Publish or Perish
I remember my dad lamenting his scientific publish or perish workplace culture,
lightheartedly explaining to me one day how promotions were awarded:
- Each applicant's publications are placed on a weighing scale
- The promotion is awarded to the candidate with the heaviest weight
Using that simple method, I doubt that Albert Einstein would've gained a promotion in 1905,
due to the (meagre) weight of his Annus Mirabilis papers:
- On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light External (Photoelectric effect). 16 pages.
- On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat External (Brownian motion). 11 pages.
- On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies External (Special Theory of Relativity). 30 pages.
- Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon its Energy Content? (E=mc**2). 3 pages.
In fact, Albert did not score a promotion in 1905, as detailed in his
1905 Performance Appraisal:
This is a patent office, Albert. Your job is to transform written patent applications into clear and precise language, and to study applications
and pick out the new ideas of an invention. These are the priorities. Where does it say that your priorities are rewriting the rules of the Universe,
unifying space and time, unifying radiation and matter, or demonstrating the existence of atoms?
Regrettably, I had to put you down as "poor" for "works well with others" and "shares credit appropriately".
You had no co-authors on your five papers, and your citations were quite skimpy: no citations at all in your June and September paper,
only one citation in your April paper, and not much better on the others.
You wrote that your special theory of relativity came to you after a discussion with your friend Michele Besso.
But you didn't even acknowledge him in your June paper. This is an area for improvement.
You seem to lack a flare for self-promotion. Lucky for us our PR department stepped in and changed your L/c2 equation into the much more marketable E = mc2.
Based on his performance as a patent clerk, I cannot recommend Albert for a promotion at this time.
-- from Einstein's Patent Clerk Third Class Performance Appraisal of 1905
Curiously, Einstein was passed over for promotion for three long years, until he "fully mastered machine technology",
remaining a lowly Patent Clerk Third Class at the Swiss Patent Office until 1 April 1906,
when he was finally promoted to Technical Expert Second Class.
See also: Performance Appraisals from the Agile Imposition series.
The Sad Story of Giordano Bruno
In 1600 Giordano Bruno was found guilty of heresy by the Roman Inquisition.
He was then humiliatingly paraded naked through the streets of Rome (with his tongue lashed to prevent him speaking)
and finally burned at the stake, with his ashes thrown in the Tiber river.
His crime? Declaring that the stars are distant suns surrounded by their own planets.
I'm still amazed at how far ahead of his time Bruno was, his bold conjecture only
recently verified by exoplanet detections by the Kepler space telescope.
If there is a heaven, I hope Bruno smiles every time Kepler finds a new exoplanet and
I look forward to paying my respects to him at his statue,
located at the site of his execution.
Galileo was only placed under house arrest for the lesser crime of suggesting that the
Earth and planets revolve around the Sun (rather than the other way around).
Scientific Culture
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents:
it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul.
What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas
from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.
-- Planck's Principle (Scientific autobiography, 1950, p.33,97)
The process in the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences,
and then carrying out experiments or empirical observations based on those predictions.
A hypothesis is a conjecture, based on knowledge obtained while seeking answers to the question.
The hypothesis might be very specific, or it might be broad. Scientists then test hypotheses by conducting experiments or studies.
A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable, implying that it is possible to identify a possible outcome of an experiment or observation
that conflicts with predictions deduced from the hypothesis; otherwise, the hypothesis cannot be meaningfully tested.
-- from Scientific method (wikipedia)
Thankfully, Science has come a long way since the days of Galileo and Bruno.
Today, the scientific community expects:
- Rigorous scrutiny. In science, all ideas (especially the important ones) must stand up to rigorous scrutiny. The culture of science does not value dogma.
- Honesty, integrity, and objectivity.
- Credit where credit is due. Scientific research articles always provide a list of citations, crediting other scientists for ideas, techniques, and studies that were built upon by the current research. The number of citations a paper receives can help indicate how influential it was, since important research influences how other scientists think about a topic and will be cited many times in other papers.
- Adherence to ethical guidelines.
Update (see erix response below): the four Mertonian norms (often abbreviated as the CUDO-norms) are:
- Communism: all scientists should have common ownership of scientific goods (intellectual property), to promote collective collaboration; secrecy is the opposite of this norm.
- Universalism: scientific validity is independent of the sociopolitical status/personal attributes of its participants.
- Disinterestedness: scientific institutions act for the benefit of a common scientific enterprise, rather than for the personal gain of individuals within them.
- Organized skepticism: scientific claims should be exposed to critical scrutiny before being accepted: both in methodology and institutional codes of conduct.
Because it undermines science, scientists take misconduct very seriously.
In response to misconduct, the scientific community may withhold esteem, job offers, and funding,
effectively preventing the offender from participating in science.
There are also strict rules around scientific publications, as detailed at publishing process
and responsible referencing:
- After erasing all signs of your identity, your paper will be sent to 2–3 other scholars who have done research in the same field for review; they will not know who you are or who the other readers or reviewers are.
- The reviewers will spend a few months reading your submission, double-checking your methods and or claims/citations from other source; they will then send it back to the manuscript editor with commentary and one of the following votes: accept for publication; revise and resubmit (the most common outcome); reject for publication. The reviewers may further write some commentary, for example, a need to redo the experiment using slightly different equipment, or ask you to read through certain books or articles others have published and incorporate that into your work.
- The reviewers have to judge the work based on what you have written and what you use as evidence, not who you are or whether you have a fancy degree.
Though the traditional Scientific method has served us well, it seems we need
new methodologies to tackle the urgent problems facing us today.
Crisis Disciplines
On an evolutionarily miniscule timescale, cultural and technological processes transformed our species’ ecology.
These changes that have transpired over this period have come about largely to solve issues at the scale of
families, cities, and nations; only recently have cultural products begun to focus on solutions to
worldwide problems and wellbeing.
Yet we lack the ability to predict how the technologies we adopt today will impact global patterns of
beliefs and behavior tomorrow
... social interactions and external feedback make it difficult, if not impossible, to reason about
cross-scale dynamics through argument alone (i.e., these are complex adaptive systems).
Humanity faces global and existential threats including climate change, ecosystem degradation, and the prospect of nuclear war.
We likewise face a number of other challenges that impact our wellbeing, including racism, disease, famine, and economic inequality.
Our success at facing these challenges depends on our global social dynamics in a modern and technologically connected world.
Given our evolved tendencies combined with the impact of technology and population growth, there is no reason to
believe that human social dynamics will be sustainable or conducive to wellbeing if left unmanaged.
Other crisis disciplines thrive on a close integration of observational, theoretical, and empirical approaches.
Global climate models inform, and are informed by, experiments in the laboratory and the field.
Mathematics describing disease dynamics suggest treatment paradigms in medicine, which can be tested and validated.
A consolidated transdisciplinary approach to understanding and managing human collective behavior will be a monumental
challenge, yet it is a necessary one. Given that algorithms and companies are already altering our global patterns of
behavior for financial reasons, there is no safe hands-off approach.
-- from Stewardship of global collective behavior (cited by erix)
As argued convincingly above,
the traditional scientific method, requiring laborious peer review for example,
is too slow for crisis disciplines and better alternatives must therefore be urgently sought.
On a more positive note, we've been forced to do this sort of thing before - the Manhattan Project and rapid vaccine development during our current COVID-19 pandemic spring to mind.
Other Articles in This Series
References
Historical References
References Added Later
Updated 26-Sep-2021: Added paragraph on Mertonian Norms.
