Thanks Charles! I think of your two options I most closely mean (1). For evidence I don’t mean 2:
“Optimize almost exclusively for compelling publications; for some specific goals these will need to be high-impact publications.”
My attempt to restate my position would be something like: “Academic incentives are very strong and its not obvious from the inside when they are influencing your actions. If you’re not careful, they will make you do dumb things. To combat this, you should be very deliberate and proactive in defining what you want and how you want it. In some cases this might involve pushing against pub incentives, in other cases it might involve optimizing for following them really really hard. What you want to avoid is telling yourself the reason for doing something is A, while the real reason is B, where B is usually something related to academic incentives. Publishing good papers is not the problem, deluding yourself is.”
Publishing good papers is not the problem, deluding yourself is.
Big +1 to this. Doing things you don’t see as a priority but which other people are excited about is fine. You can view it as kind of a trade: you work on something the research community cares about, and the research community is more likely to listen on (and work on) things you care about in the future.
But to make a difference you do eventually need to work on things that you find impactful, so you don’t want to pollute your own research taste by implicitly absorbing incentives or others opinions unquestioningly.
Thanks Charles! I think of your two options I most closely mean (1). For evidence I don’t mean 2: “Optimize almost exclusively for compelling publications; for some specific goals these will need to be high-impact publications.”
My attempt to restate my position would be something like: “Academic incentives are very strong and its not obvious from the inside when they are influencing your actions. If you’re not careful, they will make you do dumb things. To combat this, you should be very deliberate and proactive in defining what you want and how you want it. In some cases this might involve pushing against pub incentives, in other cases it might involve optimizing for following them really really hard. What you want to avoid is telling yourself the reason for doing something is A, while the real reason is B, where B is usually something related to academic incentives. Publishing good papers is not the problem, deluding yourself is.”
Big +1 to this. Doing things you don’t see as a priority but which other people are excited about is fine. You can view it as kind of a trade: you work on something the research community cares about, and the research community is more likely to listen on (and work on) things you care about in the future.
But to make a difference you do eventually need to work on things that you find impactful, so you don’t want to pollute your own research taste by implicitly absorbing incentives or others opinions unquestioningly.