A crisis, and a renewal, of faith

Many things have been hard about the last month, for many people, but I suffered a particularly personal and to me, cruel blow. After submitting my research on a new model of national satisfaction to a journal that seemed interested, I received feedback from a reviewer that was so vitriolic that the journal editor herself apologized for it – but also, consequently, politely declined the paper.

This might have been a particularly painful, but perhaps not unknown experience for anyone who is in the business of publishing peer-reviewed research. Except in this case it happened despite my, in turn politely, attempting to point out that the reviewer's core complaints were all fundamentally incorrect. Like, that my results were too "subjective." Even though the single point of the paper – described, I thought quite clearly, in literally the title – was to use algorithmic methods that remove human judgement, and the biases that come with it. Or, that the target of my criticism had "extensive research to ensure its reliability." Which seemed to be waved like a crucifix against my empirical claim that – well, I've done some more research, and your 13-year-old results are measurably bad now. But to no avail.

I'll try not to relitigate the too-many points of an incensed, ad-hominem, and flatly wrong rejection of my work, but the point is that despite all of the outright factual wrongness of it, it hurt. And perhaps, even more badly than I at first thought, because I stopped talking about what I was doing. To other people. To you. Just stopped. And worse than that, because I thought, with no small sincerity, that if I didn't have this, well – I didn't have anything. There was no contribution that I was making, in this time when contribution is so desperately needed, and so I should simply get out of the way.

I tell you this because, emotionally, it does make me feel better. But I also tell you this because, intellectually, I trust that something similar may, or will, happen to you as well. And I want to tell you not just what happened, but what came afterwards.

Today, I spent almost ten hours at the truly gorgeous Planet Word Museum in DC, attending the National Conference on Citizenship. I had been invited by the organizer and thought it would be polite to go, in a way that made me sort of ignore the substance of the conference. But I had only been there for an hour before my spirit started to come back to me.

There were people organizing citizen's assemblies – randomly selected, informal congresses of people gathered to deliberate policies for their state, and then communicate their conclusions to the elected legislature. There were whole suites of organizations advocating, organizing, and suing to save federal datasets from perversion or outright destruction. There were artists, organizing other artists to make their work political, there were at least a dozen ex-USAID members, there were professors and researchers and politicians and advocates and every one of them was in deadly, deadly earnest about the inescapable urgency of our mission. We must create a country where we work together, in good faith. At one point, or another – and no matter what happens in between – we simply must.

As I step out of the glow of the camaraderie, I find myself with my usual disappointment that so many people were there to Study, or to Discuss – not to Overturn, or to Transform, or to Prevail. But today, it was still what I needed: a building full of colleagues, of people with whom I had common and enthusiastic cause, who expressed sincere interest and admiration for the work that I had done, because they believed – like I do – that it can Make a Difference.

Work that, yes, somebody else had hated. But that was just one person. And they were not here.

It was such a revitalizing experience for me that I actually feed bad telling you about it after the fact, knowing you would have to wait 364 days until the next one – but I am also certain that before then, you will be able to find someone who can give you back the energy you thought you might have lost, if you simply go looking for someone who believes in the same causes that you do.

And I hope that you do.