Good post by @mattsclancy on why starting a new field is hard. Direct economic incentives (bigger grants) are too expensive. Selling researchers on importance is tough absent an acute crisis like Covid. Cc @alexeyguzey @michael_nielsen @davidtlanghttps://mattsclancy.substack.com/p/building-a-new-research-field …
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Misses the biggest factor though imo — new paradigms. Article hints at that in passing — more pivoty seminal publications get more citations — but doesn’t unpack it. You can’t just “start a new field” because a topic is important. You have to start it *with* something.
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A new paradigm promises to produce tons of new results fast, at low cost. New fields take off when researchers sense an explosion is imminent and they can ride it to big results. I’d argue the best researchers index on interestingness not importance. …https://proseminarcrossnationalstudies.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/thatsinteresting_1971.pdf …
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I’d argue that the burst of activity triggered by Covid was at least partly due to a “paradigm effect” rather than importance/social good. Many recognized that a huge natural experiment was underway and would paradigmatically reframe everything we thought we knew in many fields.
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I’m not actually a big fan of Kuhnian paradigm shift model, but I think it applies here to first order (I’m more in the Feyerabend methodological anarchy camp). Basically good researchers don’t work on what’s “important” but on what they have a promising attack for.
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