What are Unpublishable Papers?
As an early-career scientist, I’ve discovered that most of my ideas are unpublishable, for many different reasons. Some are too vague; others are too specific. Some are too obvious; others are totally unintuitive. Some are just half-baked. In academia, you don’t spend years working on those ideas; you shove them into a Word document and focus on something useful.
I can accept that a Good Scientist models their work off Ernest Hemingway’s approach to writing: “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pieces of shit.” But I also like my useless, unpublishable, unscientific ideas. And if they can’t find a home in the pages of Science or Nature or The International Journal of Fuzzy Systems (one of these is not like the other), then I want to give them a home here, on this Substack. Perhaps other people will, in turn, share their unpublishable papers. And from the primordial soup of bullshittery, something useful just might emerge. Our Great Tree of Science sprouts from the dung.
Which Papers Am I Unpublishing?
I study anthropology and cognitive science; that means I like thinking about humans and all the things that make us so brilliant, terrible, and utterly weird. Here are some papers I plan to unpublish in this vein:
Why is pain sometimes (but not always) funny?
What does it mean for something to be “dream-like?”
Why do humans usually think spirits come from the past, instead of the future?
If we were part of a collective intelligence — like person-sized neurons in a brain — how would we know?
How did hunter-gatherer instruments end up in a song by Arcade Fire?
Why do so many scams rely on evolutionary pseudoscience?
Why do we care so much about origin stories?
And many more!
Why and Who is Eli Stark-Elster?
I’m a PhD student at UC Davis in the Evolutionary Anthropology department. Currently, I study the cultural evolution of cognitive technologies — artifacts and practices that work by leveraging aspects of our psychology. I study them because I think they can tell us interesting things about the relationship between cognition and culture. You can learn more about me here.
Sounds Fun — Now What?
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