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Most people suck at explaining. So the fact that most scientists suck at explaining is like... yeah, that's what naturally happens, unless you actively reward g

Most people suck at explaining. So the fact that most scientists suck at explaining is like... yeah, that's what naturally happens, unless you actively reward good explanations. The perfect case would be if someone is great at research and also great at explaining. But great skills are rare, and specific combinations of great skills are even more rare. So you will have a scientist or two who are great explainers at the same time, but then you have a lot of scientists who are great at research but suck at explaining, and also a lot of people who are great at explaining but suck at research. How does academia reward them? The ones with both skills will get the highest rewards: they will invent lots of cool stuff and describe it clearly, so they will get many citations. But there are only a few such people per generation. The ones who are good researchers but suck at explanation can still invent something and publish the type of paper you complain about; and they will get a (smaller) reward for doing so. The ones who are good at explaining but suck at research... will probably be fired. There are a few things that a person whose only skill is explaining could do in academia. They wouldn't get a reward for explaining someone else's paper clearly, but they could get a reward for writing a meta-review that would explain multiple papers clearly. In theory, their scientific contribution would be in comparing the papers, but in practice, hopefully even people who only needed one of the papers would cite them as a reward for making it easier to understand. -- I don't know if this would actually be sufficient to survive academically. People who are good at explaining can also make money by writing popular textbooks. Question is, whether there is a sufficient demand for a popular textbook explaining some obscure math.

gallegojaime 6y ago
Explainers-first shouldn't be fired if they make up a small percentage, because they do a wonderful job without the bulk of resources. I'm not sure if explainers-first are the minority, though. After all, it's much easier to review than to create. And we do want new research.
- StandardFuture 6y ago
  Firstly, let's not fall for a false dichotomy. There is likely a simple equilibrium of review and creativity that must be maintained for an optimally healthy scientific community. Obviously, the old style of numerous-journals + publish-or-perish mentality was unhealthy implementations of a scientific system. But, I would move away from papers entirely. They hold no redeeming values over alternatives like a git repository published publicly with an "issues" forum e.g., GitHub, etc. This needs to absolutely become the new standard, and we need to get rid of papers and journals, both physically and digitally, in their entirety. They have zero redeeming factors at this point in time except to boost the ego of the published. Quality control can easily be decentralized and available to everyone using something like GitHub. We know this because that is literally what the security and trust of open-source software is predicated on: putting everything in the open.
ivan_ah 6y ago
> They wouldn't get a reward for explaining someone else's paper clearly, but they could get a reward for writing a meta-review that would explain multiple papers clearly. I see tremendous value for such work, and I think it is one of the biggest current bottlenecks in the sciences. We've got the cutting edge stuff happening in papers, and we've got 5-10 year old knowledge that makes it into textbooks, but in the middle there is nothing. Everyone is working on their own to catch up. We're talking thousands of grad students independently banding their heard agains the same problems... If there were more "review journals" things would drastically improve. Maybe NSF could provide some funding for such efforts? Not sure what the metrics would be for this---not citations, we'd nee more like views or upvotes like on HN. The other option would be for grad students to self-organize into "reading clubs" on different subjects and share notes.

gallegojaime 6y ago

Explainers-first shouldn't be fired if they make up a small percentage, because they do a wonderful job without the bulk of resources. I'm not sure if explainers-first are the minority, though. After all, it's much easier to review than to create. And we do want new research.

StandardFuture 6y ago
Firstly, let's not fall for a false dichotomy. There is likely a simple equilibrium of review and creativity that must be maintained for an optimally healthy scientific community. Obviously, the old style of numerous-journals + publish-or-perish mentality was unhealthy implementations of a scientific system. But, I would move away from papers entirely. They hold no redeeming values over alternatives like a git repository published publicly with an "issues" forum e.g., GitHub, etc. This needs to absolutely become the new standard, and we need to get rid of papers and journals, both physically and digitally, in their entirety. They have zero redeeming factors at this point in time except to boost the ego of the published. Quality control can easily be decentralized and available to everyone using something like GitHub. We know this because that is literally what the security and trust of open-source software is predicated on: putting everything in the open.

ivan_ah 6y ago

> They wouldn't get a reward for explaining someone else's paper clearly, but they could get a reward for writing a meta-review that would explain multiple papers clearly. I see tremendous value for such work, and I think it is one of the biggest current bottlenecks in the sciences. We've got the cutting edge stuff happening in papers, and we've got 5-10 year old knowledge that makes it into textbooks, but in the middle there is nothing. Everyone is working on their own to catch up. We're talking thousands of grad students independently banding their heard agains the same problems... If there were more "review journals" things would drastically improve. Maybe NSF could provide some funding for such efforts? Not sure what the metrics would be for this---not citations, we'd nee more like views or upvotes like on HN. The other option would be for grad students to self-organize into "reading clubs" on different subjects and share notes.