Long ago I had decided against writing papers. I had written some 4 papers, of mediocre writing and decent idea quality. I decided against it for two reasons, one is that anything I publish on lesswrong.com or effective-altruism.com will be read by hundreds of people within 24 hours of publication.
With median number of readers being around 10 (that is about 100 times less than overall reading of lesswrong.com and maybe 50 less than effective-altruism.com)
Add to that the enormous cost of writing papers, having them reviewed, the randomness involved, and the 3 year long cost of publication, and you have sure a recipe for me not wanting to do it.
I think there are fields like math and times like before 1970 where the truth was a sufficiently strong attractor that the terrible hedging writing of the sort used in academic papers could become prominent as long as it was true. That however was before TV Internet, marketing fads, blogs, and soon google glasses and virtual reality. The truth is still an attractor, but far less strong in comparison now to aesthetics, marketing and other variables. So we have to add those adornments to true ideas, or they will perish.
Also if my ideas are all wrong, I want them to be known by enough people that they can notice, give me feedback and make me change my mind. I care about consequences. I want my ideas to be consequential, because this has positive feedback, which increases probability that I’ll hit the truth over the long run. And if I don’t, someone else will. Writing papers will give me none of that.
Books however seem to be a different beast. First of all they are long enough to convey interesting ideas (of a more philosophical type) second, though they also follow exponential distributions, there are several marketing strategies that can aid publication and increase number of readers. They can be, like papers and unlike blogs, cited as decent academic evidence in good standing.
They can be monetized as well, whereas one must pay to publish papers.
In 2009 I have thus convinced myself that writing books is superior to writing papers, so I stopped writing papers and wrote a book.
Two top academics (Bostrom and Deacon) recently recommended to me to write papers, I decided to revisit the case for papers versus books.
So it’s 2015.
On all accounts it seems to me that the case for papers is worse today than in 2008.
The power law continues for papers. Publishing them continues to be costly.
Not paying to have them public is shooting oneself on the foot.
Due to Kindle etc, authors have more control and a greater share of the money that goes for books. Though less money goes to printed books, more goes to authors.
Paper’s usage decays over time for most authors, specially on empirical matters. Even papers by authors as brilliant as Hilary Putnam as less read today than before.
Books can be eternalized. People still read “word and object”.
With exceptions that publish papers on places like arxiv.org (Garrett Lisi, Tegmark, Tononi) I don’t know who rose to intellectual prominence via papers in the last many years.
I am glad to hear counterarguments, because as it stands, this seems like the ultimate no-brainer, there is not a single thing papers are better than books for.
Number of readers
Conveying complex ideas
Getting feedback on ideas
Money
Career prospects
Author’s name being remembered and sought after
Resilience over long stretches of time
Compatibility with Technological advances (current and expected)
Odds of finding collaborators in virtue of having written them.
The few properties like “peer feedback” and “short and easier to write” that papers beat books at have are completely dominated by blogging, specially on public science or philosophy blogs.
My current evaluation is that in 2008 writing books was substantially better than papers, in 2015 I think writing books and not papers is the secret sauce of being a successful academic.
But I’m happy to be convinced otherwise if you think the arguments above don’t hold, or there are even stronger ones I forgot to consider that dominate over them all.
Is it possible to successfully publish philosophy books if you are not widely published in journals? My suspicion is that it would be very difficult. It depends, of course, on what type of books you aim to publish. If they are directed at the philosophical community, there will likely be widespread confusion as to why you did not first publish your ideas in a paper so that you could receive criticism and have the opportunity to really work through the arguments against your positions. It would be very odd indeed for a philosopher to write books directed at professional philosophers if he never publishes papers.
However, if you aim to write for the popular audience, that concern may not hold any weight. I would be curious to know, however, whom you see as your future employer? If you are going to be working for a research institution, there will almost certainly be a requirement that you publish your work in journals. It may be possible, however, to work for a teaching institution and have a minimal publishing requirement, thus the majority of your writing could be done in the form of books for the popular audience. You may still have difficulty gaining credibility before publishers, however.
Edit: I just realized that you never actually said your field was philosophy. So, if it is another field, take my post lightly.
More important than my field not being philosophy anymore (though I have two degrees in philosophy, and identify as a philosopher) the question you could have asked there is why would you want a philosophical audience to begin with? Seems to me there is more low hanging fruits in nearly any other area in terms of people who could become EAs. Philosophers have an easier time doing that, but attracting the top people in econ, literature, visual arts and others who may enjoy reading the occasional public science books is much less replaceable.
This line of reasoning seems strong, but seriously conflicts with academics’ current behaviour, so I’d be interested to see if they have much useful to say in response.
I am an academic and I have published about 50 papers and one book. I think the book was helpful in getting more popular media articles. However, my impression is that the typical academic book only sells a few hundred copies. One could hope for a few more reads than this because of libraries, but some people buy a book and do not read it. As for papers, there is a big difference between conference and journal. I could believe that the median paper only get zero citations because the median paper is a conference paper. However, even relatively low-ranked journals have an impact factor of one, which means an average of five citations over five years. And if you think about it, if the average paper has 30 references, that means that the average paper also get cited 30 times. And therefore the average journal article would be cited significantly more. Furthermore, in my experience on sites like Research Gate and Academia.edu, papers typically have one-two orders of magnitude more reads than citations. So I would guess the average journal article gets read thousands of times. I think this is significantly more than the typical academic book or LessWrong. But I don’t have a lot of hard data here, so I am happy to update.
As for being successful in academia, I think only doing books would be very risky. People pay some attention to total citations, and this would likely be higher with more pieces of work (papers versus book). Also the h index is the number of publications that have been cited at least that number of times (see Bostrom’s). One rule of thumb is achieving and h index of 12 in order to get tenure. Publishing significantly more than 12 books before tenure sounds difficult. Maybe evaluators would change their metrics, but I would not count on it.
Papers X Books
Long ago I had decided against writing papers. I had written some 4 papers, of mediocre writing and decent idea quality. I decided against it for two reasons, one is that anything I publish on lesswrong.com or effective-altruism.com will be read by hundreds of people within 24 hours of publication.
The other is that Paper reading and citation follow a power law distribution: http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.3890
With median number of readers being around 10 (that is about 100 times less than overall reading of lesswrong.com and maybe 50 less than effective-altruism.com)
Add to that the enormous cost of writing papers, having them reviewed, the randomness involved, and the 3 year long cost of publication, and you have sure a recipe for me not wanting to do it.
I think there are fields like math and times like before 1970 where the truth was a sufficiently strong attractor that the terrible hedging writing of the sort used in academic papers could become prominent as long as it was true. That however was before TV Internet, marketing fads, blogs, and soon google glasses and virtual reality. The truth is still an attractor, but far less strong in comparison now to aesthetics, marketing and other variables. So we have to add those adornments to true ideas, or they will perish. Also if my ideas are all wrong, I want them to be known by enough people that they can notice, give me feedback and make me change my mind. I care about consequences. I want my ideas to be consequential, because this has positive feedback, which increases probability that I’ll hit the truth over the long run. And if I don’t, someone else will. Writing papers will give me none of that.
Books however seem to be a different beast. First of all they are long enough to convey interesting ideas (of a more philosophical type) second, though they also follow exponential distributions, there are several marketing strategies that can aid publication and increase number of readers. They can be, like papers and unlike blogs, cited as decent academic evidence in good standing.
They can be monetized as well, whereas one must pay to publish papers.
In 2009 I have thus convinced myself that writing books is superior to writing papers, so I stopped writing papers and wrote a book.
Two top academics (Bostrom and Deacon) recently recommended to me to write papers, I decided to revisit the case for papers versus books.
So it’s 2015. On all accounts it seems to me that the case for papers is worse today than in 2008.
The power law continues for papers. Publishing them continues to be costly. Not paying to have them public is shooting oneself on the foot. Due to Kindle etc, authors have more control and a greater share of the money that goes for books. Though less money goes to printed books, more goes to authors. Paper’s usage decays over time for most authors, specially on empirical matters. Even papers by authors as brilliant as Hilary Putnam as less read today than before. Books can be eternalized. People still read “word and object”.
With exceptions that publish papers on places like arxiv.org (Garrett Lisi, Tegmark, Tononi) I don’t know who rose to intellectual prominence via papers in the last many years.
I am glad to hear counterarguments, because as it stands, this seems like the ultimate no-brainer, there is not a single thing papers are better than books for.
Number of readers
Conveying complex ideas
Getting feedback on ideas
Money
Career prospects
Author’s name being remembered and sought after
Resilience over long stretches of time
Compatibility with Technological advances (current and expected)
Odds of finding collaborators in virtue of having written them.
The few properties like “peer feedback” and “short and easier to write” that papers beat books at have are completely dominated by blogging, specially on public science or philosophy blogs.
My current evaluation is that in 2008 writing books was substantially better than papers, in 2015 I think writing books and not papers is the secret sauce of being a successful academic.
But I’m happy to be convinced otherwise if you think the arguments above don’t hold, or there are even stronger ones I forgot to consider that dominate over them all.
Is it possible to successfully publish philosophy books if you are not widely published in journals? My suspicion is that it would be very difficult. It depends, of course, on what type of books you aim to publish. If they are directed at the philosophical community, there will likely be widespread confusion as to why you did not first publish your ideas in a paper so that you could receive criticism and have the opportunity to really work through the arguments against your positions. It would be very odd indeed for a philosopher to write books directed at professional philosophers if he never publishes papers.
However, if you aim to write for the popular audience, that concern may not hold any weight. I would be curious to know, however, whom you see as your future employer? If you are going to be working for a research institution, there will almost certainly be a requirement that you publish your work in journals. It may be possible, however, to work for a teaching institution and have a minimal publishing requirement, thus the majority of your writing could be done in the form of books for the popular audience. You may still have difficulty gaining credibility before publishers, however.
Edit: I just realized that you never actually said your field was philosophy. So, if it is another field, take my post lightly.
More important than my field not being philosophy anymore (though I have two degrees in philosophy, and identify as a philosopher) the question you could have asked there is why would you want a philosophical audience to begin with? Seems to me there is more low hanging fruits in nearly any other area in terms of people who could become EAs. Philosophers have an easier time doing that, but attracting the top people in econ, literature, visual arts and others who may enjoy reading the occasional public science books is much less replaceable.
This line of reasoning seems strong, but seriously conflicts with academics’ current behaviour, so I’d be interested to see if they have much useful to say in response.
I am an academic and I have published about 50 papers and one book. I think the book was helpful in getting more popular media articles. However, my impression is that the typical academic book only sells a few hundred copies. One could hope for a few more reads than this because of libraries, but some people buy a book and do not read it. As for papers, there is a big difference between conference and journal. I could believe that the median paper only get zero citations because the median paper is a conference paper. However, even relatively low-ranked journals have an impact factor of one, which means an average of five citations over five years. And if you think about it, if the average paper has 30 references, that means that the average paper also get cited 30 times. And therefore the average journal article would be cited significantly more. Furthermore, in my experience on sites like Research Gate and Academia.edu, papers typically have one-two orders of magnitude more reads than citations. So I would guess the average journal article gets read thousands of times. I think this is significantly more than the typical academic book or LessWrong. But I don’t have a lot of hard data here, so I am happy to update.
As for being successful in academia, I think only doing books would be very risky. People pay some attention to total citations, and this would likely be higher with more pieces of work (papers versus book). Also the h index is the number of publications that have been cited at least that number of times (see Bostrom’s). One rule of thumb is achieving and h index of 12 in order to get tenure. Publishing significantly more than 12 books before tenure sounds difficult. Maybe evaluators would change their metrics, but I would not count on it.