Unfinished business

This blog by J. Robert Lennon on abandoned novels made me think of the more general topic of abandoned projects. I seem to recall George V. Higgins writing that he’d written and discarded 14 novels or so before publishing The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

I haven’t abandoned any novels but I’ve abandoned lots of research projects (and also have started various projects that there’s no way I’ll finish). If you think about the decisions involved, it really has to be that way. You learn while you’re working on a project whether it’s worth continuing. Sometimes I’ve put in the hard work and pushed a project to completion, published the article, and then I think . . . what was the point? The modal number of citations of our articles is zero, etc.

5 thoughts on “Unfinished business

  1. Sounds like a loose stopping rule…this should be incorporated into your statistical analysis, no? An extension of the publication bias I guess.

  2. When I wrote my first grant application, I explained what I would do, then I explained why I thought I was likely to fail and what this would mean. I even explained my backup plans.

    The research office thought I was mad, and they got me to revise my application.

    It is sad that we cannot say "I tried this and it failed to give interesting results" without appearing weak or naive.

    Somehow failure is shameful. I am unclear why…

  3. Actually the modal number of citations of my articles is 13. But you have three articles that have been cited more than all of mine put together, and about six that have been cited more than any one of mine. So don't feel bad.

  4. "Sometimes I've put in the hard work and pushed a project to completion, published the article, and then I think . . . what was the point? "
    I have often wondered like this and many others did too. But often, many of these found uses after a while or were assimilated in bigger things. I guess some problems (whether they look relevant or not) have their own life and secondly what we do is a product of what we learn from many others and cannot really be isolated. But my stock answer to myself is that those problems kept me out of mischief.

  5. "Sometimes I've put in the hard work and pushed a project to completion, published the article, and then I think . . . what was the point? "

    Isn't this what is called the "sunk cost fallacy"?

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