The least sexy on the list
The infrastructure of knowledge doesn't get the credit it deserves
Nobody tweets about the index. Nobody posts a reel about the meta-analysis. Nobody goes viral for publishing a study that confirms another study, which is a shame, because that is arguably the most useful thing you can do in science and the least rewarded.
There is a whole category of intellectual labour that exists below the waterline of public attention. The literature review. The peer-reviewed article in a journal that twelve people subscribe to. The footnote that runs longer than the paragraph it annotates. The replication study. The annotated bibliography. The corrigendum. The dictionary of technical terms nobody asked for. The dissertation on the history of the subjunctive mood, which, as I am obliged to note, won’t put any reader in a good mood.
My own PhD was on a 13th century chronicle that will not be turned into a Netflix series. It does, however, shed some light on the Barons War and Magna Carta, which shapes our understanding of the relationship between English monarchs and the state, the birth of Parliament, the rule of law, modern democracy. You know, minor things.
These things are not glamorous. They are not designed to be. They are designed to be accurate, which is the least sexy thing in the public square.
And here is the thing: the glamorous work is downstream of all of it. The bestselling nonfiction book, the long-form magazine piece, the TED talk, the blog post… like this one — none of it works without the unsexy infrastructure underneath. The confident claim in chapter three rests on a meta-analysis. The killer statistic came from a replication study someone ran twice to be sure.
For findings to sound effortless, someone had to do a lot of effortful, unglamorous work first. The non-sexy is where the epistemic labour actually happens.
At the end of the day, most of us are just writing the press release.