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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • It’s a feedback loop. In order to raise your academic profile and potentially get a job, you need a solid CV full of peer reviewed publications. In order to get published in the first place, you often need money and institutional backing.

    If you circumvent that cycle by self-publishing (a solidly logical idea btw), then you’ll have an even harder job getting people to take you seriously and will alienate yourself from “mainstream” academia. It’s messed up. Some open access journals have tried to solve this, with some success, but it’s a systemic problem.


  • In grad school I remember being encouraged to submit a paper to a journal that would have charged me a few hundred dollars to put it in for peer review, and I told my advisor no, I needed to buy groceries, I would not throw my money away for an extra line on my CV. He got all flustered and it was a great example of why higher education is so fucked. My advisor, who ostensibly understood my background and means, could not understand how such a relatively small fee would be so prohibitive. He was incapable of understanding that I was essentially unemployed while enrolled as his grad student, and every dollar of funding went to bare essentials so I could continue breathing. He had access to discretionary funds for this exact kind of issue (I found out later), and didn’t think to offer.

    Without independent wealth and deep personal connections it’s incredibly difficult to succeed in academia, regardless of the quality of your research.












  • Bringing AI into redistricting would be a nightmare. AI is not objective, it’s trained on biased datasets and that bias is reinforced by the bias of whomever created it or wants to shape it to their will.

    We already know how to do nonpartisan redistricting, and many states (including CA) already have a nonpartisan committee in charge of it. But since elections are managed by state and local governments, and explicitly not the federal government, it would take something like a constitutional amendment to make it required nationwide. That’s also why states like CA will temporarily use different maps this cycle (if all goes well tomorrow), because CA being fair and TX cheating doesn’t help the nation as a whole reflect its actual population. Might as well force the fairness by cheating like them. It’s a shitty stopgap, but they’ve left us no choice.