[cont’d from here]

Paul Erdős sent some­body who sent some­body who sent some­body who sent me

In April of 2004 I “sold my Erdős Num­ber” on eBay. My num­ber is a 4, because I pub­lished a mea­sur­ably unim­por­tant paper with my then-​​office mate Mark New­man, who has a 3.

You can read some things about it in Sci­ence News, or the Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion [annoy­ing login], or the Ann Arbor Observer [not online?!]. When I get around to un-​​mothballing and inte­grat­ing old archived posts from the pre­vi­ous incar­na­tion of this blog, you’ll be able to read it here.

The basic facts are sim­ple: I offered 80 hours of my time, to be spent col­lab­o­rat­ing on a research paper with the auc­tion win­ner in a dis­ci­pline of their choice, after which we would sub­mit a man­u­script for peer-​​reviewed pub­li­ca­tion by the tra­di­tional routes. If the man­u­script was pub­lished, the auc­tion win­ner (and any other coau­thors) could claim an Erdős num­ber of 5. The most com­mon pos­si­ble non-​​infinite value, as it happens.

I started the auc­tion as a joke at the expense of the inbred world of sci­en­tific peer-​​reviewed pub­li­ca­tions (I was not an aca­d­e­mic at the time, but was review­ing papers for sev­eral jour­nals and con­fer­ences in my spe­cialty). And a jab at the per­ceived impor­tance of cita­tion impact stud­ies (Erdős num­ber 5! linked by an insignif­i­cant note to Men­tal! Giants!). And the preva­lent myth that pub­li­ca­tion implies qual­ity, or that author­ity and use­ful­ness are inter­change­able, or that peer review­ers are impar­tial (Cf. “review­ing papers” above). And also as a real, though infor­mal, exper­i­ment in social net­works and pub­lic per­cep­tion of com­pu­ta­tional research.

As it turned out, I never wrote another paper with anybody.

Dr. José Burillo, a Span­ish math­e­mati­cian who was affronted by my [admit­tedly] insult­ing atti­tude towards the hal­lowed aca­d­e­mic char­ac­ter, sniped the sale with (as I recall) a $1,000,000 bid—some big silly num­ber. And then imme­di­ately crowed in com­ments at danah boyd’s Apophe­nia blog that he had blocked my insult­ing den­i­gra­tion of acad­e­mia.

I have won the auc­tion. Not because I intend to pay or to col­lab­o­rate with the seller –my Erdos num­ber is already 3– but to stop the mock­ery this per­son is doing of the paper/​journal sys­tem, and also to stop some poor soul who may be in need of a joint paper for his tenure case to spend his money in this travesty…

An out­come, I should point out, that really iced the cake for my making-​​fun-​​of-​​academics goal. If had sat down and tried to delin­eate an Archie Bunker of aca­d­e­mic pride, and sent José word-​​for-​​word script and instruc­tions, he couldn’t have played the part bet­ter: moral out­rage, unre­flec­tive prej­u­dice, xeno­pho­bia, and even in the end a snatch at self-​​respect by claim­ing to “play a joke also”. Our pri­vate emails to one another (set aside for my estate) are price­less indeed.

But it was the end of the joke. While the second-​​in-​​line bid­der was seri­ous and inter­ested in work­ing, he was an entre­pre­neur in a UK edu­ca­tional startup and time pres­sures filled his cal­en­dar. Noth­ing, to date, came of it all. Except I can tell a good story in the right crowd over beer, and now and then at a con­fer­ence some­body says, “Oh, right! That was you?”. It’s always been an amus­ing result for me, this sort of peter­ing out, this going silently into the dark night.

Now, I’ve learned through the years that many folks build very poor men­tal mod­els of me. So in this very impor­tant case I feel obliged to make this explicit: amuse­ment and seri­ous con­cern are not mutu­ally exclusive.

I am amused; I am also deadly seri­ous. Some­times a joke is bet­ter than a scream. The joke ended there. The seri­ous part stays with me.

See, some­thing else hap­pened: Dur­ing the sale dozens of peo­ple con­tacted me by email and tele­phone. They weren’t see­ing it as a joke. They were anx­ious to bid. They regret­ted being unable to par­tic­i­pate. The wanted to work with me on research, or with any­body on research, or have a chance to carry for­ward research they had started but lost.…

They wanted to collaborate.

They were grad­u­ate stu­dents, and lay­men, and peo­ple with Ph.D.s and M.S. and other advanced degrees in math­e­mat­ics and sci­ence and engi­neer­ing and human­i­ties and social sci­ences and art. And they were busy, and focused, and full of ideas… and every one felt dis­en­fran­chised.

For one rea­son or another they felt unable to col­lab­o­rate in seri­ous research, to fol­low ideas through to com­ple­tion with col­leagues. They were stymied by sex­ism (MIT-​​trained female math Ph.D., forced into indus­try by uncol­lab­o­ra­tive peers), by the bur­den of dili­gence (grad­u­ate and under­grad­u­ate stu­dents, or indus­trial researchers ordered to focus and pay atten­tion on their imme­di­ate work), by the walls of the many-​​siloed Ivory Tower itself. Or they were smart aca­d­e­mics in the right posi­tion, who had nobody will­ing to col­lab­o­rate with them in a cul­ture that over-​​values com­pe­ti­tion and secrecy and pri­mary author­ship. Some were full pro­fes­sors, fully-​​credentialled but held back by ser­vice or admin­is­tra­tive oblig­a­tions, or fund­ing hard­ships, or some other oft-​​voiced com­plaint. Some were in small ivy-​​covered under­grad­u­ate teach­ing insti­tu­tions, or com­mu­nity col­leges, and just out of luck for chances to do some work.

Nobody seemed dumb. Nobody sounded like they were try­ing to scam a light­ened work­load by foist­ing the hard part of their project over to me. Nobody was try­ing to cheat on their home­work or the­sis. Nobody was a cre­ation­ist, nobody was astro­turf­ing. They all made it sound as if find­ing a col­league was the best thing they could imagine.

I make it out to be very gen­eral, very broad, almost ubiq­ui­tous. There was diver­sity in the char­ac­ter of response, but I’m not exag­ger­at­ing: nearly two dozen peo­ple con­tacted me. This expres­sion of dis­en­fran­chise­ment was a shared trait of a stream of email cor­re­spon­dents, and peo­ple who called me directly on my busi­ness line. They didn’t really care how good or bad I was, and maybe didn’t care too much about my cre­den­tials. The fact that I seemed capa­ble, and seri­ous, and will­ing to give my time and energy to think­ing and talk­ing with them about some­thing they were inter­ested in… that was enough.

Once I was a dot­com guy. Almost. For a while. (And we’ll come back to that later this week.) A real­is­tic sense of mar­ket­ing sticks with you when you’re out in the world, and taints and under­mines your aca­d­e­mic life. Know­ing any­thing at all, you’re forced to ask in sem­i­nars and lab meet­ings and review­ing papers Why does any­body want this? What cus­tomer pain does it address?.

But that is Not a Ques­tion We Take Seri­ously in the Life of the Mind. At best, it’s some­thing we ask after we’ve decided what we want to do. We do not have “cus­tomers”, we have patrons.

These peo­ple call­ing me had real pain. Not so much “pain” in terms of psy­chic or phys­i­cal anguish. But “pain” in the mar­keters’ sense of poten­tial cus­tomers’ pain: frus­tra­tion, desire, unful­filled need for improve­ments, a sense of use­less striv­ing, of wait­ing for bet­ter to come along. And some­times, yes, also real pain: regret, long-​​suffered anx­i­ety, inter­minable frus­tra­tion bal­anc­ing work­life, real life, and a denied life of the mind. You can’t have a fam­ily and a career; all the best math­e­mati­cians have done their work by 25; women can’t be pro­fes­sors in “our” dis­ci­pline; if you can’t play the game your­self, why then you’ll have to make do read­ing pop­u­lar­iza­tions; preg­nancy, divorce, death in the fam­ily, ill­ness, polit­i­cal involve­ment, vot­ing, hob­bies, inter­dis­ci­pli­nar­ity are all dis­trac­tions from your imme­di­ate work.

I’m not telling you that’s the life of every ex-​​academic. I am telling you it’s the anec­dote of every one of those peo­ple who wrote to me. And one or two reporters who inter­viewed me.

So the joke ended with José, who stepped into the role of Mocked as if he were in on the joke. The seri­ous part stays with me. Scroll back through what I’ve been writ­ing for the past three years, what I’ve been read­ing and book­mark­ing, what I’ve been hint­ing at. It’s there in plain sight.

Con­sider that there might have been 7000 peo­ple pay­ing atten­tion to my lit­tle eso­teric joke. A nice audi­ence for that science-​​bloggy kind of thing, but not a big frac­tion of the world in any sense. But of those thou­sands, dozens expressed heart­felt desire to step into the life of the mind, to have an excuse to explore basic sci­ence or engi­neer­ing or model social sys­tems or write sim­u­la­tion code or do some­thing to con­tribute to the ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion that is scholarship.

Scale that up. This is a pain served at present (I am about to be harsh, so Chron­i­cle of Higher Ed read­ers may avert their eyes) by an exclu­sion­ary, pre­ten­tious, self-​​confident monop­oly: the Academy.

It’s OK. I’m one of us. I can say that.

These peo­ple are not the Academy’s cus­tomers. The acad­emy doesn’t have cus­tomers, it has patrons.

So whose cus­tomers might they be? Who can give them what they want? And what do they want?

To answer that, I’ll repeat myself, since it’s been a few months since I banged this drum: Schol­ar­ship is con­ver­sa­tion. No schol­arly paper, no pre­sen­ta­tion, no book has any value what­so­ever except mea­sured by the responses it gen­er­ates and the answers it receives. Cita­tions, and quotes, and reviews and recommendations—they are all that mat­ters, and they are acts of con­ver­sa­tion. Dia­log.

That dia­log, dec­o­rated with a few hack­neyed rit­u­als and ethno­graphic quirks, is the Schol­arly Com­mu­nity. Inter­est­ingly, Acad­e­mia is not about con­ver­sa­tion; con­ver­sa­tion is the last thing on most poor pro­fes­sors’ agen­das. Acad­e­mia is about being aca­d­e­mic. Schol­ar­ship, that eter­nal search­ing con­ver­sa­tion, is no longer the same thing.

The most bril­liant mono­graph, sit­ting unread in a library stack, is a waste of paper. The “best” jour­nal arti­cle in the world, ele­gant and suc­cinct and capa­ble of chang­ing the world… if unre­marked, uncited, unin­flu­en­tial is no bet­ter than the worst arti­cle in the world. And is in good com­pany, with many companions.

And also: the most triv­ial, deriv­a­tive, incre­men­tal, hes­i­tant “…: Towards a…” paper, if widely read and dis­cussed can become a world-​​spanning nexus in the grow­ing net­work of aca­d­e­mic thought, a new cen­ter of dia­log, a crux of oft-​​cited impor­tance. Atten­tion trumps the mythic “inher­ent qual­ity”. One needn’t be beau­ti­ful to launch a thou­sand ideas. One need sim­ply be discussed.

But that’s nei­ther here nor there. My cor­re­spon­dents, my sup­posed dis­en­fran­chised watch­ers? They wanted a chance to carry for­ward their share of the con­ver­sa­tion. They wanted an excuse to be scholarly.

So. Even before the end of the joke, before the end of the auc­tion, I had added a seri­ous note in big type to the eBay list­ing. Some­thing had to be done; I didn’t know what. I promised that the funds raised by the sale would be used to cre­ate an online com­mu­nity to fos­ter sci­en­tific col­lab­o­ra­tion. There’s an irony, eh? All those funds I gar­nered with my mock­ery of the paper/​journal sys­tem, given to fos­ter more mockeries.

But I jab when I should stroke. I hope we can some­day thank José for the clar­ity and moral fire he imparted to me. He was such a good exam­ple. Noth­ing fos­ters inno­v­a­tive problem-​​solving like deep-​​seated per­sonal issues.

And soon it came to be the Sum­mer of 2004, and I was start­ing (iron­i­cally, as the Chron­i­cle reporter pointed out) grad­u­ate school again after sev­eral years in the real world. I’d keep those dis­en­fran­chised folks in mind. I’d help start some­thing like Sci­ence Com­mons, or some match­ing ser­vice, or some mar­ket­place of ideas. Some­thing to help them… online maybe? And I’d work to open up the Uni­ver­sity from my posi­tion as a stu­dent and maybe even­tual fac­ulty mem­ber and maybe even­tual admin­is­tra­tor: try to fix the meat grinder from the inside, as Thom LaBean once described it.

So in August I started school, think­ing I’d have time enough to work things out. Might make a good the­sis project, or a sideline.

And then my wife’s father started to die, and a close friend died hor­ri­bly, and late one night my mother-​​in-​​law came down with cancer.

And that right there, as they say, is a dis­trac­tion from one’s imme­di­ate work. I had a lot of sup­port from my depart­ment (this time around), and they were under­stand­ing and acted like adults. But the insti­tu­tion is not fully deter­mined by the behav­ior of its par­tic­i­pants: You lose your nim­ble­ness in that meat grinder, no mat­ter how expe­ri­enced a repair­man you make your­self out to be, no mat­ter how many help­ing hands reach out to steady you… you’re gonna lose some pieces pretty quick.

There is a rea­son young aca­d­e­mics make the best stars. It’s not the vivid reck­less­ness of youth. It’s sim­ply that they have not yet been dri­ven by the exi­gen­cies of real life to perspective.

[cont’d soon]