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I wonder why it is that articles written from way back when very often seem to have a way higher average quality than the stuff written today. I'm not sure the

by tw1010 9y ago

I wonder why it is that articles written from way back when very often seem to have a way higher average quality than the stuff written today. I'm not sure the sole reason is that the only thing that survives is the high quality stuff, or because anyone can publish anything on the web, thus lowering the bar. It feels like even the peak of what we find today is rarely as good as the average found back then.

typon 9y ago
I think survivorship bias, as you mention, is pretty powerful.
jhwang5 9y ago
Nowadays, anyone who has a Medium account and took a single deep learning course can write about it and establish "authority". That's why.
canjobear 9y ago
Rumelhart is a consistently good writer. In general though I think you're right and it's just a survival process that makes old articles seem high quality.
acdha 9y ago
Beyond survivorship bias, what was publication pressure like back then? I’ve gotten the impression that things used to be slower – tied to journal or conference schedules – and the job market wasn’t as cutthroat or focused on numbers.
nnq 9y ago
...maybe it's because today the higher quality ones are about stuff most of us don't understand? When a field is young you have "quality at the bottom level", but it's not really young anymore.
bluenose69 9y ago
There is an issue of survivor bias, but people with decades of experience tend to think that quality has been going downhill. If you're at a university or institution that provides archives, try scanning journals an issue at a time. I imagine that fields vary, but in the fields that I've worked in, the quality has gone down through the decades. Part of this is increasing pressure to publish, but another factor is the growth of fields. Growth works out very well if it is natural, with brilliant professors attracting brilliant students. But problems arise when deans and funding agencies judge professors by how many people they supervise. The pool of applicants has to be pretty deep, when professors are expected to supervise 3+ students each, and those students are expected to start doing the same after they graduate. Many research fields come from nowhere, grow exponentially for a while, and then either decline or find a non-research way to reach a steady state (e.g. entertaining undergraduates in service classes). The early stages have high-quality work, or subsequent stages don't occur. But quality might be expected to decrease in those subsequent stages, simply because the people doing the work were not selected as much for their quality and the potential for success, but rather to keep flow going in an academic pipeline. It also seems reasonable to put all of this in the larger context of declining levels of intellectual discourse and literacy through the years.

by tw1010 9y ago

typon 9y ago

I think survivorship bias, as you mention, is pretty powerful.

jhwang5 9y ago

Nowadays, anyone who has a Medium account and took a single deep learning course can write about it and establish "authority". That's why.

canjobear 9y ago

Rumelhart is a consistently good writer. In general though I think you're right and it's just a survival process that makes old articles seem high quality.

acdha 9y ago

Beyond survivorship bias, what was publication pressure like back then? I’ve gotten the impression that things used to be slower – tied to journal or conference schedules – and the job market wasn’t as cutthroat or focused on numbers.

nnq 9y ago

...maybe it's because today the higher quality ones are about stuff most of us don't understand? When a field is young you have "quality at the bottom level", but it's not really young anymore.

bluenose69 9y ago

There is an issue of survivor bias, but people with decades of experience tend to think that quality has been going downhill. If you're at a university or institution that provides archives, try scanning journals an issue at a time. I imagine that fields vary, but in the fields that I've worked in, the quality has gone down through the decades. Part of this is increasing pressure to publish, but another factor is the growth of fields. Growth works out very well if it is natural, with brilliant professors attracting brilliant students. But problems arise when deans and funding agencies judge professors by how many people they supervise. The pool of applicants has to be pretty deep, when professors are expected to supervise 3+ students each, and those students are expected to start doing the same after they graduate. Many research fields come from nowhere, grow exponentially for a while, and then either decline or find a non-research way to reach a steady state (e.g. entertaining undergraduates in service classes). The early stages have high-quality work, or subsequent stages don't occur. But quality might be expected to decrease in those subsequent stages, simply because the people doing the work were not selected as much for their quality and the potential for success, but rather to keep flow going in an academic pipeline. It also seems reasonable to put all of this in the larger context of declining levels of intellectual discourse and literacy through the years.