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I think particular cultural contexts and audiences might have more to do with it than any inherent benefit to one or the other approach. What kind of production
by mjn 14y ago
I think particular cultural contexts and audiences might have more to do with it than any inherent benefit to one or the other approach. What kind of production do we value? What kinds of "intermediate" production are there, where you sort of try out draft ideas? Etc.
I'm thinking of how things have changed over the past 100 years in science, for example, where it's become much more common to be prolific. One reason, imo, is that in the past you were judged (by a smaller group of peers) more by the quality of each publication: it reflected really badly if you wasted everyone's time by publishing something mediocre. Better to put in a little more effort and write fewer, better journal articles. Now, the incentives are different, and it's better to shotgun out the articles, because you're typically judged by your best articles, or even by some measure of throughput like total citation count or h-index, not by your average or worst article.
- gwern 14y agoOne of the things I keep meaning to read more about is Simonton's equal-odds rule of science: apparently his statistical analyses of scientific output show that scientists do not differ in 'quality' of output but instead quantity of output - the more they do and publish, the more likely they are to hit a home-run. (This sort of huge randomness seems possible to me - I think every author or creator has the feeling, at some point, that 'X is not my best or most interesting work, why does everyone like it so much?' Certainly in reading author interviews I've noted that they seem routinely surprised that one particular novel or series took off and made them famous, rather than another.)
- rchi 14y agoI really enjoyed Simonton's work but was quite surprised by the equal-odds rule you mentioned. It doesn't seem to apply to scientists at the highest level e.g. Einstein.
- gwern 14y agoI'm not sure about that. To some degree, you expect that Einstein's fame means that he would get an 'unfair' amount of credit for even his dull papers either because people give them too much credit ("it's Einstein, after all!") or because they get more attention than your ordinary paper which has no fans reading everything that author produces. But I think Einstein published quite a lot, actually, which would satisfy the equal-odds rule: I recall reading someone mentioning that only one paper of Einstein underwent peer review out of ~100 published, and now that I look, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_publications_by_Albert_Einstein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_publications... is a very long page.