A meditation on the highs and lows, the longs and shorts, of academic life.
Staying in the game (PDF).
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4 thoughts on “HOTTE #7: Staying in the game”
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Daniel- thanks for these essays! Very refreshing.
Subject of Happiness, or call it life satisfaction, is a hot topic these days. This essay is right on and straight from the horse’s mouth.
Wise. Thank you. I especially like your practical list of what you consider NOT to be real work. I wonder if you are being too harsh on background reading and lit searches because of your self-identified bias towards big ideas? Would it not be a great task that the lab/field buff should do but is probably avoiding because… shiny equipment! 🙂
Background reading is incredibly important, of course. And it may be that really interrogating a paper closely, for example to design a replication or borrow a modelling technique, could be real work, or that in the course of real work you need to refer to papers from the literture. But ‘doing background reading’ is often a form of deferring committing yourself to actually doing something, and for me it is definitely an afternoon activity (prepartory) not to be confused with the hard stuff.