Hackwork

In 1990, the redoubtable trio of Avijit Banerjee, Cheickna Sylla, and Somkiat Eiamkanchanlai publish a five page tour de fource titled INPUT/OUTPUT LOT SIZING IN SINGLE STAGE BATCH PRODUCTION SYSTEMS UNDER CONSTANT DEMAND in Computers ind. Engng., Vol. 19, Nos 1-4, pp. 37-41. (The caps are theirs, not mine; what exactly Computer ind. Engng. might stand for in plain English is a secret known only to the editors.) In the tail end of 2008, a certain P., Professor Emeritus in the Duquesne school of business, decides to delay his retirement in response to a bear market. As employ presupposes publishing, and publishing (in operations research) presupposes a strong show of mathematics, Prof. P. launches a discrete inquiry: does anyone in the math department know anything about optimization? Soon Banerjee, Syhlla, and Eiamkanchanlai's slender gem is sitting on my desk. It bears a handwritten sticky note: 'Carl, I haven't read this, but I think we can improve on formula (5). Regards, P.'

It is a statistical fact that the average academic article is read by a total of six people. There is a reason for this: the average academic article is very boring. When you consider the fact that most academics spends months, even years preparing these things, that the articles are sent through a review process that takes just as long and sucks up energy that every reviewer would rather invest elsewhere, that the editors spend considerable resources in assessing the article's relevance, and that the typesetters invest hours trying to figure out how to fit things like pictures and equations within the narrow limits of the journal's margins, it makes you wonder: why all that work for six people? Especially when the author, the reviewer, and the editor represent three of them?

The answer, in my opinion, is that academic journals were never designed to produce beautiful things. Rather, they were designed to serve the very narrow requirements of the university system. For young faculty, an academic journal is where the battle for tenure, grants, and recognition is fought. For the university, a faculty publication record is a convenient way to tout its qualifications as a research center and thus justify charging its undergraduates $40,000 a year. For the reviewers, assessing peer work is a chance to show goodwill to the community, and increase the likelihood that their own papers will get published. The academic journal thus plays host to a cycle of petty advancement. Small wonder, then, that its contents end up being so ponderous: the academic article tends to emerge from a mind in the thrall of tenure, rather than beauty; to be read for omissions, rather than contributions; to be cited piecemeal, for specific ends, and when those ends are met, to be forgotten completely. Should it surprise us if these misbegotten creatures should have such shabby careers in the public imagination? If they manage to live at all, it is only because God is careless, and leaves traces of his smoldering presence in dry places, souls that have long ago have shut their shutters, extinguished their lights, loaded their shotguns and are waiting for death.

In The Gift, Lewis Hyde has a chapter called 'The Gift Community'. Though the focus of the chapter is on science and its practitioners, the arguments easily extend to a broader academic community. Hyde's point is that science, at least good science, is done not for lucre, or even for prestige, but as a kind of gift. The sense in which a work of science can be understood as a gift needs to understood in context, of course: the claim is not that leading scientists don't covet any of the social or material fringe benefits that their scientific success commands, but rather that these things alone don't explain the work. "In science", Hyde claims, "it is precisely when people work with no goal other than that of attracting a better job, or getting tenure or higher rank that one finds specious and trivial research, not contributions to knowledge." In Hyde's view, good science emerges from a deep and sustained sense that the Individual can have meaningful relation with the Universe. He claims that real science develops within a community whose whole ethical and aesthetic tone closely parallel those of tribal gift societies.

What is a gift society? In some ways, the answer to that question represents the entire content of Hyde's book, so I won't attempt to do it justice here. But one metaphor that can help us think about the problem is what Hyde calls the 'vector of increase'. In capitalist societies, one enters into mercantile exchange with the explicit intention of increasing one's own wealth. Personal enrichment is the essence of the transaction, and it thus doesn't make sense to suggest that one shouldn't expect it. In gift societies, on the other hand, transactions are also carried out with the expectation of increase, but there is no expectation that the increase will come back to the giver. The increase diffuses into the community, and only as a part of that community can the parties of the transaction expect to reap its benefits. The difference, then, is that in the one case the vector of increase points back to the self, whereas in the other it follows the gift.

The problem with bad science is that it assumes the form of a gift, but is accompanied by the wrong vector of increase. In other words, bad science is done for personal enrichment, not community enrichment, and as the gift goes out, floats innocently into the arena of public discourse, fat and slow moving, it gets caught in the cross-fire of self-enrichment, impaled by a vector of increase that's going the wrong way. Is an accident that journals labor under the dead weight of their contents? That an article that takes six man-months to write languishes unread in a thousand page annual compendium buried in the basement of the stacks? Perhaps this crisis of paper, this ever more torrential output of unread and unreadable results, this wild expansion of the Unknown, is connected, in some formal way, to the acedia of intellectual capitalism?

I explain all this to Zoogle. With his usual wisdom, he only looks at me with his bug eyes and smiles. Zoogle knows too much about hackwork to knock it: true, he's not reading Banerjee, Syhlla, and Eiamkanchanlai, but he's reading us, our canned laughter, our false excitement, our lullabies that are out of tune, our forced smiles. Zoogle doesn't care. He reads everything we publish, and every time he turns a page, he smiles, takes notes, jots down a few comments. Perhaps he knows that if doesn't hear the consonant 'p' at least 3000 times he'll never say it on his own. I don't know. But whatever his reasons, he's made his peace with the system, and with Zen-like calm he lets his education ride on his parents' perfunctory daily performance. Perhaps I should pay closer attention to this boy. He may have something to teach me.