This was such a wonderful read for me because I’m currently working on my dissertation (on a topic that I care desperately about) and have given up the idea that I want to stay in academia, despite having built a pretty decent little CV for myself so far. I gave up my teaching position and am currently working part-time as a waiter in a low-cost-of-living city, which affords me the time to work on my writing and research. My five-year plan is to spend half my time working in the food and beverage industry and half my time working on my writing and research, and I have to say that approaching the latter two activities without the expectation of using them to acquire a professorship has enabled me to really take them seriously (i.e. to engage in them them without compromising the quality of the product for the sake of the hoards of unserious academics in my field), which is one of the most freeing and exciting feelings ever.
So, by some standards, I’m currently nothing more than a severely overeducated waiter, but waiting tables isn’t only a job that pays the bills (and a job that I am loving, by the way), it’s also enabling me to really take my writing and research seriously, which academia never really allowed me to do (especially because I’m in one of the most humanities-y fields of the humanities).
Anyway, my choices have been unconventional and probably not optimal from the point of view of acquiring wealth and caring for my future financial wellbeing (which has been a source of a bit of ambivalence), but these choices have nevertheless felt like the right choices to make, at least for now, and your post articulates why: because I’d rather take my writing and research seriously than compromise them for the sake of using them to acquire extrinsic rewards.
Anyway, thanks for offering this severely overeducated waiter the encouragement he needs to keep taking his values seriously.
First off - I really love this piece, especially this part:
"I played the game pretty well for a long time, and now it’s obvious to me that the reward for playing the game is more game. You just keep unlocking levels forever, and the levels don’t even get more interesting (“Ooh, this one is in space!”). It’s just the same thing over and over until you die. You don’t get out by winning; you get out by stopping."
Sad to hear (from yet another source) that this is what academia is. But it's in "corporate" life too - you see the "climbers" who think "I'll just put in the hours now, work myself to the bone, and someday I'll move up into a comfortable position." It's simply not true - long hours beget longer hours. As you said, there's no "out" unless you refuse to play at all.
I think one of the biggest pratfalls of American culture (in particular), is this sense that the only thing we should be serious about is our job. I work in middle management at a big company. I prefer my work to be predictable, and at a level I feel that I have a good grasp on. I've gotten good at what I do - but if I look at other positions, they all require a big jump up in commitment, especially more expectations to essentially be "on call" whenever one of my fellow work-o-holics just "needs" an answer at 11pm on a Tuesday. So, no thanks. I don't consider myself "serious" or "passionate" about my work. I give it 90%+ effort every day, but I leave work at work as best I can.
What am I serious about? I'm serious about being a good father and a good husband - two things that get written off as "quaint" at best, "regressive" at worst. But neither is a trivial thing, and both require real seriousness.
I'm also serious about my hobbies, particularly music (listening, playing, writing, etc.) - the things I do for my own satisfaction. I'm not making youtube videos or posting on social media every time I learn a new guitar riff - sharpening skill is for me, not other people. Other people will simply not care as much as you do about a skill or hobby - unless you manage to become famous for it. You do it for yourself, or you're doing it for the wrong reasons, IMO.
In technical jobs especially, it's possible to be serious about your work within a corporation without being a climber. But you must strive to be excellent at what you do, and you must categorically refuse any offers of promotion into management. Early in my career, I remember telling my dad, "All I do is play all day. And they pay me for it!" Decades later, I still feel essentially the same way, because I love the technical work, and I resist taking on job responsibilities that detract from it. Thus, I continue to have precisely zero people reporting to me, though I am paid very well and have a deserved reputation within the company as an expert in my niche.
This. There's a lot in this essay that's interesting and I agree with. But there's also a foundational vibe of hustling as an axiomatic good. Monomaniacal obsessions still distract and impede maturity and personal growth even if you temper them with reasonable risk adjustment or do them entirely as an amateur. Work you enjoy to a reasonable extent, some fun hobbies, and a commitment to wisdom and living life well with your community (whatever that is) doesn't seem like it's "serious", which should be a warning.
tldr: you met some asshats in the kitchen. check out the other rooms before judging the party.
i guess personal experience is biasing everyone's perception of something as gigantic and abstract as 'academia'. your experience and take on seriousness resonates with me, but in a very different way. my academic journey started out with a (fairly naive) excitement for social neuroscience (the Singer studies on empathy and mirror neurons were all the rage back then). i spent several years on an overambitious masters project and RA job to learn the ins and outs of fMRI and ended with a discussion section that - probably would have read the same if the signs of the results were swapped. once i realised this, i concluded that this wasn't _serious_ . however, i was early enough in my journey to shop around a bit more and found what i considered seriousness in a different subfield (vision science). here it was: solid ground to stand on, the ability to refute hypotheses with data, findings that stood the test of time, effects that mattered quantitatively and people who cared about all of this. yes, there were and are problems with journal obsession, hyping etc here, too. but there was plenty of seriousness to be found, which made me happy enough to hang around. i don't regret it.
I've been told that if I don't make money doing something, it isn't a business. It's a hobby. I truly resented this. There are times when you do something because it is what you feel called to do. Your statement, "Finally, the third lie: you’re only serious about something if you’re getting paid to do it," simply made my day. Thanks.
“I CAN’T BE MOTHER THERESA, SO I MIGHT AS WELL BE MUSSOLINI”
This is great, black-or-white thinking just seems like more of an epidemic lately. There's really very little... pressure that's been applied in recent times that has put some sort of limit on people in general thinking this way. It breeds so much toxicity in a world that's so obviously nuanced. I'm not sure what exactly it is... maybe they stopped teaching critical thinking, or didn't they didn't do it well enough, or there's the fact that the zeitgeist right now can be characterized by the spirit of a 14 year old girl with BPD undergoing "splitting".
I expect that's because the way "pressure" is applied is essentially through public shaming on social media, and that doesn't admit fine gradations: you get the mob baying for your blood whether you're trying but failing to be "Mother Teresa" or if you're unabashedly "Mussolini", and the latter's easier.
This is probably the most personally depressing post I've read in a few weeks, because it's completely, totally true.
Two points of addition. For the young ones for whom there's still hope.
(1) You obviously need to know what you're serious about, and you risk getting to your mid 50s and realising that beyond "personally participating in mass murder type of atrocities is bad" you have no fucking idea whatsoever. And even if you did it's be too late anyway. So better get round to figuring it out yourself before that. Speaking from experience here.
(2) Kinda related indirectly. You really need to SERIOUSLY (see what I did there) believe in the value of thing you're doing to do it for free. Not because you need money to live on, or for paints or whatever. But because *people willing to pay for your work or your art or whatever it is that you do* remains the best measure of its value -- unless what you do is for people or other creatures unable to pay. So if you're serious about farmed animals, malaria nets or fetuses, ok, but for much other stuff, if nobody is willing to part with their money, how do you know what you're doing is of any worth? People lie all the time to make others feel good, they go "awww" and "interesting" but ultimately if they could afford X and they choose not to pay for X, and your serious thing is X, then the level of self belief required is pretty staggering, isn't it?
I don't think I can produce anything of real worth and value than others cannot do better. So I might as well just do COMPLETELY UNSERIOUS things that are mildly enjoyable, like writing stupid essays about poetry or throwaway comments on substack, because the alternative is kinda, idk, despair leaning.
About “how do you know what you're doing is of any worth?” I think that as scientists this is something we know intuitively? We want to know something, there’s no good explanation, and we start digging.
Yes I agree that if you have an actual science to pursue, the value of inquiry is self evident -- tho some of it is so so tiny that the value beyond entertaining the inquirer is dubious (and there are always opportunity costs) --entertaining the enquirer is not nothing of course, but it doesn't feel "serious" in the way I understand OP's meaning.
But mostly I'm just old and sad/bitter, so the "don't miss the boat while you can still row" or some other wonky metaphoric advice for not wasting one's life is my main point.
I think you took a very specific upper middle class experience and generalized into a universal truth. Two quick examples:
1. The level of privilege needed to be able to not work somewhere because you object to its politics is extremely high.
2. You live in the United States and take advantage of its richness. The US has done and does much worse things than McKinsey but you've carefully drawn the line where that's okay but the other stuff isn't.
Oh, and a bonus point: if you think academia is the place where you find this performativeness, I can only laugh and laugh and laugh.
Academia has a stated mission of uncovering truth and acting as a lighthouse to society so the complete lack of integrity there is especially galling to people who actually value truth.
Microsoft's mission statement is "Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more."
So much for stated missions.
(Also, and this is not a point I originally made, but AM discovered that academia has the same kind of compromises and flaws as the rest of life and has deployed himself liberally across the fainting couch...sigh.)
Microsoft actually did achieve much of their vision of "A computer on every desktop". There are still organizations that don't use Microsoft, but most of my career as a software developer has been spent on work computers running Windows. And that work was typically a lot more serious than the CS classes I had taken that were supposed to be preparing me for it.
Regarding point 2, this feels like an argument in bad faith. Clearly no one is born working for McKinsey, and it's much easier to just not work for McKinsey than it is to uproot yourself from the country you were born in and start a new life in another one. Regarding points 1 and 2- I don't think anyone here is arguing against making pragmatic choices when circumstances require. If they are, they are free to chime in, of course.
"Ah, so it's okay to be part of an organization/community that's done evil things as long as it would be *difficult* to get out? Good to know."
How is this statement not in conflict with your earlier one about "not work[ing] somewhere because you object to its politics" requiring a high level of privilege? By this logic, wouldn't not having much privilege not be an excuse for working for an organization whose politics you find objectionable?
Thanks for this article, the point of “being serious” is something I’ve been making to people at work (diplomatically) for a while, because, unless you work in a field where the outcomes of your work are high stakes and directly measurable, bullshit has a tendency to emerge.
An anecdote from my previous career:
I used to work in international development, which I found to be particularly unserious at times.
At a research conference I attended, two USAID people presented a massive report on education programs funded by the US government. I had read the report beforehand and couldn’t believe that I had understood the results correctly: The objective was to improve literacy skills of 100 million children over the course of ~5 years. The evaluations showed improvements in 1.5 million children. 1.5% of the objective achieved? Surely, I must be misunderstanding.
So, I asked the USAID folks at the conference whether I had understood the numbers right and if, if I did, they would consider USAID spending on education a failure.
They did confirm that I had understood the number correctly and that there was still room for improvement. Then they moved on and other people asked less fundamental questions.
The actual results were an absolute failure, but no one seemed to really care, and they were couched between other stuff on page 37 of a 100-page report.
This was one of the moments that showed me I did not want to work in this field long term.
This was exactly the story of the vitamin c for sepsis study. The authors “showed” that vitamin c reduced sepsis mortality from 40% to 14%. It was mind blowing. I gave out vitamin C for a year.
And none of my patients got better. And then the trials kept coming back negative.
Since you're starting off with the example of the "slap on the back"-presentation that's not being challenged: there's also a lot of peer pressure to "not be serious" in public. In the beginning of my academic career, I used to ask such questions in the Q&A session until it was strongly indicated to me several times that I should stop since it made fellow academics look bad in front of an audience. Since then, I take such questions offline, which also means that the only person receiving them (and do something with this feedback or not) is the academic themself.
And on a different topic: given Mother Theresa's pretty awful beliefs and actions, if one's alternative to Mussolini is her, then being/doing good (or serious) was never on the menu. ;)
There is a lot going on at conferences that color my interpretation of very similar events in my career (although I don't disagree with your take away points about seriousness).
I am a very numerically focused guy, I have come to realize most people are not. Most people I do not think have a mental map of "this number is too big to make sense". I could speculate more why that is (poor academic training, poorly thought out measures that don't map to real world outcomes, general innumeracy, as well as bad presentation of numerical evidence from the presenter side). But I think assuming "people did not understand the numbers" is often just as reasonable as the "not serious" (although they are not mutually exclusive). I think when I present numbers many people don't interpret them at all in their mind.
A second one is norms around critiquing. I have encountered both folks from econ background who are more aggressive, vs most of the other social sciences who are more deferential (with a bias towards deferential in my field of criminal justice). There just isn't much utility in being critical at conferences. This is related to being not serious, but I suspect there is a bit deeper psychological or biological lesson in that we often default to cooperation. E.g. it is easier to ignore someone doing ridiculous work than it is to take time away from your own work to address it.
Many of those same people though if they reviewed the presentation as an anonymous peer reviewer would have critical things to say. So there is a difference in behavior in public vs private (which is not contra to your serious interpretation either).
Adam Mastroianni's article challenges us to re-evaluate what it means to be serious in life and work. Using a vivid analogy of a dubious study about backslapping's miraculous effects, he critiques the uncritical acceptance of flashy but potentially flawed research. He extends this critique to the broader issue of prioritizing appearances over genuine substance, whether in academia, professional life, or personal ambitions.
Mastroianni argues that true seriousness involves commitment to meaningful values and actions, rather than merely playing the game for superficial rewards. He debunks three lies: that seriousness is all or nothing, requires being serious about everything at once, and is validated only by monetary compensation. Instead, he advocates for incremental steps toward genuine engagement and integrity, suggesting that seriousness is not a distant goal but a daily practice that prevents life from becoming a series of unfulfilling routines.
Ultimately, Mastroianni encourages us to be "serious people" who hold something sacred and take small steps each day to align our actions with our core values.
Experience varies. The magic of the job title, and the voodoo of publications in high-prestige technical economics journals have given me a platform and credibility to put forward radical ideas that would otherwise be dismissed as reflecting a failure to understand basic economics (I still get this, but only from Dunning-Kruger types, whose economics comes from "doing their own research").
Also, for good or ill, economics seminars are nothing like the softball experience you describe. Interruptions start early and aggressive. Allegedly, there have been seminars where the speaker didn't get past the title slide. Not pleasant, but after a few of those you develop a hide like a rhinoceros, capable of withstanding cross-examination as an expert witness in court cases, hostile parliamentary committees etc.
This was such a wonderful read for me because I’m currently working on my dissertation (on a topic that I care desperately about) and have given up the idea that I want to stay in academia, despite having built a pretty decent little CV for myself so far. I gave up my teaching position and am currently working part-time as a waiter in a low-cost-of-living city, which affords me the time to work on my writing and research. My five-year plan is to spend half my time working in the food and beverage industry and half my time working on my writing and research, and I have to say that approaching the latter two activities without the expectation of using them to acquire a professorship has enabled me to really take them seriously (i.e. to engage in them them without compromising the quality of the product for the sake of the hoards of unserious academics in my field), which is one of the most freeing and exciting feelings ever.
So, by some standards, I’m currently nothing more than a severely overeducated waiter, but waiting tables isn’t only a job that pays the bills (and a job that I am loving, by the way), it’s also enabling me to really take my writing and research seriously, which academia never really allowed me to do (especially because I’m in one of the most humanities-y fields of the humanities).
Anyway, my choices have been unconventional and probably not optimal from the point of view of acquiring wealth and caring for my future financial wellbeing (which has been a source of a bit of ambivalence), but these choices have nevertheless felt like the right choices to make, at least for now, and your post articulates why: because I’d rather take my writing and research seriously than compromise them for the sake of using them to acquire extrinsic rewards.
Anyway, thanks for offering this severely overeducated waiter the encouragement he needs to keep taking his values seriously.
This is really inspiring, thanks for sharing it!
First off - I really love this piece, especially this part:
"I played the game pretty well for a long time, and now it’s obvious to me that the reward for playing the game is more game. You just keep unlocking levels forever, and the levels don’t even get more interesting (“Ooh, this one is in space!”). It’s just the same thing over and over until you die. You don’t get out by winning; you get out by stopping."
Sad to hear (from yet another source) that this is what academia is. But it's in "corporate" life too - you see the "climbers" who think "I'll just put in the hours now, work myself to the bone, and someday I'll move up into a comfortable position." It's simply not true - long hours beget longer hours. As you said, there's no "out" unless you refuse to play at all.
I think one of the biggest pratfalls of American culture (in particular), is this sense that the only thing we should be serious about is our job. I work in middle management at a big company. I prefer my work to be predictable, and at a level I feel that I have a good grasp on. I've gotten good at what I do - but if I look at other positions, they all require a big jump up in commitment, especially more expectations to essentially be "on call" whenever one of my fellow work-o-holics just "needs" an answer at 11pm on a Tuesday. So, no thanks. I don't consider myself "serious" or "passionate" about my work. I give it 90%+ effort every day, but I leave work at work as best I can.
What am I serious about? I'm serious about being a good father and a good husband - two things that get written off as "quaint" at best, "regressive" at worst. But neither is a trivial thing, and both require real seriousness.
I'm also serious about my hobbies, particularly music (listening, playing, writing, etc.) - the things I do for my own satisfaction. I'm not making youtube videos or posting on social media every time I learn a new guitar riff - sharpening skill is for me, not other people. Other people will simply not care as much as you do about a skill or hobby - unless you manage to become famous for it. You do it for yourself, or you're doing it for the wrong reasons, IMO.
In technical jobs especially, it's possible to be serious about your work within a corporation without being a climber. But you must strive to be excellent at what you do, and you must categorically refuse any offers of promotion into management. Early in my career, I remember telling my dad, "All I do is play all day. And they pay me for it!" Decades later, I still feel essentially the same way, because I love the technical work, and I resist taking on job responsibilities that detract from it. Thus, I continue to have precisely zero people reporting to me, though I am paid very well and have a deserved reputation within the company as an expert in my niche.
Yep, the goal is FIRE, which doesn't require climbing but does require playing the game and saving up.
This. There's a lot in this essay that's interesting and I agree with. But there's also a foundational vibe of hustling as an axiomatic good. Monomaniacal obsessions still distract and impede maturity and personal growth even if you temper them with reasonable risk adjustment or do them entirely as an amateur. Work you enjoy to a reasonable extent, some fun hobbies, and a commitment to wisdom and living life well with your community (whatever that is) doesn't seem like it's "serious", which should be a warning.
tldr: you met some asshats in the kitchen. check out the other rooms before judging the party.
i guess personal experience is biasing everyone's perception of something as gigantic and abstract as 'academia'. your experience and take on seriousness resonates with me, but in a very different way. my academic journey started out with a (fairly naive) excitement for social neuroscience (the Singer studies on empathy and mirror neurons were all the rage back then). i spent several years on an overambitious masters project and RA job to learn the ins and outs of fMRI and ended with a discussion section that - probably would have read the same if the signs of the results were swapped. once i realised this, i concluded that this wasn't _serious_ . however, i was early enough in my journey to shop around a bit more and found what i considered seriousness in a different subfield (vision science). here it was: solid ground to stand on, the ability to refute hypotheses with data, findings that stood the test of time, effects that mattered quantitatively and people who cared about all of this. yes, there were and are problems with journal obsession, hyping etc here, too. but there was plenty of seriousness to be found, which made me happy enough to hang around. i don't regret it.
Glad to hear it!
I've been told that if I don't make money doing something, it isn't a business. It's a hobby. I truly resented this. There are times when you do something because it is what you feel called to do. Your statement, "Finally, the third lie: you’re only serious about something if you’re getting paid to do it," simply made my day. Thanks.
“I CAN’T BE MOTHER THERESA, SO I MIGHT AS WELL BE MUSSOLINI”
This is great, black-or-white thinking just seems like more of an epidemic lately. There's really very little... pressure that's been applied in recent times that has put some sort of limit on people in general thinking this way. It breeds so much toxicity in a world that's so obviously nuanced. I'm not sure what exactly it is... maybe they stopped teaching critical thinking, or didn't they didn't do it well enough, or there's the fact that the zeitgeist right now can be characterized by the spirit of a 14 year old girl with BPD undergoing "splitting".
I expect that's because the way "pressure" is applied is essentially through public shaming on social media, and that doesn't admit fine gradations: you get the mob baying for your blood whether you're trying but failing to be "Mother Teresa" or if you're unabashedly "Mussolini", and the latter's easier.
This is probably the most personally depressing post I've read in a few weeks, because it's completely, totally true.
Two points of addition. For the young ones for whom there's still hope.
(1) You obviously need to know what you're serious about, and you risk getting to your mid 50s and realising that beyond "personally participating in mass murder type of atrocities is bad" you have no fucking idea whatsoever. And even if you did it's be too late anyway. So better get round to figuring it out yourself before that. Speaking from experience here.
(2) Kinda related indirectly. You really need to SERIOUSLY (see what I did there) believe in the value of thing you're doing to do it for free. Not because you need money to live on, or for paints or whatever. But because *people willing to pay for your work or your art or whatever it is that you do* remains the best measure of its value -- unless what you do is for people or other creatures unable to pay. So if you're serious about farmed animals, malaria nets or fetuses, ok, but for much other stuff, if nobody is willing to part with their money, how do you know what you're doing is of any worth? People lie all the time to make others feel good, they go "awww" and "interesting" but ultimately if they could afford X and they choose not to pay for X, and your serious thing is X, then the level of self belief required is pretty staggering, isn't it?
I don't think I can produce anything of real worth and value than others cannot do better. So I might as well just do COMPLETELY UNSERIOUS things that are mildly enjoyable, like writing stupid essays about poetry or throwaway comments on substack, because the alternative is kinda, idk, despair leaning.
You don’t have to do something better than everyone else for it to be something worth doing seriously.
Not better, no. But at least of some use/worth. And that is often measured in money.
+1 for getting to know oneself
About “how do you know what you're doing is of any worth?” I think that as scientists this is something we know intuitively? We want to know something, there’s no good explanation, and we start digging.
Yes I agree that if you have an actual science to pursue, the value of inquiry is self evident -- tho some of it is so so tiny that the value beyond entertaining the inquirer is dubious (and there are always opportunity costs) --entertaining the enquirer is not nothing of course, but it doesn't feel "serious" in the way I understand OP's meaning.
But mostly I'm just old and sad/bitter, so the "don't miss the boat while you can still row" or some other wonky metaphoric advice for not wasting one's life is my main point.
I think you took a very specific upper middle class experience and generalized into a universal truth. Two quick examples:
1. The level of privilege needed to be able to not work somewhere because you object to its politics is extremely high.
2. You live in the United States and take advantage of its richness. The US has done and does much worse things than McKinsey but you've carefully drawn the line where that's okay but the other stuff isn't.
Oh, and a bonus point: if you think academia is the place where you find this performativeness, I can only laugh and laugh and laugh.
Academia has a stated mission of uncovering truth and acting as a lighthouse to society so the complete lack of integrity there is especially galling to people who actually value truth.
Microsoft's mission statement is "Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more."
So much for stated missions.
(Also, and this is not a point I originally made, but AM discovered that academia has the same kind of compromises and flaws as the rest of life and has deployed himself liberally across the fainting couch...sigh.)
Microsoft actually did achieve much of their vision of "A computer on every desktop". There are still organizations that don't use Microsoft, but most of my career as a software developer has been spent on work computers running Windows. And that work was typically a lot more serious than the CS classes I had taken that were supposed to be preparing me for it.
"Microsoft actually did achieve much of their vision of "A computer on every desktop".
Really? All seven billion people in the world have computers, do they?
Such a level of elite tunnel vision -- who exactly are you envisioning with that remark?
I didn't claim all 7 billion people in the world have computers.
You said "much of their vision" -- so how many people is that? 5 of 7 billion? 3 of 7 billion?
Regarding point 2, this feels like an argument in bad faith. Clearly no one is born working for McKinsey, and it's much easier to just not work for McKinsey than it is to uproot yourself from the country you were born in and start a new life in another one. Regarding points 1 and 2- I don't think anyone here is arguing against making pragmatic choices when circumstances require. If they are, they are free to chime in, of course.
Ah, so it's okay to be part of an organization/community that's done evil things as long as it would be *difficult* to get out? Good to know.
"anyone here is arguing against making pragmatic choices"
I think the entire post is completely ignoring the issue...which was my point.
"Ah, so it's okay to be part of an organization/community that's done evil things as long as it would be *difficult* to get out? Good to know."
How is this statement not in conflict with your earlier one about "not work[ing] somewhere because you object to its politics" requiring a high level of privilege? By this logic, wouldn't not having much privilege not be an excuse for working for an organization whose politics you find objectionable?
Whoosh was the sound my point made going over your head.
When you get around to actually stating your point clearly, please let me know.
When you develop any kind of reading comprehension, let me know.
Thanks for this article, the point of “being serious” is something I’ve been making to people at work (diplomatically) for a while, because, unless you work in a field where the outcomes of your work are high stakes and directly measurable, bullshit has a tendency to emerge.
An anecdote from my previous career:
I used to work in international development, which I found to be particularly unserious at times.
At a research conference I attended, two USAID people presented a massive report on education programs funded by the US government. I had read the report beforehand and couldn’t believe that I had understood the results correctly: The objective was to improve literacy skills of 100 million children over the course of ~5 years. The evaluations showed improvements in 1.5 million children. 1.5% of the objective achieved? Surely, I must be misunderstanding.
So, I asked the USAID folks at the conference whether I had understood the numbers right and if, if I did, they would consider USAID spending on education a failure.
They did confirm that I had understood the number correctly and that there was still room for improvement. Then they moved on and other people asked less fundamental questions.
The actual results were an absolute failure, but no one seemed to really care, and they were couched between other stuff on page 37 of a 100-page report.
This was one of the moments that showed me I did not want to work in this field long term.
This was exactly the story of the vitamin c for sepsis study. The authors “showed” that vitamin c reduced sepsis mortality from 40% to 14%. It was mind blowing. I gave out vitamin C for a year.
And none of my patients got better. And then the trials kept coming back negative.
Anyway, I love your writing. Keep grinding
Since you're starting off with the example of the "slap on the back"-presentation that's not being challenged: there's also a lot of peer pressure to "not be serious" in public. In the beginning of my academic career, I used to ask such questions in the Q&A session until it was strongly indicated to me several times that I should stop since it made fellow academics look bad in front of an audience. Since then, I take such questions offline, which also means that the only person receiving them (and do something with this feedback or not) is the academic themself.
And on a different topic: given Mother Theresa's pretty awful beliefs and actions, if one's alternative to Mussolini is her, then being/doing good (or serious) was never on the menu. ;)
There is a lot going on at conferences that color my interpretation of very similar events in my career (although I don't disagree with your take away points about seriousness).
I am a very numerically focused guy, I have come to realize most people are not. Most people I do not think have a mental map of "this number is too big to make sense". I could speculate more why that is (poor academic training, poorly thought out measures that don't map to real world outcomes, general innumeracy, as well as bad presentation of numerical evidence from the presenter side). But I think assuming "people did not understand the numbers" is often just as reasonable as the "not serious" (although they are not mutually exclusive). I think when I present numbers many people don't interpret them at all in their mind.
A second one is norms around critiquing. I have encountered both folks from econ background who are more aggressive, vs most of the other social sciences who are more deferential (with a bias towards deferential in my field of criminal justice). There just isn't much utility in being critical at conferences. This is related to being not serious, but I suspect there is a bit deeper psychological or biological lesson in that we often default to cooperation. E.g. it is easier to ignore someone doing ridiculous work than it is to take time away from your own work to address it.
Many of those same people though if they reviewed the presentation as an anonymous peer reviewer would have critical things to say. So there is a difference in behavior in public vs private (which is not contra to your serious interpretation either).
Adam Mastroianni's article challenges us to re-evaluate what it means to be serious in life and work. Using a vivid analogy of a dubious study about backslapping's miraculous effects, he critiques the uncritical acceptance of flashy but potentially flawed research. He extends this critique to the broader issue of prioritizing appearances over genuine substance, whether in academia, professional life, or personal ambitions.
Mastroianni argues that true seriousness involves commitment to meaningful values and actions, rather than merely playing the game for superficial rewards. He debunks three lies: that seriousness is all or nothing, requires being serious about everything at once, and is validated only by monetary compensation. Instead, he advocates for incremental steps toward genuine engagement and integrity, suggesting that seriousness is not a distant goal but a daily practice that prevents life from becoming a series of unfulfilling routines.
Ultimately, Mastroianni encourages us to be "serious people" who hold something sacred and take small steps each day to align our actions with our core values.
Thank you for the backslapping!
Experience varies. The magic of the job title, and the voodoo of publications in high-prestige technical economics journals have given me a platform and credibility to put forward radical ideas that would otherwise be dismissed as reflecting a failure to understand basic economics (I still get this, but only from Dunning-Kruger types, whose economics comes from "doing their own research").
Also, for good or ill, economics seminars are nothing like the softball experience you describe. Interruptions start early and aggressive. Allegedly, there have been seminars where the speaker didn't get past the title slide. Not pleasant, but after a few of those you develop a hide like a rhinoceros, capable of withstanding cross-examination as an expert witness in court cases, hostile parliamentary committees etc.
This really feels like a Sam Kriss piece where I unironically agree with most of it even if it is satire
Needed this today, thanks bud