When the internet fails, you feel gaslighted by the world

One of the downsides of living in a world where you can verify so many things with a single search in Google is that when you can’t do that, you seriously start to wonder if you’re right in the head.

For years, I remembered a song I heard when I was young. Because I was young, I don’t think I ever knew the name of the artist, but I remembered the chorus. Every now and then, I would go to Google and search for lyrics I remembered from the chorus.

I’d like to ride a big white horse
‘Cause I can’t ride with the damned
Or maybe drive a racing car
And steer it with one hand
I’d live a life of danger
Most any way that I can
‘Cause that’s the kind of man
That I am
‘Cause that’s the kind of man
That I am

And every time: nothing. I was back at it again today after an NPR interview with Michael Murphy reminded me of another song I remembered but could never track down (“Wildfire”). And try googling those lyrics, and I'd get songs from the wrong decade, sometimes the wrong century. But somehow, I finally found the right combination of search terms to find a top 40 Canadian hit:


“That’s the Kind of Man That I Am” by The Good Brothers! Even knowing the artist and title of the song, and Even though it was a top 40 hit on Canadian country radio stations, there does not appear to be lyrics entered in any lyric database anywhere.

Now, if I could just find a song from around the same time called “Shotgun Rider.” (And no, I don’t mean the BTO song. There are a lot of songs titled “Shotgun Rider.” Marty Robbins, Blue Jug, Tim McGraw...)

The weekly science news cycle

In politics, there is constant referencing to the “news cycle”, which is generally considered to be 24 hours. The next day is not quite a blank slate, but things older than that are not “news.”

In science, there is also a news cycle, it’s not a daily cycle. It’s a weekly one.

The scientific news cycle starts on Wednesdays, with the release of that week’s issue of Nature. It continues Thursday, with the releasee of that week’s issue of Science. Love them or hate them, the papers dropped by these two journals in mid-week drive much of the media coverage for science – whether newspapers, television, radio, or something else – for the rest of the week.

These journals are well tied into the traditional news ecosphere. Journalists often have advance notice of the big stories dropping by embargoed press releases, so the most connected media outlets are often dropping headline stories about Nature and Science papers in the middle of the week.

Social media discussions are also heavily influenced by these two glamour magazines. You often see early reaction on science Twitter the day of release, and longer reactions (blog posts, for instance) before the weekend is out.

Friday and Saturday are days for continuing, slightly longer and more in-depth coverage. Many science radio shows (also available as podcasts) air on Friday or Saturday, and they almost invariably feature interviews with authors who had a publication in Nature or Science that week. I’m thinking of NPR’s Science Friday, CBC’s Quirks and Quarks, and ABC Radio National’s The Science Show on (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not the US TV network).

These are also days where websites and media companies that don’t have their own science reporters learn about stories from other reporters. A large amount of media coverage of science says, “As reportedimn The New York Times...”, not “A new paper in Nature...”.

Sunday is the day for deep dives and long reads about science. Newspapers and magazines often put out their long form feature articles or investigative pieces. It’s the day for things that “not news, but still important.”

Monday and Tuesday are reaction days from the some in the scientific community, particularly those who are low-key users of social media. They are the catch-up points for people who heard about some story that broke last week, but they maybe heard about it by listening to a radio show or reading a New York Times article. But they didn’t really tweet or comment about it because they weren’t at their desk until Monday.

Second letter in Science!

I have yet another story of a publication that started because I was wasting time on the Internet. I say again: blogging is one of the best ways for an academic to work out ideas.

This new publication is my second brush with the realm of glamour magazines in my career. It’s a letter again and not a research article, but I’ll take it.

Blog readers and maybe some of my Twitter followers might recognize the arguments. They are the same ones I made in this blog post previously. Somewhere along the way, I found myself referencing it in tweets that I thought, “Maybe I can bring this to a wider audience.” More people read the glamour magazines than my blog. I chose to try for Science because it seemed to me that GRE discussions were most relevant to the US.

While the letter is short, it actually expanded from what I originally submitted. Letters editor Jennifer Sills pushed me to expand the last paragraph to include a few sentences about possible solutions. This was a good push, and the letter is better because of it.  I’ll quote Clay Shirky again (emphasis added):

(W)hat are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately.

While blogging is one of the best ways I have found to develop and work through academic ideas, an editor who genuinely edits is invaluable in fine tuning and honing ideas.

References

Faulkes Z. 2019. #GRExit's unintended consequences. Science 363(6425): 356. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw1012

Related posts

Letter in Science!
I come to bury the GRE, not to praise it

Publishing may be a button, but publishing isn’t all we need

“We need to do a better job training PhDs in...”

I went looking for how many ways people completed the some version of the sentence, “We need to do a better job training PhDs in...”:

• Teaching.
• Ethics.
• Philosophy of science.
• Coding.
• Database management.
• Deep, slow, careful, insightful thinking.
  
• Project management.
• Graphic design.
• Communication. (Also here, here.)
• Accounting.
• Performance.
• Statistics.
• Writing.
• Outreach.
• Creativity. (Added 11 April 2023)
• Curiosity. (Added 17 May 2023) 
  

And that is with a couple of very trivial searches. I daresay many more entries could easily be added to this list.

As an educator, I never want to be the person to be the person saying that we shouldn’t train people. Heck, one of the entries on the list above is from me! But there is a finite number of things we can expect to teach people in a finite amount of time. I see two problems..

First, faculty tend to think, “We can do this in house.” They underestimate the complexities of fields, and they don’t reach out to experts in other fields. So the training risks being done by amateurs.

Second, long lists like this tend to encourage superficial “box checking.”

It may be that this “Train them in everything” is a symptom of the loss of support jobs in universities. Faculty are increasingly expected to do everything. If a department doesn’t have a staff photographer, who will do it? Faculty. Professors have to be one person bands, capable of playing every instrument, because universities don’t want to hire an orchestra (so to speak).

This is not a realistic expectation by academics. We should not expect to train grad students to be experts in everything, because nobody can be an expert at everything.

If I had the ability, I would rather see departments try have many more staff positions for some of these task above. Expand the pool of staff experts so that faculty don’t have to try to do everything.

Additional, 3 June 2019: Kieran Healy has a great thread underlining why graduate programs tend to push towards “Train students in everything”: the brutal academic job market.

Many grad programs exist in a state of permanent revolution that is fueled by the real anxiety produced by uncertainty about one’s future work and prospects. This creates demands that something be done to make those anxieties go away. ... the core uncertainty—and thus the anxiety—is ineradicable through policy, especially in a brutal labor market the program has no control over.

Assessing the “treatment effect” of program structure is itself infected by the core uncertainty about who will “do well” and why. The market is tiny. Admission processes deliberately neutralize many elements that would predict success if literally everyone could be admitted.

A common response is to wish one could inoculate against this uncertainty by “requiring” people to learn everything or somehow be intellectually fully-formed right away. But this is impossible; faculty will disagree about what it means; students will likely rebel against it.

In practice you have to be humane about the reality that underpins the anxiety, while remaining clear-eyed about what a program can and can’t do about it at the level of training. The levers that can be pulled aren’t attached to the things you really want to adjust.

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All scholarship is hard