My Work is Bad

A brief explanation of why all my work is bad:

``What is the State of Blacks in Philosophy?'' -- it's actually my fault that there is a genuinely incoherent non-explanation of what statistics were done in this paper, which is all the more shocking and shameful since largely it was just super basic descriptive stuff -- graphs! On the whole fine for what it is but that's an incredibly basic thing.

 ``Causally Interpreting Intersectionality Theory.'' -- the interest of a methodology piece is, of course, the results of applying the methodology. Years out and that's still never been done, despite the fact that this paper is cited a fair bit. People act as if this paper somehow does more work to vindicate intersectionality theory; they're vastly over-estimating how interesting it is. What's more, at least some of the reason the method is yet to actually be applied is that to get anything interesting it requires such large data sets as to perhaps be unwieldy.

``On Fraud" -- a very simple model, which I always intended to get back to but so far never have, so the whole paper ends up being a totally under-developed as a thought. A prequel to something that never came to be - and that is my fault.

``Decision Theoretic Model of the Productivity Gap." -- literally just an inferior version of other people's work, ironically enough given the topic - other women's work! Carole Lee had the actual original idea behind the paper (https://philpapers.org/rec/LEERCC), then Erin Hengel made a much better model and empirical study of this idea (https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/3018341/). My paper is just an awkward transitional phase between these two people's actually good work. Behind the scenes, the review process for this one was incredibly humiliating - not because the editors or reviewers were bad, they were lovely and reasonable. But in my junior scholar desperation to get published I made stupid and indefensible changes to try and meet the comments, and they actually had to get me to remove all the things I added because I didn't know what I was talking about and should have just stuck to what I knew.

``Vindicating Methodological Triangulation.'' -- ok this is one paper of mine I like, but everything good about it is from my coauthors. It should be noted that the use this paper is put to is often quite out of line with what it shows. We argue that triangulation is advantageous under such and such circumstances, and get appealed to as if we had shown that triangulation is always good. This probably reflects unclarity in our writing.

``Logical Empiricists on Race.''  -- not clear what this paper actually is. It's not advocating a view since I think it's mistaken, nor is it proper historical scholarship on a view anybody actually held. It's like especially boring fanfic, where neither the author nor the reader can have any reason to care. Pathetic pseudo-scholarship.

``A Role For Judgement Aggregation In Coauthoring Papers.''  -- I mean it's just so niche for one thing, the audience for this paper is probably just its authors. What is more, we haven't actually promoted the norm beyond trying to live it in our own work. What's the point of advocating a norm if you don't, like, actually advocate it? So I guess fine for what it is, but an incredibly niche thing which we have not actually properly attempted to subsequently realise.

``Du Bois' Democratic Defence of the Value Free Ideal.'' -- it was intended to be a paper to teach this issue from, but honestly I don't actually think it can do that. It requires too much scaffolding and previous familiarity with the value free ideal debate. What's more, since Du Bois wasn't responding to the contemporary debate, teaching from this always makes it clear to me that there is a move that will be obvious to modern students that he does not consider. Fails at its own end. 

``The Emergence of Intersectional Disadvantage"  -- this paper has a lot to like about it, but my contributions in particular were negligible or got in the way, truly carried by my coauthors. They were lovely throughout, but I sometimes think back to writing this and am just filled with shame, I can't believe anyone lets me into this field, I actively hold things back. (Exactly the same thing could be said for "Difficult trade-offs in response to COVID-19: the case for open and inclusive decision making")

``Is Peer Review a Good Idea?"  -- somebody should do the work of putting forth what can be said for implausible claims and infeasible proposals. But if thats the thing you do, odds are you're probably just wrong and will be rightly forgotten.

"Book Review of "An Epistemic Theory of Democracy"" -- has a good opening line (Two heads are better than one, three heads are even better than two – and so on and so on; hence we should have a democracy.") but otherwise a banal summary of a good book, totally failing to do the subject justice.

"Collective responsibility and fraud in scientific communities " -- I was late in my work here, my poor coauthors suffered so much. Working with me is an actively unpleasant experience for all involved.

"Group Lies and Reflections on The Purpose of Social Epistemology" -- a response to Jennifer Lackey's work that is ultimately shallow and missing her point. It is a frequent experience for me that I just don't understand epistemology, I am basically not deep or subtle enough, I miss distinctions that matter. Lackey is someone whose thought is subtle in precisely the way I habitually fail to properly respond to, so I just did a bad job of building on her excellent start point.

"Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s The Red Record" -- probably my favourite of my single authored papers, but in being as much it just illustrates my limitations. At best what I can do is summarise the work of other better scholars. I have got by in philosophy just by having odd reading habits, and so being able to summarise and transmit the work of my betters.