[citation needed]

The excellent and ever-candid Candid Engineer in Academia has an interesting post discussing the love-hate relationship many scientists who work in wet labs have with benchwork. She compares two very different perspectives:

She [a current student] then went on to say that, despite wanting to go to grad school, she is pretty sure she doesn’t want to continue in academia beyond the Ph.D. because she just loves doing the science so much and she can’t imagine ever not being at the bench.

Being young and into the benchwork, I remember once asking my grad advisor if he missed doing experiments. His response: “Hell no.” I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I do. So I wonder if my student will always feel the way she does now- possessing of that unbridled passion for the pipet, that unquenchable thirst for the cell culture hood.

Wet labs are pretty much nonexistent in psychology–I’ve never had to put on gloves or goggles to do anything that I’d consider an “experiment”, and I’ve certainly never run the risk of  spilling dangerous chemicals all over myself–so I have no opinion at all about benchwork. Maybe I’d love it, maybe I’d hate it; I couldn’t tell you. But Candid Engineer’s post did get me thinking about opinions surrounding the psychological equivalent of benchwork–namely, collecting data form human subjects. My sense is that there’s somewhat more consensus among psychologists, in that most of us don’t seem to like data collection very much. But there are plenty of exceptions, and there certainly are strong feelings on both sides.

More generally, I’m perpetually amazed at the wide range of opinions people can hold about the various elements of scientific research, even when the people doing the different-opinion-holding all work in very similar domains. For instance, my favorite aspect of the research I do, hands down, is data analysis. I’d be ecstatic if I could analyze data all day and never have to worry about actually communicating the results to anyone (though I enjoy doing that too). After that, there are activities like writing and software development, which I spend a lot of time doing, and occasionally enjoy, but also frequently find very frustrating. And then, at the other end, there are aspects of research that I find have little redeeming value save for their instrumental value in supporting other, more pleasant, activities–nasty, evil activities like writing IRB proposals and, yes, collecting data.

To me, collecting data is something you do because you’re fundamentally interested in some deep (or maybe not so deep) question about how the mind works, and the only way to get an answer is to actually interrogate people while they do stuff in a controlled environment. It isn’t something I do for fun. Yet I know people who genuinely seem to love collecting data–or, for that matter, writing Methods sections or designing new experiments–even as they loathe perfectly pleasant activities like, say, sitting down to analyze the data they’ve collected, or writing a few lines of code that could save them hours’ worth of manual data entry. On a personal level, I find this almost incomprehensible: how could anyone possibly enjoy collecting data more than actually crunching the numbers and learning new things? But I know these people exist, because I’ve talked to them. And I recognize that, from their perspective, I’m the guy with the strange views. They’re sitting there thinking: what kind of joker actually likes to turn his data inside out several dozen times? What’s wrong with just running a simple t-test and writing up the results as fast as possible, so you can get back to the pleasure of designing and running new experiments?

This of course leads us directly to the care bears fucking tea party moment where I tell you how wonderful it is that we all have these different likes and dislikes. I’m not being sarcastic; it really is great. Ultimately, it works to everyone’s advantage that we enjoy different things, because it means we get to collaborate on projects and take advantage of complementary strengths and interests, instead of all having to fight over who gets to write the same part of the Methods section. It’s good that there are some people who love benchwork and some people who hate it, and it’s good that there are people who’re happy to write software that other people who hate writing software can use. We don’t all have to pretend we understand each other; it’s enough just to nod and smile and say “but of course you can write the Methods for that paper; I really don’t mind. And yes, I guess I can run some additional analyses for you, really, it’s not too much trouble at all.”

Is it wise for academics to blog? Depends on who you ask. Scott Sumner summarizes his first year of blogging this way:

Be careful what you wish for.  Last February 2nd I started this blog with very low expectations.  During the first three weeks most of the comments were from Aaron Jackson and Bill Woolsey.  I knew I wasn’t a good writer, years ago I got a referee report back from an anonymous referee (named McCloskey) who said “if the author had used no commas at all, his use of commas would have been more nearly correct.”  Ouch!  But it was true, others said similar things.  And I was also pretty sure that the content was not of much interest to anyone.

Now my biggest problem is time—I spend 6 to 10 hours a day on the blog, seven days a week.  Several hours are spent responding to reader comments and the rest is spent writing long-winded posts and checking other economics blogs.  And I still miss many blogs that I feel I should be reading. …

Regrets?  I’m pretty fatalistic about things.  I suppose it wasn’t a smart career move to spend so much time on the blog.  If I had ignored my commenters I could have had my manuscript revised by now. …  And I really don’t get any support from Bentley, as far as I know the higher ups don’t even know I have a blog. So I just did 2500 hours of uncompensated labor.

I don’t think Sumner actually regrets blogging (as the rest of his excellent post makes clear), but he does seem to think it’s hurt him professionally in some ways–most notably, because of all the time he spends blogging that he could be doing something else (like revising that manuscript).

Andrew Gelman has a very different take:

I agree with Sethi that Sumner’s post is interesting and captures much of the blogging experience. But I don’t agree with that last bit about it being a bad career move. Or perhaps Sumner was kidding? (It’s notoriously difficult to convey intonation in typed speech.) What exactly is the marginal value of his having a manuscript revised? It’s not like Bentley would be compensating him for that either, right? For someone like Sumner (or, for that matter, Alex Tabarrok or Tyler Cowen or my Columbia colleague Peter Woit), blogging would seem to be an excellent career move, both by giving them and their ideas much wider exposure than they otherwise would’ve had, and also (as Sumner himself notes) by being a convenient way to generate many thousands of words that can be later reworked into a book. This is particularly true of Sumner (more than Tabarrok or Cowen or, for that matter, me) because he tends to write long posts on common themes. (Rajiv Sethi, too, might be able to put together a book or some coherent articles by tying together his recent blog entries.)

Blogging and careers, blogging and careers . . . is blogging ever really bad for an academic career? I don’t know. I imagine that some academics spend lots of time on blogs that nobody reads, and that could definitely be bad for their careers in an opportunity-cost sort of way. Others such as Steven Levitt or Dan Ariely blog in an often-interesting but sometimes careless sort of way. This might be bad for their careers, but quite possibly they’ve reached a level of fame in which this sort of thing can’t really hurt them anymore. And this is fine; such researchers can make useful contributions with their speculations and let the Gelmans and Fungs of the world clean up after them. We each have our role in this food web. … And then of course there are the many many bloggers, academic and otherwise, whose work I assume I would’ve encountered much more rarely were they not blogging.

My own experience falls much more in line with Gelman’s here; my blogging experience has been almost wholly positive. Some of the benefits I’ve found to blogging regularly:

• I’ve had many interesting email exchanges with people that started via a comment on something I wrote, and some of these will likely turn into collaborations at some point in the future.
• I’ve been exposed to lots of interesting things (journal articles, blog posts, datasets, you name it) I wouldn’t have come across otherwise–either via links left in comments or sent by email, or while rooting around the web for things to write about.
• I’ve gotten to publicize and promote my own research, which is always nice. As Gelman points out, it’s easier to learn about other people’s work if those people are actively blogging about it. I think that’s particularly true for people who are just starting out their careers.
• I think blogging has improved both my ability and my willingness to write. By nature, I don’t actually like writing very much, and (like most academics I know) I find writing journal articles particularly unpleasant. Forcing myself to blog (semi-)regularly has instilled a certain discipline about writing that I haven’t always had, and if nothing else, it’s good practice.
• I get to share ideas and findings I find interesting and/or important with other people. This is already what most academics do over drinks at conferences (and I think it’s a really important part of science), and blogging seems like a pretty natural extension.

All this isn’t to say that there aren’t any potential drawbacks to blogging. I think there are at least two important ones. One is the obvious point that, unless you’re blogging anonymously, it’s probably unwise to say things online that you wouldn’t feel comfortable saying in person. So, despite being a class-A jackass pretty critical by nature, I try to discuss things I like as often as things I don’t like–and to keep the tone constructive whenever I do the latter.

The other potential drawback, which both Sumner and Gelman allude to, is the opportunity cost. If you’re spending half of your daylight hours blogging, there’s no question it’s going to have an impact on your academic productivity. But in practice, I don’t think blogging too much is a problem many academic bloggers have. I usually find myself wishing most of the bloggers I read posted more often. In my own case, I almost exclusively blog after around 9 or 10 pm, when I’m no longer capable of doing sustained work on manuscripts anyway (I’m generally at my peak in the late morning and early afternoon). So, for me, blogging has replaced about ten hours a week of book reading/TV watching/web surfing, while leaving the amount of “real” work I do largely unchanged. That’s not really much of a cost, and I might even classify it as another benefit. With the admittedly important caveat that watching less television has made me undeniably useless at trivia night.

…teaches you How To Write Badly Well. For instance, if you want to write badly well, you must Refuse to leave the present tense:

I sit at my desk and remember how, years ago, I wonder what my life will be like when I am fifty, which I am now. I’m imagining that I’m living in a big house, I remember as I sit in my one-bedroom apartment. Now I pour myself a drink and cast my mind back to a time when I’m full of hope and passion which is never to be extinguished, as it is now.

‘What am I doing?’ I mutter to myself, taking a sip of my drink. In my memory, I’m seven years old, sitting in the highest branches of a tree which is being planted a hundred years before I am born. Now, though, the tree is long dead. I’m chopping it down at the age of twenty and thinking about when it is supporting my weight at the age of seven. I look at my watch.

‘Late,’ I mutter to myself. It is eight; the retrospective is just starting, half an hour ago.