Since the best you can show with this is a loose correlation, you’re going to run into troubles across different fields. For example, the Intelligent Design people aren’t rigorous in their methodologies and don’t produce a lot of academic writing. So they don’t fit your model. Maybe if you add all non-academic sources, like the propaganda they produce?
Yes, and Zizek has also made movies. Wittgenstein never published anything but his dissertation, but left 20,000 pages of manuscripts behind. Some people are known largely thru the publication of notes taken by students. There are many difficulties.
Just figuring out how much time a person had to write seems pretty important. Einstein was at the Princeton institute for advanced studies, so he had no teaching duties. Nietzsche was sick a lot of the time. Wittgenstein spent years working as a gardener.
Number of journals in a field is also probably important. Reputation of journals may or may not be worth factoring in. And now we have blog posts to count.
Also, if you add in some of the hyper-productive people, like Bach and maybe Noam Chomsky, I think that would skew the results even more. How do you evaluate Bach? He was clearly productive—or does this not count b/c it’s in music?
Specifically WRT Bach, he couldn’t be used as a datapoint because his fame was not achieved in an environment in which number of publications were counted and used in hiring/promotion decisions, or had any other impact on his success. Bach was before recorded music, so most of his compositions were (I think?) heard once in his life time, by a few people who were not influential. And he didn’t achieve fame until later.
Bach also has the complication that his job required him to write new music each week.
Consider Beethoven vs. Mozart. Beethoven is in the “rigorous” camp; he revised for months or years, building complex structures into his music. Mozart was not rigorous. Mozart liked to say that he didn’t need to revise; he just sat down and wrote music as it came to him, “like a cow pisses.” So how valuable is rigor in music?
Personally, I don’t consider Mozart to be on the level of Beethoven. The Mozart that rises to the level of Beethoven, maybe his Requiem, are ones he spent more time on and did revise. (And he wrote only half of the Requieum!) But that’s a minority opinion, and I’m not a music scholar at all.
Since the best you can show with this is a loose correlation, you’re going to run into troubles across different fields. For example, the Intelligent Design people aren’t rigorous in their methodologies and don’t produce a lot of academic writing. So they don’t fit your model. Maybe if you add all non-academic sources, like the propaganda they produce?
Yes, and Zizek has also made movies. Wittgenstein never published anything but his dissertation, but left 20,000 pages of manuscripts behind. Some people are known largely thru the publication of notes taken by students. There are many difficulties.
Just figuring out how much time a person had to write seems pretty important. Einstein was at the Princeton institute for advanced studies, so he had no teaching duties. Nietzsche was sick a lot of the time. Wittgenstein spent years working as a gardener.
Number of journals in a field is also probably important. Reputation of journals may or may not be worth factoring in. And now we have blog posts to count.
Also, if you add in some of the hyper-productive people, like Bach and maybe Noam Chomsky, I think that would skew the results even more. How do you evaluate Bach? He was clearly productive—or does this not count b/c it’s in music?
Specifically WRT Bach, he couldn’t be used as a datapoint because his fame was not achieved in an environment in which number of publications were counted and used in hiring/promotion decisions, or had any other impact on his success. Bach was before recorded music, so most of his compositions were (I think?) heard once in his life time, by a few people who were not influential. And he didn’t achieve fame until later.
Bach also has the complication that his job required him to write new music each week.
Consider Beethoven vs. Mozart. Beethoven is in the “rigorous” camp; he revised for months or years, building complex structures into his music. Mozart was not rigorous. Mozart liked to say that he didn’t need to revise; he just sat down and wrote music as it came to him, “like a cow pisses.” So how valuable is rigor in music?
Personally, I don’t consider Mozart to be on the level of Beethoven. The Mozart that rises to the level of Beethoven, maybe his Requiem, are ones he spent more time on and did revise. (And he wrote only half of the Requieum!) But that’s a minority opinion, and I’m not a music scholar at all.