Also this week: spongy floors, TikTok scicomm, the moral panic over LLMs, and more.
From Jeremy:
Why aren’t there more Matt Levines? (Matt Levine being the author of finance newsletter Money Stuff.) Basically meaning, why aren’t there more people who blog often and well, to a broad audience, about a non-political industry or niche? The suggested answer is basically the same as Brian’s answer to the question “How do some scientists manage to publish so many papers?”: a “hurdle model.” I would only add that I think “Matt Levines” come in degrees. I would be very proud for this blog to be known at “the Money Stuff of academic ecology.”
Writing in Nature, Emma Maris reviews Jonathan Watts’ new biography of Gaia hypothesis originator James Lovelock.
Tyler Cowen has a long, wide-ranging podcast interview and transcript with Kyla Scanlon. Kyla Scanlon has made her name as an economics explainer on social media, and now pop econ author, without a graduate degree. If you want to know what effective scicomm looks like in 2024, on topics that lots of people care about, you could do worse than look to Kyla Scanlon for inspiration. Then again, once you hear what it’s like to be Kyla Scanlon, you may decide you’d rather do anything else than talk about topics people care about on social media:
SCANLON: I think so because a lot of the comments are personal. They see you as a nonobjective commentator, even if you’re talking about data. For me, it’s been difficult the past few months because you’re talking about various data sources, what’s going on with inflation, what’s going on with the labor market. But because we’re in a post-truth society, everybody is like, “You’re lying.” “You’re a liar.” “You’re horrible for that.” I’ve worked on that because you’re just a figment of the audience’s imagination.
COWEN: Yes, in a way, they’re making a deal with you. They promise to listen and give you numbers, and you promise to let them abuse you. That’s the exchange. That’s what they want.
SCANLON: Yes, exactly.
COWEN: It’s the right to selectively abuse.
SCANLON: Something to project on. It’s never about you.
Dan Davies on what spongy floors can teach us about management and decision-making in large complex organizations. I feel like this blog ought to start writing more posts aimed at senior academics–the sorts of people embarking on their first gig as department chair, associate dean, etc. But I don’t know how to write those sorts of posts. So the best I can do is point you to posts others have written.
Writing in the LRB, here’s William Davies on Wendy Brown, Max Weber, and whether academics should stay out of politics. I don’t agree with all of it, but it went in some interesting directions I wasn’t expecting.
New moral panic just dropped (for instance). It’s about LLMs. Previously we discussed this issue. I’m pretty sure I disagree a fair bit with some (many?) of our regular readers and commenters on this issue. Which, if so, makes this issue somewhat unusual. Our commenters and I mostly agree on the majority of topics we post on. But I really appreciated that previous discussion anyway, because it didn’t have the character of a moral panic. What disagreements there were didn’t have the puritanical cast that disagreements elsewhere seem to be taking on (at least, to the limited extent one can judge just from the first two links in this paragraph). So I was able to learn from those disagreements.
Coming up:
The cybernetic roots of (some important bits of) ecology