On U-Turns, Detours and Academic Productivity

There’s a piece of common wisdom among academics that I’d like to share with you today.  One of the best ways to become a productive scholar – the type who frequently introduces an innovative way of looking at a problem and  who is never short of research topics  -- is to read widely outside your field of primary interest.  That’s because often new and novel research ideas in one field come about through a process of ‘borrowing’ from another field.  Within political science, we can identify approaches to looking at problems that have been borrowed from psychology, sociology and economics, to name a few. 

Back when I was in graduate school at the University of Michigan, I was fortunate to be able to take a class with Robert Axelrod, the award-winning author of the Evolution of Cooperation, a seminal work in the field of international relations.  He  offered his students a lot of advice as we began our academic careers and some of it has stuck with us today.  First, he encouraged us to apply for every single fellowship and grant, seminar and program for which we might be remotely eligible.  I still remember him asking us, “What have you got to lose?  All it costs you is the price of a stamp – but that grant might be worth ten thousand dollars.”  This shows you how old I am – since now most of the applying takes place on line (making it even cheaper, by the way . . . )

The other piece of advice had to do with this notion of borrowing.  He was constantly asking how explanations which helped in understanding and predicting one type of phenomena might be useful in explaining other phenomena.  I remember watching his mind work – as he asked us whether, for example, computer models which predicted which buildings were stable and which were prone to collapse – might be applied to asking about stability in the international system, or the likelihood of a regime change.  (Those of you in my research methods class will recognize this as the principle of generalizability.) 

Recently my own extradisciplinary reading has been in the field of engineering ethics, and I’ll blog more about that later this week.  I’ve been enjoying a book by Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen called Moral Machines:  Teaching Robots Right from Wrong.  In it, the authors make the argument that increasingly, humans are turning over many functions of running society to machines which make decisions which affect our lives.  These machines are using automation and algorithms to do everything from deciding who gets an extra ‘pat-down’ at the airport, to automatically shutting off your credit card if you engage in an unusual transaction, to shutting off a nuclear reactor if a breach is detected.  As we begin to traverse this brave new world in which both humans and machines think, make decisions and affect society, there are certainly ways in which political scientists can begin to think about the politics which will arise.  But more about that later this week . . .