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Why Scientists Should Blog

scienceofblogging.com

18 pointsig116 comments

I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, the peer review system was designed specifically to keep out the low-quality material that blogs let through for free because of their more inherently democractic nature; I can't be the only one who thinks many people who blog (and even some who appear on HN) are not presenting useful enough or clear enough material to be worth reading by any audience. People's lives are finite and time spent reading published work that is useless detracts from time spent reading useful work that helps in one's own line of inquiry.

Smooth talking bullshitters like Ron Jeffries who promote objectively useless or even counterproductive methods abound, taking bandwidth away from more useful ideas. You need only remind yourself of this exchange:

http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s...

http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/09/sudoku-in-coders-at-w...

It will be sad the day a Ron Jeffries of the academic world wastes as much of other people's time reading his posts.

But has that day come already? On the other hand, it's not like the peer review system is immune to gaming and corruption either. We've got people chopping whatever work they've done into least-publishable-units and objectively good work being ignored because it is not like the other peer-reviewed work out there. And since most people working in a scientific field have not also gone through educating themselves against bullshit techniques (i.e., rationalism), we get plenty of bad papers that only serve to lengthen CVs (An aside: instead of chemistry, physics, computer science or other subjects, I think it is much better for one to begin a scientific education with a course in _rationalism_).

In the meantime, I think a useful course of action would be to just do what sensible people are already doing, which is to throw our hands up with respect to relying on any _system_, be it blogging or peer review, as a channel for useful information and continue to be unbiased about evaluating the usefulness of any communication, disregarding its source. As for blogging your scientific work, sure, go ahead, but I would be as responsible about it as I would a peer-reviewed publication, if not more, simply because of the larger audience. This is not to say that it decreases the set work you can put out in blog form, as another fundamental difference is in how finished the work in a blog versus a paper is. But place ample disclaimers if you do frame it as science.

I think the root problem is really the motivation for blogging or writing papers in the first place. Is it motivation to get fame and money? Or to use these channels at "face value"; that is, as forums in which useful things get posted? I have not come up with a solid, brain-dead algorithm (which is necessary because I am biased as well) that would distinguish between these sources of motivation given a set of postings/papers, but with a little thought perhaps someone can.

Or maybe we shouldn't tie so many extrinsic rewards to blogging/publishing papers. Then the problem would "take care of itself."

As a recently-minted PhD from a good university, there is at least some stigma associated with blogging or appealing to general population.

your academic peers, determine where you get your next job, whether you get tenure, etc. You don't want them thinking that your research is frivolous because you have popular blog posts or press coverage. strong publications come first, everything else is lower on the scale.

Another example is teaching. At top univs, getting an award for teaching as an untenured prof may indicate that you're not spending enough time on research.

I don't think most scientists should blog. In fact, I think most scientists would rather not blog because you have two options:

1. Blog on an academic level: Use all the big words, acronyms, and assumptions that go along with your educations level and maximize the academic audience. This feels the most natural but reaches the smallest audience.

2. Blog on a general level: Break down everything so that the general audience will understand it.

There is no such thing as a middle ground, and as a general rule, these two audiences are almost mutually exclusive.

"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself." — Albert Einstein

I think there's no harm in encouraging scientists to be able to explain things in familiar terms, and break the massive disconnect between scientist-level discourse and the kind of "ZOMG Wifi kills trees" interpretations that come out in public discourse.

Moreover, some scientists fail even to communicate effectively with other scientists. In many circles there is a culture of bad writing and incomprehensible jargon, even though these things are not prerequisites to effective scientific communication (quite the opposite.)

"If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize." -Richard Feynman

There's plenty of middle ground. Any good scientist is able to explain what they do to various different audiences:

1. A six-year-old

2. An uneducated layman

3. A layman with the general gist of what sciencey things are about

4. A scientist in a completely different field

5. A scientist in a similar field

6. A scientist in your own subfield

7. The three other people in the world who actually understand what you're doing.

From a blogging point of view, though, there's an issue. If you're blogging about your own work then there's actually not all that much to write except on level 7, because the details of what you're doing on a day-to-day basis don't change on the higher levels. And if you're going to be blogging about science in general... well, it takes an awful long time to do that kind of thing.

I think higher level overviews can still be very useful. For example take a physicist working at CERN. He can't explain to a general audience what exactly he's working on, but he can explain about: the world is made of a couple of types of particles, we don't know for sure all these types of particles, and what their characteristics are, with the LHC we're trying to find out. Then he can maybe explain a bit about the things his own research is about. If you relate the things you write about to reality from time to time (e.g. "electrons are what makes electricity work, but they are also inside all the matter around you") then the general audience won't understand everything, but they will still get something out of what you write.

I agree it's a great idea for scientists to write, and to do it regularly, and for a variety of audiences. But for the most part I don't think a blog is the right medium.

Blogs just create a huge obligation to update them regularly whether you have something to say or not. They encourage you to bury your the few good things you have to say under a mountain of regularly-updated rubbish. The internet is filled with blogs updated a few times and then abandoned... heck, I think I have a few myself.

I agree. A better model is "articles" or "essays" like PG does.

Exactly. I don't have the patience to maintain a blog, but I can see myself cranking out a few essays a year whenever inspiration strikes.

This actually gives me an idea, though, because the trouble with me cranking out essays is that I have nowhere to publish them. Sure, I could put them on my own personal website, but it's too much effort to create one and then find somewhere to host it... and besides, nobody would ever find it. Alternatively I could get a Wordpress blog to host my very occasional essays, but all the blogging sites are set up with blogs rather than essays in mind, so they're really non-optimal.

So here's a startup idea for someone: a wordpress clone optimized towards the writer of occasional long pieces rather than frequent short postings.

Wordpress really presents itself as a generic "publishing platform" these days, it just mostly gets used for blogs.

When I was looking around for a new WP theme for projectgus.com (which only gets updated once every couple of months on average), I found quite a few "long form oriented" themes that were intended for people with the kind of use cases you describe.

I didn't choose one because I think the traditional blog format works for me, but they certainly exist.

If you want to go pure PG-style then you could just use some CSS and plain old HTML.

(FWIW, many of my favourite "tech bloggers" only post a few times a year. Those posts are worth waiting for. Mind you, they don't label themselves as "tech bloggers". Ech, what a horrible term. ;).)

He may have a good strategy in that he teamed up with another person on his PLoS blog. That can decrease the chance of blog silence.

Even if there isn't a middle ground, I'm not sure why that means a scientist shouldn't blog. You may not be able to "kill two birds with one stone" with a scientific blog post, but there's nothing stopping you from writing two posts.

Both academic and general level blogging have advantages. A science blogger can do no wrong!

Notice the blog series he discussed was about research that was already published. Most people are concerned about giving away too much, lest they be scooped. By writing about things that are already public, he avoided that.

The downside to this though is that you'll be blogging about things that aren't as cutting edge as the experiment you just finished this afternoon. But that might not be a bad thing...

on a meta-level, has anyone done a query for "Why X Should Y" titles for blog posts? those sorts of titles seem to get on HN often. other popular templates include:

- "Why activity X is like doing a start-up"

- "Why I'm leaving X", followed by someone else posting "Why I'm staying with X"

Unfortunately the "why X should blog" articles outweigh the "why X should not blog" articles, since Xes who think that Xes shouldn't blog tend not to blog about it.

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