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Maybe I've drunk the kool-aid, but saying "academic institutions fetishize academic papers" seems wrong to me. It's like saying that developers fetishize worki
by nycticorax 10y ago
Maybe I've drunk the kool-aid, but saying "academic institutions fetishize academic papers" seems wrong to me. It's like saying that developers fetishize working applications. It's not a fetish, it's the whole point of the thing. The output of research is research papers. Yes, sharing raw data and code are both good things, and should be promoted. But no one is going to take the time to look at either unless the paper presents good evidence for some novel result.
- moron4hire 10y agoPapers don't do anything. Papers aren't executable. Papers are largely only useful in regards to writing other papers. To make the whole point of the exercise to be something that is inert and self-referential is the fetishization part.
- Retra 10y agoPapers teach people things. You can't really hand someone some working code and expect them to iterate on it to produce something novel and insightful, because it won't be written in a high-enough language to express the core concepts flexibly.
- moron4hire 10y agoI don't see how open source software is at all compatible with the view you've just expressed.
- throwaway2048 10y agohow much undocumented, uncommented open source code have you contributed to?
- mcguire 10y agoOut of curiosity, have you ever tried to learn say, networking by reading the Linux stack?
- Retra 10y agoI don't see how that's related. There are loads of open source software projects that are maintained by only a single person precisely because they haven't bothered to properly document why it exists, what came before it, what important things it is demonstrating, or what needs to be done to improve it; the archetypical content of a research paper.