My dad picked me and my brother up from our after school program early so we could go to a matinee - only time we did something like that.
Thanks for reading! This is based on this post in the New Things substack. Please share this thread or that post with anyone you think might be interested! mattsclancy.substack.com/p/time-for-m...
A Third Anniversary Post
The main downside is the time. But Open Philanthropy has a grant program that can provide financial help to buy you quarter time to work on it, if your institution is supportive. Please reach out to chat more if interested! www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/innova...
Lastly, I think the social impact of writing a living literature review can be large. You inform policymakers, decision makers, voters. You help aspiring scholars survey the landscape and race to the frontier. You help existing scholars see connections. www.newthingsunderthesun.com/pub/vqahzl0l
Evidence from patents and papers
Note also that while most fields have some great researchers, most lack even a good writer of a living literature review. You can probably be the first!
More generally, I think good online writing can be good for your career. It’s certainly been good for me (but, you know, survivor bias). Compared to teaching a course, it’s much more publicly legible; a bigger audience of potential collaborators and partners can see your work.
Selfishly, it’s also great as a commitment device to keep up-to-date on your field, better understand papers (since you have to explain them), and keep high-quality notes (I revisit New Things all the time to refresh my memory on something I read years ago).
The updatable format of a living literature review keeps what you write reflective of frontier research, like a course you update every time you teach. But most effort probably goes into writing new stuff, so a LLR eventually covers far more topics than a class ever could.
But the potential reach is much larger. I taught 12 students in my economics of innovation course. New Things has 16,000+ subscribers.