started grad school studying "the brain" but science is so distractingly broken I've been studying its infrastructure almost the whole time, and just found myself writing about "the evolution of pluralistic expression on parallel namespaces in wikilike communities."
I wish ppl started seeing this^ - getting derailed from whatever anyone "wanted" to study by the ethical immediacy of scientific infrastructural deficits - as a cost of being deinfrastructured. maybe one step towards framing the journal system et al as everyone's responsibility
time spent plinkoing a paper down a journal hierarchy is an infrastructural cost.
reinventing rigs is an infrastructural cost.
asking questions into the Twitter void is an infrastructural cost.
losing data is an infrastructural cost.
etc.
constantly asking the question "why is it like this" and then fishtailing around an ever-elusive conclusion that makes you believe it is impossible to fix, rather than making cumulative progress on a communications problem is -- precisely -- an infrastructural problem
I think we can fix it, but I think we have to start thinking of scientific infrastructure as something to be immediately invested in because it impacts the lives of all the people that do science with us, something that we invest resources in & organize with our colleagues about.
instead of rushing in with some improvised proposal that flames out in the span of 12 hours, we can also engage with the people whose literal entire discipline is to study sociotechnological system. mebs we can also engage literally millions of digital folk knowledge communities