alt Hacker NewsI did marine biology field work almost 5 decades ago as a lowly junior lab tech. Work always has downsides, for me it was not really the Scots winter, cold feed, chapped hands, the land-rover having to reverse up steep icy roads to get back from the harbourside: it was washing the glassware and dealing with sodium hydroxide weighing (it absorbs moisture from the air so its a fools game). But, field work also brought amazing experiences, I visited the seaside 70+ times over a year, and got an insight into what a time series really means when you cover the tidal and weather and seasonal cycles.
It's also always error-prone. Nothing in the field is perfect. Reality is a bad approximation for your model at times, if you take a model centric view.
I would be immensely skeptical that field work is ever going away. There may be aspects of truth in this around cost of travel, risk, seniority.
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I hope it doesn’t go away, too.
It’s been sad seeing journalism in the online era, where so much (not all!) content is produced without really visiting or researching things. Often it’s based only on statements / tweets, sometimes more seeping based on phone calls, sometimes reading a book on the topic, but rarely do journalists seem to show up anywhere.
When reading something like Didion’s piece on the LA highway central command, it shows how irreplaceable lived experience is.
I think this is a classic old-vs-new tale. I started my PhD in biochemical research where analyzing data by hand was definitely a "craft" in some aspects. Later I forewent going to the lab entirely and instead spent all my time on developing machine learning for automated data analysis. But just like field work, you still need people in labs who can continue the craft.
The article should perhaps introspect a bit more instead of setting up a false dichotomy between "rainforest field work or computers".
I've always enjoyed field work, much of the code I've written has been well outside of any office.
Exploration geophysics paid for me to travel to and across more than half he countries on the planet, calibrating old maps, datums, projections against the 'new' WGS84, scaling peaks to stage base stations, getting familiar with the ins and outs of tides, magnetic fields, gravity, radiometric backgrounds, finding a good band in Mali ...
Loved it.