Hello you,

After the rather expansive – but according to some feedback (thanks!) interesting – piece last time on democracy and the internet, here’s something different (and shorter).  It’s a piece about academic/nonacademic collaborations.  And then we’ll end with a timely recommendation about charitable giving and a picture of some DIY.

One of my main professional and personal interests is how to connect deep thinking & research with routes to action & impact.  In practical and human terms, this often means interfacing between academics and non-academics.  I have found this an interesting experience and a useful skill, and wanted to reflect on some aspects of it.

Academic - Non-Academic Collaborations

I have spent a large chunk of my professional career sitting somewhere between two groups of people we might broadly call “academics” and “policymakers”.  I have some, though more limited, direct experience with academic settings as a PhD researcher and teaching assistant in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London 2013-2017.  While there I was interested in ideas of communication, engagement, impact, etc; but I made a lot of the mistakes I’ll outline below, particularly thinking terms of producing “understandable” content rather than building interpersonal relationships.

But for a longer time I have been inside more “policymaking” settings, including social media analysis and counter-disinformation in 10 Downing Street 2017-2019, data protection and Brexit at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (AKA “the Department for Fun, and also Digital”) 2019-2021, and doing a research-for-policy/advocacy role at the NGO AlgorithmWatch since 2023.  I also did various freelance projects along the way.  In all of these I acted as a node between academics and non-academics.  I’ve done that across computer science, social science, philosophy – as I’ll point out below, often the precise discipline is less important than the nature and culture of the collaboration.

So I’m writing the below mostly from the position of what I’ll very broadly call “policymakers”, in which I’m also including NGOs and more advocacy-oriented think tanks (in the sense of, organisations who propose policy changes and try and drive them).  That’s a very broad definition, but I think it works for what I’m trying to say below.

Also, this post is very much subsuming individuals to professions/cultures, which is often inaccurate and/or unfair – there are many policymakers who think and act more like academics, as I describe them below, and also vice-versa.  What I’m giving is my take on cultural forces which may help understand certain situations or behaviours – but certainly are far from the whole story.

(An interesting psychological thing, often remarked on by people like me who sit at the intersection between disciplines: I feel many academics I work with see me as quite policy-maker-ey – we need to do something, now! What’s the message that will land well? etc.  Whereas I feel some in policymaking circles see me as more academic – hmm no it’s more complicated than that, we need more evidence, etc.   But such is the life of being a weird-halfway-between-things person, I guess).

Being Understandable vs. Being Relevant: The Menu Metaphor     

There’s some fairly unhelpful advice people often give to academics, or experts in general – “make it understandable to the general public”. 

This is unhelpful for multiple reasons.  For one, the first of communication is that you should have a specific audience in mind, and “general public” ain’t that. 

Ok, what if you remove “general public” and just say “make it understandable to [x] audience”?  Well sorry to be pernickety but I’m going to object to the (very common) use of the word “audience”.  This implies a broadcast, one-way transfer, which is (i) annoying but also (ii) very unhelpful for reasons I’ll come onto. 

Ok, what about “make it understandable to [x] person or group”?  I’d still object to the word “understandable”, but here comes a more constructive point.  The instruction to make something more “understandable” often leads to experts “translating” what they have written into the same thing but in simpler language (nowadays, perhaps, using an AI chatbot).  When often what that instruction actually means is – cut that down a lot.  Give me the really key points.  The rest can be an annex.

I think “understandability” is part of a broader and more important concept of “relevance”.  Most people won’t absorb complex biological terminology – until it’s about a disease that affects them, and then they can become pretty expert.  I remember kids at my school who complained how they could never remember anything for exams, and yet could reel off scores from football matches multiple years ago.   The first step to getting listened to – which is an essential step to being understood – is making someone think “that person has something to say that I want to listen to”.

The metaphor I keep in mind is a menu.  If a chef wrote a menu with long, technical descriptions of every dish, and was asked by the other staff to “make it suitable for the customers”, the point wouldn’t be too replace “emulsify” with “mix”, “julienne” with “thinly sliced”, etc.  It would be to pick the sentence that describes the dish best.   Unless, of course, the entire clientele is expected to be super-foodies who would appreciate all the detail.  But if that was the case, this would probably be clear and agreed beforehand. 

But normally the distinction between audiences is less clear than “normal clientele” and “they’re all super foodies”.  Often there is a very fair question:  How should I know what the “key points” are?  How, from a position not in the audience, do I know what is “relevant” to them?

This is why I prefer thinking about relationships, with dialogue and listening and learning, than broadcasting to audiences. A key point – to return to my objections to “audience” and “broadcast” above – is that this becomes much easier if you listen to the other person/people.  You may need to really listen.  The other people may not tell you explicitly what’s relevant. They may not even be able to tell you what’s relevant – you’re the expert, you should be telling me the relevant info! 

This listening is as much emotional/interpersonal as content-based.  What is making the listener perk up? What seems to be frustrating them?  Here it helps if you can build a longer-term relationship, but without that you can still make sure discussions involve genuine back-and-forth and “is this useful? or not? what would you like to hear?” questions. 

Collaborating: A Gap-Jumping Metaphor

If you can build a longer-term partnership, understanding the other side may get easier – but also the stakes of understanding “relevance” get higher.  Now you may be asking for things from each other.  Here there’s various practical communication tips you can employ – my favourite being “let me express in my own words to you what I think you’re asking for, you correct me”.  But I think to truly understand “relevance”, it’s also very important to think of – and listen out for – various emotional, personal, cultural, and other contextual aspects of your partners.

I think of these through the metaphor of “jumping a gap”.  On one side of the gap is discussion, thinking, planning, critiquing, etc.  On the other side is “ok we’re committing to this”.  There are uncertainties which can make the jump seem wider and more daunting. 

For policymakers, there are always uncertainties about whether the things you commit to doing will actually have an impact, and if so what it will be.  You can try and plan, evaluate, etc., but ultimately it’s a bit of a shot-in-the-dark.  (Though this simplification hides the huge differences between some policymakers – e.g. between governments and NGOs.  For governments, it’s really important to ask what impact your decisions will have.  For NGOs, the bigger issue is often how to have an impact.)

For academics, particularly in highly contested fields like tech policy, there will probably be uncertainties - along the lines of “we can’t conclusively say X, we need to caveat Y, more research is needed on Z” – before making the jump and saying “yes, this is the right idea to commit to”.  This is also cultural: Peter Galison’s history/philosophy-of-science classic How Experiments End explores how even in highly quantitative subjects, whether a “discovery” has been conclusively made, or whether more tests are needed, is a choice shaped by various social factors.

Underlying attitudes to the uncertainties, risks, and results – to the gap and the jump, when to leap versus how long to spend “closing the confidence gap” – will vary depending on professional contexts and external pressures. 

In my experience, policymakers feel more compelled to make the jump.  If you’re a government or regulator, you often have to make decisions one way or another; and often with time pressures.  If you’re an NGO, you may not be forced to make decisions in the same way; but if you never stick your neck out and do something, you may fade into irrelevance while watching the problems you’re trying to solve get worse.  So while they want the confidence gap closed somewhat before they make the leap, it’s also as if they hear onlookers urging them to jump.

For academics, a bigger risk is making the wrong leap – of committing to an idea or findings too early, and later having to face withering criticism and reputational risks from others in the field (I think –but again, I’m mostly speaking from experience of working with academics).  It’s as if they hear people around going “oof, you really think you can make that jump?”.  An alternative risk (which I think depends on things like discipline, seniority, maybe even personality) is that some leaps may be feasible, but are pedestrian; they’re not novel, or advancing the field.  “Puh, who cares about that jump” say the onlookers.

(There may also be a cultural mindset difference – people going into policymaking because they want to do things and people going into academia because they want to think deeper about things – but this will vary between individuals and I don’t like flattening out individual differences into cultural stereotypes.  I think it’s often productive to consider these external pressures/incentives, rather than say “oh that’s just how that person is”).

Speaking from a policymaking perspective – the result of these differences is that collaborating with academics can sometimes feel like you’re about to make the leap… and then the collaborators start to make the uncertainty gap in one direction wider, and then pointing in other directions and saying “maybe we should leap in that direction instead.  Or maybe that one”.  Or they see the chance for something really big and novel, and point towards a gap that – to policymakers – seems impractically wide. 

This may seem like I’m overly elaborating on a familiar theme of “let’s take immediate steps” vs. “let’s think harder”.  But I’m writing it this way to draw out the emotional aspects, the wider stakes, and the personal contexts involved.  And it’s good to be explicit about these things. 

For example, it isn’t helpful if policymakers dismiss all academic “we need more research” claims as just unhelpful; it should be possible to agree lines between “more research is necessary” vs “more research would be very helpful” – and understand the mutual risks to each side of getting that line wrong.  Or if an academic partner is arguing that there needs to be a fundamental reframing of narratives around a big topic, while the policymaker is thinking “how the heck am I supposed to convince everyone of that”.  It’s better if they can discuss particular settings where pushing or rejecting particular narratives might lead to some progress, while showing how in other contexts there are simply too many practical barriers. 

Conclusion: An Ecosystem of Menus and Leaping

I’ll end by pointing to some good examples of academics who I think communicate in ways that help us policymakers.  In particular working around European platform governance, Paddy Leerssen and Rachel Griffin are good examples – note how this (from Paddy, on media ownership) and this (from Rachel, on Codes of Conduct) combine deep dives into material and topics that are relevant to us policymakers, but in more breadth and depth than we normally would; and make pointers about directions of travel which could help policymakers, as well as academics, decide where to focus attention.  On AI Governance, Joanna Bryson (Bluesky, LinkedIn) and Philipp Hacker provide very helpful social media updates on AI policy – which really go beyond updates and into deeper, often novel, but rarely confusingly broad thoughts.

The key underlying point: We are dealing with topics which require a very difficult combination of deep thinking, detailed research, impactful activities, influence, balancing reactiveness and considered thinking…. That can only to be accomplished by an effective ecosystem.  Building that requires going beyond content and understand-ability, and into relationship-building, listening for relevance, and making our various needs and contexts expicit.  We should all be chefs and waiters with concise and informative menus leaping together over sensibly-sized gaps to deliver delicious decisionmaking.  I hope that makes sense and is relevant.  I expect it’s at least memorable.

Fun Fact About: Coffee and Tea

I’m not a particularly well-travelled person, but I do like coffee (a lot).  So maybe it’s fitting that one of my few long-distance trips in recent years was to Salento, a major coffee-growing and extremely beautiful region of  (visiting my lovely friend Katerin who’s started a company doing cool things around sustainable plastics).  There I learned that the word “coffee”, which is remarkably similar across many language families, comes from the Ethiopian province of Kaffa where coffee originates from.  I thought that was cool.

But Wikipedia, the spoilsport, says “There is no evidence that the word qahwah was named after the Ethiopian province of Kaffa … or any significant authority stating the opposite”.  Qahwah is the Arabic word for coffee, which (according to better evidence) moved to Europe via the Ottomans who adapted the word to Kahve.

BUT also according to Wikipedia there is evidence for the similarly fun fact that weather a language uses either (some variant of) “Tea” or “Chai” depends on whether they received the product by sea or by land.

Recommendations

Long but important recommendation. Do some donations, maybe a regular one, to a mix of causes you care about – but I’m going to spotlight Médecins Sans Frontières.

Explanation: In response to the continually horrendous situation in Gaza I spent a while trying to find reliable and effective charities to donate to.  This is challenging.  The field of Effective Altruism, which is based on this very good principle of evidence-based giving, shies away from crises like Gaza (I guess evidence is hard to gather, though I would like to see more discussions of crisis topics than about philosophical frameworks and AI, which I guess are more comfortable and intellectually appealing).  There’s also balance to strike between giving directly to people and families (e.g. via the aggregator Gaza Funds, where you can check in periodically and new fundraisers appear), with risks that you don’t know where your money is going; and bigger institutions, where the impact may get diluted and there will always be .  So I’m doing a mix of the above in the hope that over time they net out to a better result.

Also an important point, which I was reminded by on the Effective Altruism Forum, is to not forget other severe crises all over the world.  So for my “institutional donation” I settled on Medicines Sans Frontiers; the various places I looked, from reddit threads to GiveWell, were generally positive, and it also means supporting a range of terrible situations in addition to in Gaza.

But unlike some other crisis, Gaza is ultimately a (geo)political crisis.  It has felt recently like the political winds can sometimes shift, and if you write to your political representatives you might be able to help build pressure for some kind of change.  There are various resources to make that easier, e.g. if you’re in the UK you can find a template letter here.

New recommendation – get an accountability buddy.  I mentioned I only finished last week’s piece because of pressure from my friend Francesca.  She is in possession of a Google Doc where I lay out things I want to do each week (blogging, how much German, etc.).  I record that.  Maybe she will read it sometime and see if I’m falling short – and maybe not.  But even if she doesn’t read it, the feeling helps me focus and definitely get more done (she’s like a friendly Panopticon).  And sometimes she does weigh in, though usually to tell me I’m being unrealistic in my goals.  She is usually right.

Not fully a recommendation, as I was underwhelmed, but lots of people seem to like the book Perfection which is about Millenial Expats in Berlin.  It’s probably more about globalisation by culture and freelance graphic designers, which is an interesting theme, but I found the “Berlin” of it somewhat too cliched (not inaccurate, but still cliched).   But it’s still a decent read and thought-provoking and I’ve had interesting discussions about it – so if you have read it, I’d love to chat, especially if you don’t actually live in Berlin.

Finally: DIY.  My house is full of modern furniture I have inherited which I don’t like, but I get very indecisive about buying older furniture (which I do like but is often heavy and expensive and also my walls are full of useful but unhelpfully located sockets).  So last weekend I bought some reclaimed wood and replaced a black metallic console with some shelves.  It was relatively straightforward and I get a bit of satisfaction whenever I look back at them.  Though the décor needs to be adjusted beyond “books to show off in a Zoom background”.