The limits of writing for free

Earlier this year, and to the disgust of much of the science writing community, Jonah Lehrer gave a speech at the Knight Foundation in which he apologized for his misdeeds. He was paid 20K for the appearance. Lehrer, you might recall, is the bestselling science writer who recycled old articles for pay, plagiarized stuff, and fabricated Dylan quotes he used in one of his books.

That’s the first data point. The second one is more recent. Last month, Nate Thayer started a lively debate on the future of journalism by publishing an email exchange between himself and an Atlantic editor who asked for an article for free. See for instance this analysis by Felix Salmon and a must-read response from Alexis Madrigal. But the article I’d like to highlight is Ezra Klein’s “Revenge of the sources”:

The salaries of professional journalists are built upon our success in convincing experts of all kinds working for exposure rather than pay. Now those experts have found a way to work for exposure without going through professional journalists, creating a vast expansion in the quantity and quality of content editors can get for free. [...]

Now, the people who were once sources can write their own blogs, or they send op-ed submissions or even feature articles to editors looking for vastly more content. Think about Brad DeLong’s blog, Marginal Revolution, or the Monkey Cage. This work often doesn’t pay — at least not at first — but it offers a much more reliable, predictable and controllable form of exposure. It’s a direct relationship with an audience rather than one mediated by a professional journalist.

Time for the third and last data point. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the “main UK government agency for funding research and training in engineering and the physical sciences”, declares in its funding guide (page 32) that:

Investigators are expected to participate in activities that seek to engage the public with engineering and science. Results from individual research projects may provide opportunities to engage the public through various forms of media communication.

In official terminology, this is Public Engagement, part of something called Pathways to Impact which is a mandatory component of a grant application. This guide advises the researchers – among other things – to plan a public engagement strategy, develop “an activity timeline or Gantt chart” (?), and “[t]hink about [their] public engagement role as one that is ongoing”. (On paper at least, this seems to go quite a bit beyond NSF’s “broad impact”. While “public engagement” is listed as only one way of fulfilling the “impact” requirements, in practice many researchers might not have other options available.)

In other words, academics are told to practice journalism for free – the same thing to which Nate Thayer and others reacted so strongly.

Cherry blossoms

It’s been a busy spring, with several research projects under way and/or near completion. More on that and other matters soon. Meanwhile, there’s this.

More on commenting and the publishing reform

Ingrid Daubechies asks on Math 2.0:

Suppose most mathematical research papers were freely accessible online.

Suppose a well-organized platform existed where responsible users could write comments on any paper [...]

Would this be, or evolve into, a useful tool for mathematical research? What features would be necessary, useful, or to-be-avoided-at-all-costs?

This is not a rhetorical question: a committee of the National Research Council is looking into what could be built on top of a World Digital Math Library, to make it even more useful to the mathematical community than having all the materials available. This study is being funded by the Sloan Foundation.

There’s good stuff in the comments, especially here and here. I’ve said before that having comments on papers is not my highest priority, and I can think of other improvements on a comparable scale (significant, but without overhauling the whole system) that would add more value. So, in case anyone is interested and for future reference, here’s my take on a few specific issues that seem to come up again and again. In this post, I’ll stick to relatively small stuff, generally of the kind that could be set up initially by, say, NRC without much help from the community, as per the question I started with. There are of course bigger fish to fry, from the creation of new journals to rethinking funding mechanisms for science. But that’s for another time.

Gender Bias 101 For Mathematicians

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

- JFK

MYTH 1: Sexism is perpetrated by a small number of men, typically close to retirement age, who are “against women.” Most academics, especially mathematicians, are open-minded people who are against discrimination.

FACT: Please read this study on gender bias in science hiring:

In a randomized double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student—who was randomly assigned either a male or female name—for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student. Mediation analyses indicated that the female student was less likely to be hired because she was viewed as less competent.

See also summaries and discussion here and here, and my own posts here and here. This is not an isolated study, either. See, for example, this study on gender and blind auditions in music. I’ve seen the same exact thing in my own experience and heard about it from colleagues. Statistical evidence from my own university confirms it.

The bottom line is, we are all biased. We all tend to think of women’s work as somewhat smaller, derivative, inferior. We do so unconsciously and involuntarily. We are not aware of it, nor do we notice it in others. That’s what all these studies are saying. It’s as if everyone is wearing glasses with the same tint. You’re wearing them even if you’re “open-minded” or “against discrimination”, even if you start your sentences with “I’m not against women, but…”

It is not, and never has been, only about a few individuals who forgot to catch up with the times. It’s not about trolls who say horrible things about women on unmoderated blogs. It’s about you, and me, and everyone we know. It’s about the nice, polite, progressive people who just wish that their female colleague down the hall didn’t try to be more ambitious than is good for her. (She’s clearly good, but does she really think she’s equal to X and Y? And she doesn’t have the same leadership quality, either.) It’s about that paper by two female authors that’s just not quite as groundbreaking as this other paper written by two men. In other words, you need to start by examining your own bias.

Manicure

On commenting, conversations, and epijournals

Earlier this week, I closed the comments on this blog. I was reading this post, by another blogger who shut down the comments at his place, and realized that I had wanted to do the same for some time. I really encourage you to read the entire post. This is not a matter of not keeping with the times (quite the opposite – I’ll get to it shortly), or of not having the right technical fixes for specific trolling problems. It’s about what conversations we want to have, when, where, and with whom – and when we’d rather walk out and do something else that’s more valuable.

In my own blogging experience, the feedback I get by email and in person has long been infinitely more valuable and insightful than most of the public comments I was getting here. There have been exceptions, and I’m grateful to those commenters, but there have also been entries where I deleted more comments than I approved. Instead of an attractive feature, it became a chore. And ultimately, this blog is not a community service that I am obliged to provide. I will not do it if I cannot enjoy it, and so changes had to be made.

The more I think about it, the more I agree with Dan Conover that open commenting for everyone might be on its way out as the default mode on the internet.

Still not on MathOverflow

It’s been almost 2 years now since I wrote my MathOverflow post, but it still gets plenty of clicks, a comment now and then, and other feedback by email or otherwise. The subject has in fact come up again on MO recently, here and here.

I’d like to correct the chronology that the commenter fedja suggests in the first discussion above. I wrote my post in response to a discussion that was already well under way on MO, after my blog got linked there. Generally, I don’t go out of my way to write long posts on why I’m not interested in something or other. I’d rather write about the many things that do interest me. Also, I posted it before the discussion on MO started attracting comments like this one: