Outsiders have their own form of confidence. When they look at the Insider, they think that they see a naked emperor. They understand the Insiders’ methods well enough. But the Outsiders are convinced that these methods are narrow-minded and limiting. During the housing bubble, when he wanted to confirm his hypothesis that home buyers were expecting unsustainable rates of house price...
The social justice mob is now censoring research
Hard to believe this is happening in the U.S., you’d expect this kind of stuff from totalitarian regimes like China or North Korea. The end result will be scientists censoring themselves, especially graduate students and junior faculty who do not have the luxury of tenure. That’s really the goal of the mob: intimidating faculty into silence. Theodore Hill, a retired professor of...
Faculty respond to incentives; who would have guessed?
National policies take varied approaches to encouraging university-based innovation. This paper studies a natural experiment: the end of the “professor’s privilege” in Norway, where university researchers previously enjoyed full rights to their innovations. Upon the reform, Norway moved toward the typical US model, where the university holds majority rights. Using comprehensive data on Norwegian...
Good quote about faculty work
A prerequisite for a successful scientific career is an enthusiastic willingness to pore through the minutiae of subjects that 99.9 percent of Earth’s population find screamingly dull.
The Wizard and the Prophet, p. 148.
Speaking truth to power about qualitative research
From a rejection letter to a qual researcher, about why the manuscript was being rejected: Of course, the whining and outrage was predictable. More here: Let’s face facts: it’s a quant world now. Policymakers and stakeholders don’t want to hear stories about the lived experience or any other such nonsense. Funders are increasingly adopting a similar mindset. The trend is only...
Science isn’t broken
If you follow the headlines, your confidence in science may have taken a hit lately. Peer review? More like self-review. An investigation in November uncovered a scam in which researchers were rubber-stamping their own work, circumventing peer review at five high-profile publishers. Scientific journals? Not exactly a badge of legitimacy, given that the International Journal of Advanced Computer...