@skdh I'm not sure whether to defend my statement here, or over in your thread (with much greater reach). How about I do it here, and quote-tweet it over there, sound reasonable?
@skdh When I wrote that, I considered saying something like "...and (to a certain extent) optimize...", but one of my pet peeves is people who add weasel-word qualifiers to everything in an attempt to control perception, so I didn't.
@skdh This is because I have total faith that nobody on Twitter would ever willfully interpret my statement in the most jaundiced possible way. That never happens. 😉
@skdh Because I totally agree, and have often made clear, that perverse incentives, combined with a hypercompetitive environment, are a serious problem in academic culture, with fundamental physics being something of a poster child for the issue.
@skdh Note that I did not call this a problem with "science", because it isn't. The academic culture surrounding science is not itself the science. Science is just fine, thank you very much, and conflating science with culture is one of the things creating the problems, IMO.
@skdh However (and this is really the essence of my comment), scientists inevitably work within the framework of a broader culture, in the case of this discussion an academic culture, but it could be corporate or political or what have you.
@skdh Because of course we do! How could it possibly be otherwise?
@skdh So. My goal is to do good science, which is (to adopt physics language) a cultural invariant. My job as a scientist is to work out how it is, not how I think it should be. The universe is the universe, and does not give a toss about our viewpoint on the subject.
@skdh But I necessarily do so in a cooperative setting, with other evolved monkeys like me. Because I have no choice, and because it works better.
@skdh I could work alone in my basement, but all of us have seen way too many products of *that* to have any illusion that it ends well.
@skdh Cooperative science works better -- and this is true even if you only ever write single-author papers. We all know this. Doing science well requires communication, and cooperation.
The facts don't care about this, but we do. Because we get to the facts better that way.
The facts don't care about this, but we do. Because we get to the facts better that way.
@skdh So. To do science well, we have to be good at communicating, and at least a little good at cooperating.
@skdh I can think of a lot of truly brilliant people whose science, in the end, got nowhere because they were incapable of, or unwilling to learn to cooperate.
@skdh So here's my (perhaps controversial) thesis: Any cooperative structure necessarily includes incentives, or (broadly defined) metrics.
@skdh This is neither good nor bad per se, it simply comes with the territory. Part of doing good science is being able to navigate that, because if you aren't, you won't be doing science for long, at least not as a professional.
@skdh To pretend you don't care about this is just as foolish an extreme as caring too much about it (and we all know examples of the latter problem as well).
@skdh You have to be able to hit a functional middle. No amount of empty renown is going to turn a wrong idea into a right one, for nature cannot be fooled. But a right idea that languishes unnoticed is of no use to anyone.
@skdh When we work as mentors, IMO an important part of the job is teaching the skills of scientific communication and cooperation. People (weirldy) like to act as if such things are inherently corrupt. Bollocks!
@skdh Being good at getting a good idea noticed is part of the job. Do you seriously disagree with this?
