The joys of connecting sciences etc.

I"ve just been away at an interesting conference on making connections across science and between science and other forms of knowledge. It was great. Perhaps the talks that stood out for me most (they made me laugh with considerable relief at the time too) was the difficulty that people experience as scientists trying to do work that spans disciplines and professional boundaries.

As Hugh Campbell put it, you have to get used to reviewers hating your papers, to feeling like an idiot rather than an expert.

On top of that you don't have such great outputs because building the relationships necessary takes a huge amount of time since it takes heaps to work out how to engage with other scientists and most of these kinds of projects also require researchers to engage meaningfully with research "subjects" and with other stakeholders.

And on top of that most science institutions have no idea of the difficulties and tend to view people involved in these kinds of projects as abject failures!

Oh dear!