Academic Productivity

Michael Nielsen has a great post on why open science is failing to take off. His main point is that science was never that open to start with, but thanks to the communication needs of the time and the technology available people developed the peer review system. A system that is now hauting us, while top scientists disregard current technology (mostly web-based) that makes the current system look silly.

By the way, Nielsen knows what he is talking about; he wrote the standard text on quantum computation the most highly cited physics publication of the last 25 years according to Google Scholar.

The first example he uses is Nature’s open peer review system:

Inspired by the success of amazon.com and similar sites, several organizations have created comment sites where scientists can share their opinions of scientific papers. Perhaps the best-known was Nature’s 2006 trial of open commentary on papers undergoing peer review at Nature. The trial was not a success. Nature’s final report terminating the trial explained: There was a significant level of expressed interest in open peer review… A small majority of those authors who did participate received comments, but typically very few, despite significant web traffic. Most comments were not technically substantive. Feedback suggests that there is a marked reluctance among researchers to offer open comments.

His second example is the usual suspect: wikipedia.

Seigenthaler has described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool".

Nielsen marvels as scientists missing the point of wikipedia:

[...] You’ve bought into the current game, and take it for granted that science is only about publishing in specialized scientific journals. But if you take a broader view, you believe science is about discovering how the world works, and sharing that understanding with the rest of humanity.

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I think if we all put together a list, it’s going to be easy to identify these troublemakers and avoid them. Actually, a better question would be what are the activities that get the most bang for your time, but they may vary a lot from discipline to discipline. Straightforward application of Pareto’s principle should go a long way.

By the way, is any of you keeping any kind of log of where your time goes? Or running any application like rescueTime?

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I was recently involved in a project where I needed to examine some research literature on learning and memory. In particular, I was investigating the spaced learning effect on memory. Memory research has been central to psychology for as long as  psychology has existed as an academic discipline, and the spacing effect (also known as distributed practice) has been studied for well over an hundred years. Studies of the spacing effect have shown that when you space learning over separate learning intervals, long term retention is normally much higher compared with the equivalent amount of training from a single or “massed” session. This effect is robust across different time scales, different kinds of learning, and is even true across different species. Another effect, not quite as well studied, is the testing effect. Repeated testing over time is also beneficial for learning, mainly because testing involves effortful memory retrieval, which is advantageous for the formation of long term memories.

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I found interesting this paper by Kanazawa (2004). It proposes that  ‘both crime and genius stem from men’s evolved psychological mechanism which compels them to be highly competitive in early adulthood but ‘‘turns off’’ when they get married and have children.’ He thinks testosterone may be one reason for productivity.

This part is particularly moving:

Perhaps the tragic life of the French mathematician Evariste Galois (1811–1832) best illustrates my argument (Singh, 1997, pp. 210–228). Despite the fact that he died at age 20, Galois made a large number of significant contributions to mathematics. (His work was integral to Andrew Wiles’ celebrated proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1994.) Galois was involved in an affair, and the woman’s fiance challenged him to a duel. The night before the duel, Galois stayed up all night and wrote down all of his mathematical ideas on paper. (It is due to these notes, written on the last night of his life, that many of Galois’ ideas survived to the posterity.) From  other comments written on the paper, next to a series of mathematical notations, however, it is clear that Galois spent the night, intensely thinking about the woman over whom he was to have a duel the next morning. Something compelled this young man of 20 to produce so many brilliant mathematical ideas in one night and then go to a duel the next morning, ready to kill or be killed over a woman. It is my contention that the same psychological mechanism was responsible for both.

So _IF_ Kanazawa is right, other than staying single and surrounded by desirable partners, what can one do? Well, maybe sports are a good way to pump some testosterone in. It makes sense: many people I know, myself included, feel more productive after exercising. More so if it involves any kind of controlled risk or competitive activities.

Another good thing for testosterone levels: dancing (with a partner).

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I found a (badly scanned) paper on how to concentrate. It’s a so-so article, but there is at least one gem in it:

remember that solitude has always been, in all the history of mental achievement, a requisite for great work. (…) The great poems written in lonely garrets—the masterpiece paintings conceived by the artist amid the fields—the divine harmonies first heard by the musician communing with the stars—the sublime oration which first stirred the soul of the orator as he tramped in the forest—all attest that the best comes to man when he is alone.

This is interesting. I always found that some people complained I spent too much time in front of the computer… maybe that is what it means to be lonely. The funny thing is that nowadays it is a lot harder to be alone. Maybe alone is just a romantic surrogate for ‘uninterrupted’ I don’t think the mood implications of lonely help in any way, unless you are producing poetry, music or plastic arts… but certainly not papers.

So, do you feel lonely? Do you seek time apart from ‘the world’? It’s true that most academics’ social lives suck (not mine ). But what is the right causal path here? Do we kill our social lives so we can get ‘in the state’ more often and be productive? Or is it the other way around: we are ‘in the state’ so often that social relationships just die off?

One thing is true: having an internet connection provides constant, second-class (in the sense that it’s not as rich as real-life interaction) social stimulation; being in front of the computer is not a certain way to achieve ‘the state’ (lonely or not). But maybe a good solution is to concentrate a lot (no surrogate activities, like me writing this blog post while I should finishing up my paper), and then get a lot of first-class, ‘live person’ social action.

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