Occasionally I encounter sentences I think I should remember. Here is today’s:

“I’d outlived my sense of future.”

Betty Reid Soskin, from: https://themoth.org/radio-hour/truth-and-power-global-stories-of-women

With a few words, she points at something that is immediately familiar but rarely visible.

Answering the question in the title directly: Academics care about impact factors.

The issues mentioned in my last couple of posts are also particularly clear in the use of impact factors in academia. Impact factors are a way of assigning quantitative value to academic publications. Every person in academia whose opinion I am aware of thinks that impact factors are a bad way of doing this, and sees emphasis on impact factors as a threat to research. Writing papers with a goal of maximizing the impact factor is the academic equivalent of clickbait. You’re writing to get “clicks”–in academia, this is typically converted to number of citations–rather than writing out of any pure motivation to increase our understanding of a topic. Before “clickbait” was a word, this was characterized as making research “sexy”. But there is no external governing body that forces impact factors on academics. Impact factors arise from the behavior of academics and have value only insofar as academics assign value to them. The people who think impact factors are important are the same people who say, “I don’t like it, but that’s just the way the system works and there’s nothing I can do about it.” There’s a particular tidy circle, here. Impact factors are performative. It’s not a report on the objective value of research, but an assigning of value to research. And the people who object to that valuation are precisely the same people who produce that valuation.

There’s a failure of self-recognition that I think is interesting and has wider importance. “That which I oppose myself to” and “that which I create” are identical, and perhaps always are in some sense. To know your enemy, you need a good mental model of that enemy. What you’re reacting to, then, is not so much some external force as that internal model. You know your enemy insofar as you accurately recreate the enemy internally. You can defeat that enemy, too, insofar as the enemy is internalized. To the extent, then, that you are defeating yourself. Everything seems to curve in on itself at this point and it is hard to know how to proceed.

The fate of monarch butterflies, Danaus plexippus, is one of the very few cases in which invertebrate conservation has been on the radar–the other famous case being Apis mellifera, a domesticated species that is not rare, not in decline, and a threat to biodiversity rather than being remotely plausible as a cause célèbre for biodiversity or environmentalism. Environmental activists may as well unite behind Prunus dulcis and Zea mays as behind Apis mellifera. Leaving Apis mellifera aside, the ordinarily cited threat to Danaus plexippus is herbicides. Herbicides do what we intend them to do, but too well. A few decades ago, our herbicides were not terribly effective. We intended to make our row crops free of weeds–a category in which every agriculturalist would include all species of Asclepias–but we weren’t all that good at it. So there was still a fair amount of one or another species of Asclepias around, and especially in the parts of the midwest that were formerly tallgrass prairie but which have been converted quite thoroughly to row crops (mostly corn, wheat, and soybeans), all the Asclepias we couldn’t kill was an important food source for Danaus plexippus. As our herbicides have become more effective, that food source has become scarce.

The standard environmentalist ‘sell’ at this point is that this or that herbicide is evil and should be banned. This is absurd. The problem is not that a particular tool has made it easier for us to act on the incentives provided by our socioeconomic system, the problem is the incentives provided by our socioeconomic system. We’ve decided that row crop production is the highest value for this part of our country. Making it more difficult to maximize that value misses the point. So long as we’re trying to eradicate Asclepias, worrying about the tool is kind of a pointless rearguard action. It’s like trying to get the guy who wants to murder you to use a knife rather than a pistol–if you can’t change the guy’s motivation, sure, it’s better he use a knife, but the pistol isn’t the problem. The guy trying to murder you is the problem.

For biodiversity, herbicides aren’t the problem, agriculture is the problem. Making agriculture less efficient is not good for biodiversity. If yield per acre goes down while demand for the crop remains constant, guess what happens? Acres in production go up. So long as the same incentive structure remains in place, lower efficiency per acre means more acres are needed. If we want milkweeds to do well, we need to provide land owners in the midwest with new incentives. So long as our incentive structure tells them to kill milkweeds, making it harder for them to do so is self-defeating. The tool, the herbicide, only looks like the problem so long as our society tells farmers to use it for ill.