Daniel Lemire on social pressure

>From the comments and Daniel Lemire’s blog:

When I started out doing research, I thought that research was about sitting in your office thinking up new ideas. God! Was I wrong!

Now, don’t get me wrong, research is not about having meetings with other researchers or spending time chatting, or drawing UML diagrams of what is to be done, or spending weeks on funding proposals. We might do these things, but they don’t make us good researchers. But neither will sitting in your office thinking new ideas. That’s not effective research.

On quasi-desert islands with no telecommunications, you’ll find very few great researchers. The social network doesn’t need to be immediate: I think you can be a great researcher even in a tiny school. And I don’t think your network should be made of students mostly, especially not your own students.

I believe the secret to being a good researcher is to belong to a tightly knitted group of solid researchers. Research is about networking. By tightly knitted, I don’t necessarily mean “military-like”: I mean that you feel peer pressure all the time to do good research. This can be achieved through emails, blogging, phone… whatever the mean…

Social forces are incredible things. As a researcher, being in a good social environment (which may need to be created from scratch) is like being a runner with a 50 kph tail wind. A turning point in the early days of my research group was the installation of a couple of sofas in front of a whiteboard in the room next to my office. It wasn’t my idea, but boy, was it about the best $30 we ever spent…