[Petit Fours #452] On research slop, incentives, and invisible colleges
Hi, all! From the beginning of the frosty season, here’s what I’ve got for you:
#1 Judd Antin recently put out an excellent blogpost on ResearchSlop. It’s written with industry settings in mind but much of what’s said should give academics something to reflect on, too. “None of this is about rejecting AI or clinging to the old ways, despite the enduring image of the old man shaking his fist. It’s about ensuring that when organizations adopt AI tools, they actually get what they’re paying for: research that drives good decisions rather than research that creates more work downstream.”
#2 Almost at the exact same time, Jess Holbrook wrote along similar lines about Research Slop, so clearly this is something that’s on thoughtful people’s minds right now: “People rightfully want to understand users better. But the problem is research slop does little to further this goal. Instead it gives the appearance of understanding, like looking at high-level metrics dashboards. Relevant as part of the process, but knowing numbers or headline insights isn’t the same as thoughtful understanding of people and data.“
#3 Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz has written a cool book on Mapping Goffman’s Invisible College: “Erving Goffman (1922–1982), trained as a sociologist, was an important theorist of social interaction. My focus in this book, however, will not be on his ideas; those have already been the subject of a significant number of works, and so I will take for granted that most readers are at least generally familiar with his ideas. Instead, this book will be about the context of his ideas: the groups where an overlapping set of ideas were discussed, the projects where they were worked out, and what turns out to be necessary to encourage the development of new ideas.“ Much of academia loves stories of individual heroes but I’ve long found it much more interesting to think of the informal connections and networks that enable us to make collaborative headway, so it’s no wonder the premise of this book resonates with me.
#4 If you, like me, are not particularly looking forward to the end-of-year reporting frenzy, you might enjoy reading Amy Bruckman’s blogpost on Why Your Work Software is Exhausting to Use. “So why does our work software so often not take real human needs and motivations into account? Has anyone designing business software taken first semester human-computer interaction (HCI)? The reason behind this trend was explained by a paper called “Why CSCW Applications Fail” written by Jonathan Grudin in 1988. The answer is simple: the incentives for the people who design/purchase the software are different from the incentives for the people who use it.“
-A