Slacking

On Friday I have the day off, thanks to the wedding of a fantastically privileged prince to, as Tim Dowling nicely put it (and appropriately for this blog),

…Future princess, common Kate;
As common as the common skate,
Which is to say, quite rare these days…

Add this to the rather more proletarian May Day holiday on Monday, and last weekend’s Easter break (Good Friday? Yes, and good Monday too ta very much) and that makes 11 workdays in three weeks.

Which led me to wonder, how many other academic scientists will do as I have done, and take off every minute offered? I’ve been thinking a bit recently about the culture of ridiculous working hours in science, triggered by Rachel Bowden’s Nature Jobs blog a couple of weeks back. More particularly, I’ve been working myself into a state of some annoyance about what I perceive to be a bit of macho posturing, of bragging about the hours one works.

The biologist Edward O. Wilson – whose work and writing on biodiversity I respect and admire very much – has been quoted (I can’t find the source) as saying that a good scientist should expect to work 80 hours a week. 40 for research, 40 for admin, teaching, etc. This figure seems to be bandied around almost as something to aspire to, and I suppose that during your PhD, there is something kind of rights-of-passage about really putting in the hours, in the manner of junior hospital doctors. But, perhaps because I gave up trying to maintain anything like that pace a while ago (still more so since the birth of my son), it aggravates me that anyone thinks that, for a normal person, an 80 hour working week could possibly be sustained over a period of years, decades even.

Let’s do the maths (as Mark insists to Jeremy in an episode of Peep Show, the ‘s’ on the end there is non-negotiable).

There are 168 hours in the week, so 88 after your 80 hours of work.

Let’s assume you sleep for 7 hours a night – personally I’d prefer more, but 7 sounds reasonable. So, you now have 39 waking hours left.

Some of that will be filled with the business of staying alive. Let’s say 2 hours a day for preparing and eating food. More will be taken up with remaining vaguely hygienic in body and home – does an average of an hour a day for washing self and clothes, cleaning the house, doing any essential DIY tasks that arise, tidying the garden, buying groceries, etc., sound about right?

OK. You have 18 hours left. You’ll spend some of those commuting to work and back – an hour a day, if you’re lucky, which – assuming you spread your 80 hours over 6 days, brings you down to 12 hours.

12 hours a week, every week, to do everything else. To socialise, chat to family and friends on the phone, play with your kids (assuming you ever found the time to perform the various tasks necessary to produce any), exercise, watch TV, whatever.

It’s worth laying these sums out in black and white because I know that people do feel pressured into working stupid hours (as a matter of course, I mean, not just for the occasional mad week before a deadline, which we all do). My message is that there are two ways to survive such a punishing schedule.

First, you could live to work. If you have no interest in food as anything other than fuel; if you are prepared to forego hobbies, exercise, a social life of any real meaning; then I suppose you could just about cram it in.

Second – and this I suspect is the route taken by most senior academics who are proud of their long hours at the desk – you can perform an accounting trick. You acquire a spouse who is prepared to do all of the work of making life run smoothly, and you simply appropriate their 40 hours. 80 hours work between a couple? (With sole credit to the partner in paid employment, of course.) Easy enough. But it’s not a path that many of us particularly want to follow.

So, I’ll be enjoying my bank holiday weekends. And working damn hard – during office hours – when I get back.

Thinker's Block

One of the challenges of managing the progression from being ’somebody’s post-doc’ to an autonomous PI is to maintain the flow of new ideas. To start with, this is easy. After all, if you’re anything like me, you will have spend a considerable portion of the preceding few years developing and honing a whole stock of ideas, trying to convince employers and fellowship panels of their worth. The moment someone finally agrees to fund you, you’re up an running, free and gloriously independent to bring these thoughts to fruition. The first cracks in this blissful state of being start to appear a couple of years later. You’ve tried out those things that you were sure would make your name. They may have worked, to an extent – you’ve probably published a few papers of which you’re rather proud. And no doubt, your initial research has suggested all kinds of routes for future work.

The first decision you need to make is, should I be pursuing these new ideas myself? Or, should I be chasing the money, aiming to employ people to do the work for me? On the one hand, your institution will be desperate for the overheads that a big grant will bring (conveniently overlooking the generous overheads that your fellowship is already delivering…). But – you also need to think, how much do I want to be a manager? Especially when you know, deep down, that the person best qualified to do the work quickly and to the requisite standard is, well, you.

The second big mental shift you need to make is to recognise that there is no end point. There’s no final report, no thesis to hand in, after which you can go out and celebrate, relax. No. Even if you’ve achieved everything you set out to, got it all written up and published; even then, you’ve got to come into work the next day, face that blank page, and think what to do next. All the while well aware that the most productive researchers in your field have maintained an average publication rate of a paper every two weeks for over 10 years…

This is when the doubts creep in. Are you up to this after all? What if your last good idea really was just that: your last good idea. What’s next on the list? And after that? Where are your next 6 papers coming from? Your next big grant application?

It’s easy, on such occasions, to feel swamped, to feel the sheer enormity of the amount of stuff you need to know, to read and absorb and understand in order to make progress in any one of the disparate areas that interest you; to wish, sometimes, that you could be happy making steady, incremental progress in one tiny area, rather than constantly to seek an exciting new challenge in a discipline whose history and literature remain (to you) as yet unknown. Even the most meticulously-ordered hierarchical to-do list can struggle to cope with this.

Two things can help here. Dripping taps. And walking.

I can’t remember where I picked up the dripping tap analogy, but the idea when feeling flooded is to imagine this flood emanating from a vast array of dripping taps, each one representing something that you should be doing. And then you simply walk methodically through this landscape, concentrating on a tap at a time, turning each off in turn. You won’t stem the tide, of course, but you may keep your head above water.

And walking. Nietzsche said that “all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking”, but the quote I cling to more is one half remembered, I’m pretty sure from Roger Deakin’s lovely Wildwood, about “working it out while walking”. The rhythm of walking seems to coax disparate thoughts out into the open, encouraging them to coalesce into something more tangible. (In passing, you can crowbar this into theories of creativity if you like, for instance James Webb Young’s classic A Technique for Producing Ideas involves thinking very very hard about something, then removing yourself from the work environment – by going for a walk, say – to let the doughy information you’ve absorbed prove into a nice elastic idea.)

So if you see me marching around Weston Park in Sheffield, chances are I’m tackling my thinker’s block. And incidentally, this walk home seems to have done the trick of unclogging my blogger’s block, too.

Battling for the right name: thinking about climate 'sceptics'

Getting the name of your movement right is crucial. Can you imagine waking up one morning, as a campaigner for the right of women to have abortions, to realise that the other side had just called their campaign Pro-Life? How can you counter that, without seeming somehow ‘anti life’? So Pro-Choice was born. It’s a good attempt, but can’t help but sound like a compromise, like second best. Fairtrade is another example, which shows that sometimes the liberals get in first. By labelling ethically traded goods as ‘fair’, the strong implication is that everything that is not so labelled is (by definition, indeed) unfair. (There was even a suggestion, which I rather like, on Mark Thomas’s Radio 4 political comedy The Manifesto that all goods which do not carry the ‘FairTrade’ logo should be labelled ‘Unfair Trade’…) Of course, what some of the big importers of coffee, chocolate, tropical fruit and so on have done is to introduce their own brand of fair trade (without actually signing up to the binding conditions that the fair trade label requires; ‘not-quite-as-unfair-as-usual-trade’, if you like), but again, it feels like they’ve been caught on the hop.

The reason I bring this up is because of the shameless commandeering of the word ‘sceptic’ by those who refuse to accept the evidence that Earth’s climate is changing as a consequence of human actions.

Now, I happen to think that the term ‘sceptic’ is a very complimentary one. As a child in Sunday School, I was always kind of proud to share a name with the only sceptical disciple (an early sign, perhaps, that I was bound for the scientific rather than the clerical life…) And I certainly believe that one has to earn the title ‘sceptic’ (although there might be exceptions: I remember a report in the local press when I was a kid, of a star rugby player forced to miss a game with a ‘sceptic toe’…).

By all reasonable definitions of the term, all of us scientists should aspire to be sceptics. But even the most fervent sceptic should be swayed by the weight of evidence (my biblical namesake, after all, was finally convinced by the evidence of his eyes and fingers). So, I would like to think of myself as a climate change sceptic: I have critically considered the evidence, and the most parsimonious (i.e. sceptical) position is that anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are having a profound effect on the Earth’s climate, biogeochemistry, and ecology.

But, us proper sceptics have been gazumped: the term ‘climate sceptic’ is now irreversibly associated with a different kind of sceptical approach. One which cherry picks facts to match an argument, and ignores all evidence to the contrary – even when this contrary evidence far outweighs the favourable evidence in terms of both quality and quantity. One which gives more credence to internet rumours than to peer-reviewed (i.e., quality controlled) scientific research. A definition of ‘sceptical’ which is, in fact, indistinguishable from ‘credulous’.

What can we do? We need a name that encompasses proper scientific scepticism, to counter this false-sceptic meme. To date, the argument has usually been framed as between climate scientists and climate sceptics, but this is misleading – it suggests that the ‘sceptics’ are some kind of independent scrutinising body, overseeing the scientific process. To return to the example I started with, it’s kind of like pitting ‘pro-life’ against ‘the medical establishment’; there’s a non-equivalence there.

My suggestion? Well, it’s tricky, because most candidates have already been snapped up by the brand-savvy ‘sceptics’. I’d originally thought of ‘climate realist’ as an umbrella term which suggests scepticism, pragmatism, and a certain down-to-earthness; but it turns out there’s a different kind of realist (read: fantasist) already… So what about ‘climate thinkers’?

I would love to see a news programme pitting a ‘renowned climate sceptic’ (Nigel Lawson, say) against a ‘respected climate thinker’ – perhaps Nicholas Stern, or David King, or Paul Nurse, or any other true sceptic.