Also this week: Priyanga Amarasekare petition, tweets vs. citations, philosophy of science vs. street names, back to the future (of natural history museums), and more.
From Jeremy:
Two junior scientists have launched a petition to California lawmakers to intervene with UCLA on behalf of Priyanga Amarasekare. You can go here to read the petition, and sign it if you support it. You can sign no matter where you reside. Every signature helps, but signatures from California residents are likely to carry the most weight with California lawmakers. If you wish, you can choose to sign in such a way that your name will only visible to the lawmakers who will receive the petition.
Are new scientific ideas getting harder to find? Against the “burden of knowledge.”
Fiction and non-fiction book recommendations from Stephen Heard, on various natural history-adjacent topics. Self-recommending.
Max Dresow with a great, accessible two-part post on what makes for productive speculation in science (part 1, part 2). Illustrated with fascinating paleontological examples, although the ideas generalize beyond paleontology. Come for the (putative) Triassic kraken, stay for the (putative) periodicity of mass extinctions. The exercise of applying Dresow’s taxonomy of speculation to neutral theory in community ecology is left as an exercise for commenters.
A big randomized controlled experiment finds that having an ecologist with many Twitter/X followers tweet about a paper causes the paper to be downloaded and retweeted a bit more, but doesn’t have any detectable effect on how often it’s cited. Relatedly, here’s Andrew Hendry’s old post on ideas that many scientists are really enthusiastic about, even though they don’t explain much of the variation in the data. “Sharing your papers on social media will materially increase their reach and impact” seems like one of those ideas. (Or am I overestimating the number of scientists who think that social media materially increases the reach and impact of their papers?)
New results showing that parent educational achievement predicts the academic career progression of their children. The as-yet-unreviewed preprint finds that, when comparing PhD grads from the same institution in the same field in the US, having at least one parent with a graduate degree improves most measures of tenure-track academic career progression by about 10-15%ish on average. Further analyses suggest that this result may be due to differential professional networking. Note that I skimmed this very quickly, so I can’t vouch for the results, but I’m passing it along in case you want to read and evaluate it for yourself.
Thank god he wasn’t walking on Kuhn-strasse. The street would’ve petered out into an overgrown trail in the woods. Then emerged from the woods in another country where they speak a different language. 🙂 In the comments, there are 1000 Internet Points up for grabs, as a reward for the best joke on this theme. 😛
You say that like it’s a bad thing. (I kid, Twitter/X users, I kid.) (But not entirely.)
We have to go back. 🙂