*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project. E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Philip Schrodt received his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Indiana University in the 1970s, combining formal studies in mathematics and political science with a lot of work at the university computer center, which housed a "supercomputer" with probably a fraction of the computing power of a Fitbit. He had a long academic career teaching international relations and political methodology with tenured positions at Northwestern University, the University of Kansas, and Pennsylvania State University, along with various visiting gigs, and extended field work in the Middle East, primarily the West Bank. Having published about 100 articles and after a couple dozen research grants, around 2010 he made the decision to leave academia, in the vain hope of providing a model for other Boomers to get out of the way (didn't work), but at the very least to escape the omnipresence of 20-variable garbage can regression models and having to pretend these were important (that strategy worked). He spent the next ten years enjoyably and gainfully employed as a fulltime data scientist and software developer, primarily on projects related to forecasting political conflict, though is now slowly winding down those projects. He blogs at asecondmouse.org.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

Well, the extended rant I'm providing in response to this prompt has nothing, and everything, to do with the contemporary state of the field. As I complain endlessly, people in political science don’t realize that once you get outside academia you have no access to the literature because it is virtually all paywalled and can cost $35 just to look at a full abstract. “Your work might as well be buried under a pile of radioactive sludge In Antarctica.” Not everything is paywalled but so much of it is—even if you can get a few open articles, you can’t follow out the references—it’s not worth the trouble. That’s a completely different situation than computer science and data science, where everything important is accessible with a few clicks. Conferences? First, they are hugely expensive. And as for me, want to know how Harry Potter felt beneath that invisibility cloak? Go to an academic conference after the age of 55. Pre-COVID I was going to a number of invitation-only workshops, and those kept me in touch, and I still do a couple remotely, though I miss the individual interactions.

This lack of access has consequences: Who did the U.S. media turn to when trying to get a handle on Russia-Ukraine? John Mearsheimer! And specifically, his work in 1990 ("Why We Will Soon Miss The Cold War" and "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War") about the implications of the end of the Soviet Union. Mearsheimer is a really smart guy and an excellent scholar, but that’s saying the past 30 years of IR scholarship is irrelevant beyond the academic community. Ouch! For that situation, you can mostly thank the paywalled journals which support the parasitic bureaucracies of professional organizations and "university" presses, and the deans, associate deans, assistant deans, and their endless layers of tenure committees who only look at paywalled journals when deciding on tenure.

Do the math: typically, about five years pass between getting an idea and getting it published in a top journal (after multiple revisions which typically make the work ever more boringly conventional), so a full decade passes before that idea itself is used in a publication. In computer science and data analytics, a really hot new method will be publicized, tested, and refined, and available in multiple open-source implementations in three to six months, as we are currently seeing with neural network innovations.

This is an admittedly extreme example but look at the Deepmind (a subsidiary of Alpha/Google) AlphaFold system—a large, specialized neural network—which solves the protein folding issue that has been at the absolute core of biochemistry for about 50 years, during which time about 100,000 proteins had been solved. AlphaFold is entered in a competition in June-2020, the spectacularly accurate results are described in Nature in June-2021 and 350,000 proteins had been solved, and by June-2022 it had solved 200-million protein sequences, essentially all known cases. And all of the results are available in an open-access database (see DeepMind, Washington Post, Nature etc.) More frivolously, the text-to-image systems such as DALL-E have gone from seemingly impossible to ubiquitous in mere months. Of course, there's a not-insignificant part of the academic community for whom this is a feature, not a bug: they revel in irrelevance. But I'm with Francis Bacon—the philosopher, not the artist—and believe that the sort of work we are doing should benefit humankind. Or at least try to.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

Compared to graduate school and my early years in the field, I pay a lot more attention to history now, and try to read pretty widely, not just the same two or three works everyone reads or pretends to, like Thucydides (though Thucydides is pretty good). In the last decade or so I’ve paid a lot more attention to Chinese (and Asia more generally) history: these people were writing incredibly sophisticated philosophical treatises long before one saw work of comparable complexity in Europe (1000 years of elite illiteracy following the end of the western Roman Empire didn't help: nothing of that magnitude occurs in Asia). I’ve also been reading a lot of early Buddhist writings—these can be reliably dated to about 2100 years ago, and many probably go back 2400 years or so—and from these, you see human psychology, both individual and collective, just has not changed that much (the buzzword I like is that it is “evergreen”). Finally, I’m reading more political anthropology—the late Marshall Sahlins, I’m a fanboy! And of course, James C. Scott: the Western ‘human nature’ we spend most of our time studying is an incredibly narrow sample of how humans can organize themselves. What/who was mostly due to fairly extended work, mostly with NGOs, in the Middle East, particularly Palestine thanks to Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, and some additional time in West Africa thanks to Leo Villalon.

To what extent is political and social behaviour predictable?

We've been the apex species on this planet for at least 50,000 years and apex species make their environments predictable. So, most of us most of the time through most of history (and pre-history) led a rather tranquil existence and died peacefully in the presence of someone who cares about us. As Sahlins points out, Hobbes (and for that matter, Rousseau and Bakunin) didn't know the first thing about actual primitive societies and Hobbes instead inferred from his own highly structured society which was undergoing numerous socio-political transitional stresses. "Nasty, brutish, and short" was the result of political chaos in early modern England; real pre-modern societies, and generally........

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