5 Comments
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Abby ShalekBriski's avatar

Thank you for saying this in a succinct manner. As someone with a background in production agriculture, I am open to and looking for rigorous theoretically and empirically motivated research around the topic.

I am always happy to read and introduce other people to research that challenges how we’ve always done things. But I struggle with folks who have a personal thesis framed as research.

Seth Ariel Green's avatar

Thanks! I have been enjoying your work as well, your interests are a really nice complement to the stuff I've been focusing on so far.

"A personal thesis framed as research" is one way to put it, though I also think of this as a collective problem, e.g., a researcher might do a genuine search for mechanisms but if their discipline will only publish things conforming to certain viewpoint, there's a collective suppression of search, or a kind of indefeatable publication bias.

Matt Ball's avatar

Thanks for this, Seth - important stuff.

Seth Ariel Green's avatar

Thank you for your kind words! What happened was I was complaining about this problem to a friend who also has a Soc PhD and eventually I decided I should stop annoying her and just write the idea out 😃

Matt Ball's avatar

I appreciate that you deal with it constructively, rather than just my "Old man shakes fist at cloud."