I love this post. I’m not in academia, but I feel this so deeply — the question of what makes work meaningful or truly valuable feels so important, especially when it feels like the world is taking shortcuts and incentives the wrong type of work
Reading this as a machine learning person who spent NeurIPS asking authors “what do you want this work to make possible?” and getting a lot of “uhhh” in response, your secret third real finally gives me a name for why that felt so off.
The distinction between real 1 and real 2 and this third sense matches almost exactly the filter I’ve been groping toward. I keep running into papers where the math is fine and the benchmarks click, but I can’t tell what the authors think should happen in the world as a result, or what phenomenon they actually care about understanding. Your classification makes that discomfort legible instead of just grumpiness.
I also really appreciated the willingness to kill projects once you realised they weren’t going to be “real enough” in that third sense. That’s a standard I’d like to hold myself to more often. This essay is going to sit in the back of my head the next time I’m tempted to massage a negative result into something paper-shaped.
Jessica, your voice as a writer is real. Congrats on finding it. I’m inspired by your honesty and your commitment to doing work that has real reasons underneath it. Wishing you the best in continuing your studies
Thank you for this piece, and articulating and capturing this degradation of realness 😭 It really makes me tragic seeing it unfold, and I think this will ultimately be what we will have to grapple with in understanding what creativity really means and what might be truly unique among Work That A Human Creates.
> My theory of real is that a creative work is real if it has a good reason to exist. If its creator can look themselves in the eye and say with full honesty that they know why they're making it, and that they like why they're making it.
It’s weird to me how much supposed creative work no longer comes from the heart, and how there might be another system to better incentivize it and discourage external players. I wonder if it comes trying to bottle up what used to be the lightning of creativity — professors feeling pressure to reach # of publications, students trying to graduate from PhDs, international students trying to stay in the U.S., all contributing to this circus that no longer feels like a real space of thought.
I don’t know what this system may be :’) but so far my coping mechanism has been understanding how to create and capture these crazy stories in people to reflect the insanity of it back to them, hopefully in an attempt that others, and them, can see if this version of the world is truly what we want. This got me thinking so much, I really appreciated the read!
thank you for writing this! i've been struggling with very similar thoughts this year and your vocabulary for realness has helped crystallize some of my very abstract thoughts/feelings about giving up writing papers for the sake of writing papers and the ick i get when i read papers that were clearly written for the purpose of being written. i feel like we're in the minority in the research community, which makes me sad, but reading posts like this one remind me that at least i'm not alone 🫶
Would you say academia or industry rewards the third kind of real by your definition, or it feels more like a personally calling to the things you care about and any reward would be secondary to satisfying this calling.
You sound to me like a 'real' academic, and sadly the entire academy is rife with the problem. Can't answer a question you actually think is worth answering? Make up another question.
Intense disagree with the final claim; the moon isn't real. The sun is. The phases of the moon, yes. The moon itself? Don Quixote quested to the moon for a reason. It's telling that NASA planted a flag in the 60s for the hype, and nobody has found any particularly good reasons to care about that rock since then. And it's such a great esoteric symbol! The bhavachakra wouldn't be the same without an imaginary moon
I love this post. I’m not in academia, but I feel this so deeply — the question of what makes work meaningful or truly valuable feels so important, especially when it feels like the world is taking shortcuts and incentives the wrong type of work
Reading this as a machine learning person who spent NeurIPS asking authors “what do you want this work to make possible?” and getting a lot of “uhhh” in response, your secret third real finally gives me a name for why that felt so off.
The distinction between real 1 and real 2 and this third sense matches almost exactly the filter I’ve been groping toward. I keep running into papers where the math is fine and the benchmarks click, but I can’t tell what the authors think should happen in the world as a result, or what phenomenon they actually care about understanding. Your classification makes that discomfort legible instead of just grumpiness.
I also really appreciated the willingness to kill projects once you realised they weren’t going to be “real enough” in that third sense. That’s a standard I’d like to hold myself to more often. This essay is going to sit in the back of my head the next time I’m tempted to massage a negative result into something paper-shaped.
I have this exact feeling about machine learning papers all the time I'm glad you relate!!! thanks for reading : )
mother has mothered again truly
i enjoyed this post!
Jessica, your voice as a writer is real. Congrats on finding it. I’m inspired by your honesty and your commitment to doing work that has real reasons underneath it. Wishing you the best in continuing your studies
thank you!! & great to hear from you :)
One annual post a year is not nearly enough :')
Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for this piece, and articulating and capturing this degradation of realness 😭 It really makes me tragic seeing it unfold, and I think this will ultimately be what we will have to grapple with in understanding what creativity really means and what might be truly unique among Work That A Human Creates.
> My theory of real is that a creative work is real if it has a good reason to exist. If its creator can look themselves in the eye and say with full honesty that they know why they're making it, and that they like why they're making it.
It’s weird to me how much supposed creative work no longer comes from the heart, and how there might be another system to better incentivize it and discourage external players. I wonder if it comes trying to bottle up what used to be the lightning of creativity — professors feeling pressure to reach # of publications, students trying to graduate from PhDs, international students trying to stay in the U.S., all contributing to this circus that no longer feels like a real space of thought.
I don’t know what this system may be :’) but so far my coping mechanism has been understanding how to create and capture these crazy stories in people to reflect the insanity of it back to them, hopefully in an attempt that others, and them, can see if this version of the world is truly what we want. This got me thinking so much, I really appreciated the read!
thank you for writing this! i've been struggling with very similar thoughts this year and your vocabulary for realness has helped crystallize some of my very abstract thoughts/feelings about giving up writing papers for the sake of writing papers and the ick i get when i read papers that were clearly written for the purpose of being written. i feel like we're in the minority in the research community, which makes me sad, but reading posts like this one remind me that at least i'm not alone 🫶
Would you say academia or industry rewards the third kind of real by your definition, or it feels more like a personally calling to the things you care about and any reward would be secondary to satisfying this calling.
I think real 3 works for some people in industry.... unfortunately I am allergic to having a job
You sound to me like a 'real' academic, and sadly the entire academy is rife with the problem. Can't answer a question you actually think is worth answering? Make up another question.
I am reminded of Daniel Dennett's closely related notion of chmess: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DCDChmess2006.pdf
this piece is amazing, thanks for sharing!!
Intense disagree with the final claim; the moon isn't real. The sun is. The phases of the moon, yes. The moon itself? Don Quixote quested to the moon for a reason. It's telling that NASA planted a flag in the 60s for the hype, and nobody has found any particularly good reasons to care about that rock since then. And it's such a great esoteric symbol! The bhavachakra wouldn't be the same without an imaginary moon
this post is so real
For some reason, this post makes we want to reread Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance