I am now in a truly interdisciplinary environment if researchers representing all the social sciences, public health, and medicine. It gives you a very different perspective on research and academic narrowness defined by our disciplines. Some questions: - ThreadSky

pdakean.bsky.social • 74 days ago

I am now in a truly interdisciplinary environment if researchers representing all the social sciences, public health, and medicine. It gives you a very different perspective on research and academic narrowness defined by our disciplines. Some questions:

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pdakean.bsky.social•74 days ago

Is it the right thing for science to spend your whole career concentrating on one topic area? How does that help our science? How does it help the scientist?

janprobst.bsky.social•74 days ago

It depends. Sam's guardian has focused on a population, which is a public health thing. Varying topics and approaches and lots of interdisciplinary work. Opinion: worst thing about tenure is its insistence on personal glory > team building.

pdakean.bsky.social•74 days ago

Does tenure force us to become too narrow as we make a “name” for ourselves to show we are worthy of a lifetime position?

jeremykoster.bsky.social•74 days ago

Abundant literature suggests that boundary-spanners in organizational settings are routinely penalized relative to specialists. Here is an example: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/orsc.2022.1610?trk=public_post_comment-text

pdakean.bsky.social•74 days ago

And yet what happens if we don't expand those boundaries? How sad our system as this paper notes-is set up to not support new ideas and discovery as we have suggested science is all about. Thanks for sharing, Jeremy.

jeremykoster.bsky.social•73 days ago

As low-hanging fruit, psychologists could more often disagree with Campbell:
"(W)here either internal validity or representativeness must be sacrificed, which should it be? The answer is clear. Internal validity is the prior and indispensable consideration."
http://rogosateaching.com/somgen290/campbell_1957.pdf

pdakean.bsky.social•74 days ago

How do we solve big problems if we only understand one small aspect of what is going on with human behaviors? If the answer is to work in teams-when does that happen within a department of people doing narrow science?

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