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A few months ago, I had the pleasure to interview Adam Savage (@donttrythis), former host of mythbusters. Before the interview we had a conversation where I asked him about the letters & reactions he received from academia. He told me ... [opens thread] /1
that while reactions were mostly positive, they did get some angry letters. Yet, those letters were almost always from graduate students. Grad students missed nitpicked the method in angry letters. Professors, understood that mythbusters was fighting for... 2/
science & technology in a world where it had to compete with football, reality tv, & other forms of entertaining. To me, that little tidbit spoke loads about the cultural mistakes of the academic community. 3/
Academics often say that we need more outreach. But the first ones to police outreach from academics are other academics. Many academics often fail to understand that different media satisfies different purposes and reaches different audiences. 4/
Shows like mythbusters are important because they are NOT targeted at PhD students. They are targeted at curious teenagers. Enthusing young minds is a different goal than publishing in a peer reviewed journal, and as such, it needs content that is best suited for that goal. 5/
Similarly, I get vexed when I see colleagues taking down other colleagues based on a magazine or newspaper article written to introduce people to them or some of their ideas. 6/
What scientists see as a zero sum game of competition within their field, is actually a game in a bigger field. A field where science competes for attention against sports, Hollywood, & politics. 7/
So the temptation to “take down,” colleagues participating on the popularization of scientific content, or being featured in a profile, hurts science more than it helps. The policing, naively portrayed as a defense of rigor, misses the target. 8/
Internally it is ok for scientist to be critical of each other’s work, but in the face of the wider public, they must understand that they are not fighting for their share of the pie, but for the size of the pie. That involves not policing colleagues that take 9/
a picture for a popular magazine, newspapers article that don’t include references to all previous literature, or scholars who participate in an activity with more entertainment value than scientific value. 10/
Hollywood actors know that when they are doing interviews they should always praise anyone from the movie industry, because they are representing the industry, not just themselves. That doesn’t mean they cannot be critical to one another behind closed doors 11/
Academics should take a line from that script & avoid the temptation of the takedown. For many academics, their field is their world. But fields are not only small within academia, academia is small within the world. Push the boundaries by which academia grows. Don’t police them.
