10 ms·

Stepping back a bit, I feel the argument is analogous to how music is becoming more mainstream and generic, how casual gamers "corrupt" the art form of gaming,

Stepping back a bit, I feel the argument is analogous to how music is becoming more mainstream and generic, how casual gamers "corrupt" the art form of gaming, how clickbait and stupit stuff is overshadowing lovingly curated independent websites, eternal September etc. One answer to all these propositions is that the valuable stuff is still there, you just have an additional flood of mediocre boring predictable stuff. You can still find enough indie music and games and movies to spend all your free time on. Similarly, if you know where to look and whose papers to watch out for, you can read more interesting stuff. The existence of more bullshit makes the filtering somewhat more effort, but it's bearable. Most papers are never deeply read anyway, outside of the reviewers. Even citations don't mean someone really read the paper in depth. So, most medíocre, boring papers get ignored. It's an illusion to expect that every researcher can pump out multiple really interesting non-boring papers every year. So we pretend. We write, we cite, we present, overiflate, overpromise etc. It must look like there is steady hard noble work and toil. It's like a ritual. The scientists are writing all these papers so tax payers can sleep well that their money is paid for hard work.

timkam 6y ago
I largely agree, but we do not write all these papers "so tax payers can sleep". We write these papers because the administration incentivizes us to get the highest profile publications with the lowest effort possible. In relatively creative fields (i.e., much of computer science), this can even mean to make friends in the community and co-author papers with them without being the one who does any of the hard work. (In other sciences, it means being the one who pulls in the money, as far as I understand.) A related problem I see is that we treat all papers the same: position (opinion) papers, reviews & surveys, and "hard" results (relevant proofs, strong empirical results, software artifacts that are deployed at scale in practice etc.). As the blog post somewhat suggests, the administration should primarily ask us to summarize these results when assessing whether we are worthy of funding and faculty positions; sure, it takes more effort, but I think it is possible.
- nextos 6y ago
  Exactly, the big issue is that paper counts have become the dominant metric. And like with all structures dominated by a single metric, it's easy to game the system. Most professors I have worked with in experimental sciences are completely disconnected from actual research. They just optimize for hiring hordes of people to churn out tons of mediocre papers, which they don't care about. I came from theoretical CS & math, so this was really shocking. It's really depressing and it needs to change. Academia is now in a phase similar to that of an innovative startup which has been filled in with many middle managers, and has turned into a corporate monstrosity.
  - retrac 6y ago
    "Paper count" is about as reliable a metric as "lines of code". Publish or die is a toxic mentality in academia and you are certainly not the first to have observed this, sadly.
    - xmprt 6y ago
      I'm not sure if those two fields are comparable. In software engineering, at least there's usually a dollar value impact for the code you write. In research, the impact isn't as tangible and probably won't be known for years.
      - throwawaygh 6y ago
        > In research, the impact isn't as tangible and probably won't be known for years. This still describes a lot of software engineering.
    - unishark 6y ago
      It's pretty outdated. In research schools you need to win funding or die nowadays. And while publications do help you, say in getting hired and promotions, your publications are dug into pretty deeply. They don't want to be tricked into hiring someone useless who can crank out fluff but can't win a grant.
dmix 6y ago
Or even more reductionist there are only a finite amount of talented and smart people ever in history doing truely new and interesting stuff. It’s just the nature of the game. You can’t just turn a dial and add more talent. Although a bit off topic there are some authoritarian nation states who tried to do this by social engineering. Soviet Union made being an engineer a common place job title and China is trying to make tons of super smart kids at STEM. But we all know there is more to being smart than forcing kids to go down certain academic route and get top end scores (you know the whole creative side and capacity for original works to be created). The democratic approach still seems to be the winner (not just due to brain). It’s as I mention always going to be a small minority who do great things. That doesn’t scale up artificially.
- mattkrause 6y ago
  > You can’t just turn a dial and add more talent. I'm not sure I agree there. It's notoriously hard to get/keep a research position, especially a) in academia and b) outside CS. There are a decent number of graduate student slots, some postdocs, and then you're thrown into the thunder dome. The competition itself--and the resulting uncertainty--chases a lot of people into other careers. The people in my grad school cohort who "left" research were just as smart and often just as successful (in terms of papers, etc) as those that stayed. It's not hard to imagine some policy tweaks that could have kept some of them in research.
  - derbOac 6y ago
    >The people in my grad school cohort who "left" research were just as smart and often just as successful (in terms of papers, etc) as those that stayed. There's research to support that actually: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/11/new-study-says-scientists-are-leaving-academic-work-unprecedented-rates https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/11/new-study-say... Buried in that paper they basically show the hazard rate for exiting academics is sort of uncorrelated with metrics like citation rate etc.
- vosper 6y ago
  > Or even more reductionist there are only a finite amount of talented and smart people ever in history doing truely new and interesting stuff. It’s just the nature of the game. You can’t just turn a dial and add more talent. It’s true that we can’t turn a dial, but there must be a vast amount of human potential that goes unused every day, because people are born in impoverished countries, or suffer discrimination due to gender or race or something else, get sick with a preventable disease, or whatever other thing denies them the opportunity to make the most of themselves. This is probably actually the norm in the world, not the exception. So I think there’s rather a lot we could do as a species (or within individual countries) to give people opportunities and make sure potential for progress is realised
azhenley 6y ago
Are papers getting more boring or does the reader just find less novels things to read as they read more and more? Maybe the reader is bored of the field in general. The 500th time you do anything isn’t as exciting as the 5th time. On another note, why does everything have to be exciting? Small incremental improvements over the years is what I aim for.
abathur 6y ago
I think I agree with a large chunk of this: there are inevitably triage/discovery problems as the number of things/options go up. The cost of evaluating each remains fairly constant, and at some point production outstrips the ability of even extremely-interested/dedicated individuals to have a good handle on it all. Beyond this point, you either need organized collective effort (and trust) to efficiently distribute the work of keeping up (and synthesize the results) or the larger community will be wasting ever-increasing slices of potential energy to extract increasingly less knowledge of the scope of activity. But there's a difference between simple volume growth for good reasons (i.e., people chasing incentives that are aligned at multiple levels of society), and volume growth caused by people chasing incentives that are misaligned at one or more points up the stack. If the researchers are spending their time on things even they find boring because Goodhart's law, I think it is important to recognize it and try to undo the misaligned incentives. They're not only externalizing a cost on their entire field of knowledge--but we're also collectively suffering some ill-defined opportunity cost of whatever it was they would've spent their time on if they were following curiosity.
barrkel 6y ago
This is a bit off-topic to papers, but perhaps there's an angle. One answer to all these propositions is that the valuable stuff is still there, you just have an additional flood of mediocre boring predictable stuff. I don't think this is true for most things with a mass market. I think products which have efficiencies of scale - or low marginal costs of reproduction - suck up more capital, which raises certain basic levels of standards and polish and marketing, but also greatly increases capital risk and thus reduces investor risk appetite for product novelty. These mass market products starve the mid-market of attention, which makes the mid-market less capital efficient, which means the mid-market needs to get cheaper and cheaper, lose polish, until it's less attractive to the mass market of consumers, and so on in a spiral until a certain spartan rawness becomes its own aesthetic - indie games, indie films, indie music. I think there's a concrete example which demonstrates the actual absence of that long tail of interesting content, and not just that it's harder to find: blogs. Blogs were great in the mid 2000s. The market did two things: it matured - the best blogs got more mindshare and turned into something closer to media organizations, much more capital intensive with full time paid writers, while and Facebook and Twitter sucked up the mass market of newsfeed consumers, both on the producer and consumer side, making it easier to produce low-value inanities and easier to consume tidbits from celebrities. This sucked the air of attention from blogs; being long-form, they were too hard to write and too long to read; and being unpaid, they didn't have slick editors or snazzy design. So a lot of them shrivelled up. There are still niche blogs, plenty of them, but a lot fewer - and we can track this loss, because we have (or had) them in our newsreaders.
- jononor 6y ago
  To explain blogs you also have to factor in the moves toward more image and video centric content, I think.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Video content could be in itself another argument in favor of GP's thesis. There seems to be dearth of high quality video material. You have big-budget high quality videos, big-budget garbage, and then lots and lots of low-budget garbage: i.e. all the stuff "influencers" and "YouTube personas" create to live off ad revenue. There is a small and somewhat obscure but relatively stable middle - low-budget, high-quality videos. I attribute its survival to two things: some live off Patreon donations and occasional sponsorship deals, others live because the creators have an actual dayjob, and they do YouTube as a hobby. This is similar to blogs - best ones are done on the side, with no expectation of revenue.
amelius 6y ago
"Science advances one funeral at a time" -- paraphrased from Max Planck
Ericson2314 6y ago
Inevitable of not, this has real costs, in that that government will eventually turn off the gravy train and the "good" and "bad" research alike will be negatively impacted. In other words, academia is sowing the seeds of its own demise, and with it, the official institutional pinnacle of our culture [please don't wince too hard when reading that!]. ---- The solution i think is less research but more library work. See https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2020/07/08/the-landscapes-of-digital-scientific-knowledge/ https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2020/07/08/the-landscapes-of-... and https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/ https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te... which it cites. The amount of work library work we are not doing is just staggering. Consider these claims: - There should be an accredited-author-ornly "kernel wikipedia" which the main one can choose to incorporate, almost like release vs staging branches. - Different subfield way wish to keep their own intentionally biased corpuses, like https://ncatlab.org/nlab/ https://ncatlab.org/nlab/ - After 6 months, virtually no one should have to read the original research article, because the librarian core will have incorporated it's results claims (however controversial) into the appropriate articles - Textbooks / "knowledge bootstrap plans" should be continuously updated from the encyclopedia, not unlike how bootstrapping is managed in a package repo - Librarians do the work, but also adjudicate disputes, as researchers will be naturally incentivized to contest how their work is incorporated as that is the primary way it is consumed.
- craftinator 6y ago
  > In other words, academia is sowing the seeds of its own demise This is first order thinking. Yes, if an increasingly large quantity of academic research is becoming bullshit, eventually the ratio of good to bad research will reach an inflection point where policy will be set that reduces research funding. This reduction in funding will have many effects, but the largest will be that as funding becomes a scarce resource, a higher curation of both researchers and topics will come into effect. There will be less research and papers overall, but the largest decrease in research will be those that are bullshit. Finally, as more and more research will be fruitful and useful, and fewer and fewer bullshit papers are published, an inflection point will be reached. There will be more funding allocated to these exciting new areas of study, and more research will happen. Of course, with funding no longer a scarce resource, less curation will occur, and a few more bullshit papers will be published... And the cycle will have advanced one wavelength. It's been happening for years, centuries, as a basic economic cycle, and looks something like this: _/T\_/T\_/T\
skizm 6y ago
Music is becoming more generic because musicians can rapidly reach a wide audience and iterate quickly, so they see what works and what doesn't and continue down the path of sound that produces the most money.
- bumby 6y ago
  Isn’t the premise that this analogy extends to academia by “seeing what works and what doesn’t” to produce the most publications to the point where the majority of papers are derivative? While the iteration of the individual may not be quicker, the large increase in the number of publications seems to be indicative of the field iterating quicker. E.g., the artist takes a big risk to produce a sound that diverges from “what works” just like a scientist takes a big risk to diverge from well-worn theory that has produced past publication fodder.
patrec 6y ago
> One answer to all these propositions is that the valuable stuff is still there I don't understand the popularity of this argument. Whilst someone might (theoretically) have written the Great American Novel in his or her basement unbeknownst to pretty much anyone, a lot of art is fairly resource intensive and thus you can say with extremely high confidence that's its not being produced and the fault lies not with people not looking hard enough. Same with research and journalism.
- Siira 6y ago
  In games at least, I feel that more good games are being produced.
Bakary 6y ago
>It's an illusion to expect that every researcher can pump out multiple really interesting non-boring papers every year. So we pretend. We write, we cite, we present, overiflate, overpromise etc. It must look like there is steady hard noble work and toil. It's like a ritual. The scientists are writing all these papers so tax payers can sleep well that their money is paid for hard work. The flip-side to this is that there is a glut of moderately motivated scientists and PhD candidates. As a result, the demand for conferences and citations is self-sustaining to meet the expectations of millions of people wanting to enter the academic world without a clear plan beyond joining the world itself. It's as though the English-major-to-professor cycle has also become a reality in the hard sciences.
- semi-extrinsic 6y ago
  In 1916, J.J. Thomson (as in Thomson scattering; discoverer of the electron) said it perfectly [1]: “If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it." [1] https://archive.org/details/b29932208 https://archive.org/details/b29932208 - see pages 198-200, ref HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21388715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21388715
  - Bakary 6y ago
    I was thinking more along the lines of people who are not suited to do research in the first place. This will either be those who join the academic world out of inertia following their educational path or class/cultural pressure, or those who dislike the general labor market and want to enter the academic world due to its particularities. On a speculative note: I believe it's yet another argument in favor of UBI
agumonkey 6y ago
> So we pretend. We write, we cite, we present, overiflate, overpromise etc. > so tax payers can sleep well that their money is paid for hard work. It's a bit contradictory. I won't go into scandalized rant because it's useless, and there's no point shouting against the universe from a bedroom chair. Still it's a bit disheartening. I wish the scientific world could reinvigorate and pump some spark back into the field.
smitty1e 6y ago
Rick Beato rails against gridding and autotune in music over on YouTube. My wife, a health outcomes researcher, points out that the expectation is that every little publishable bit be kicked out the door for a pharma project. Historically, they would have dropped a single summary result at the end of the effort. Now, she's trying to "autotune" the neutral or even negative results. Nominally in the name of "transparency". If this is true, the need is a research Adele to come along and shame the riff-raff with sheer natural brilliance.
- Sophistifunk 6y ago
  We all know autotune, but what's "gridding"?
  - 1986 6y ago
    I'm guessing this means quantization of a rhythm.
    - redis_mlc 6y ago
      Correct, it's aligning played musical notes to a bar (measure) on a computer screen. Then almost always, a clone tool is used to repeat that one bar identically dozens of times. So you lose most of the organic nature of music in a mechanical fashion.
      - Sophistifunk 6y ago
        I agree you're losing something that might be valuable, but it's not really part of the music, rather part of the performance. I think there's room for both though, just as we've had studio vs live recordings for the last 50 years or so.
      - smitty1e 6y ago
        Who needs humanity when you can have mathematical perfection? Beside humans?
alexhutcheson 6y ago
The problem isn’t the existence of the papers, it’s the years of effort that go into producing the papers. It’s the failure to harness the hard work and brainpower of so many brilliant people towards efforts that would meaningfully improve the lives of others.
riedel 6y ago
In the line of your comment about tax payers money: one of the biggest issues IMHO is the disfunctional "market" here because most of the work is paid easily by the tax payer . Particularly publishers are mostly not paying for reviews but are paid for journal and conferences largely on quantity (with few noble exceptions). The effect for a long time now was an ever increasing number of conferences (peer reviewed proceedings still make a large share in CS) and journals. What is actually worse IMHO, the review request get more and more and are largely boring. So you really have to attract the attention of the reviewer to not trigger the reflex of looking for reasons to reject (or worse the opposite, which may account to the same because there are always other reviewers, so its a matter of luck who gets assigned) I think better structures are needed that actually incentivise good reviews. This would lead to better papers, too. There are multiple options for this. Maybe it is simply time to see reviews as publications themselves and say goodbye to flawed blinded review process. Another thing would be to take the publishers out of the game. Even IEEE and ACM have become largely a playing field for power politics between the US, China and Europe . I think we could do better and be more inclusive here. Publishing reviews and rejected work would further make meta studies much more reliable removing also bias towards positive results (who actually wants to hear about easily replicatable negative results at a conference)
jhoechtl 6y ago
All what you say is true and I appreciate your deep thoughts. There is another dimension to that though. It's the long tail. The internet has tremendously facilitated mixing existing content. That's creative too but not in the original sense of creating something new. With detached knowledge before the internet age much less content has been produced and I would assume the novelty to mixed content ratio was very much in favour of new content instead of mixed content. Internet technology brought us search engines but their search algorithmus favour those paying most instead of providing a service to discriminated remixed content from new content.

timkam 6y ago

I largely agree, but we do not write all these papers "so tax payers can sleep". We write these papers because the administration incentivizes us to get the highest profile publications with the lowest effort possible. In relatively creative fields (i.e., much of computer science), this can even mean to make friends in the community and co-author papers with them without being the one who does any of the hard work. (In other sciences, it means being the one who pulls in the money, as far as I understand.) A related problem I see is that we treat all papers the same: position (opinion) papers, reviews & surveys, and "hard" results (relevant proofs, strong empirical results, software artifacts that are deployed at scale in practice etc.). As the blog post somewhat suggests, the administration should primarily ask us to summarize these results when assessing whether we are worthy of funding and faculty positions; sure, it takes more effort, but I think it is possible.

nextos 6y ago
Exactly, the big issue is that paper counts have become the dominant metric. And like with all structures dominated by a single metric, it's easy to game the system. Most professors I have worked with in experimental sciences are completely disconnected from actual research. They just optimize for hiring hordes of people to churn out tons of mediocre papers, which they don't care about. I came from theoretical CS & math, so this was really shocking. It's really depressing and it needs to change. Academia is now in a phase similar to that of an innovative startup which has been filled in with many middle managers, and has turned into a corporate monstrosity.
- retrac 6y ago
  "Paper count" is about as reliable a metric as "lines of code". Publish or die is a toxic mentality in academia and you are certainly not the first to have observed this, sadly.
  - xmprt 6y ago
    I'm not sure if those two fields are comparable. In software engineering, at least there's usually a dollar value impact for the code you write. In research, the impact isn't as tangible and probably won't be known for years.
    - throwawaygh 6y ago
      > In research, the impact isn't as tangible and probably won't be known for years. This still describes a lot of software engineering.
  - unishark 6y ago
    It's pretty outdated. In research schools you need to win funding or die nowadays. And while publications do help you, say in getting hired and promotions, your publications are dug into pretty deeply. They don't want to be tricked into hiring someone useless who can crank out fluff but can't win a grant.

dmix 6y ago

Or even more reductionist there are only a finite amount of talented and smart people ever in history doing truely new and interesting stuff. It’s just the nature of the game. You can’t just turn a dial and add more talent. Although a bit off topic there are some authoritarian nation states who tried to do this by social engineering. Soviet Union made being an engineer a common place job title and China is trying to make tons of super smart kids at STEM. But we all know there is more to being smart than forcing kids to go down certain academic route and get top end scores (you know the whole creative side and capacity for original works to be created). The democratic approach still seems to be the winner (not just due to brain). It’s as I mention always going to be a small minority who do great things. That doesn’t scale up artificially.

mattkrause 6y ago
> You can’t just turn a dial and add more talent. I'm not sure I agree there. It's notoriously hard to get/keep a research position, especially a) in academia and b) outside CS. There are a decent number of graduate student slots, some postdocs, and then you're thrown into the thunder dome. The competition itself--and the resulting uncertainty--chases a lot of people into other careers. The people in my grad school cohort who "left" research were just as smart and often just as successful (in terms of papers, etc) as those that stayed. It's not hard to imagine some policy tweaks that could have kept some of them in research.
- derbOac 6y ago
  >The people in my grad school cohort who "left" research were just as smart and often just as successful (in terms of papers, etc) as those that stayed. There's research to support that actually: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/11/new-study-says-scientists-are-leaving-academic-work-unprecedented-rates https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/11/new-study-say... Buried in that paper they basically show the hazard rate for exiting academics is sort of uncorrelated with metrics like citation rate etc.
vosper 6y ago
> Or even more reductionist there are only a finite amount of talented and smart people ever in history doing truely new and interesting stuff. It’s just the nature of the game. You can’t just turn a dial and add more talent. It’s true that we can’t turn a dial, but there must be a vast amount of human potential that goes unused every day, because people are born in impoverished countries, or suffer discrimination due to gender or race or something else, get sick with a preventable disease, or whatever other thing denies them the opportunity to make the most of themselves. This is probably actually the norm in the world, not the exception. So I think there’s rather a lot we could do as a species (or within individual countries) to give people opportunities and make sure potential for progress is realised

azhenley 6y ago

Are papers getting more boring or does the reader just find less novels things to read as they read more and more? Maybe the reader is bored of the field in general. The 500th time you do anything isn’t as exciting as the 5th time. On another note, why does everything have to be exciting? Small incremental improvements over the years is what I aim for.

abathur 6y ago

I think I agree with a large chunk of this: there are inevitably triage/discovery problems as the number of things/options go up. The cost of evaluating each remains fairly constant, and at some point production outstrips the ability of even extremely-interested/dedicated individuals to have a good handle on it all. Beyond this point, you either need organized collective effort (and trust) to efficiently distribute the work of keeping up (and synthesize the results) or the larger community will be wasting ever-increasing slices of potential energy to extract increasingly less knowledge of the scope of activity. But there's a difference between simple volume growth for good reasons (i.e., people chasing incentives that are aligned at multiple levels of society), and volume growth caused by people chasing incentives that are misaligned at one or more points up the stack. If the researchers are spending their time on things even they find boring because Goodhart's law, I think it is important to recognize it and try to undo the misaligned incentives. They're not only externalizing a cost on their entire field of knowledge--but we're also collectively suffering some ill-defined opportunity cost of whatever it was they would've spent their time on if they were following curiosity.

barrkel 6y ago

This is a bit off-topic to papers, but perhaps there's an angle. One answer to all these propositions is that the valuable stuff is still there, you just have an additional flood of mediocre boring predictable stuff. I don't think this is true for most things with a mass market. I think products which have efficiencies of scale - or low marginal costs of reproduction - suck up more capital, which raises certain basic levels of standards and polish and marketing, but also greatly increases capital risk and thus reduces investor risk appetite for product novelty. These mass market products starve the mid-market of attention, which makes the mid-market less capital efficient, which means the mid-market needs to get cheaper and cheaper, lose polish, until it's less attractive to the mass market of consumers, and so on in a spiral until a certain spartan rawness becomes its own aesthetic - indie games, indie films, indie music. I think there's a concrete example which demonstrates the actual absence of that long tail of interesting content, and not just that it's harder to find: blogs. Blogs were great in the mid 2000s. The market did two things: it matured - the best blogs got more mindshare and turned into something closer to media organizations, much more capital intensive with full time paid writers, while and Facebook and Twitter sucked up the mass market of newsfeed consumers, both on the producer and consumer side, making it easier to produce low-value inanities and easier to consume tidbits from celebrities. This sucked the air of attention from blogs; being long-form, they were too hard to write and too long to read; and being unpaid, they didn't have slick editors or snazzy design. So a lot of them shrivelled up. There are still niche blogs, plenty of them, but a lot fewer - and we can track this loss, because we have (or had) them in our newsreaders.

jononor 6y ago
To explain blogs you also have to factor in the moves toward more image and video centric content, I think.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Video content could be in itself another argument in favor of GP's thesis. There seems to be dearth of high quality video material. You have big-budget high quality videos, big-budget garbage, and then lots and lots of low-budget garbage: i.e. all the stuff "influencers" and "YouTube personas" create to live off ad revenue. There is a small and somewhat obscure but relatively stable middle - low-budget, high-quality videos. I attribute its survival to two things: some live off Patreon donations and occasional sponsorship deals, others live because the creators have an actual dayjob, and they do YouTube as a hobby. This is similar to blogs - best ones are done on the side, with no expectation of revenue.

amelius 6y ago

"Science advances one funeral at a time" -- paraphrased from Max Planck

Ericson2314 6y ago

Inevitable of not, this has real costs, in that that government will eventually turn off the gravy train and the "good" and "bad" research alike will be negatively impacted. In other words, academia is sowing the seeds of its own demise, and with it, the official institutional pinnacle of our culture [please don't wince too hard when reading that!]. ---- The solution i think is less research but more library work. See https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2020/07/08/the-landscapes-of-digital-scientific-knowledge/ https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2020/07/08/the-landscapes-of-... and https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/ https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-te... which it cites. The amount of work library work we are not doing is just staggering. Consider these claims: - There should be an accredited-author-ornly "kernel wikipedia" which the main one can choose to incorporate, almost like release vs staging branches. - Different subfield way wish to keep their own intentionally biased corpuses, like https://ncatlab.org/nlab/ https://ncatlab.org/nlab/ - After 6 months, virtually no one should have to read the original research article, because the librarian core will have incorporated it's results claims (however controversial) into the appropriate articles - Textbooks / "knowledge bootstrap plans" should be continuously updated from the encyclopedia, not unlike how bootstrapping is managed in a package repo - Librarians do the work, but also adjudicate disputes, as researchers will be naturally incentivized to contest how their work is incorporated as that is the primary way it is consumed.

craftinator 6y ago
> In other words, academia is sowing the seeds of its own demise This is first order thinking. Yes, if an increasingly large quantity of academic research is becoming bullshit, eventually the ratio of good to bad research will reach an inflection point where policy will be set that reduces research funding. This reduction in funding will have many effects, but the largest will be that as funding becomes a scarce resource, a higher curation of both researchers and topics will come into effect. There will be less research and papers overall, but the largest decrease in research will be those that are bullshit. Finally, as more and more research will be fruitful and useful, and fewer and fewer bullshit papers are published, an inflection point will be reached. There will be more funding allocated to these exciting new areas of study, and more research will happen. Of course, with funding no longer a scarce resource, less curation will occur, and a few more bullshit papers will be published... And the cycle will have advanced one wavelength. It's been happening for years, centuries, as a basic economic cycle, and looks something like this: _/T\_/T\_/T\

skizm 6y ago

Music is becoming more generic because musicians can rapidly reach a wide audience and iterate quickly, so they see what works and what doesn't and continue down the path of sound that produces the most money.

bumby 6y ago
Isn’t the premise that this analogy extends to academia by “seeing what works and what doesn’t” to produce the most publications to the point where the majority of papers are derivative? While the iteration of the individual may not be quicker, the large increase in the number of publications seems to be indicative of the field iterating quicker. E.g., the artist takes a big risk to produce a sound that diverges from “what works” just like a scientist takes a big risk to diverge from well-worn theory that has produced past publication fodder.

patrec 6y ago

> One answer to all these propositions is that the valuable stuff is still there I don't understand the popularity of this argument. Whilst someone might (theoretically) have written the Great American Novel in his or her basement unbeknownst to pretty much anyone, a lot of art is fairly resource intensive and thus you can say with extremely high confidence that's its not being produced and the fault lies not with people not looking hard enough. Same with research and journalism.

Siira 6y ago
In games at least, I feel that more good games are being produced.

Bakary 6y ago

>It's an illusion to expect that every researcher can pump out multiple really interesting non-boring papers every year. So we pretend. We write, we cite, we present, overiflate, overpromise etc. It must look like there is steady hard noble work and toil. It's like a ritual. The scientists are writing all these papers so tax payers can sleep well that their money is paid for hard work. The flip-side to this is that there is a glut of moderately motivated scientists and PhD candidates. As a result, the demand for conferences and citations is self-sustaining to meet the expectations of millions of people wanting to enter the academic world without a clear plan beyond joining the world itself. It's as though the English-major-to-professor cycle has also become a reality in the hard sciences.

semi-extrinsic 6y ago
In 1916, J.J. Thomson (as in Thomson scattering; discoverer of the electron) said it perfectly [1]: “If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it." [1] https://archive.org/details/b29932208 https://archive.org/details/b29932208 - see pages 198-200, ref HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21388715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21388715
- Bakary 6y ago
  I was thinking more along the lines of people who are not suited to do research in the first place. This will either be those who join the academic world out of inertia following their educational path or class/cultural pressure, or those who dislike the general labor market and want to enter the academic world due to its particularities. On a speculative note: I believe it's yet another argument in favor of UBI

agumonkey 6y ago

> So we pretend. We write, we cite, we present, overiflate, overpromise etc. > so tax payers can sleep well that their money is paid for hard work. It's a bit contradictory. I won't go into scandalized rant because it's useless, and there's no point shouting against the universe from a bedroom chair. Still it's a bit disheartening. I wish the scientific world could reinvigorate and pump some spark back into the field.

smitty1e 6y ago

Rick Beato rails against gridding and autotune in music over on YouTube. My wife, a health outcomes researcher, points out that the expectation is that every little publishable bit be kicked out the door for a pharma project. Historically, they would have dropped a single summary result at the end of the effort. Now, she's trying to "autotune" the neutral or even negative results. Nominally in the name of "transparency". If this is true, the need is a research Adele to come along and shame the riff-raff with sheer natural brilliance.

Sophistifunk 6y ago
We all know autotune, but what's "gridding"?
- 1986 6y ago
  I'm guessing this means quantization of a rhythm.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    Correct, it's aligning played musical notes to a bar (measure) on a computer screen. Then almost always, a clone tool is used to repeat that one bar identically dozens of times. So you lose most of the organic nature of music in a mechanical fashion.
    - Sophistifunk 6y ago
      I agree you're losing something that might be valuable, but it's not really part of the music, rather part of the performance. I think there's room for both though, just as we've had studio vs live recordings for the last 50 years or so.
    - smitty1e 6y ago
      Who needs humanity when you can have mathematical perfection? Beside humans?

alexhutcheson 6y ago

The problem isn’t the existence of the papers, it’s the years of effort that go into producing the papers. It’s the failure to harness the hard work and brainpower of so many brilliant people towards efforts that would meaningfully improve the lives of others.

riedel 6y ago

In the line of your comment about tax payers money: one of the biggest issues IMHO is the disfunctional "market" here because most of the work is paid easily by the tax payer . Particularly publishers are mostly not paying for reviews but are paid for journal and conferences largely on quantity (with few noble exceptions). The effect for a long time now was an ever increasing number of conferences (peer reviewed proceedings still make a large share in CS) and journals. What is actually worse IMHO, the review request get more and more and are largely boring. So you really have to attract the attention of the reviewer to not trigger the reflex of looking for reasons to reject (or worse the opposite, which may account to the same because there are always other reviewers, so its a matter of luck who gets assigned) I think better structures are needed that actually incentivise good reviews. This would lead to better papers, too. There are multiple options for this. Maybe it is simply time to see reviews as publications themselves and say goodbye to flawed blinded review process. Another thing would be to take the publishers out of the game. Even IEEE and ACM have become largely a playing field for power politics between the US, China and Europe . I think we could do better and be more inclusive here. Publishing reviews and rejected work would further make meta studies much more reliable removing also bias towards positive results (who actually wants to hear about easily replicatable negative results at a conference)

jhoechtl 6y ago

All what you say is true and I appreciate your deep thoughts. There is another dimension to that though. It's the long tail. The internet has tremendously facilitated mixing existing content. That's creative too but not in the original sense of creating something new. With detached knowledge before the internet age much less content has been produced and I would assume the novelty to mixed content ratio was very much in favour of new content instead of mixed content. Internet technology brought us search engines but their search algorithmus favour those paying most instead of providing a service to discriminated remixed content from new content.