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In praise of books
If you want to get recognition long-haul, it seems to me writing books is more contribution because most of us need orientation. In this day of practically infinite knowledge, we need orientation to find our way. Let me tell you what infinite knowledge is. Since from the time of Newton to now, we have come close to doubling knowledge every 17 years, more or less. And we cope with that, essentially, by specialization. In the next 340 years at that rate, there will be 20 doublings, i.e. a million, and there will be a million fields of specialty for every one field now. It isn't going to happen. The present growth of knowledge will choke itself off until we get different tools. I believe that books which try to digest, coordinate, get rid of the duplication, get rid of the less fruitful methods and present the underlying ideas clearly of what we know now, will be the things the future generations will value. Public talks are necessary; private talks are necessary; written papers are necessary. But I am inclined to believe that, in the long-haul, books which leave out what's not essential are more important than books which tell you everything because you don't want to know everything. I don't want to know that much about penguins is the usual reply. You just want to know the essence.
That is another bit from "You and Your Research," by Richard Hamming, do read this important piece. Being an author of books, I am happy to hear this argument, but I can think of other strategies:
1. Influence the long-run by mattering now with specialized research; this is especially effective if social opinion has a "unit root" and persists (for purposes of contrast, imagine long-term mean reversion, in which case short-run victories wash out). While you may get less long-term recognition, you will get more short-term recognition.
2. Work on projects with the highest expected value of impact.
3. Build up a specialized field that will have long-run influence. Take your pride in the progress of the field, not in how long your name sticks around. What is so special about your name anyway? (Analogy: would you rather your distant descendants know your name, know your contributions but not your name, or resemble you but not know either? It is not obvious that the former option should win out.)
4. Do what you want. If you don't love your daily grind, it won't matter for the scientific long-run anyway.
Comments are open...
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 3, 2006 at 05:34 AM in Books | Permalink
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Comments
I've heard that the rate of doubling has dropped (in the last 40 years) from every seven to every five years. (This seems like a major judgement call. Who would know?)
If these are true, then the slope of the curve is positive as is it's derivative. In other words, the rate of change is getting greater.
I hope this is true because we may be able to get colonies off this planet before things go bang.
p.s. my email address has no "x"s.
Posted by: Jim Gwyn at Jan 3, 2006 9:55:50 AM
If 1/2 of 1% of what Ray Kurzweil (among others) says is true, in 340 years your brain will be so enhanced that it won't have too much trouble digesting all of the world's knowledge. That is, one of the new tools that will soon be available to researchers is better brains.
Posted by: mobile at Jan 3, 2006 10:05:01 AM
mobile - Let's see: All the billions of dollars that Microsoft has can't deliver a secure computing experience, and you are hoping for Kurzweilian super-AI to make you a 5000 IQ ultrageek?
Posted by: Matthew Cromer at Jan 3, 2006 10:17:47 AM
"If you want to get recognition long-haul, it seems to me writing books is more contribution because most of us need orientation."
Spoken like a true careerist modern academic. Over the last century or so, the truly original contributions (Einstein, Goedel, Turing, Watson & Crick) were made in papers -- often quite brief. A recent book discusses and reprints 25 of them in a mere 576 pages. The Discoveries: Great Breakthroughs in 20th-century Science, Including the Original Papers by Alan Lightman, Hardcover: 576 pages,
Pantheon (November 8, 2005), http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375421688/.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at Jan 3, 2006 12:27:46 PM
I think this is a misunderstanding of the quantitative measures of increasing information. My understanding is that the data most poeple are using to make the estimates about the doubling of knowledge are based on data points, and not fundamental understanding (i.e. generalizable theories). Assuming that is correct, than we have already developed (and are continuing to develop) the tools needed to assimilate the massive increases in data. Those tools are improved mathematics (especially statistics) and computers. Between those tools, we should have nearly unlimited abilities to assimilate data until we hit the physical computational limit of the universe. And we've got a long way to go before that.
Posted by: Sisyphus at Jan 3, 2006 1:48:05 PM
Robert Schwartz,
Clearly the really big discoveries/breakthroughs almost always
appear as articles. However, very few of us are likely to get
into that all time top 25 (or even 100) or so. To those who are,
more power to them.
Regarding "career academicism" it is clear that at least for
assistant profs trying to get tenure, articles are absolutely
the way to go. That is what counts. At some places I hear that
books are nearly negatively valued. That seems to have been the
case at the University of Notre Dame where the regular (and
somewhat heterodox) economics department had its grad program
taken away because the faculty (including the enormously influential
Philip Mirowski) were publishing too many books and not enough
articles in sufficiently leading journals.
OTOH, I basically agree with Tyler. Well and focused books
are the way most of us are more likely to have an impact on
the development of economics and related areas. Articles simply
have to be kept too short and too focused to get any kinds of
big picture. However, of course, given my above remarks, they
are recommended for those who have already obtained tenure,
at least for those who involved wiht an academic career. And
it is not clear that they help all that much at the higher
levels of promotion to full prof or pay increases. But they
can have serious intellectual impact.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Jan 3, 2006 5:52:39 PM
It's easy to quantify the contributions of books and papers, just because you can count references.
I think I'm interested in how well the group mind (internet) is functioning. As an example, I can get a fast answer from wikipedia to confirm a random memory. That is a brain amplifier, though not quite in the way science fiction expected. We don't know who (or how many people) contributed to that random article, but we are all leveraged.
The whole blog/comment thing is interesting too ... I think it helps our understanding, helps us work out our understanding of things, in a wierd way.
(I'm taking off for Texas tommorow and mined Marginal Revolution for past "blegs" last night.)
Posted by: odograph at Jan 3, 2006 8:31:36 PM
BTW, the random memory during that post was Forbidden Planet's brain amplifier, and Wikipedia confirmed it as the Krell Mind Machine, filling in some intereseting details.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Planet
Posted by: odograph at Jan 3, 2006 8:40:00 PM
Mr. Cowen's second item of advice is to "work on something with the highest expected value of impact." Few people or companies do this; one that explicitly does is re-inventing several of our most fundamental technologies. See www.borealis.com.
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Posted by: levan at Sep 6, 2006 2:08:47 AM
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