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Will a better-connected, more searchable record of academic output allow talented thinkers to sidestep this historic need for academic track hoop-jumping and ob

Will a better-connected, more searchable record of academic output allow talented thinkers to sidestep this historic need for academic track hoop-jumping and obtain reasonable assurance of future recognition for independent work?

vkou 7y ago
No, because search isn't the problem, curation and education is. Search by itself is a waste of time, if you don't know what you don't know, and don't know what to look for. Institutional frameworks solve those problems.
- contingencies 7y ago
  Not sure I agree. There are plenty of curated resources and institutional frameworks but the last time I took an online university-affiliated class I would have learned more and saved time by simply reading a book. I think being broadly educated is partly having the capacity to delve fruitfully in to unknown domains and grapple with unknown semantics. Perhaps I am biased: my mother was a librarian.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  Indeed, telling a person the those thing "they don't know they don't know", telling people the key question people are trying to answer in the field, provide structure and guidance while a person spends time attempting to address a given question, etc, etc, etc. All these things are powerful and shape most modern intellectual endeavors. And by that token, someone who apply discipline and rigor in approaching questions outside an institution can have an incredible effect - back to Chomsky essentially creating the field that he's dominated (theoretical linguistics, one thing I didn't know 'till this article).
  - vkou 7y ago
    The key question that people are trying to answer in the field of fluid dynamics is how to find the solution to the Navier-Stokes set of equations. There you go. You have the question. You have a search engine. Go solve it. Oh... Hmm. 'Knowing which question to solve' only helps for easy problems. A search engine can help you solve easy problems. It won't do a damn thing for hard problems. You need someone to curate what is known in the field, point you in the right direction, steer you away from dead ends, help you break the problem down into bits that you might make headway in. Academic institutions do just that. They don't always do it optimally, they can get stuck in local maximums, they are occasionally blind-sided by some genius that attacked the problem from an unorthodox angle. But they do a hell of a lot more then a search engine ever would.
    - contingencies 7y ago
      The whole notion that there is a field and it has a key question and there's a goal to solve it is already a triple set of local maximums.

vkou 7y ago

No, because search isn't the problem, curation and education is. Search by itself is a waste of time, if you don't know what you don't know, and don't know what to look for. Institutional frameworks solve those problems.

contingencies 7y ago
Not sure I agree. There are plenty of curated resources and institutional frameworks but the last time I took an online university-affiliated class I would have learned more and saved time by simply reading a book. I think being broadly educated is partly having the capacity to delve fruitfully in to unknown domains and grapple with unknown semantics. Perhaps I am biased: my mother was a librarian.
joe_the_user 7y ago
Indeed, telling a person the those thing "they don't know they don't know", telling people the key question people are trying to answer in the field, provide structure and guidance while a person spends time attempting to address a given question, etc, etc, etc. All these things are powerful and shape most modern intellectual endeavors. And by that token, someone who apply discipline and rigor in approaching questions outside an institution can have an incredible effect - back to Chomsky essentially creating the field that he's dominated (theoretical linguistics, one thing I didn't know 'till this article).
- vkou 7y ago
  The key question that people are trying to answer in the field of fluid dynamics is how to find the solution to the Navier-Stokes set of equations. There you go. You have the question. You have a search engine. Go solve it. Oh... Hmm. 'Knowing which question to solve' only helps for easy problems. A search engine can help you solve easy problems. It won't do a damn thing for hard problems. You need someone to curate what is known in the field, point you in the right direction, steer you away from dead ends, help you break the problem down into bits that you might make headway in. Academic institutions do just that. They don't always do it optimally, they can get stuck in local maximums, they are occasionally blind-sided by some genius that attacked the problem from an unorthodox angle. But they do a hell of a lot more then a search engine ever would.
  - contingencies 7y ago
    The whole notion that there is a field and it has a key question and there's a goal to solve it is already a triple set of local maximums.