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Hello! I'm one of the editors of Distill. I'm certainly open to the possibility that we could have helped the authors differentiate their contribution more. It
by colah3 6y ago
Hello! I'm one of the editors of Distill. I'm certainly open to the possibility that we could have helped the authors differentiate their contribution more.
It seems like it's important to you to call Distill out on what you see as an institutional failure. I think you could actually do that more effectively and credibly if you wrote your comment differently.
Putting myself in the author's shoes, it feels pretty hard to engage with your comment. When you swear, it gives the sense you don't wish for people to engage with you. When you say "who the fuck reviewed this paper, a 25 year old fresh professor", it feels like you're implying that people who are young are intrinsically not knowledgable. When you don't leave open space for more charitable interpretations, it makes productive conversation a lot harder.
I appreciate your dedication to improving scientific discourse. I'd love to see if we can turn this into a productive conversation.
- SQueeeeeL 6y agoI took my other comments down, because I realized I was being ignorant to the real people who wrote the paper/operate the journal, and I apologize for that. I think other's have criticized Distill much more aptly then I ever could, so I don't think I have much to contribute to the conversation
- colah3 6y agoThanks for the response! Your apology makes me feel more positive about conversations on the internet. :) I genuinely appreciate you giving feedback. Running Distill is hard, and there's lots of places we make mistakes or could do things better. From my perspective, Distill has to balance a lot of equities. I see one of our major roles as trying to explore new visions of what an academic journal can be, so I put a lot of weight towards us doing weird and unusual things, like these threads. But we also need to take care around process and quality. And sometimes we screw up. Distill is also entirely volunteer run. Everyone involved has full time jobs, and runs Distill on top of that. And honestly, we're often quite exhausted. So sometimes we make mistakes that a better version of ourselves with more time for Distill would not.
- SQueeeeeL 6y agoI really appreciate the idea of a place where code and paper can be intertwined, it's a cool idea for a journal! I also really enjoy journals doing weird unusually things! I just have a penchant for people defining novel terms and not fully exploring existing literature in a field. In my opinion, it creates a very disorienting effect where those who have useful tools to contribute (typically neural network researchers) immediately start on the worst footing. Everyone is constantly playing catch-up in understanding and can't follow the evolution of an idea/methodology over time. I was under the impression that Distill was funded by Google, is this not the case?
- colah3 6y agoNope. There's money committed if we ever run the Distill Prize ($10K prizes recognizing outstanding scientific communication), but that's tied up in legal issues. For regular Distill, all the costs (several thousand dollars a year) come out of volunteer pockets, and all the time is volunteered. Edit: There was a period of 6 months where Firebase (which is connected to Google?) gave us free hosting, reducing our expenses.
- SQueeeeeL 6y agoThat's impressive, and also re-contextualizes a lot of my feelings towards the journal. Have there been any plans to go more mainline in funding efforts. I know all open access Nature journals are "pay to publish". It's a slippery slope to being predatory, but without university's paying for subscriptions, the funding for a journal must come from somewhere and Nature seems to maintain quality in spite of their model (in this case donations).
- colah3 6y agoWe've sometimes discussed it in the context of whether we can "scale up" Distill. But I think at this point I expect us to just stay niche and volunteer focused.