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Levitt is leaving academia? Wow - that’s news!
Might be more of a sabbatical. This is the Freakonomics episode where he talked about this https://freakonomics.com/podcast/math-curriculum/
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I'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?
Depends on your goals. Do you want to have impact or chase obscure brain teasers?
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I guarantee a cottage industry of YouTubers would pop up digesting and rewrapping that content. Today, it's probably too inaccessible for them to do so.
Two Minute Papers is a great example of this: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbfYPyITQ-7l4upoX8nvctg
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Depends on your goals. Do you want to have impact or chase obscure brain teasers?
Size of impact is orthogonal to quality of impact, people who chase social stats seem to forget this fact.
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/
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I'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?
Depends on your goals. Do you want to have impact or chase obscure brain teasers?
This is actually very scary to me. This means that many papers citation list is not a result of a thorough literature search but rather the authors recalling papers they might have read or seen on social media. This is dangerous in that if there were papers from before The Tweet era that actually found that part of your research protocol was bad, they would not be found. An example of this is the rat maze study that…
Kill Elsevier and paywall then. They are the alternative but no one is going to pay 30$ per paper they need to read. If references were hyper links to the full pdf, they would get more views
If it is tweeted on an account with 0 followers, then certainly not, right?
And when tweeted to one millioin scientists in the same field, then certainly yes, right?
The research community really should do a better job of engaging with the wider world, irrespective of whether it increases citations. For example, I had this paper in Hotnets 2019, and about 80 people saw my presentation. But I also spent some time, turned it into a little video and put it on YouTube. 360,000 people have seen it there. Now the subtleties were probably lost on many of those people, but if only a few…
Most research is not useful or suitable to the wider world.