Three hats...
... no, not the puzzle.
I might be wearing any one of three hats. Which one is it today?
OK, so I mean figurative hats, rather than real ones. I don't actually own any proper hats, because I'm not that sort of fashionista [1]. So which figurative hat is it I'm wearing whilst writing and posting this, and why? And what sort of hats are they anyway?
Here I mean figurative hats, denoting what aspect of ones life you might be representing at some particular time. For example, anyone with a job of some kind (even a working physicist) has a choice of two pretty obvious hats to chose from, one being the private citizen “speaking personally’’ hat, and the other a sort of at-work “employee’’ hat. For some sorts of jobs the distinction will usually be obvious, in that you are either at work (in a shop, perhaps, where wearing your shop “hat” is rather tied to the place of work), or not at work (so wearing your personal hat).
But add in some (so-called) “social media” activity and lines can become blurred, … or at least some employers tend to think so, or indeed traditional media might also if you become somehow newsworthy for private activities, and, in need of a descriptor, they seize on where you work or your place of work. If some passing Professor were to say something even only mildly controversial about speed limits in their spare time, for example; they may find their employer dragged into (or leaping enthusiastically) into the fray and commenting on how suitable their private opinions might be.
Just to be clear, I'm not wearing an “employee” hat here, even if I do talk about work. Rather, I’m wearing my third hat — my “professional” hat, i.e. that of a practising scientist. So what you get here is mostly professional hat wearing, with maybe a little personal decoration from time to time. Even if I have just happened to burble on about a recent paper I published, or whatever, and even though that paper most likely had my institutional address. There is no “employee” hat wearing here.
Indeed for me that “employee” one is the least important of hats. And if it happens that my employer is, in some sense, unhappy with this, I'm not sure I care all that much. This is because I am subject to the typical "we'll only employ you if someone else gives us the money to do so" attitude towards contract researchers in universities. This doesn’t really provide much of an incentive to become — or to present — any kind of institutional identity to the world, beyond the bare minimum. So they pay me — if someone else deigns to give them the money, and I use it, not really thinking of myself as an “employee”, but rather as a professional physicist, to do research.
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[1] This might not be true.
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PS: It might be interesting to note that I found a few different “three hat” puzzles when thinking about what to put as the sub heading. Why not look them up and see how you get on?
Next time: Swimming in the ocean
Keywords: physics, science, computation, thoughts, philosophy, miscellaneous