gilbertrollins

Alright! Here comes the selective reading train! I was speaking with two upper middle class white women, one of whom is attractive. And I shared a nice little anecdote about a friend of mine feeling uncomfortable about being looked at sexually by a professor. "Sexually intimidated?" Go get me a survey that teases out the difference between women feeling a little icky from someone coming on to them, and "intimidated," and demonstrate that a majority of unwanted come-ons result in "intimidation," and I'll concede that such a dramatic phrasing is the best way to frame a discussion about commonplace sexual undertones in professional (and academic) relationships.

I've had enough of this sexism. I'm leaving. Generally though, I think the same advice for picking schools and SOPs applies to student/faculty relations: get in where you fit in.

Had to look that one up. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=neghit Interesting. Was jussayin it's clear you don't dislike sexual attention, as you admit below (not quite sure how to "neghit" you for intellectual honesty -- I'm sure I'll come up with something). Weird. Your friends truly don't understand graduate school. But if you can make it work for you - do it. Spousal appointments are an attractive option. In fact, CUNY Buffalo is notorious for preferring them. I don't know what else to dig for, though. People hook up in graduate school, sometimes with faculty. Meh.

And I have a lot of sympathy for the way hegemonic, heteronormative, and patriarchical binaries delimit your choices such that you have no choice but to use a profile picture with a lot of makeup and a bitchy Calvin Klein pose. I know that feel! But seriously - if you're main question here is "how much of my Professors getting flirty with me because I'm attractive and intellectuall engaged should I be ok with and put up with?" I don't have a clear cut answer. Personally I enjoy whatever attention I might get from my looks, and would venture you and a lot of women do too. I find it a little incredible to imagine upper middle class attractive white girls in college feeling disempowered to direct and mitigate the amount of sexual under and over tones in their professional interactions, but I might be mistaken. Edit: I was talking to a friend of mine about getting some research experience and suggested a particular professor. She hesitated then said he basically stared down her shirt the entire time he lectured. That unfortunate, and probably made her feel something like the way the old lady at the sub shop makes me feel when she says sexually explicit things to me. But I don't think we live in a world where a critical majority of men feel they have a free pass to eye up whatever woman they want, and women don't. Wait - I totally eye up women all the time. What am I saying? Ok look, until women and men get together for a Town Meeting and decide to completely change the courting game - men are going to be aggressive and women coy. I mean. C'mon. Women who want to talk to a guy at a bar will go and stand near him, or sit next to him, waiting for him to be aggressive. All in maintenance of traditional courting games. Some of that is going to spill over into a professional environment. I think the best way to mitigate the problems it can cause is to be open about it.

Gotta watch what you say -- you'll hurt those feels.

Yet, largely statistically accurate. We're discussing heterosexual relationships. Though we can discuss homosexual relationships, too. If the amount of discourse about heterosexuality clocks in at about 85%, that will be proportional to the amount of heterosexuality in most regions. Disclaimer: I think gay is pretty great. I argued precisely against that point. The gender roles came first. http://www.amazon.com/The-Origins-Sex-History-Revolution/dp/0199892415/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=1QWBS9HK76A7K&coliid=I2YEPLXD4055AA The anthropomorphization into biology came second. http://www.amazon.com/Genial-Gene-Deconstructing-Darwinian-Selfishness/dp/0520265939/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355982335&sr=1-1&keywords=the+genial+gene Is there anyone in the occident who actually believes that full-force anymore? That stereotype seems to increase in strength in inverse proportion to the mean national income of the population observed. We've got some of the most malleable gender roles in the world. Fair enough.

"but physical attractiveness definitely seems to be a major factor in who men want to date." True, but no less so for women. Though gender roles make it such that them openly displaying their sexual desires as physically-derived makes them "sluts" or whatever, so there are Herculean efforts to deny that women get excited about good looking men, or that even if they do, they have some sort of imagined control over that "disgusting, base, and immature" impulse that men don't. "And most men find it perfectly acceptable/preferable to date someone younger than themselves, whereas women tend to do the opposite" True, but becoming less so.

Oh I understand that. I was posing the sardonic rhetorical to the audience you were trying (nobly) to placate. Frankly I got involved in the thread because 1) You've been vociferously downvoted for having an ounce of intellectual curiosity among people known more for their obtuse vocabulary than original thought, and 2) because you have a cute profile picture. Now that's sexist. Come at me, bro.

Women don't prefer attractive and youthful men? Do women that prefer older men prefer them because they look like Grandpa, or because of their ostensible (and often times questionable) existential maturity? To your first statement there: "Sexual currency" imputes some sort of materialistic and economistic corruption onto women's sexuality. In less pretentious terms: it's an allusion to prostitution. I suppose I could write a very long and upset diatribe about why I don't like the usage and think it's uncharitable to both womens' and mens' framing of their relationships, but I won't. Gender scholarship tends on my (very small) reading to thrive on this sort of out-of-control cynicism. And your assertion that the currency is predicated on looks implies that men have basal, one-dimensional sexualities. In less pretentious terms: all men want is a fuck. Again I think that's not just uncharitable, but empirically incorrect. As it happens, a majority of the aggressive male / coy female binaries originated very recently in Victorian England. Yet these of course have been anachronistically painted on the rest of history, have fueled an outrageous public discourse that makes both men and women untrusting of one another, and have even been anthropomorphized into sociobiology. In this view then, "in the beginning" early hominids like the rest of the animal kingdom ran around raping their way to genetic proliferation, a situation which putatively has only made minor improvements over 10,000 years of civilized history, and only really since 1st wave feminism cracked the DiVinci Code in the 1970s.

Why is it sexist to note that people have sex, and often times with people they work with? On balance I don't think that's a problem. Producing and environment where people systematically deny those tendencies and frown on it only serves to limit the transparency that is necessary to adjudicate legitimate conflicts of interest.

I think what everyone's concerned about here is the "young impressionable female advisee or undergraduate meets the older, wiser, and hip-er professor" stereotype. And I think that's narrow, saying very little about the intelligence and agency of young women, and very little about the ethics and motivations of older men. Innocent little girl / dirty old man binaries don't get us very far here. Outside direct conflicts of interest, I do not see the problem with people finding romantic or sexual partners at work, whether in the academy or not.

Why doesn't the AWA signal writing ability?

If you took an intro stats course, you most likely learned "n>30 good" and the difference between mean, median, and mode. I don't know anything about IR, but if that's a close-to-accurate caricature of your quant experience so far, you need to get comfortable writing more math to be able to handle the graduate work. A lot of getting better at math is just getting comfortable with notational things, and honing your algebraic fluency to the point you can concentrate on the more difficult concepts. To that end, I would get an intermediate stats book (preferably something for engineers where it will be more formal). I would also go through some linear algebra and calculus. The only way to get over math phobia is exposure. Better to do it now than when your stipend is riding on it.

I've listed several heterodox or network economists at schools, but addressed the work of sociologists in the department in relation to my interests in the most detail. Does that convey that I understand how the game works, that I'm going to be publishing in soc journals and presenting and soc conferences, even if drawing from, criticizing, and posing alternatives to some work in economics? In some sense ignoring work on technology and growth in economics wouldn't be very scholarly. I have made, I think, clear in my SOP and writing sample that my preference for solving the problems I see, is in theories of networks and organizations, in sociology.

I listed Willer and Lakoff. Willer does some social psych, and Lakoff is a cog linguist (branch of cog psych). Willer lists "moral cognition" or "moral psychology" as one of his leading interests, and such "moral" or "embodied" cognition is something Lakoff, and then Lakoff and Johnson founded. Moreover, Willer is doing economic sociology, and Lakoff is deeply interested in markets. I've had a touch of conversation with Lakoff, who is a fan of my adviser's work, and though I didn't discuss in detail for lack of space, the whole goal of the teaming would be to underline the ethical frames people draw on to navigate the market (a challenge to neoclassical assumptions). So I think the connections are there, even if I didn't nail a project proposal in the SOP. I also talked about Fligstein's theory in relation to my thesis work outlined in the writing sample. So I don't think I gave the impression that fawning across disciplines at an early age can -- that one is confused about one's goals and projects. That concludes my rationalizing my potential mistakes for the evening.

Welp, there goes Berkeley for me! Edit: Wait - I just checked. Willer is listed as an associate professor, meaning tenured, no?

I think you're going to have a hell of a time without an affiliation to some kind of academic institution, whether that's a job in journalism, at a think tank, the research department of an NGO or State bureau, or even a community college in North Florida. There are also distinguished adult continuing-education programs like Graham School at Chicago, and another at Harvard, that won't expect you to go for an academic job. I don't know what you mean by "community engagement," but it seems unlikely that you'll have the time to research a book that's nearly academic in quality and serve soup at the same time.

I don't know. I spoke to Christina Bicchieri, a philosopher at UPenn who models social norms with game theory, about whether she would advise me if I were in the economics department or in a program at Wharton (Penn's business school). She said in that case she couldn't be my primary adviser, but could sit on my committee. I didn't apply to Penn, but I did just send Berkeley Sociology last night and mentioned conversations I have had with George Lakoff, who is in the Linguistics department. I talked about Fligstein and Willer mainly, though. I think it needs to be clear your interests lay mainly in the department you're applying to even if you're interested in ancillary faculty. I could be wrong.

Jacib is an especially incisive student of the fashions and inside-baseball in sociology, and his contributions to the forum are uniformly positive. While I suspect our politics disagree sharply on a few matters, he has engaged thoughtful discussions, where he cites a competent reading of classical and contemporary scholarship. While he seems to share a motivation for social advocacy with many members of the board, he never pretends that motivation is a substitute for reasoned intellectual curiosity and a thorough consideration of counters to his points. That, I think is an example social scientists broadly can benefit from, including in economics. There is no excuse in this discipline or any other for letting ethical outrage discourage an honest evaluation of evidence and argument. Re Goffman, I'd like to point out that his model of actors on a social stage is not altogether different from that in economics -- both posit that people (agents in economics; actors in sociology) behave strategically given the constraints they face (roles in sociology; incentives in economics), in order to advantage favorable outcomes. And both of those frames presuppose a good deal of cynicism about human behavior. That theme is common throughout the behavioral sciences in fact. You see it in psychology too, where a good deal of action is supposed to come from either biological determinants (stripping people of dignified agency), or from the pathological compensation of anxieties and suppression of the ID. Add to that the focus on Power, capital P, in political science, and it starts to look like economics is not nearly the only or chiefly Dismal Science. Reductionistic accounts are the contrarian favorite of social scientists. In this view -- just about any proposition that counters the ethical intuitions of what people would otherwise like to believe about their own motivations receives a rubber stamp, merely for being contrarian and cynical. Re: Bowling Alone, it's not clear that communities have continued to lose straightforward social associations like bowling leagues without substituting other associations in their place. Social Capital, after receiving some initial excitement, has been largely abandoned because of the exceptionally poor job the collection of researchers first attempting it did of defining it and measuring it. See Ben Fine's book on the matter. Whether the progress of modern organizations and the market has degraded social space is an open question -- not a trivial axiom of social analysis. Violent crime per capita rates, for instance, have been on the decline for most of the world's history, and recent data show that the drop observed in the 90s in Urban violence that everyone was so amazed with, has continued. There are of course other measures here, but it is a particularly salient example. I don't lack an appreciation for the study of Social Problems, and in fact aced my social problems course. There is a quote about economics that it has enjoyed the privilege it has because it chooses for its unit of analysis solved political problems -- i.e. social transactions where volunteering agents agree and shake hands. I'm not naive that there are other ways to mitigate social exchange than market trades, but I do think the obsession with social problems in sociology can neglect those problems that people have collectively invented to solve already, generating the impression at times that the sky is falling. My focus thus on the benefits that XYZ institution or social process has brought to society might be read as a careless dismissal of the many problems we have yet to solve. But I don't see why it should be. I'm just extra interested in social coordination, as against social frictions. That we've come as far as we have in society is fascinating to me. Figuring out how to keep a good thing going is I think broadly speaking, the objective of most social scientists.

That was not me. I might get testy when attacked personally, but I don't sockpuppet accounts on webforums to defend myself like some psychopath. If there is a moderator available - do check the IPs for correspondence. There is none, I guarantee.

And for the record - I was interested in deer hunting when I was a kid, but my mom wouldn't let me.

I'm scratching my draft. I'm just going to copy pasta this thread and tack a picture of myself flipping the camera off at the end. See where that lands me.

Alright fine, since I'm hitting diminishing returns, I'll substitute some real work.

Others might. For me, the benefit of the next margin of discovering to what degree sociologists' political priors will influence the reception of my research interests is huge. I suppose I could have just taken the fact that north of 90% of the discipline votes democrat, and stayed away. But I'm interested in understanding the texture of sociology. These debates aren't a bad start. @darthvegan: Palito's discussion with me was largely about methodology, and ostensibly at least, the division between social sciences happens more over methodological approaches than over topics studied and the normative conclusions about them. For instance, about 60% of economists are center left democrats, regardless their professional methods. But if you meant exclusively to provoke my personal/political worldview, then I apologize for misinterpreting you.

Lacking a substantive argument, the grasping at personality straws continues.