I guess a lot of these scientific challenges are longstanding and a lot of people have grappled with them over time, but the current discussion seems fairly dominated by a small group that is ridiculously interconnected and self-referring that it can be an echo chamber.
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I see these ahistorical and disjoint takes happening constantly on Twitter and in light of the fact the main conversants are seasoned and highly respected members of the field it makes me concerned. What is going on?
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I would describe this phenomenon as an emergent hype machine that powerful people (most likely inadvertently) feed. It does a disservice because out field has a rich history and making out like we are just discovering stuff wrecks the literature.
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It's not a month that goes by that I don't' see papers in prestigious journals that don't cite whole swathes of other bits of the same field. I don't want to name examples, but many come to mind including ones where I personally (and Brad) have called out/attention to on Twitter.
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About "moving fast and breaking things" though, since it was basically mentioned as a stance... Let's not? Let's try to be a bit more respectful to our field and colleagues? Let's optimise that? The whole point of doing it right
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Agreed. I think we all know that Twitter is not the ideal media for having a relaxed and carefully thought discussion about anything. It promotes coarse statements and disputes, particularly among individuals with, say, too much bile.
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But it is what we have at hand and I fear we are misusing it. Perhaps we should try to minimise using it as a competition scenario and fruitless winning/loose dynamics.
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It's a very stupid game, but once someone attacks you then the culture is if you don't defend yourself then they are right. I guess we are mimicking simplistic view of animal hierarchies.
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I'm an omega.
End of conversation
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If the twitterverse comes up with useful insights without crediting the first person having that insight, is that so bad? I think of twitter more like face to face conversation and I most certainly do not always cite my sources in f2f.
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No, but face-to-face doesn't have an audience of thousands. So when you speak face-to-face you have the pragmatics of you and the few people you're chatting with to deal with. On Twitter, 2k+ people will see, e.g., my tweets and have varying degrees on context collapse.
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I analyzed the numbers. The first link to a paper that starts such threads tend to be 10ks. The second group tends to be 1k ish. The rest of the discussion is relatively small I think. Lots of people get >500 views.
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About 500 is a lot though given the size of our field, no?
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Also to be clear... My point wasn't just that Twitter is something we need to think carefully about because of the pure number of who reads our tweets. My point is in my tweets, I think there's a specific thing going on and it affects the quality of scientific outputs.
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If you disagree that there is something going on (what i describe already) which manifests both on Twitter and in the literature and other places offline, that is fine. But I encounter it pretty much every week in various forms — monthly in the case of ahistorical articles.
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I just don't know what to do and it hurts to see people behave like they have no memory, if that makes sense.
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It does. How could I be more useful on Twitter?
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