The assessment of my PhD thesis by the University of Sydney and the way I see our world

I’m one of those people who bothers institutions they feel have wronged them— a habit often associated with cranks. I want to explain why I do it and why I find it life-affirming and important, using my PhD at the University of Sydney as an example and going through some of the principles I think are at stake and/or illustrate what happened.

I The marking of Philosophy Bear’s PhD (a very rough summary)

Please keep in mind that this is about an eighth of what actually happened, though I have tried to be fair and representative.

After I handed in my PhD thesis, I heard back from the university through my supervisor. My supervisor, a wonderful man who bears no blame in what follows, informed me that a representative of the university was proposing that my thesis be passed formally without corrections, on the informal promise of a few tweaks.

Most likely this was an attempt to synthesize the comments of my markers. My two markers both gave generously of their time and gave great comments. One asked for minor revisions, one specifically made a point of saying please, please, I urge you in the strongest of terms, do not give the student minor revisions, it’s a waste of time.

I, of course, was delighted and conveyed my assent to the proposal through my supervisor. Receiving a grade of passed without corrections is a great honor and, better, a great time saver.

Then I got back the actual decision of the examination committee, and it asked for minor corrections. Specifically, two things:

1. “Those corrections that would improve the thesis” AND

2. An attribution statement for the following paragraph:

“Stauffer, Armin and Schultz (2014) found that the dopaminergic system reflected the revealed cardinal utilities of monkeys making decisions under risk: “Critically, the dopamine prediction error responses at the time of reward itself reflected the nonlinear utility functions measured at the time of choices”. Hybrid approaches that bridge psychology, biology and formal constructions on behaviour seem like a promising direction for future research- one that could solve, among other problems, the embarrassment of riches issue- although this is not the approach we are developing in this thesis. A Biorvix preprint by Matsumori et al. (2021) focusing on interpersonal comparision further develops a similar and exciting line of research, using a much larger sample of human subjects they deployed: “A method based on brain signals that correlated with changes in expected utility weighted by subjective probability. The signal was larger for participants with lower household incomes than for those with higher household incomes and their ratio coincided with the estimates by “impartial spectators””- In other words, they found that estimates by third parties of comparative utility changes between persons corresponded to the difference in magnitude of the activation of brain regions associated with reward.”

Long-term readers might remember it from a post of mine in 2023. A paragraph that specifically led with:

“Here’s a bit from my thesis on the subject:”

In other words, they were asking me to attribute a bit of my thesis to a quote from my thesis that I had posted elsewhere. It is standard practice for academics to quote their unpublished work. It is not standard for academics quoting their unpublished work to then attribute that work when published, to the place where they quoted it. It’s a demand for a weird circular citation that no one does. I did not think it was supported by the policies of the university on intellectual honesty and attribution, or by prevailing intellectual honesty norms.

I don’t know what happened between my Supervisor communicating to me that the thinking was to pass the thesis with no formal corrections, and the real outcome. However, given the lack of specificity in the final requests except around the author attribution statement I suspect that in the intervening time between his initial statement and the final recommendation, the assessor read the report of the academic honesty department, and decided that he could not give me no-corrections-with-a-few-informal corrections in light of that report. This seems the kinder construal- the alternative being that he offered me no corrections, and then changed his recommendation to the chair of examinations just because he changed his mind about the material, which would be a cruel thing to do. The University argues this isn’t the case because intellectual honesty reports are generated before theses are even sent to markers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the examination committee members read it before then.

I appealed, my argument was that since the requested attribution statement was baseless in university policy and academic practice, it should be struck, and since the only remaining request for revisions contained no specific content, the grade should be without corrections.

Eventually, it reached the student appeal body, chaired by a very sharp lawyer. Essentially this body agreed with me in spirit and sent the decision to be remade with a recommendation that the decision-makers take my line.

Instead of following this recommendation, the decision makers remade the decision more or less exactly as it was before. This is the problem with asking the same people to remake a decision.

I appealed again, this time the body had a different composition and was less sympathetic. Although the decision hasn’t been formally made yet, it’s pretty clear that it will be against me. After it is returned I will do the corrections, put in a FOI request for relevant emails, lodge a complaint with the ombudsman and leave it at that.

The process was outrageous at many junctures. During the second hearing, one of the advocates for the university’s side rather boldly asked me why I was still mucking around with the appeal and wasting everyone’s time (quite a rude thing to ask I would think). I responded that I agreed that the whole process was a massive waste of time, but that cut both ways didn’t it. I certainly had a strong enough case that there would be no shame in giving in to it. If they had the right to suggest I give in for reasons of efficiency, that applied equally to them.

None of this was based in respect for rules. There were a dozen or so rule breaches by the university throughout the process that the university concedes and seems unperturbed by. The university was not at all anxious with the inviolability of their procedures, their anxiety, to my mind at least, was with ensuring that they do not have to put time into seriously considering appeals from students if it isn’t an issue which was, to their mind, serious.

“Everyone does minor corrections” isn’t a substitute for procedural and substantive fairness (it also isn’t true). Minor corrections should not be treated as a sort of hazing ritual that you’re a bad sport about, minor corrections are for when there is something minor that must be corrected, and if passing something with no corrections is suggested, that suggestion shouldn’t be withdrawn just because the academic integrity office made a mistake. And above all, if you want to tell people they’ve won a prize, you’d better have a damn good reason for withdrawing that.

II An apologia for tilting at windmills or: my philosophy of life

I want to talk about how my little fight reflects my philosophy of life. I also want to explain why I think, despite appearances, such endeavors are not quixotic. Here’s the ways and reasons by which I understand what I did.

Firstly, be kind to people and harsh to institutions. One reason our society is often shit is because people direct their grievances against other people rather than institutions. People search for someone to blame when they should search for the most general factors that can be changed.

I get it. People have smug faces and annoying voices and just can’t see the point and…But to think individuals are the primary target is thinking like a chimpanzee. It’s the kind of thinking that makes people willing to spend billions of dollars on hunting Osama Bin Laden but oppose spending a cent on global warming. It’s the kind of thinking that works if your world consists of about 100 people, but doesn’t work in the world as it exists now.

Targeting individuals is a mistake for many reasons:

A) We’re not going to change people by retaliating against them. Individuals tend to remain fixed- it’s institutions that can change. Thinking you’re going to make things better by seeking vengeance against individuals shows a lack of social imagination.

B) Being cruel to individuals causes pain, but institutions don’t feel anything— yet can be surprisingly easy to intimidate.

C) For the most part, institutions are what run the world now, not individuals.

D) By seeking vengeance against individuals who have fucked up, we make ourselves hypocrites when, inevitably, we fuck up ourselves.

E) Our anger has to go somewhere. There is so much rage and fury inherent in our lifeway. Rage directed at institutions is much less corrosive than dripping malice for individuals.

Even while I enthusiastically skirmished with the University, I tried to avoid making it harmful to any particular person. I did not, e.g. seek a review of any individual’s behaviour although there were opportunities. Disappointingly I did consider it during a dark period, which I later regretted— I’m very glad I didn’t.

Weirdly a lot of people seem to think of it in reverse- they find it moral to have a go at individuals but not at structures. “But shouldn’t we respect institutions” you say? Yes, we should. We should respect them by trying to improve them. Institutions tend to improve through vigorous correction, whereas individual people need a softer hand.

Secondly, make the unjust visible. Make injustices big and small appear anew- as strange, alien intrusions. Bring out the moral strangeness of commonplace. Even when no one is to blame, remind us of our misfortunes so that one day we might oppose and end them.

I’m not talking here about protesting known wrongs, although this is also important (even more important in fact). I’m talking about things that most people don’t even think of as bad. Whether it’s natural death, infant circumcision, people acquitted of crimes not being compensated for pretrial detention, people being judged on the basis of their astrological sign, the sort of bureaucratic fuckery I’m talking about here— whatever.

Making a culture where unfairness won’t be accepted through inertia— where institutionally accepted practices can be reappraised without notice has two benefits: A) It gets rid of specific instances of injustice B) It forces institutions to think about their actions with a critical eye, even if they reflect established practice. If “that’s the way it was done” is not an excuse, institutions might take their obligations more seriously. Such an approach- everything you have done is potentially subject to evaluation by different rules later, can become tyrannical and neurosis-inducing when applied to individuals, so needs to be tempered. When it comes to institutions though, there’s no harm in a higher standard. All too often people mistake the rule of law - a valuable end, with the rule of institutional convenience.

We should try to grow as a species so that change doesn’t require a crisis or— my preferred formulation— we should greatly expand our conception of what a “crisis” is. Crisis is everywhere- it’s just that we usually don’t care about it. Indeed if you look at ‘real’ crises they are very often just misfortunes that were always present but which, for some unfathomable reason, everyone decided all at once were unacceptable. A scandal very like a dozen before it, long tolerated with a weary sigh, suddenly seen with fresh eyes and found by the public to be abominable. This is a theme to which history returns again and again.

Thirdly, People talk about Hanlon’s razor- never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. There is some wisdom to this, but in my experience, most error isn’t either/or. Bad things happen when someone is both lackadaisical and harsh at the same time.

This is something I learned working in medical administration. Most mistakes and offended patients happen through a combination of someone- receptionist, nurse, doctor- not paying sufficient attention and not caring enough about a particular patient at a particular time. Alfred Marshall said of supply and demand:

We might as reasonably dispute whether it is the upper or the under blade of a pair of scissors that cuts a piece of paper, as whether value is governed by utility [demand] or cost of production [supply].

Just so, separating malice and incompetence is like trying to pin the blame on one blade of the scissor. They both work together to subvert both situational attention and responsiveness to reasonable demands, and each of the pair often causes and strengthens the other.

Most disasters that have a human element have at least a little of both malice and incompetence. Malice is a very strong word to be used to describe anything that happened in my case, but as it is Hanlon’s terminology I will stick with it. By malice here is understood by me very broadly as any kind of poor direction of the will, it can include a lack of sympathy, irritation, laziness, exasperation, greed, gluttony, or lust as well as the classic active will to harm. We have all certainly been malicious on many occasions, most of which we will have failed to notice. When malice meets the limitations of our intelligence and capabilities, what we call incompetence, this is usually when things go wrong.

The predicament I’ve described with my thesis could have been avoided either:

1. If those involved had done their readings more carefully. Or

2. If, in the absence of a will to do the readings, they’d defaulted to a heuristic of generosity.

Some people will reject 2. It’s certainly not ideal but that’s just all the more reason to do the readings.

I don’t want to cause anyone undue trouble. I have no illusions about my own competence, I make mistakes all the time. Thus my resolution upon realizing the dual operation of incompetence and malice was this: I decided to always try to be nice since it is easier to control whether or not one is nice than whether or not one is incompetent. I have no illusions about my ability to always be nice/non-malicious either, but it’s all I can do.

Fourthly, live on the basis that everything matters. Everything people care about matters and I can tell you from personal experience that I really, burningly cared about these events.

It’s not always wrong to say “Wow man, you really should take some perspective”. In many cases, this is the best advice. However, we should resist the urge to think things are only truly bad if they are comparable to paradigm-case awful events: death, false imprisonment, etc.

When we compare the worst things that can happen to comparatively small events, it shouldn’t make us shrink the significance of these little disasters in our mind. Rather small disasters should increase our appreciation of the enormity of the most terrible things possible. If all deeply upsetting events matter a great deal, even those this small, how cosmically dreadful must the death of a child, or dementia, or torture be? The same applies to good things. Rather than diminishing small triumphs and joy, we should see how much they matter, and so greatly heighten our appreciation of large joys.

As everyone says we love irony in the current period- a kind of insulation from being in the world. Caring too much is seen as weakness.

But to the extent we treat everything as no big deal, we die to that degree.

I’m not saying you should get really sad about everything that happens to you. I’m saying that ideally should care and think things are important without hurting too much about them. I’m not sure how to describe that state exactly but it is possible I think. You can think something greatly matters without getting uncontrollably upset about it.

Nor does intensifying our appreciation of the gravity of life require us to take extreme or worse, cruel action. Precisely in seeing the importance of all things, we should become more thoughtful in our choices.

Nietzsche imagined the idea of eternal recurrence as a way of posing the question do you truly love this life? If you truly love it, goes the thought, you will want more of it, exactly as it is and you should be pleased that your existence will repeat again. In a sense, treating things as more important increases the quantity of your life rather than a repetition through eternal recurrence. Raising your overall investment in everything by x2 is a bit like living the same life twice. It is also a kind of true opposite of depression.

Fifthly it's all just choices we make in relation to each other, in the final sense, institutions don’t exist. Government? It’s just a way of people acting together. A university? Also a constellation of actors. Earlier I spoke of being cruel to institutions and kind to individuals, but ultimately this comes down to being critical of the formalized patterns through which we relate to each other while loving each other as people.

I’m aware this will sound like it’s contradicting what I said in section one, but the points are consistent. As someone trying to change the world for the better, you should understand things through the categories of institutions and institutional leverage, but as a moral decisionmaker embedded in an institution, you should not see your institutional position as shielding you from responsibility. There are differences, but ordering someone executed through an official process has more similarities with shooting them yourself than not. The state is in many ways no more a fundamental moral reality than a school club made by eight-year-olds. In the final moral sense, there are only atoms and the void and we stand naked in our relations to each other. No judge’s robe can alter the moral balances inherent in changing someone’s life through a sentence, and the same is true of the smaller things we do to each other every day.

We all sort of know this, but in practice, we forget it. We obscure our own and other people’s positions from ourselves and others using layers of customs, laws, precedents, etc. etc. The dust of history keeps accumulating, so we have to keep wiping it off.

Now things aren’t quite so stark as I’ve described above. The judge for example might be constrained to make certain bad decisions because otherwise what they do will be overturned. The bureaucrat can be fired, and they’ve got mouths to feed- these are valid moral considerations. But the institution in itself, the calcified pattern of human behavior, is no excuse. Our role is, in a sense, to constantly remind the world that actions are real, material things, and not just sequences of moves in a formal social language game. That’s part of reforming institutions.

Sixthly There’s no way to say this without sounding dorky, but that’s okay. always be an agent. Everywhere you go, everywhere you look, seek opportunities to act. Act with others if possible- organizing, strategizing, assembling. If it isn’t appropriate or possible to involve others, act alone. Regardless, act. Create clubs, institutions, unions, ideas, objects, portraits, essays. Contest elections and hold protests. Introduce your friends to each other. Make a website. Run an experiment. Write letters of condemnation. Write letters of commendation. Speak, write, photograph, record— start another fucking podcast if you must. Compliment. Give constructive criticism. Think seriously and openly hunger for that unknown thing or viewpoint you're missing. Cultivate virtues, or if you can’t do that, at least seek better vices. Even something as simple as sitting with a friend and staring into the distance, together, rather than doing it alone is a victory. Fight the ongoing dissolution of this world into passive and lonely dollops. Be the hero of your own story, even if it’s an absurd, overweening, and pretentious story. Do this not because you’re special but because we’re all special. Bring your choices and options you’d forgotten you had into consciousness.

You could put 80% of what I said in 1-6 into a single maxim: let nothing remain frozen.

III

Some housekeeping.

As I have mentioned elsewhere I have moved to Canberra to take up a post with the Australian public service. My starting date has been delayed due to the gears of bureaucracy. It is a pity because I’m no longer getting paid for my old job and have to pay rent and it’s certainly not making the money situation any easier.

Firstly, I’d like to remark that if this job ever does start (I am almost sure it will) there will probably be something of a reduction in my output as a result, since, until now, I have been working part-time. I will still try to keep putting out essays, but my output will reduce. The good news is that it’s falling from a very high baseline. I feel awful about reducing writing output, writing is my number one strategy for trying to make things better- but needs must.

Secondly, I’d like to thank all my paid contributors, most definitely including those who have recently stumped up money through a subscription or otherwise while I am between jobs. It amounted to quite a bit of money, and I wasn’t just affected by it financially, there’s something quite emotional about people choosing to help you out of pure kindness. On prices, I’ve had several people tell me that my price of $5 a month, 60 dollars a year is too low (no, really). However, I’m not going to raise it at least until inflation drags it down much lower in real terms because charging people extra for something I give away for free seems… ungrateful. I’ve set founding membership at 100 dollars per year as an easy option for those who want to pay a bit more. Making 3.5 thousand dollars a year for something I give away without charging shows how extraordinarily generous so many people are.

So yeah, thank you to all my readers, and to all who contributed money, and I apologize in advance if my output falls.