

Why Scientists Should Blog - ig1
http://scienceofblogging.com/why-scientists-should-blog-a-case-study/

======
partition
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://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-
solvers.html)

[http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/09/sudoku-in-coders-
at-w...](http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/09/sudoku-in-coders-at-work.html)

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."

------
anmol
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.

------
juiceandjuice
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.

~~~
hugh3
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.

~~~
jules
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.

~~~
hugh3
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.

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

~~~
hugh3
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.

~~~
angusgr
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. ;).)

------
mbreese
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...

------
pgbovine
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"

~~~
hugh3
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.

