Ah yes, I suspected that the incentive structure of academic philosophy and publishing in a philosophy journal was a big part of the issue here.
I’d be happy to help with your next paper if you want to talk through the ideas. I’d be less excited to contribute if you’ve already finished a draft. I feel that collaboration is more useful in the idea development stage than the polishing stage. At that point, there’s a lot of real sunk cost so outside contributions on the important parts of the argument become much less useful. Actually, I think that’s exactly what you described in being unable to really take your advisor’s good advice into account in framing this paper because it came too late in the process.
Just to clarify, I did change the argument after meeting with my supervisor, which is reflected in the final published draft. He said he didn’t think timing was the issue, so I figured out a better way to word the argument. The things I didn’t change were the argument title and paper title. I left “the timing problem” as the name for those, even though the argument wasn’t as obviously about timing anymore, because I thought changing the names might be a problem (and it’s entirely possible I was wrong about that). I thought that’s what you had noticed: that the name of the argument didn’t fully suit the argument itself. That’s because I changed the argument but not the name of it.
Yes, I understood all of that and that’s what I was referring to.
That change of argument but not title or abstract were exactly why I found the post so frustrating. The abstract didn’t actually give a good argument, because you’d changed the central argument but couldn’t change the title and didn’t change the abstract that much. I suspected that the practices and incentives of academic philosophy were somehow at fault. They were.
Ah yes, I suspected that the incentive structure of academic philosophy and publishing in a philosophy journal was a big part of the issue here.
I’d be happy to help with your next paper if you want to talk through the ideas. I’d be less excited to contribute if you’ve already finished a draft. I feel that collaboration is more useful in the idea development stage than the polishing stage. At that point, there’s a lot of real sunk cost so outside contributions on the important parts of the argument become much less useful. Actually, I think that’s exactly what you described in being unable to really take your advisor’s good advice into account in framing this paper because it came too late in the process.
Just to clarify, I did change the argument after meeting with my supervisor, which is reflected in the final published draft. He said he didn’t think timing was the issue, so I figured out a better way to word the argument. The things I didn’t change were the argument title and paper title. I left “the timing problem” as the name for those, even though the argument wasn’t as obviously about timing anymore, because I thought changing the names might be a problem (and it’s entirely possible I was wrong about that). I thought that’s what you had noticed: that the name of the argument didn’t fully suit the argument itself. That’s because I changed the argument but not the name of it.
Yes, I understood all of that and that’s what I was referring to.
That change of argument but not title or abstract were exactly why I found the post so frustrating. The abstract didn’t actually give a good argument, because you’d changed the central argument but couldn’t change the title and didn’t change the abstract that much. I suspected that the practices and incentives of academic philosophy were somehow at fault. They were.