I think a common mistake for researchers/analysts outside of academia[1] is that they don’t focus enough on trying to make their research popular. Eg they don’t do enough to actively promote their research, or writing their research in a way that’s easy to become popular. I talked to someone (a fairly senior researcher) about this, and he said he doesn’t care about mass outreach given that only cares about his research being built upon by ~5 people. I asked him if he knows who those 5 people are and could email them; he said no.
I think this is a systematic mistake most of the time. It’s true that your impact often routes through a small number of people. However, only some of the time would you know who the decisionmakers are ahead of time (eg X philanthropic fund should fund Y project, B regulator should loosen regulations in C domain), and have a plan for directly reaching them. For the other cases, you probably need to reach at minimum thousands of vaguely-related/vaguely-interested people before the ~5 most relevant people for your research would come across your research.
Furthermore, popularity has other advantages:
If many people read your writing, it’s more likely someone else can discover empirical mistakes, logical errors, or (on the upside) unexpected connections. If 100 randos read your article, it’s unlikely any of them can discover a critical mistake. This becomes much more likely at 10,000+ randos.
writing for a semi-popular audience forces some degree of simplicity and a different type of rigor. If you write for “informed people” or “vaguely related experts” as opposed to people in your subsubfield, you have less shared assumptions, and are forced to use less jargon and be more precise about your claims.
Recruitment and talent attraction. If your research agenda is good, you want other people to work on it. Popular writing is one of the best ways to get other smart people (with or without directly relevant expertise) to notice a problem exists and decide to dedicate time to it.
Personal career benefits: funders you haven’t heard of before (and who haven’t heard of you) are more likely to discover you and proactively offer funding. Employers working on related fields, or just who like your reasoning style, are more likely to actively recruit you.
Now of course it’s possible to aim too much for popularity, and Goodhart on that. For example, by focusing on research topics that’s popular rather than important, or on research directions/framings that’s memetically fit rather than correct. Obsessing over metrics can also be bad for having the space to explore newer and more confusing ideas.
Nonetheless, on balance I think most researchers should be aware of what makes their research popular and in part gravitate towards that. Maybe I think they should spend >10% of their time on publicizing their work (not including “proof of work” style paper writing, grant applications, etc), whereas instead many ppl seem to spend <5%.
[1] Academia (and for that matter, for-profit research within a company) has this problem less because usually your peer group and potential collaborators in your sub-subfield are more well-defined and known to you. Also, academics care less about impact. Even so, I think ppl are leaving impact (and possibly career success) on the table by not being more popular. Eg if you work in theoretical econ you should aspire to have your theories be applied by applied economists, if you work on the evolutionary dynamics of bees you should want to be read by people working on ants, if you work on themes in Renaissance art history you should aspire to be read by people studying Renaissance political philosophy, etc.
This means (imo) academics should be more willing to have academic blogs and Twitter threads, and tolerate (or even seek out) media coverage of their work.
I think a common mistake for researchers/analysts outside of academia[1] is that they don’t focus enough on trying to make their research popular. Eg they don’t do enough to actively promote their research, or writing their research in a way that’s easy to become popular. I talked to someone (a fairly senior researcher) about this, and he said he doesn’t care about mass outreach given that only cares about his research being built upon by ~5 people. I asked him if he knows who those 5 people are and could email them; he said no.
I think this is a systematic mistake most of the time. It’s true that your impact often routes through a small number of people. However, only some of the time would you know who the decisionmakers are ahead of time (eg X philanthropic fund should fund Y project, B regulator should loosen regulations in C domain), and have a plan for directly reaching them. For the other cases, you probably need to reach at minimum thousands of vaguely-related/vaguely-interested people before the ~5 most relevant people for your research would come across your research.
Furthermore, popularity has other advantages:
If many people read your writing, it’s more likely someone else can discover empirical mistakes, logical errors, or (on the upside) unexpected connections. If 100 randos read your article, it’s unlikely any of them can discover a critical mistake. This becomes much more likely at 10,000+ randos.
writing for a semi-popular audience forces some degree of simplicity and a different type of rigor. If you write for “informed people” or “vaguely related experts” as opposed to people in your subsubfield, you have less shared assumptions, and are forced to use less jargon and be more precise about your claims.
Recruitment and talent attraction. If your research agenda is good, you want other people to work on it. Popular writing is one of the best ways to get other smart people (with or without directly relevant expertise) to notice a problem exists and decide to dedicate time to it.
Personal career benefits: funders you haven’t heard of before (and who haven’t heard of you) are more likely to discover you and proactively offer funding. Employers working on related fields, or just who like your reasoning style, are more likely to actively recruit you.
Now of course it’s possible to aim too much for popularity, and Goodhart on that. For example, by focusing on research topics that’s popular rather than important, or on research directions/framings that’s memetically fit rather than correct. Obsessing over metrics can also be bad for having the space to explore newer and more confusing ideas.
Nonetheless, on balance I think most researchers should be aware of what makes their research popular and in part gravitate towards that. Maybe I think they should spend >10% of their time on publicizing their work (not including “proof of work” style paper writing, grant applications, etc), whereas instead many ppl seem to spend <5%.
[1] Academia (and for that matter, for-profit research within a company) has this problem less because usually your peer group and potential collaborators in your sub-subfield are more well-defined and known to you. Also, academics care less about impact. Even so, I think ppl are leaving impact (and possibly career success) on the table by not being more popular. Eg if you work in theoretical econ you should aspire to have your theories be applied by applied economists, if you work on the evolutionary dynamics of bees you should want to be read by people working on ants, if you work on themes in Renaissance art history you should aspire to be read by people studying Renaissance political philosophy, etc.
This means (imo) academics should be more willing to have academic blogs and Twitter threads, and tolerate (or even seek out) media coverage of their work.