WEEKENDBLOGG: INTRODUCING DAVID Z.

I innlegget An academic failure to serve the public good på vannressursbloggen Aquanomics skrev min gode venn David Zetland nylig følgende om manglende virkelighetsrelvans i akademisk forskning:

Let's start with the assumption that an academic professor or researcher is paid to promote new ideas and teach students.

Now, we need to somehow measure and prioritize outputs. Teaching output is relatively easy to measure (student evaluations and progress), but not as important as research that changes how we think of the world.

Research impact is, unfortunately, difficult to measure. The current method relies on "impact," which basically boils down to publishing in "top" journals. (A top journal is one that other journals tend to cite more often.)

Now it gets ugly, since it's pretty common to just count one's publications and give more weight to those that appear in top journals. The actual content of articles is less important.

The importance of this "publish or perish" model has resulted in a massive increase in the number of papers presenting incremental (often trivial) changes on established themes (supply of ideas) and a proportionate increase in the number of journals accepting less-than-stellar papers (demand for ideas).

This "market" suffers in two ways. First, academics spend very little time on promoting their ideas once they are published. Second, those ideas are often irrelevant to the real world.

David er definitivt ikke som akademikere flest. Han har skrevet viktig bok og driver populært diskusjonsforum som gir lite eller ingen formell forskningsprestisje. Han har vært på FOX news og BBC radio, er sitert i New York Times,  har gjesteblogget på Freakonomics, og er regelmessig "livsopplever" på Burning Man festivalen. Og nedenfor er han til og med i virksomhet som miløøkonomisk nyhetsreporter i den virkelige verden!