Dear Magicians,

I was at a lunch in Austin when someone asked: “What’s your score on Rate My Professors?”

Everyone pulled out their phones. Within seconds, my entire teaching reputation was being evaluated by strangers.

Nobody felt guilty about this.

But ask those same students if they gossip about which research labs are good? Suddenly it’s drama. Suddenly it’s beneath serious students.

This is backwards.

Eshin Jolly, a neuroscientist here at UC San Diego who studies gossip, found something crucial: gossip is often spontaneous, and takes place when people suffer some sort of anxiety resulting from ambiguities in their social circles.

Translation: Gossip is what you do when you need information and don’t have it.

Which describes your entire undergraduate experience.

Rate My Professors is institutionalized gossip. Crowdsourced reputation management. Everyone uses it without guilt.

But gossip about research labs, toxic advisors, or exploitative programs? That’s taboo.

Why? Because Rate My Professors is contained. It can’t expose which famous professors are terrible mentors or which prestigious programs have toxic cultures.

Here’s the puzzle: How does a system maintain an illusion of meritocracy while being fundamentally arbitrary?

Answer: Convince everyone that sharing information about the arbitrariness is morally wrong.

Call it gossip. Make it taboo. Watch students stumble through the same mistakes individually instead of learning collectively.

I spent grad school avoiding “drama” and sometimes feeling superior. Then after grad school I joined a lab everyone told me was toxic. Because they gossiped. And I didn’t. It led to me being fired. But that turned out to be the greatest gift I ever got.​

So talk to other students. Learn from their mistakes. You don’t have time to make them all yourself.

You already do this for professors. Do it for everything else.

It’s the same behavior. We just pretend one is data and the other is drama.

Until next time, have a M.A.G.I.C. Week,

Brian