One thing I wonder about: how much of the “brains” setback was due to it being from an evil, self-imposed policy? That is, the bombing was a sort of random, external factor. But the expulsion of the Jews was a conscious policy from the regime. If the scientists had randomly died of disease or something, instead of being deliberately kicked out, would the effect have been similar?
Hmmmmm this is particularly interesting because, if the setback was really a recruiting problem, it breaks the problem down in a way I hadn’t thought about. Because when most people deal with this question they treat it as kind of a “are there currently good people there? Yes or no?” But your question implies a different formulation.
Not just “are there good people at the department right now?” But also, “how likely is that department to treat good people well/retain them if they do good work?”
This is quite interesting. Because if we could start to find some rough answers to how important the expectations piece is, that could possibly shed some light on how to:
Recruit top scientists to departments/orgs/research areas that are not currently top-tier but looking to build up towards the future
And the more impactful, less zero-sum topic of maybe there are ways to use whatever we learn to get more talented potential researchers into academic departments in the first place.
I’m sure we all know people who gave up possible top-flight academic careers for the private sector not just because of the paycheck, but also because they didn’t really have any faith in the academic institutions/ecosystem as a whole treating them well.
Would love to know anyone’s thoughts or if there are interesting papers to start running down this rabbit hole on!
“If the scientists had randomly died of disease or something, instead of being deliberately kicked out, would the effect have been similar?”
This paper by Pierre, Josh, and Wang does exactly that. They look at the sudden death of ‘superstar academics’ and find a noticeable decline in their collaborators productivity.
When I was considering that line of reasoning that you just made, I wasn’t sure how seriously to take the change because it was unclear to me if that was a negative spillover that affected their capacity to do or work just that the field moved on in the absence of a superstar.
Because in Pierre’s (god I love him, he’s a godsend) Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time? there seems to be an interesting dynamic. Upon an untimely death, collaborators’ pubs went down and newcomers’ pubs went up. In that case, an alternative model of the situation could be “the old famous group of researchers had a certain capture/influence over publishing in the area that was broken by the untimely death of one of them.”
In essence, I wasn’t sure what to think because, as you pointed out, their direct collaborators were hurt. But it seems like the fields where a superstar dies also get an injection of new ideas. So I withheld judgment on what I thought might be happening because it felt up in the air.
But I’m open to hearing more evidence! I like being swayed. It’s fun.
Yeah, that’s certainly true, the deaths have interesting dynamics. My advisor (Christian Fons-Rosen) is a co-author on that paper with Pierre and Josh. I’m definitely interested in exploring the area more.
If one wanted to start flirting with how to disentangle the lost collaborator effect from the lost capture effect, do you think there are any decent ways to do that?
I imagine whatever it is will be imperfect. But maybe there’s some pseudo-randomness to certain positions of status/power coming to an end that are independent from one’s research capacity.
Like maybe you’re only allowed to be the chair of x society or editor of y journal for a fixed time period and then you’re forced to step down. Maybe something like that could be a codifiable measure of some level of capture of a field.
I think it’s a great question. Two papers come to mind about capture that are somewhat related. These are not directly related but get at the capture part of research to some extent:
I’m really fond of this paper by Rubin and Rubin because the empirical strategy is smart.
“Like maybe you’re only allowed to be the chair of x society or editor of y journal for a fixed time period and then you’re forced to step down. Maybe something like that could be a codifiable measure of some level of capture of a field.”
I know some people who are working on something kind of like this. Happy to explore this further when we chat.
Interesting paper and great writeup.
One thing I wonder about: how much of the “brains” setback was due to it being from an evil, self-imposed policy? That is, the bombing was a sort of random, external factor. But the expulsion of the Jews was a conscious policy from the regime. If the scientists had randomly died of disease or something, instead of being deliberately kicked out, would the effect have been similar?
Hmmmmm this is particularly interesting because, if the setback was really a recruiting problem, it breaks the problem down in a way I hadn’t thought about. Because when most people deal with this question they treat it as kind of a “are there currently good people there? Yes or no?” But your question implies a different formulation.
Not just “are there good people at the department right now?” But also, “how likely is that department to treat good people well/retain them if they do good work?”
This is quite interesting. Because if we could start to find some rough answers to how important the expectations piece is, that could possibly shed some light on how to:
Recruit top scientists to departments/orgs/research areas that are not currently top-tier but looking to build up towards the future
And the more impactful, less zero-sum topic of maybe there are ways to use whatever we learn to get more talented potential researchers into academic departments in the first place.
I’m sure we all know people who gave up possible top-flight academic careers for the private sector not just because of the paycheck, but also because they didn’t really have any faith in the academic institutions/ecosystem as a whole treating them well.
Would love to know anyone’s thoughts or if there are interesting papers to start running down this rabbit hole on!
“If the scientists had randomly died of disease or something, instead of being deliberately kicked out, would the effect have been similar?”
This paper by Pierre, Josh, and Wang does exactly that. They look at the sudden death of ‘superstar academics’ and find a noticeable decline in their collaborators productivity.
When I was considering that line of reasoning that you just made, I wasn’t sure how seriously to take the change because it was unclear to me if that was a negative spillover that affected their capacity to do or work just that the field moved on in the absence of a superstar.
Because in Pierre’s (god I love him, he’s a godsend) Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time? there seems to be an interesting dynamic. Upon an untimely death, collaborators’ pubs went down and newcomers’ pubs went up. In that case, an alternative model of the situation could be “the old famous group of researchers had a certain capture/influence over publishing in the area that was broken by the untimely death of one of them.”
In essence, I wasn’t sure what to think because, as you pointed out, their direct collaborators were hurt. But it seems like the fields where a superstar dies also get an injection of new ideas. So I withheld judgment on what I thought might be happening because it felt up in the air.
But I’m open to hearing more evidence! I like being swayed. It’s fun.
Yeah, that’s certainly true, the deaths have interesting dynamics. My advisor (Christian Fons-Rosen) is a co-author on that paper with Pierre and Josh. I’m definitely interested in exploring the area more.
If one wanted to start flirting with how to disentangle the lost collaborator effect from the lost capture effect, do you think there are any decent ways to do that?
I imagine whatever it is will be imperfect. But maybe there’s some pseudo-randomness to certain positions of status/power coming to an end that are independent from one’s research capacity.
Like maybe you’re only allowed to be the chair of x society or editor of y journal for a fixed time period and then you’re forced to step down. Maybe something like that could be a codifiable measure of some level of capture of a field.
Maybe?
I think it’s a great question. Two papers come to mind about capture that are somewhat related. These are not directly related but get at the capture part of research to some extent:
This paper by Carrell/Figlio/Lusher captures the clubbyness in economics.
I’m really fond of this paper by Rubin and Rubin because the empirical strategy is smart.
“Like maybe you’re only allowed to be the chair of x society or editor of y journal for a fixed time period and then you’re forced to step down. Maybe something like that could be a codifiable measure of some level of capture of a field.”
I know some people who are working on something kind of like this. Happy to explore this further when we chat.
Thanks! I’ll read them this weekend! Have a good weekend!