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This reminds me of a story from Steven Levitt. He published Freakonomics together with Stephen Dubner then went back into academia while Dubner went down the p
by Swizec 6y ago
This reminds me of a story from Steven Levitt.
He published Freakonomics together with Stephen Dubner then went back into academia while Dubner went down the podcaster route.
15 years later, Dubner has reached millions of people with his work and Levitt recently started a podcast and soft quit academia after realizing that one of his best papers after years of research and hard work got 3 citations. He assumes fewer than 20 people will ever read that work.
- sidr 6y agoI'm not sure why number of views/reads is the metric to optimize for, though. I'm sure more people listen to the Joe Rogan Experience than have read a Mathematical Theory of Communication. Does that intrinsically make it worth more?
- Swizec 6y agoDepends on your goals. Do you want to have impact or chase obscure brain teasers?
- sooheon 6y agoSize of impact is orthogonal to quality of impact, people who chase social stats seem to forget this fact.
- Swizec 6y agoWho said anything about social stats? Levitt in particular says he feels like his research can have a bigger impact if it’s shared broadly with people than if it reaches 10 other academics and that’s it. We’re not talking about likes on social media, we’re talking about breadth of audience for academic research and how scientists can do better than chasing meaningless citation stats. Levitt talks about his thought process in this wonderful episode of Freakonomics. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/math-curriculum/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/math-curriculum/
- sooheon 6y ago> Who said anything about social stats? You did. > Dubner went went down the podcaster route. 15 years later, Dubner has reached millions of people [...] I assume this is measured in terms of subscribers or listen counts. I'm not saying the Freakonomics Stevens have/haven't had quality contributions to the world, I'm not even saying anything w.r.t. average podcast quality vs. average academic paper quality. I'm only saying that people often measure impact along only one dimension.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kaitai 6y agoI gotta say A Mathematical Theory of Communication is not an obscure brain teaser, and has had quite an impact.... so your reply doesn't really reflect what the previous poster was asking about...
- mathattack 6y agoLevitt is leaving academia? Wow - that’s news!
- Swizec 6y agoMight be more of a sabbatical. This is the Freakonomics episode where he talked about this https://freakonomics.com/podcast/math-curriculum/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/math-curriculum/
- mathattack 6y agoInteresting. I will listen. He’s a distinguished service professor which is as high as you can get.
- mathattack 6y agoThis sounds like an empirical side project rather than leaving academia, no? Has it been long enough to see the results? Interesting that they put their hopes on data fluency on the College Board while the SATs are falling out of fashion.