A third (and not likely to be) final note on Pre-mature Publishing
The never-ending story
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I’ve been dealing with Ted Kaczynski for weeks now. He re-entered my consciousness when my podcast co-host mentioned him in the context of ‘extreme self-reliance’ during our Episode on Emerson’s essay, Friendship. We decided we’d read the Unabomber Manifesto that he demanded be published in the New York Times 25 years ago.
Then I decided that while I was reading, I should do an audio recording so our Syllojism audience could do the challenge with us before listening to the podcast. Also, I figured if I’m not on the FBI watch list, this ought to get me in some kind of database. Unnecessary, and WAYYY too much work, but I did it anyway, of course. It took several hours. (Subscribe to premium cuz, labor.)
Now, I’ve been editing this audio for going on a week (it was 3.75 hours unedited). Suffice it to say, I am intimately acquainted with Ted’s ideas.
As confirmation bias would have it, I noticed that a movie called Ted K (The challenge for Syllojism Episode 6) was to be released a week after we recorded the episode.
Of course, we had to watch it and comment (Syllojism Episode forthcoming). While editing all of this content, I’ve had new thoughts about it, and we’d already recorded the episode. I thought ‘I probably should have done this first and then recorded the episode’, but we were eager to record. I realized that this is another example of my Publish or Draft AKA Premature Publishing dilemma. Ted’s urgency to publish reminded me of where this dilemma that is not so much of a dilemma was born: my career in science.
When I was at the bench, I worked on problems that were difficult because that was what interested me: what has no one been able to figure out? Where are the gaping holes in our knowledge? In the midst of digging, I’d find that the holes were holes because they were deep and hard to get into, and once you did good luck publishing your way out. Naively, I thought that the scientific community was in place to help humanity solve these problems! I obviously had a lesson to learn. The first professional conference I attended was full of scientists parading their data, and I fielded questions like:
“Are you sure there’s no other way this could be happening?”
“What else have you tried?”
“Have you read so and so’s work on this?”
A lot of skepticism - which I expected.
As I presented more and more, I noticed people came to my poster to take notes and pictures. I’d get a lot of questions about methodology and my rationale. A lot of people didn’t believe my findings, yet other people seemed very interested.
I went on presenting before publishing (like an idiot) until one day a bigger lab published my findings out from underneath me here and later here. My data weren’t ready for publication, and my advisor was pissed that I had presented prematurely. I was, too, but I was pretty ok just having my findings validated even if Personal validation doesn’t buy reagents. This happened a few times though, and it did start getting old. Yeah, cool, I was the first to show (publically) that ER Beta was SUMOylated, but if it ain’t published - it don’t count. I was also bummed that we weren’t collaborating with the lab that we knew would be working on it. There was this spirit of competition that really killed my vibe. I just wanted to do cool science, bruh.
My discovery was dead in the water, so, I wrote a piece about competition versus collaboration for The Endocrine Society’s magazine Endocrine News. Reading it today, I’m blown away by how accurately it depicted my feelings. It was a very confused piece. I had authored technical manuscripts, but no one taught me how to construct an argument in an Op-Ed. I also wanted to please my advisor who was more pro-competition than I was. I thought by arguing for collaboration, I came off as a sore loser. So, I argued with myself publically (as usual) and ended up putting out a piece that reflected my confusion about the topic.
I’ve always struggled with collective v. individual efforts, which leads me back to Ted K. While Teddy argues that leftism is trash and collectivism is pretty much the devil, he uses the pronoun “we” to write the entire manifesto. He also blames “society” and “the elite” for all the problems in the world, never considering that individual actions are what lead to organizational technology. He thought he needed collective power to destroy collective technology. Call me old-fashioned, but I still think the end doesn’t justify the means. I don’t think collectivism/leftism is the devil. I think we need individualism as much as we need collectivism, and I think some people who are shitty just do shitty things. (Ahem.)
Opposite from me, Ted K sat on his manifesto. Where I just want to get it out there while it’s fresh, he wanted it out there in a big, calculated way. Maybe if he had felt some agency to push his ideas out into the universe without doing a murder, people would be more inclined to consider which of his blood-stained ideas hold merit. Now, if someone takes his ideas and puts them forth in a way that makes sense, he’ll be a mere footnote in their story. If he were born in 1985, maybe he’d have a Substack and be doing a guest spot on Joe Rogan.
So, yeah. Call it premature or call it not-doing-a-murder… just put your shit out there.