{"id":2636,"date":"2008-05-22T10:18:41","date_gmt":"2008-05-22T10:18:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/05\/22\/publish-or-president\/"},"modified":"2008-05-22T10:18:41","modified_gmt":"2008-05-22T10:18:41","slug":"publish-or-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/05\/22\/publish-or-president\/","title":{"rendered":"Publish or President?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The pinhead filling in for Colin Cowherd (himself a pinhead of epic proportions) yesterday on ESPN radio was unduly proud of himself for coming up with the following hypothetical (paraphrased from memory):<\/p>\n

\n

Suppose that you had a choice between having your favorite candidate win the presidential election, or having your favorite sports team win a championship. Which would you pick?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Even by the standards of hypotheticals on sports call-in shows, this is pretty stupid. After all, it’s not really a fair comparison– whatever psychological boost it may provide, your favorite sports team winning a title is not likely to affect you personally. A presidential election, on the other hand– particularly this presidential election– will have a significant effect on the status of the nation, and that will affect your daily life in a way that sports won’t.<\/p>\n

(This did not stop large numbers of Cubs fans from calling in to vote for sports titles over politics, of course…)<\/p>\n

Of course, this got me wondering whether there’s a better comparison, involving something with more concrete importance (though not too concrete– “a billion dollars tax-free” is unfair in the other direction). For scientists, maybe something like:<\/p>\n

\n

Suppose that you had a choice between having your favorite candidate win the presidential election, or having a first-author paper in Science<\/cite>. Which would you pick?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For this particular election, I’m not even sure that would do it… What would need to be offered before you had to think seriously about this choice? A tenure-track job? Tenure? A secure source of funding?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The pinhead filling in for Colin Cowherd (himself a pinhead of epic proportions) yesterday on ESPN radio was unduly proud of himself for coming up with the following hypothetical (paraphrased from memory): Suppose that you had a choice between having your favorite candidate win the presidential election, or having your favorite sports team win a… Continue reading Publish or President?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,28,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-politics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2636\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}