Justine Zhang

so, listening to, believing, supporting survivors. learning to wade through the stupid politics of institutions that I'm increasingly embedded in. not looking away.

the survivors didn't ask for the job of dealing with callous nonsense. but I applied to be a professor, elected to contribute to an academic community.

and yes, I realize, big department etc, but when a dept has a pattern of performing egregious anti-actions that's the inference I have to make.

there are? were? people I wanted to collaborate with in CSE and now I'm wondering if I should just assume they were all looking the other way.

I'm tired from doing a PhD. I can't imagine, on top of that, dealing with what the survivors went through, and then dealing with an institution that makes it hard to do anything except look away.

from harm, but also the BS that gets thrown into calling out harms when they should be doing papers and elevating science, as if that were unambiguously more important.

this just makes me terrified, if I wasn't already, that as a professor I won't be able to protect my students.https://twitter.com/UMichCSE/status/1398066895274885121 …

also @UMichCSE apparently. lots of tags <-> lots of conversations

I'm going to be an assistant professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information, starting Fall 2022! I stopped by in 2019 and had a fabulous time zipping between @umsi, @umisr & @UMichECE. I'm looking forward to lots more of that :)

I've been looking forward to spring at the end of a long winter of epistemic crises. But maybe that's suspiciously neat. Maybe spring was asking the first question, maybe I shouldn't even think of this as winter. (& I hope this rings a bell for someone else.)

Then again, where I come from, subjectivity incurred by personal history leads to bad science. Some people learn from the start how to see initial conditions and subjectivities as inevitable and crucial.

Sometimes I wonder if this is just a grass is greener thing, i.e., everyone at a certain level of intellectual maturity comes to see their own initial conditions as limiting, and recognizing that without being paralyzed is how to move forwards.

The tools I've learned to use, the ideas I've become fluent in, hold the world accountable to abstract descriptions, rather than holding abstract descriptions accountable to the world. That seems like the wrong direction to go.

My nagging thought these days is: what I really want to do in my research is to describe the world well, only that I started out in computer science, in an impoverished set of initial conditions for doing that.

Perhaps cozily occupying a moral high ground is a sign of or recipe for not actually having the moral high ground. Or, thinking of high grounds as things that can be modeled once and for all, by some luminary, is the wrong way to go about it.

Or, the ranking that's closer to where I landed: software engineering << academic research < academic research, with *impactful* stuff. And (looks around) that's been going really well?

I resonated with how it feels nice/is crazy motivating to occupy some moral high ground, where the ordering is something like banking << tech company with a great! culture! < startup < *socially impactful* startup.

I read Abolish Silicon Valley (Wendy Liu) over the weekend. I wasn't really looking for a good description of how I felt about tech, society, and my sense of self-worth in the very recent past? But there you go.

In the last analysis, it's the interaction of representation and represented where, so to speak, the action is. (Plans & Situated Actions, Lucy Suchman)

It's in the gulf between that number in the database and the visceral, adrenaline rush of responding to a call that fear comes in, a gulf created by the abstraction of numbers. (Blockchain Chicken Farm, Xiaowei Wang)