Students at the University of Cambridge. (Photo by Graeme Robertson/Getty Images)
An unexpected post went viral this weekend. In it, a Cambridge University student shared that she had completed her Ph.D. The woman in question, Dr. Ally Louks, celebrated the completion of her dissertation with an unassuming tweet that somehow sparked outrage online.
Take a look and see if you can decipher why:
At the time of writing, this post has been viewed over 24 million times and has angered many people.
Guess why?
Well, it’s his duty. Titled “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose,” it focused on the use of perfume in literature – and a large Twitter/X community took umbrage.
This is an interesting, if upsetting, phenomenon that shows how disconnected from reality online communities are and how social media can enable some of the worst aspects of humanity.
What really happened with Dr. Ally Louk and her doctorate in “Politics of Smell”?
At first glance, there is nothing particularly remarkable about Dr. Ally Louk’s social media post. This was a person who had spent several years studying for her doctorate and celebrating the conclusion of her dissertation. Regular post-grad stuff, really.
At one point, this caught the attention of a supposedly right-wing segment of Twitter/X and blew up.
Now, we’re not going to share links to specific tweets posting hateful comments because it highlights and encourages toxic behavior, but thousands of people have questioned Dr. Louk’s work on the policy of smell, saying it added “nothing of value” and was “a completely ridiculous waste of academic resources, time and energy.”
Many went much further, including sexist, aggressive and vicious comments.
Even if there was some who supported and celebrated Dr. Louks’ achievements, the vast majority of posters were negative.
This meme sums up the reaction perfectly:
While it is upsetting that Dr. Ally Louks suffered such a torrent of abuse, it provides a perfect example of how social media can distance people from reality and encourage some of the worst aspects of human nature.
What the Ph.D. Backlash on “The Politics of Smell” Means
At first glance, it is understandable that some people might react negatively to an article titled “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose.”
This might seem niche just for the sake of it, a borderline parody of academia, but here’s the thing: this article is not intended for a broad audience. This is research intended solely for expert consumption, as Dr. Ally Louks herself points out:
As Dr Louks explains, this is written for others in his field, of course lay people will find it dense and nonsensical – that is the nature of specific academic writing.
Complaining about this is like seeing a snippet of a paper on quantum mechanics and moaning that you don’t understand. The politics of smell thesis is simply not suited to the kind of large-scale consumption that the social media storm has pushed it toward.
However, the biggest problem, and what might spark a negative reaction to scent paper, also lies in the way social media inflates people’s egos.
Studies show that people who share articles online and just think they are experts have too much confidence in their own knowledge. Combine this with the Dunning-Kruger effecta cognitive bias in which people believe they know more than they do, and you get a mass of individuals unwavering in their perception of correctness.
In the United States, about 1.3% of the population has a doctorate. This represents approximately 4.5 million people. A small amount. More than five times that number of people saw Dr. Ally Louks’ original tweet about finishing her dissertation on the politics of smell.
We can safely assume that the vast majority of people commenting under his post do not have PhDs and probably do not know what the nature of academic research entails.
Yet, because of social media, they have an inflated sense of their own rightness and understanding of this world.
The reaction to Dr. Ally Louks’ olfactory doctorate unfortunately shows the worst side of the Internet. The party who thinks they know better than the experts, who completely misjudges the interest of a message and the one who resorts to vile insults during discussions.
Although the Internet has brought us many positive things, the very nature and structure of social media does not prioritize understanding and nuance – something that was made clear by the reaction to Dr. Ally’s thesis Louks on the politics of smell.