If nothing goes wrong, A Modern Guide to Research should be out in print this summer. Before that happens, there are three things I need to get out of the way.

The first is collecting complaints about the book. This is mainly for the promotional copy around the launch. If you have read the online version, you are welcome to leave a comment through the link below. Praise, criticism, either is fine—although, realistically, only the positive comments and the funny negative ones will end up being selected. The ordinary negative ones are still useful for later revisions. Only the first field is required; the rest of the questionnaire exists mostly to demonstrate my poor survey-design skills:

https://wj.qq.com/s2/10408005/9374/

The second thing is to clarify how the printed edition differs from the online edition. The print version is revised from version 2.71. Because the publisher has also put labor into the manuscript, many of the print edits have not been merged back into the online version, although some factual issues have been updated there as well. The current open-source online version is 2.718. Changes contributed to the online version after 2.71 are not necessarily reflected in the printed book, and some revisions made for print are not in the online version either.

In terms of readability, the printed edition should be better, largely because my Chinese prose is stubbornly unreliable and needed outside help. It also includes some illustrations. Links in the online version have been removed from the main text and converted into footnotes, which required changes in wording. The dictionary section has been cut from the print edition, and quite a lot of the jokes have been toned down or rewritten so the book can reach a broader readership. Many internet-style expressions are not as widely understood as people online like to imagine. A few are still there, though, as small Easter eggs.

I have said before that the open-source version will keep being updated. That means the gap between it and the printed edition will only grow over time. Volunteers are always welcome to help revise the open version. Open source and openness matter a great deal to research. If, after roughly ten years, enough material has changed and the publisher agrees, a later version may be revised again into a new print edition. If that happens, the preface will include the contributions of volunteers. The online open-source version will also remain publicly available. If you do not want to buy the book, reading the open version is completely fine.

The third thing is to explain why I am publishing the book at all, and where the royalties will go.

There will be royalty income, but for me that money will have very little effect on my financial situation. My way of thinking about this is simple: I first calculate my actual annual consumption—rent, utilities, clothes, food, housing, transportation, and the rest of ordinary life. That number represents my real consumption demand. Then I calculate how much I pay in taxes and Social Security, excluding things like 403(b) and IRA contributions. If my consumption demand is equal to the amount I hand over to the state, then my income can, in effect, support another version of myself with the same level of consumption.

Generally speaking, if a person’s income can support two copies of themselves and still leave a surplus, the extra happiness brought by additional income becomes quite limited. A 2012 survey in the United States once suggested that after income reached 75,000 dollars, more money no longer brought much additional happiness. Adjusted for inflation, that would be around 100,000 dollars today. In the United States, the taxes paid on a 100,000-dollar income can also roughly support someone with normal consumption needs.

Of course, I know later studies challenged that 75,000-dollar claim and found that more money can still help. I also know some people estimate that an American needs to spend 60,000 dollars a year. But I am not especially interested in other people’s consumption needs. Thanks to Connecticut’s high taxes and my own lifestyle—renting, no car, no partner, no gold-devouring child—my personal consumption demand, somewhere in the spirit of the “Sanhe gods,” is far below 60,000 dollars. At my current income, the taxes I pay are enough to support another version of me. Psychologically, I do not feel that I owe the United States anything. Under this calculation, there is also certainly enough surplus for extra insurance, since even in America the income tax on begging has not yet become heavy enough to exceed half of one’s income.

This little accounting method may even have some general applicability. There is no upper limit to earning money, but there is usually some limit to spending it, once investment and gambling are excluded. That limit is set either by income or by imagination. If a person’s personal expenses are roughly equal to what they pay in taxes, at least they are not creating a burden for society. Seen this way, evading taxes while collecting benefits starts to look rather impolite.

Since the book income will not materially change my financial life, the money can be used for something more interesting.

At first I considered writing postcards to everyone who bought the book. Mailing them from the United States would probably cost more than the royalty I receive from each copy. But this plan has several problems. It is not very environmentally friendly. It would mainly expose the fact that my handwriting is bad. And I have more or less tried this experiment before: fewer than one-third of the postcards arrived, most of them within the United States. Most of the overseas ones disappeared into the postal delivery black hole. As far as I know, none reached China.

Then I thought of a scholarship.

Setting up a scholarship does not actually require a huge amount of money. With a little over 100,000 yuan, the annual interest can provide one or two thousand yuan to reward one person every year, and the thing can keep going. Some people will surely say that I am not qualified to establish a scholarship. But I do not recall any rule saying that one must first reach a particular level of achievement before giving money away. I am handing out money, not asking for it.

So I plan to use the royalties from this book to create the Guide Scholarship. Future contributors to the open-source edition should also be aware of the arrangement: your name may appear in the book, but the economic proceeds will be quietly diverted by me into this scholarship experiment.

When the scholarship starts

The scholarship begins only if either of the following conditions is met: the book sells 50,000 copies, or royalties reach 150,000 yuan. Once that happens, all royalties automatically become the prize pool. Before the pool is officially formed, royalties will simply accumulate and can only be used under the exemption clauses described below.

The reason for choosing 50,000 copies is that this is roughly the threshold for a bestseller. If the book does not sell well, then trying to sustain a prize pool would be a very sustainable form of draining a dry pond. The 150,000-yuan threshold is set from the perspective of interest income: it should be enough to ensure that some money can be awarded every year. I do not even know the final price of the book yet. If I were setting it, I would choose 42 yuan, but the publisher seems to be using color printing, so the price is not really under my control.

Prize pool management, including authorized misappropriation

The prize pool has one and only one source: royalties from the book.

There are, however, a few cases of authorized misappropriation:

1. Buying printed copies of the book to give away. The number of copies provided by the publisher is lower than the number of friends I want to send the book to.
2. If my family, friends, or I need the money for life-safety or medical reasons, I will use it without hesitation and disclose it honestly. Investment, home-buying, and education do not count.
3. If I meet a recipient in person, one meal may be reimbursed from the royalties. So it is probably best not to meet. It costs money.

If the prize pool keeps growing, the award amount or the number of recipients may be increased later.

The pool will be invested in a one-year fixed-term deposit. The scholarship will be paid from interest. If the interest is insufficient, the principal will be used. If the pool remains below 100,000 yuan for three consecutive years, all remaining funds will be spent on one open science meeting, and the scholarship will end there. Any later royalties, if they still exist, will be spent eating with past recipients. This suddenly makes me want to give myself the award once.

Award amount

The award is 3,000 yuan, given once per year. It will be transferred directly through Alipay or to a bank account. There are no restrictions on how it may be used. If no suitable recipient is found in a given year, or if the selected recipient refuses the money, the amount returns to the prize pool. Awards will not accumulate, nor will missed years be paid out retroactively.

The recipient may be an individual, an organization, or a team. A recipient may win more than once, but the reason must be different each time.

Compliance

The award will be paid from a private account. No donations will be accepted. If you want to run something similar, please run it yourself.

It is not that I do not want the prize pool to become larger. It is just that the famous wealth-building manual known as the Criminal Law contains two relevant offenses: illegally absorbing public deposits and fundraising fraud. I am only doing an experiment; I do not especially want to become a case study in a criminal law lecture.

Transparency

Before the scholarship is awarded each year, I will fully disclose royalty spending in the issue section of the book’s open-source version. The reason for the award will also be made public. For environmental reasons, there will be no certificate. The money will simply be transferred. If I happen to meet the recipient, I can write one by hand on a napkin. If the recipient needs a recommendation letter, I can also write one, provided the person receiving the letter is psychologically prepared for my writing style.

What the scholarship rewards

The scholarship is meant for people who develop open-source research software that significantly reduces the research costs of their peers, or for people who have fallen into a serious pit in research and can declare that a particular line of exploration has completely failed.

The motivation is that the current research environment does not pay enough attention to data-analysis software, while paying too much attention to successful research. In real research, data analysis often becomes the thing that blocks progress, but many people do not recognize it as such and simply assume that something cannot be done. At the same time, the pursuit of success can make researchers impatient and eager for shortcuts. More meaningful trial and error is often ignored, avoided, or treated as embarrassing.

So I want to reward people who can still sit down and do research properly in the current environment. The point is to encourage them to keep doing research. This is meant to help when help is actually useful, not to decorate people who are already surrounded by flowers. I suspect this also matches the tastes of the book’s readers.

Application requirements

There are none. You do not need to prepare materials or apply. I will look around online, or hear unreliable rumors from friends, and then contact the person by email.

There will not be an expert review committee. Even if there were one, I would not trust it. In any case, I do research myself, so I can judge the significance of the work well enough for this experiment. Of course, the work must be open-source and open. Otherwise I would not be able to see it.

In practice, this will look a lot like money falling from the sky. The only requirement is that the recipient must write a humorous acceptance statement for public release. Whether it is humorous is decided by me. Please check your spam folder, since my email will probably be mixed in with messages from fake UBS employees, widows of Iraq War veterans, and exiled Middle Eastern princes.

The rules for the Guide Scholarship certainly still have loopholes. Suggestions are welcome. In any case, it probably will not start immediately. If the book does not sell, I will simply gain the title of “author of an unsold book.” If it does start, I can give myself the title of “scholarship sponsor,” and everyone who has contributed to the open-source edition can use it too. Apart from the money, this experiment does not seem capable of losing much.

Once again, here is the complaint-collection link:

https://wj.qq.com/s2/10408005/9374/