15 lessons from 2024

Or; what I picked up from other people and the internet.

First (?) full rainbow spotted, 22nd December 2024 in Fuerteventura.

2024 is nearing its end. It’s been a great year. I wrote and handed in my master’s thesis and gained the crisp title of cand.scient.pol after five terrific years at the University of Copenhagen. That also concluded my time at Egmont Kollegiet, which was my colorful home over the course of my studies. I moved to Somerville, Massachusetts, and now enjoy not being woken up by a heavy bass at 2 a.m. over the weekend. However, I do miss the festivities and the hearty madklub.

Fall marked the start of my doctoral degree at the Government Department at Harvard. This has been a delight, and the average conversation is slightly above average. I am happy that I am actively pursuing my ambition of becoming a mediocre tennis player over the course of the degree. This has been greatly aided along by the graduate student tennis club, where I can see that it is a good thing that the PhD takes 5-7 years – I’ll need time to get at proper hitting level.

Based on this, I present a list of lessons from 2024. You can interpret this as advice I would have given myself at the start of 2024, which potential relevance for other people.

Productivity

1. Minimal viable product. I guess this is the biggest tech-bro/consultant/start-up-slang-cliché, but it is not a salient enough phrase in ivory tower environments. Here, perfectionism is often a trait that has been internalized so heavily throughout a steady climb through the educational system, where the apparent incentive is to maximize grades. While I’ve mostly been ok at settling for much less than perfect (but not always), thinking in terms of the minimal viable product is often a productive approach for research. This is also a variant of saying keep it simple as possible. And in projects, one quickly learns that the simplest project may not actually be that simple. So, keep it simple, create the minimal viable product for the given stage of the project, get feedback, iterate, and repeat until it is ready for the market (of ideas).

2. Love thy deadline. This compliments the above, but this is something I came to appreciate last year, while reading Torben Beck Jørgensens “Forskning med følelse” (2006) [research with emotion/feeling]. It is generally a fantastic book by a scholar from Copenhagen I never got to meet, where Jørgensen describes the magical power of the deadline. When approaching the deadline, one becomes able to make choices which before seemed impossible; to exclude unnecessary details which before seemed so hard to kill, and to focus on the question at hand. Of course, one does not want to postpone everything to the last minute, but one should feel comfort in that the last minute will provide clarity and strength which were hitherto inaccessible.

3. Share as early as possible. I was at a gathering with a professor some years ago, where someone asked rather directly how to achieve success in research. The professor answered that the best predictor of success among their peers from their PhD-program was simply how early people shared their ideas. Sharing was here understood widely; when did they tell someone else about it, when did they ask for someone else to read a draft or when did they choose to present a project. This is a further variant from the above, but it certainly is a distinct piece of advice that I have taken to heart. And the best opportunities I have gotten this year have been from sharing something early and then see that snowball with someone else’s ideas. Of course, you need something to share, and I have suffered awkward moments by realizing the immaturity of an idea in live conversation. But swallow the awkwardness and get out there, because science is social, and the quickest way to thinking is through interaction.

4. Manage the work week. PhD-life comes with a high degree of autonomy, and in the American setting, you basically have a very long-time horizon (5+ years) to get something done. Optimally, you would spread the effort out, make sure to sleep, exercise and have a great social life. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. This is partly due to a unfortunate rhetoric against a 9-5 lifestyle (as if this is insufficient), and due to a very real problem of unobserved progress in your work. As Roth and Schindler put it well, there is a trade-off between quality and quantity of work, but because it is difficult to observe quality, we tend to increase the quantity (see this JMP on “Self-Detrimental Avoidance of Rest”). To fall further down the Econ-Mine, Adam Smith put it well in the Wealth of Nations: “Excessive application during four days of the week is frequently the real cause of the idleness of the other three, so much and so loudly complained of”. And the complaints are still loud. Embrace 9-5, weekends and vacations, and enjoy the marginal increase in the quality of your output.

5. Managing upwards. In an advisee-advisor relationship, there can be some sort of misunderstood expectation that the advisor will have a golden plan or recipe for you, and you just have to uncover and follow that. Apart from the unfortunate effect of losing independence, this is also not possible to implement and follow for the advisor. There is one advisor and multiple students, so if anyone has the time to plan, it should be the advisee. Practically, I have the habit of making a one-page note for every meeting, where the one-pager states the goal of the meeting, and what needs to be done before the next meeting. I keep these notes in the same document, and this then gives a transparent overview of what is going on in the project for both parts. I think this may feel out of touch for some, or as if one is reaching out too aggressively for the wheel, but that should be the route to go!

Knowledge

6. We can know more than we can tell. Or, Polyani’s Paradox. This came up under the context of discussing some method for measuring, where it is surprisingly difficult to devise a precise algorithm – or rules – that dictate when something is gerrymandered (that is, that an election district as an odd shape). But we do have some sort of intuition of what an odd shape is, and this intuition is hard for us to express in words. Thinking of AI, I think 2024 as a big year of thinking of intelligence as the expression of ideas through words and being impressed by LLMs abilities to do so. And while this is certainly impressive, there are still capacities of human intelligence and data storage which LLMs aren’t yet able to master (see Yann Lecun on Lex Friedmann for this view).

7. Research aesthetics. Research is, to a great deal, an exercise in aesthetics. This is not the conventional view. Often, we may portray research as the endeavor of arriving to an ultimate truth. But, when you shop from field to field, you see tremendous variance in how arguments are made and presented. And we may discard bad presentations of knowledge as straying from the truth. However, we are ultimately obeying to some notion of aesthetics, and violations to the conventional norms how the presentation of arguments which we have internalized and build our intuition from. This is not necessarily a bad thing; as mentioned above, our human edge may well stem from our capacity to holistically evaluate the look, feel and sound of an argument. This does, however, mean that we should invest more time in asking whether our work matters to the world, or whether we are engaging in an aethstetic exercise which only a select few can appreciate and understand (this lesson came while reading Cyrus Samii’s “problem solving” approach).

8. Someone is always better. Academia often creates a circle of insecurity, where people feel inferior to a field or scholar which either seem more rigorous or important than one’s own work. A political empiricist may feel inferior to a political methodologist, but the political methodologist may then feel inferior to the econometrician, which then feels inferior to the statistician. However, the statistician is inferior to someone in pure math, but the person in pure math may feel inferior to some random empiricist, because their work may feel less applicable! This point is from Gary King’s advice to junior faculty, and I guess the greater point is that insecurity goes round, and is not a terribly productive state of mind to achieving the main goal, which is making an impact on the field.

9. The second academic realization. The first academic realization is to my mind the Socratic revelation of “I know that I know nothing”. Acquiring knowledge is the gradual process of realizing how little one has. I would add that the second realization is that it is – at least – ten times easier to falsify an argument than to actually present a positive argument. That is, one can sit conformably at a workshop and with great ferocity attack the argument, to show that there in fact is nothing there. However, when one must make the argument, and perhaps feel that one is onto something, one quickly meets how quickly it can all be taken down by other comfortable spectators. It is here the second academic realization dawns upon one, and further epistemic humility is given to oneself. Yes, something may seem a bit wrong but to produce something that even seems remotely sound is an incredible feat.

10. You see survivors. When reading and engaging with faculty, you are always seeing the survivors. That is, you are seeing publications that made it all the way through, and not the countless ideas and drafts that were shelved. Personally, you have full awareness of what you show and what cannot be shown and may therefore feel a sense of inadequacy. Further, you may get advice from faculty, who themselves are the survivors are the entire progress. Therefore, one must understand that one engages with the worldview and the products of survivors and remember that not everyone made it through with advice given, and that not every idea made it all the way. The only way to learn from here is to try and see what sticks.

11. Embody the profession. I wrote this last year, but professional habitus is an underrated trait of being a good employee of anything. That is, learning what is right to do and say in a given setting. The only way to acquire professional habitus (after childhood, which is hard to change, but creates real differences) is to embody your profession, and see what people do, rather than to listen what they say. To gather this data, you need to engage as much as possible in person, and use the most effective tool of human learning, imitation and iteration.

Social

12. Say it. There are a lot of good things that we could say and write to friends and family, but rare occasions where we actually do it. One never knows when the last chance is. Further, we may postpone difficult conversations, because they are uncomfortable in the moment. But we rarely err by taking these conversations upfront or saying what we are grateful to others today. Just say it.

13. Listen. Listening is scarce in a busy world. I am much of a talker myself, and practicing attentive listening to say something of actual meaning is always valuable.

14. Be grateful. The hedonic treadmill of life has the effect of quickly normalizing things, good and bad. When I was sick two years ago, these circumstances quickly normalized and were taken for granted. When I became healthy, and have enjoyed good health since, this is likewise quickly taken for granted. Finally, when I started my PhD this year, it was harder to imagine any greater professional dream I could have had over the last 10 years. But this too, quickly gets taken for granted. Although this had the good effect of allowing us to digest and weather hard times, we are too quick to forget when times are good. We forget to be grateful, and perhaps secular society has abandoned those rituals which instated gratitude in our daily lives. We should try.

15. Assets and liabilities go together. One’s 20s come with a great deal of personal challenges – figuring out what to do, who to be, and more. And if there is one thing I have come to appreciate, is that asset and liabilities go together. When I see and have experienced problems with mental health, these problems often rhyme with the greatest problems one has. One may be too restless and fly too close to the sun and feel the burn of one’s wings. You could be steady and calm but become irritated that you have not taken enough chances. One can then bemoan the bad and the problems one has, but again, these problems often arise from the good one does. You often feel great guilt for meeting these seemingly self-caused problems, but remember that assets and liabilities go together, and forgive yourself.

That’s it! And let me follow the above by thanking friends, family and colleagues for making 2024 a stellar year, and making me look forward to all the good things which wait in 2025!