It’s time for me to answer the question.
Is my work about “influencing people” or is it about “solving hard problems”?
The first part of my answer has to be: Is this a valid question or not? Does the question make sense?
In some ways no. You can do both. As with most things in life, it’s not one or the other. It’s not even a sliding scale— you can do both a lot, or neither at all.
However, I think it’s fair to ask what my primary goal is. In the spirit of the question, I could answer with what the most important one is— at least in theory.
The next part of my answer has to be: Is this the right question to ask? Is it missing the point? Is it going down the wrong path? Or is it hitting on something important?
I think that it is a question worth asking, because it leads to surprising results— surprising results for me and others (which I now know from sharing the answers more widely). The answers are not what I expected, so I learned something from it. My assumptions were wrong! That’s not a bad thing— that’s progress.
But is it the whole picture? Is it the right tree to bark up? Taking a step back, more questions shook out of this. They are as follows:
Question 1 has been a very informative question to ask. I’ve learned a lot about people’s practices by asking it.
I think question 2 is rubbish. It’s too general and vague to get anything meaningful out— people answer vaguely to a vague question, and it’s hard to compare responses. So far, I’ve only got pretty general answers like “other researchers” and “industry” (which I reported on in the previous post). I hope to find a better way of probing into that topic. My impression is that “impact” is a really sore topic on the whole, and most researchers try to avoid it as much as they can.
I haven’t tried asking question 3 directly because it’s something I’ve been able to enquire about through the other questions. I might try asking it directly to see how good/bad it is.
Looping back around, I think the original question is a bit weird because “solving hard problems” and “influencing people” are not directly comparable. “Solving hard problems” implies that you haven’t yet figured out something, whereas “influencing people” implies that you’ve already figured something out.
There’s not a clear balance and I think it biases away from the “influencing” option a bit. “Influencing” sounds less noble, because it sounds like there’s less work involved— that you don’t care about if your message is right or wrong— that you think you’ve already got it all figured out.
But the question is about the nature of your research. Are you hoping to discover? Or are you hoping to advocate? I think that both can be worthwhile pursuits for a person to pursue. (editor: rewrite sentence to avoid repetition of “pursue”)
A good example of “advocacy” research is Ink & Switch’s local-first essay.
A good example of “discovery” research is… Actually I can’t think of any because I find that kind of stuff miserably boring. But I know it’s out there because I’ve seen it. It’s the kind of stuff that’s like “Here’s how to make your code run faster, and we have the numbers to prove it.” I’ve read many papers and articles like this, and I benefit greatly from them— I just always forget them, because they’re supposed to be dry, right? It’s supposed to share something clearly— it’s not supposed to influence me beyond that. It’s not that it’s not allowed to— it’s that it doesn’t care— it has enough work to do as it is!
In the advocacy case, there is still lots of work involved in figuring out the message. How do you know that your message is worth transmitting? How do you know that it’s worth influencing people in that way? And then, after you’ve done that, the challenge is: How are you going to influence people effectively? There are multiple steps.
And I could break down the “discovery” style of research in a similar way. What problem is worth solving? And then: How are you going to solve it?
Both approaches have multiple steps, and they are comparably tedious in that way. There is nothing more or less noble in the “advocacy” route, in my opinion— it just represents a different kind of work that needs to be done.
Sometimes work is drawing dots.
Sometimes work is drawing lines.
No single question can cover everything. So of course, the question doesn’t encapsulate everything that a researcher does. It’s just one area of enquiry that you can prod— one lens to look through— one way to probe. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. You can combine it with other bits of information to make a bigger picture. So let’s cover what those other pictures bits might be.
One thing that popped up was “building community”. I think that’s really important, so a good answer will link to that in some way.
Another thing I think is important is—
Wait, I think I’m getting onto my answer now— let’s do it:
So…
Now that I have analysed and pulled apart the question, it’s finally time to tell you what I think— what my answer is— how I answer.
And I will reveal it in the next part of this blog post series.
In the meantime, time to get…
time to get…
Back to the wikiblogarden.