta-comment thread going right now that is discussing the issue of professor friendliness. This would have fit great there!
I think you made a bit of a jump there from my statement that I like to know my professors as people, to some sort of assumption that this includes taking their advice in all things, and being part of an “inner circle”. In fact, my OP primarily talks about how professors behave in class towards all their students. (with the exception of the mention a group dinner, but that was not the norm). Mainly if I am asking a professor for advice it would be for resources/books for a project. I don’t know how you get from that to:
these kinds of contacts in your life can be dangerous,
I didn’t say that you committed any mistakes of the sort I was describing. I merely pointed out that this is a common failure mode for those who establish some sort of relationship with higher-status people that goes beyond purely formal professional interaction, but falls short of achieving real insider/intimate status. I used the second-person pronoun only in the generic sense, as a less awkward replacement for third-person sentences using “one.”
I also didn’t say that this needs to involve any special status relative to the rest of the class. The same effect I described above can kick in even if it’s just a professor interacting with the whole class in a way that comes off as friendly and informal.
For all I know, your instincts may be very well calibrated when it comes to situations of this sort, and none of my statements are directed at you in particular. (Except for this disclaimer, obviously.) I am merely pointing out a general pattern in human relations, and one that is relevant in this context because it is often manifested in situations where relations between people become more personal than what the interaction strictly requires, but still fall short of real closeness and mutual recognition of insider status.
Another problem with advice is that even if it’s not just about about signalling, it may be wrong. People’s ability to predict is pretty limited.
Seth Roberts does a very interesting analysis of why professors just try to get students to duplicate what the professor would do, rather than cultivating the student’s particular qualities.
Roberts displays his usual mix of lucidity and senselessness in that post, which would take some effort to disentangle with full accuracy.
Regardless of that, though, there is a more important point here. Namely, professors will typically advise students to duplicate some ostensible aspects of what they have done—the ones that make for a good status-signaling story—not the truly important things that enabled them to succeed under the existing system. The latter sort of information is the truly valuable one, which you can get only with an extraordinary power of insight or (maybe) if you happen to be among the close friends and family of someone who possesses it.
As for bad advice that’s not due to signalling, I think that’s actually rare among smart and accomplished people, and it usually comes in a form that’s easy to see through. When people give advice about something where they have no accomplishment to show, it will look like bullshit to anyone with any intelligence. Even people who give consciously malicious bad advice are usually not very hard to detect.
I think some examples of the kinds of advice you’re talking about would help your comments. I don’t have a solid sense of the advice you’re thinking of. They don’t have to have real examples.
Look at it this way: a professor is, by definition, someone who has managed to achieve a specific high-status position under the present bureaucratic system for awarding academic titles and selecting people for academic jobs. If someone like that gives you career advice, there are many ways how it may end up being awful signaling nonsense despite the good intentions of the advice-giver. For example:
Education in your area may well be a zero-sum signaling game, which however nobody engaged in it will admit. The professor will speak with the implicit assumption that by pursuing the same path as him, you’re enhancing your real market value—whereas in reality, you’re wasting time and effort on signaling in ways that were effective back in his generation, but have been superseded by more advanced developments in signaling since then.
The professor’s advice will not at all reflect the real way he managed to fight his way through the system. He’ll give you an idealized version that sounds like the road to success means obeying all the official respectable norms and satisfying all officially advertised standards by the letter. Yet, of course, the real story would be very different.
(groans) Look, I agree that it worked well the firsttwo times, but I would rather that “Zack M. Davis provides an artistic rendering of Vladimir M.’s comment” not become a running joke; these things have a tendency to become old and not-funny very quickly.
(That having been said, I expect a dollar at the Berkeley meetup on the twenty-first.)
I have a tangential comment that doesn’t really fit into either subthread, but I still think is worth making. Namely, you say:
In my experience, these kinds of contacts in your life can be dangerous, because they may provide you with very bad advice that you end up believing with high confidence.
On the one side, you are faced with accomplished, impressive, high-status people who are friendly to you and who don’t seem to have any ulterior motive, so you’ll be inclined to trust and value their advice. On the other side, however, even when people themselves believe they’re giving honest good advice, it takes a very extreme degree of altruism—normally displayed only towards immediate family members and very close friends—to focus on a real no-nonsense perspective and avoid falling into signalling behavior. This may easily lead to a situation where high-status people dispense advice that is by all realistic standards horrid nonsense, while basking in the glow of its great signaling qualities—and honestly believing that they’re doing you a favor by giving it.
The general lesson is that if you have a chance to hang out with high-status people, by all means do so, since it’s enjoyable and has numerous potential benefits—but make sure to take their advice with a grain of salt. They may be honestly friendly to you and fond of you, but you must be aware that it still doesn’t make you a member of that tiny and exclusive inner circle of people with whom real insider knowledge is shared.
There actually is a meta-comment thread going right now that is discussing the issue of professor friendliness. This would have fit great there!
I think you made a bit of a jump there from my statement that I like to know my professors as people, to some sort of assumption that this includes taking their advice in all things, and being part of an “inner circle”. In fact, my OP primarily talks about how professors behave in class towards all their students. (with the exception of the mention a group dinner, but that was not the norm). Mainly if I am asking a professor for advice it would be for resources/books for a project. I don’t know how you get from that to:
I didn’t say that you committed any mistakes of the sort I was describing. I merely pointed out that this is a common failure mode for those who establish some sort of relationship with higher-status people that goes beyond purely formal professional interaction, but falls short of achieving real insider/intimate status. I used the second-person pronoun only in the generic sense, as a less awkward replacement for third-person sentences using “one.”
I also didn’t say that this needs to involve any special status relative to the rest of the class. The same effect I described above can kick in even if it’s just a professor interacting with the whole class in a way that comes off as friendly and informal.
For all I know, your instincts may be very well calibrated when it comes to situations of this sort, and none of my statements are directed at you in particular. (Except for this disclaimer, obviously.) I am merely pointing out a general pattern in human relations, and one that is relevant in this context because it is often manifested in situations where relations between people become more personal than what the interaction strictly requires, but still fall short of real closeness and mutual recognition of insider status.
Another problem with advice is that even if it’s not just about about signalling, it may be wrong. People’s ability to predict is pretty limited.
Seth Roberts does a very interesting analysis of why professors just try to get students to duplicate what the professor would do, rather than cultivating the student’s particular qualities.
Roberts displays his usual mix of lucidity and senselessness in that post, which would take some effort to disentangle with full accuracy.
Regardless of that, though, there is a more important point here. Namely, professors will typically advise students to duplicate some ostensible aspects of what they have done—the ones that make for a good status-signaling story—not the truly important things that enabled them to succeed under the existing system. The latter sort of information is the truly valuable one, which you can get only with an extraordinary power of insight or (maybe) if you happen to be among the close friends and family of someone who possesses it.
As for bad advice that’s not due to signalling, I think that’s actually rare among smart and accomplished people, and it usually comes in a form that’s easy to see through. When people give advice about something where they have no accomplishment to show, it will look like bullshit to anyone with any intelligence. Even people who give consciously malicious bad advice are usually not very hard to detect.
I think some examples of the kinds of advice you’re talking about would help your comments. I don’t have a solid sense of the advice you’re thinking of. They don’t have to have real examples.
Look at it this way: a professor is, by definition, someone who has managed to achieve a specific high-status position under the present bureaucratic system for awarding academic titles and selecting people for academic jobs. If someone like that gives you career advice, there are many ways how it may end up being awful signaling nonsense despite the good intentions of the advice-giver. For example:
Education in your area may well be a zero-sum signaling game, which however nobody engaged in it will admit. The professor will speak with the implicit assumption that by pursuing the same path as him, you’re enhancing your real market value—whereas in reality, you’re wasting time and effort on signaling in ways that were effective back in his generation, but have been superseded by more advanced developments in signaling since then.
The professor’s advice will not at all reflect the real way he managed to fight his way through the system. He’ll give you an idealized version that sounds like the road to success means obeying all the official respectable norms and satisfying all officially advertised standards by the letter. Yet, of course, the real story would be very different.
Thank you :)
I would pay $0.99 to hear Zack_M_Davis sing the first sentence in the parent.
(groans) Look, I agree that it worked well the first two times, but I would rather that “Zack M. Davis provides an artistic rendering of Vladimir M.’s comment” not become a running joke; these things have a tendency to become old and not-funny very quickly.
(That having been said, I expect a dollar at the Berkeley meetup on the twenty-first.)
:D