I can imagine that a good fraction of social science research can be compressed into a paragraph digestible for a lay audience, which will find the results neat. Hopefully, an author can write such a compelling digestible paragraph in just an hour.
However, what is the point? Clearly it doesn't advance the academic's goals, unless they c…
I can imagine that a good fraction of social science research can be compressed into a paragraph digestible for a lay audience, which will find the results neat. Hopefully, an author can write such a compelling digestible paragraph in just an hour.
However, what is the point? Clearly it doesn't advance the academic's goals, unless they can get a sizeable following. Does reading it help the lives of the lay-readers? It seems like it will just be read as another neat fact that doesn't meaningfully contributed to anybody's knowledge (e.g., like anything you can find on https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/).
Nonetheless, maybe the costs are low enough that people should still do it. Maybe the upside of the neat facts will be high enough if there was some website to deposit these summaries, which got meaningful readership (let's say at 100 people fully reading a paragraph summary, at the median). The biggest advantage I see is just getting people more interested in science, in general. Maybe it will also make social science more respected. Maybe these outcomes are good enough for this to be worthwhile (if 100+ readers can be achieved).
Another thing, about "Unless you’re someone who has the time and reputation to get an op-ed published" I don't think you really need to have that much clout to enter the press. If your finding is interesting, you can just contact media people (not the NYT or somewhere massive, but some minor organization), talk to them about your results, and they can run with it.
I can imagine that a good fraction of social science research can be compressed into a paragraph digestible for a lay audience, which will find the results neat. Hopefully, an author can write such a compelling digestible paragraph in just an hour.
However, what is the point? Clearly it doesn't advance the academic's goals, unless they can get a sizeable following. Does reading it help the lives of the lay-readers? It seems like it will just be read as another neat fact that doesn't meaningfully contributed to anybody's knowledge (e.g., like anything you can find on https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/).
Nonetheless, maybe the costs are low enough that people should still do it. Maybe the upside of the neat facts will be high enough if there was some website to deposit these summaries, which got meaningful readership (let's say at 100 people fully reading a paragraph summary, at the median). The biggest advantage I see is just getting people more interested in science, in general. Maybe it will also make social science more respected. Maybe these outcomes are good enough for this to be worthwhile (if 100+ readers can be achieved).
Another thing, about "Unless you’re someone who has the time and reputation to get an op-ed published" I don't think you really need to have that much clout to enter the press. If your finding is interesting, you can just contact media people (not the NYT or somewhere massive, but some minor organization), talk to them about your results, and they can run with it.