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I wrote it for an academic conference (https://2020.programming-conference.org/home/salon-2020 https://2020.programming-conference.org/home/salon-2020) which ha

I wrote it for an academic conference (https://2020.programming-conference.org/home/salon-2020 https://2020.programming-conference.org/home/salon-2020) which had as its theme an essay by Ivan Illich (http://akkartik.name/illich.pdf http://akkartik.name/illich.pdf, pdf, 67 pages) But in the end, your BS radar is your own.

muzani 7y ago
That's fair. But academia is often full of BS, pardon the language, and so the radar needs to be cranked up. With, say, Medium articles, one can skim if it's good or not within seconds. Academic papers can take hours, if not weeks to discover if it's complete BS or whether I'm just not smart enough, and so I can only go off minor cues. It's generally better to read hard things. They're hard because they have a lot of information density or a lot of gaps. But that also makes people confuse poor readability for quality. Something that has no content tries to be hard to read by stuffing it full of gobbledygook. Whereas something that is trying to communicate an idea often goes through a few revisions trying to simplify the idea. If you have great ideas, you want the user to be expending their brainpower trying to comprehend the idea, not translating it into simple English. (exception is using jargon that's common to people at the right level)
- thulecitizen 7y ago
  > Academic papers can take hours, if not weeks to discover if it's complete BS Did you see this recent thread? It is a paper on how to read papers and it was very useful and insightful for me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21979350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21979350 From the linked pdf: "Researchers must read papers for several reasons: to review them for a conference or a class, to keep current in their field, or for a literature survey of a new field. A typical researcher will likely spend hundreds of hours every year reading papers. Learning to efficiently read a paper is a critical but rarely taught skill. Beginning graduate students, therefore, must learn on their own using trial and error. Students waste much effort in the process and are frequently driven to frustration. For many years I have used a simple ‘three-pass’ approach to prevent me from drowning in the details of a paper before getting a bird’s-eye-view. It allows me to estimate the amount of time required to review a set of papers. Moreover, I can adjust the depth of paper evaluation depending on my needs and how much time I have. This paper describes the approach and its use in doing a literature survey."

muzani 7y ago

That's fair. But academia is often full of BS, pardon the language, and so the radar needs to be cranked up. With, say, Medium articles, one can skim if it's good or not within seconds. Academic papers can take hours, if not weeks to discover if it's complete BS or whether I'm just not smart enough, and so I can only go off minor cues. It's generally better to read hard things. They're hard because they have a lot of information density or a lot of gaps. But that also makes people confuse poor readability for quality. Something that has no content tries to be hard to read by stuffing it full of gobbledygook. Whereas something that is trying to communicate an idea often goes through a few revisions trying to simplify the idea. If you have great ideas, you want the user to be expending their brainpower trying to comprehend the idea, not translating it into simple English. (exception is using jargon that's common to people at the right level)

thulecitizen 7y ago
> Academic papers can take hours, if not weeks to discover if it's complete BS Did you see this recent thread? It is a paper on how to read papers and it was very useful and insightful for me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21979350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21979350 From the linked pdf: "Researchers must read papers for several reasons: to review them for a conference or a class, to keep current in their field, or for a literature survey of a new field. A typical researcher will likely spend hundreds of hours every year reading papers. Learning to efficiently read a paper is a critical but rarely taught skill. Beginning graduate students, therefore, must learn on their own using trial and error. Students waste much effort in the process and are frequently driven to frustration. For many years I have used a simple ‘three-pass’ approach to prevent me from drowning in the details of a paper before getting a bird’s-eye-view. It allows me to estimate the amount of time required to review a set of papers. Moreover, I can adjust the depth of paper evaluation depending on my needs and how much time I have. This paper describes the approach and its use in doing a literature survey."