Substrate

All that goes to say, if you just one day got rid of pre-publication peer review entirely – just got rid of it, full stop – there’s no reason to believe that the overall quality of published research would go down, at all. You’re still incentivized to publish your best work; arguably more so because you no longer have the cover of “being peer reviewed” as legitimacy. There will still be good research, and bad research. And post-publication peer review will still be able to pass judgement on anything it wants.

The academic journal business model is a funny one, because the journals themselves don’t actually do much work. The content is produced by PIs, for free, who apply for publication in hope of getting selected. Other PIs who review and curate submissions also work for free: it’s considered a part of academic duty, and prestigious to accept but disastrous to decline. In short, aside from the cost of ink and postage, academic journals deal in one thing only: positional scarcity. The real shame in academic publishing, if you ask me, isn’t Elsevier’s 35% profit margin on journal subscriptions. It’s the much larger amount of money, time and influence that is regressively taxed from the young scientists, to the old ones, in exchange for nothing but brand access.

Only rarely do online-first takes on economics, management theory, cultural theory, and analytic philosophy, among others, make the leap into academia, that other internet of texts. There are perhaps numerous reasons why this is the case. A significant one, though, is the lack of coherent citation and attribution practices on the web.

Fewer than 1 percent of doctorates in math are awarded to African-Americans. Edray Goins, who earned one of them, found the upper reaches of the math world a challenging place.

What I’m missing is the identity of an academic. An academic is an intellectual, a truth-seeker and truth-teller, a lifelong learner. Whereas I only do those things, if I feel like it. An identity gives you permission to do all the above. External permission, such as being allowed in a laboratory if that’s where your interests are pursued. But it’s also about allowing yourself to engage in intellectual pursuits. Or even: being afraid that without the external pressure of people expecting (predicting) novel intellectual output from you, you would not create any.

we are going to see an increasing number of academics thinking not so much about their paper CV, but rather about their [videos].

When we’re not so different from people around us, it’s irresistible to become obsessed about beating others. ​ Still here’s my answer: If one must go to college, I advise cultivating smaller social circles. Instead of going to class and preparing for exams, to go to the library and just read. Finally, not to join a fraternity or finance club, but to be part of a knitting circle or hiking group instead. ​ In Canada, people apply to major in certain subjects; if they earn admission, it’s not so easy to switch, so there’s less of this intellectual loitering that one finds on American campuses. And when I attended a German university, students told me that German 18-year-olds don’t usually go directly to university after high school. Instead, they take a year off to travel, work, or volunteer. These experiences create difference and maturity, thus better inoculating people against mimetic contagion. ​ Girard presents a model of human conflict that is Shakespearean, not Marxist. That is, he thinks that people are not engaged in class struggle, in which proletarians unite against the bourgeoisie; instead, people reserve horror and resentment for people most like themselves. ​ If one is a Girardian, then there is perhaps no greater catastrophe than the growing tendency of the American meritocracy to be incubated in elite colleges. Is it not worth fretting that the people running the country are coming in higher numbers from these hothouse environments at a young age, where one is inflamed to compete over everything and where tiny symbolic disputes seem like life and death struggles? How much of the governing class has fully adopted this attitude, and to what extent can we see our recent political problems to be manifestations of this tendency?

You will have the opportunity for unparalleled focus on whatever your research question is. ​ Those who have recently obtained a PhD can outwork virtually any of their peers in terms of duration and efficiency ​ To undertake this vow of poverty voluntarily, while doing work that is more intellectually challenging than most of your peers that are earning average salaries shows superhuman commitment to seeing something through to completion ​ This criticism will either get to you, and you’ll bail out of the program, or you’ll learn to separate the valid criticism from the invalid criticism, a skill that will serve you well in any profession, in any discipline ​ If you work on your degree alone, you’re doing it wrong. Have a side job. ​ Stick to your schedule. Be humble. Don’t expect to get more than 3 hours of high-order intellectual work done per day

But as it currently stands, the incentives for mathematicians reward one thing and one thing only: publishing influential papers.

With his students, he was able to write a program capable of typesetting the entire 700-page revised volume of his book by 1978. The program, called TeX, revolutionized how scientific papers are formatted and printed. It’s also one of the oldest OSS projects still in use. The disconnect between technical or scientific and nontechnical authors is also fundamental to understanding TeX’s mainstream obscurity: In nontechnical publishing, typesetting is usually not essential for conveying the author’s intent. Typesetting is considered ornamental; authors of popular material are content to send a Word document to their publisher and let professionals do the rest. Technical authors, on the other hand, need to convey their meaning precisely through glyphs, sizes, and placement. TeX lets them do that, as well as exchange their documents in a widely understood format.