Funny thing: do your eyes light up seeing a "scholarly academic paper", or a "deeply tinkering blog"? Which one have we trained our brains to react more strongl

Funny thing: do your eyes light up seeing a "scholarly academic paper", or a "deeply tinkering blog"? Which one have we trained our brains to react more strongly to, what is more exciting to you? What do you feel you learn more out of, have more confidence to choose as a starting point for further activities? OP's distinction between tinkering and research seems wishful thinking at best. There are many grievances people have with research (and it's easy to think of examples), but I find most tend to fall under: * (unaddressed) RISK: poor result analysis, cherry-picked examples; glossing over edge cases and failure modes; focus on novelty and "academic writing" at the cost of repeatability and conceptual clarity. The Mummy Effect of research that looks great but crumbles to dust when you actually try to touch it: https://rare-technologies.com/mummy-effect-bridging-gap-between-academia-industry/ https://rare-technologies.com/mummy-effect-bridging-gap-betw... * (missing) OWNERSHIP: cadence dictated by grant cycles rather than one's intrinsic motivation to solve a problem; slow or missing feedback cycles; no dog-fooding => poor code and documentation; few incentives to make it easier for others to pick up or validate the results In fact, both of these seem better addressed by tinkerers than by institutionalized research. No wonder people react more positively to "tinkerers" and "hackers"! Academia has a lot of positive inertia (and taxes) going for it, but all goodwill has its limits.