4 ms·

> authors consist only of academics I consider that a strength, not a weakness

notvladputin 11y ago
For certain fields, I would agree. However, academic philosophies are only part of the whole field. Practical philosophies, ones that make the topics much more accessible and relevant to everyday life, is another big component. (Mindfulness, stoicism, practical meditation, ethics, etc.) Until last year, I avoided philosophy because I never found it relevant, interesting, or anything other than navel gazing. It turns out I was only exposed to academic philosophy. Once I found more practical works, it became much more important to me.
- forgotmysn 11y ago
  That's interesting. Although I think the SEP works as a primarily academic tool, it would be cool if it could be annotated to include links to practical interpretations of the same ideas.
collyw 11y ago
Do you think that holds for tech? I hear a lot more cutting edge stuff coming out of Googe or MS than I do from universities.
- dalke 11y ago
  What do you call "tech"? From your profile, you work at the "CNAG DNA sequencing centre in Barcelona", so you know that Google and MS aren't really doing cutting edge work on that area of technology, compared to, say, UC Santa Cruz. However, you are are a Django developer, so the things you are interested in are more aligned with the types of things that Google and MS work on. Perhaps there's a bias in what you consider to be 'tech'?
  - tikhonj 11y ago
    Well, I can't say much for bioinformatics, but we certainly can't discount industry and open-source projects in the fields I'm familiar with like distributed systems and programming languages. I mean, I might not value PHP, Python and Go as a matter of taste, but they have their own ideas worth documenting that were not created by academic researchers. In fact, I'd be suspicious of and programming language reference that was controlled by academics or any group with specific credentials because interesting developments in PL are extremely democratic and happen everywhere. (Including some pretty self-contained bubbles like the world of Chuck Moore and colorForth.)
    - dalke 11y ago
      Of course we can't discount them. My own field of research, chemical information as it applies to pharmaceutical research, is dominated by industry. Given that collyw works in a bioinformatics organization, my underlying question was why collyw discounted all of the cutting edge technology coming out of academic bioinformatics research. I could also have pointed out, say, cutting edge techniques in photochemistry for arene C-H amination, which came from a university (see http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1326 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1326 ). By limiting "tech" to those areas of software where Google and Microsoft have a strong business interest, then of course they will have a strong presence. I wanted to highlight that possible bias.
      - collyw 11y ago
        Illumina is coming up with most of the technology making the bioinformatics research possible. The bioinformaticians are generally running perl or python scripts on the data, not coming up with new technology.
        dalke 11y ago
        I don't understand what this is supposed to mean. New methods of analyzing data, which can be implemented as a script, is also new technology. But it sounds like you are excluding it as a possibility. Again, what do you call "tech"? Intel provides most of the CPUs that Google, Microsoft, etc. use. Can't I be equally dismissive and say that Intel provides the tech and Google/MS merely run programs on top of it?
- forgotmysn 11y ago
  Thats fair, but I don't think the SEP is thought of as a technical resource.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  That's not true. Most of what I've found was done with Universities with it often published to ACM or IEEE. The areas I collect are security (esp high assurance), fault-tolerant systems, software engineering (esp automated), systems modelling, and specific use-cases (eg databases). I have skimmed over 10,000 papers on these topics to find that most of the best work is University or a company partnered with one with occasional great work out of Microsoft, Google,etc. Further, I stumbled upon the meme expressed by Perrine [1], etc that tech continuously reinvents the wheel by making same failures or re-inventing same solutions from the past. There's a bunch of tech that hasn't caught up to stuff from 60's-80's in those papers I reference. You'll see me do my part by referencing it in places like this where it might apply. However, it reflects an overall trend that there's tons of wisdom that's not transferred to new tech generation and we need a Standford-style encyclopedia for it all. More likely a collection of books and Wikipedia-style articles so cross-referencing will encourage serendipity. So, we could really use this. I considered creating one but Jeremy Epstein advised me to get real buy-in from academics first. That such a repository would probably need a lot for it to be effective, using a network effect I'm guessing. That's a lot more work than I have time for right now lol. Nonetheless, we desperately need it for INFOSEC and IT. Just for fun, I'd use only best-of-breed tools and methods its recommends to run the site itself. People would see it in action as they showed up. [1] https://c59951.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/5085-1255-perrine.pdf https://c59951.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/5085-1255-perrine.pdf
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Completely seconded. Universities are where the bulk of CS and software research comes from. Pretty much every paper I've read, especially for systems software, has been from academia, with the notable exceptions of a few publicly funded research labs.

For certain fields, I would agree. However, academic philosophies are only part of the whole field. Practical philosophies, ones that make the topics much more accessible and relevant to everyday life, is another big component. (Mindfulness, stoicism, practical meditation, ethics, etc.) Until last year, I avoided philosophy because I never found it relevant, interesting, or anything other than navel gazing. It turns out I was only exposed to academic philosophy. Once I found more practical works, it became much more important to me.

forgotmysn 11y ago
That's interesting. Although I think the SEP works as a primarily academic tool, it would be cool if it could be annotated to include links to practical interpretations of the same ideas.

collyw 11y ago

Do you think that holds for tech? I hear a lot more cutting edge stuff coming out of Googe or MS than I do from universities.

dalke 11y ago
What do you call "tech"? From your profile, you work at the "CNAG DNA sequencing centre in Barcelona", so you know that Google and MS aren't really doing cutting edge work on that area of technology, compared to, say, UC Santa Cruz. However, you are are a Django developer, so the things you are interested in are more aligned with the types of things that Google and MS work on. Perhaps there's a bias in what you consider to be 'tech'?
- tikhonj 11y ago
  Well, I can't say much for bioinformatics, but we certainly can't discount industry and open-source projects in the fields I'm familiar with like distributed systems and programming languages. I mean, I might not value PHP, Python and Go as a matter of taste, but they have their own ideas worth documenting that were not created by academic researchers. In fact, I'd be suspicious of and programming language reference that was controlled by academics or any group with specific credentials because interesting developments in PL are extremely democratic and happen everywhere. (Including some pretty self-contained bubbles like the world of Chuck Moore and colorForth.)
  - dalke 11y ago
    Of course we can't discount them. My own field of research, chemical information as it applies to pharmaceutical research, is dominated by industry. Given that collyw works in a bioinformatics organization, my underlying question was why collyw discounted all of the cutting edge technology coming out of academic bioinformatics research. I could also have pointed out, say, cutting edge techniques in photochemistry for arene C-H amination, which came from a university (see http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1326 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/349/6254/1326 ). By limiting "tech" to those areas of software where Google and Microsoft have a strong business interest, then of course they will have a strong presence. I wanted to highlight that possible bias.
    - collyw 11y ago
      Illumina is coming up with most of the technology making the bioinformatics research possible. The bioinformaticians are generally running perl or python scripts on the data, not coming up with new technology.
      - dalke 11y ago
        I don't understand what this is supposed to mean. New methods of analyzing data, which can be implemented as a script, is also new technology. But it sounds like you are excluding it as a possibility. Again, what do you call "tech"? Intel provides most of the CPUs that Google, Microsoft, etc. use. Can't I be equally dismissive and say that Intel provides the tech and Google/MS merely run programs on top of it?
forgotmysn 11y ago
Thats fair, but I don't think the SEP is thought of as a technical resource.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
That's not true. Most of what I've found was done with Universities with it often published to ACM or IEEE. The areas I collect are security (esp high assurance), fault-tolerant systems, software engineering (esp automated), systems modelling, and specific use-cases (eg databases). I have skimmed over 10,000 papers on these topics to find that most of the best work is University or a company partnered with one with occasional great work out of Microsoft, Google,etc. Further, I stumbled upon the meme expressed by Perrine [1], etc that tech continuously reinvents the wheel by making same failures or re-inventing same solutions from the past. There's a bunch of tech that hasn't caught up to stuff from 60's-80's in those papers I reference. You'll see me do my part by referencing it in places like this where it might apply. However, it reflects an overall trend that there's tons of wisdom that's not transferred to new tech generation and we need a Standford-style encyclopedia for it all. More likely a collection of books and Wikipedia-style articles so cross-referencing will encourage serendipity. So, we could really use this. I considered creating one but Jeremy Epstein advised me to get real buy-in from academics first. That such a repository would probably need a lot for it to be effective, using a network effect I'm guessing. That's a lot more work than I have time for right now lol. Nonetheless, we desperately need it for INFOSEC and IT. Just for fun, I'd use only best-of-breed tools and methods its recommends to run the site itself. People would see it in action as they showed up. [1] https://c59951.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/5085-1255-perrine.pdf https://c59951.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/5085-1255-perrine.pdf
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Completely seconded. Universities are where the bulk of CS and software research comes from. Pretty much every paper I've read, especially for systems software, has been from academia, with the notable exceptions of a few publicly funded research labs.