Write Every Day...

I am an annoying person, I accept that.  One of the reasons I am annoying is that I claim that people who succeed in academics may succeed for all sorts of reasons, but almost ALL of those who fail, fail because they didn't try, and keep trying, to write every day.  Every. Day.

So, you folks are going to find this study annoying, too.

People underestimate the value of persistence for creative performance 

Brian Lucas & Loran Nordgren  
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
 August 2015, Pages 232-243 

Abstract: Across 7 studies, we investigated the prediction that people underestimate the value of persistence for creative performance. Across a range of creative tasks, people consistently underestimated how productive they would be while persisting (Studies 1–3). Study 3 found that the subjectively experienced difficulty, or disfluency, of creative thought accounted for persistence undervaluation. Alternative explanations based on idea quality (Studies 1–2B) and goal setting (Study 4) were considered and ruled out and domain knowledge was explored as a boundary condition (Study 5). In Study 6, the disfluency of creative thought reduced people’s willingness to invest in an opportunity to persist, resulting in lower financial performance. This research demonstrates that persistence is a critical determinant of creative performance and that people may undervalue and underutilize persistence in everyday creative problem solving. 

Nod to Kevin Lewis

 Note:  I am certainly not saying that people who fail in academics are lazy.  Nor am I saying that people should want to succeed in academics, because there are many other things that are more important for society and more satisfying for the individual.

What I'm saying is that if you want to succeed, it's a simple business.  As Jim Buchanan put it, "Keep your ass in the chair."  And then write.  Every day.  So, if you want to succeed, and you fail...well, it was unnecessary.

I had lunch with a friend while I was in England recently. (We went to Nando's Peri-Peri.  I liked it; it was cheeky).  And we chortled to each other.  There are SO MANY people who are clearly smarter than we are.  I don't just mean people who THINK they are smarter; I mean people who are actually smarter.

The reason we chortled is that they eat their livers every day, because to them our (relative) success is inexplicable.  But it's actually pretty simple.

What did you write today?

What is academia good for?

Letting or cajoling academics to make their work "relevant to the real world" is a common theme in popular culture, epitomized by Nick Kristoff's Op-Ed in today's NY Times.

There is conversation all over the Twitters about it. For example,

 

Marc AndreessenVerified account‏@pmarca

Delicate balance. Don't want to ruin what makes academia special. Do want to enable people to make maximum contribution to world.

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But people, I am here to tell you that the last thing you really want is academics out in the real world. Academia is a socially efficient institution that has evolved to effectively keep highly intelligent but basically useless people out of the the real world labor force. Believe me, putting them back in would lower, not raise, national wealth.

Just like the real purpose of social security is to nudge unproductive older people out of the labor force and thus raise average productivity, the real purpose of the academy is to keep academics out of the real world labor force. It's really win-win.

Can you imagine if Noah Smith worked in an office? Everyone would be learning Japanese, laughing, speaking in Doge, and not getting anything done. But compared to everyday pedestrian slackers, Noah could and would spin their antics into raises not pink slips.

Could you imagine the level of workplace violence Bryan Caplan's opinions might inspire if he worked on an assembly line?

Can you even begin to picture the amount of labor unrest that Pete Boettke and Steve Horowitz would stir up if they worked in a factory?

Think about the gross insubordination, crude jokes, and overall humiliation me and Mungowitz would dish out to the bosses so unlucky as to have employed us. We would bring any company to its knees in a couple of quarters, without really even trying.

And economists are among the most likely academics to be able to pass a real world Turing test!

People, the best thing you can do is keep having kids and keep sending them to University. We need a safe place to warehouse people like me.

University life in this year of the Tucks Medicated Pad (i.e. 2014)

Two actual emails that I received today from actual administrators at my university. People, I know I have a sweet gig and shouldn't complain, but these are pretty amazing.

The first was to inform faculty of "University Policy Regarding Search Warrants" (I am not making this up). We were instructed to ask for a copy of the warrant, inform law enforcement that the University is "represented by Counsel" and then call the University counsel and then provide the Office of the Counsel with a copy of the warrant and any other "supporting materials".

This memo comes with zero context, background, rationale or anything, just boom. I wonder how many employee or consultant hours and dollars went into crafting this piece of shit?



The second relates to the fake "shots fired" emergency we had last week. It informed us that in light of "last week's incident" we need to be made aware of what "shelter in place" means.

Turns out it means lock the door, cover the windows, turn out the lights, silence electronic devices, and remain quiet and "vigilant". That would have made for a great job seminar if we had all hid quietly together underneath our conference table for an hour because some Architecture professors can't tell the difference between a backhoe and an AK-47!

I would say that in the light of last week's "incident" all faculty should be required to put in say, 10 hours at a shooting range in order for them to become more familiar with what gunfire actually sounds like, so that their false alarms don't lock up the rest of the campus and put us all under tables in the dark.

Taking On the Ivy League

It is possible to do better on education.  Even in higher ed, where the U.S. is pretty good, it is possible to do MUCH better.  An interesting video with some ideas on how.


Also...the Minerva Project

Nod to the Ward Boss.

Mentors and Giants

Chris Alcantara is doing a series of "interviews" he calls "Mentors and Giants."

I am, at best, a mentor.  But Chris was kind enough to post the interview on his blog...

Which is here.

T. Oatley on "Ditch the Job Talk"

One of the thing that frustrates me is the centrality of the "job talk" for professional hiring in academics.

It's an artificial situation, and has almost nothing to do with whether the person will be a success.  Not surprisingly, "good" job talks turn out to have almost no predictive value in judging tenure chances, and "bad" talks don't tell you much, either. 

(Full disclosure:  I was notoriously a "bad" job talk giver.  Neanderbill had to save me at UNC, after I totally stunk up the joint.  And my talk at U Minn and U Md were epically, apocalyptically bad, still spoken of in awe a decade after the sorry debacles were over.  People--I in particular--were still waking up screaming at the horrors they had suffered through. So perhaps this is just sour grapes, I'll admit that).

And for senior people...even dumber.  Why in the world would you look at the job talk for a senior person? If you have read their work, and think it's not good, or not good enough, that's fair.  But a job talk?  Seriously?

Anyway, Dr. T. Oatley has some thoughts. And as always, the thoughts of Dr. T. Oatley are worth reading.

Economics: Older Authors, More Original Data

Six Decades of Top Economics Publishing: Who and How?

Daniel Hamermesh
NBER Working Paper, December 2012

Abstract: Presenting data on all full-length articles published in the three top general economics journals for one year in each of the 1960s through 2010s, I analyze how patterns of co-authorship, age structure and methodology have changed, and what the possible causes of these changes may have been. The entire distribution of number of authors has shifted steadily rightward. In the last two decades the fraction of older authors has almost quadrupled. The top journals are now publishing many fewer papers that represent pure theory, regardless of sub-field, somewhat less empirical work based on publicly available data sets, and many more empirical studies based on data assembled for the study by the author(s) or on laboratory or field experiments.

I wonder if this is because the revolution in economics methods changed publication in the 1950s.  Or was it just the new emphasis on publication, at all, that has now reached steady state?  If that's true, then the new distribution is what we should expect, and the bias toward younger authors and low-hanging fruit data sets was short-lived.

Nod to Kevin Lewis

ch-ch-changes

A flim-flam man turns philosophy professor only to be shocked by the company he now must keep. Well worth reading it all, here's a juicy excerpt:


"Bob, the professor business is even sleazier than the jewelry business. At least in the jewelry business we were honest about being fake. Plus, when I go to conferences, I've never seen such pretentiousness. These are the most precious people I've ever met."

"Come on, Clancy. Did you really think people were going to be any better in a university?"

"Um, kind of." Of course I did. "And it's not that they're not better. They're worse."

Welcome to my world!