4 ms·

This brings an interesting anecdote from when I suddenly had this question of how my seniors working in the 80s and 90s in a small Indian lab managed to get the

This brings an interesting anecdote from when I suddenly had this question of how my seniors working in the 80s and 90s in a small Indian lab managed to get the literature they want (when their small lab was still one of the most advanced institutions in the state). My senior said they’d pretty much have to write up a literature request letter, attach a cheque and mail it to the main library in New Delhi, and they would typically hear back from them after a month or two either with a copy of the article or saying they can’t get it (roughly half the time). They still did good research, arguably even better than what crap gets spewed out now! Just like Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way (actually it made it worse), free access to arbitrary literature was not exactly the limiting step in anyone’s research career in my experience. It’s definitely annoying but once you’re up to speed in a field you are typically happy with just the abstract and if it’s an important enough paper you find a way to get it one way or another. Especially with a good supportive library and ILL system it’s typically a snap.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
>Just like Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way (actually it made it worse), free access to arbitrary literature was not exactly the limiting step in anyone’s research career in my experience. Changing everyone's ability to know things is a much taller order than changing some people's ability to know things. I would not be where I am without Wikipedia or the internet. Growing up, I had no educated adults around me. If I grew up without the internet, I do not see how I could have learned many of the things I did, especially due to time and money constraints. I would certainly dispute the claim that knowing things in a meaningful way (whatever that means) with the internet is worse than without the internet.
musicale 6y ago
> Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way (actually it made it worse) Are you making a claim of knowledge (e.g. epistemology) or of learning (e.g. pedagogy?) If you're talking about learning, then I would say things like Khan academy, MOOCs, online course materials, online textbooks and digital libraries seem like powerful counterexamples. Personally I've learned a lot of interesting and practical things from youtube, github, and HN, not to mention non-paywalled research papers. The internet's enabling of billions of people to get access to thousands if not millions of newspapers, books, television programs, movies, songs, and other sources of information and culture from all over the world, and to talk with each other at minimal cost (compared to traditional telephony), seems like an astonishing achievement If you're making an epistemological claim, I would suggest that the internet era allows you to compare more sources more easily, for example more newspapers than you would have been able to read easily in the pre-internet era. Although it's possible that news outlets have become more opinion-based in the US recently, opinion-based (or opinion-biased if you prefer) print news is basically as old as the printing press, and was certainly well-represented in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
esturk 6y ago
What a strange qualification of "everyone". Surely, someone or some group of people must have benefited greatly. Even in the aggregate the average person must have benefited as well.
jancsika 6y ago
> Just like Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way What are you talking about? Wikipedia substantially changed everyone's ability to know things. In fact, Wikipedia was so good at increasing everyone's ability to know things, I wonder if we're now having to build back a way to synthesize and ponder our desired context for all those things. That problem may be exaggerated due to unregulated app casinos sucking out any surplus time to reflect and wonder, but I think the problem is definitely there either way.
- inetsee 6y ago
  My biggest criticism of Wikipedia is that it refuses to publish anything that isn't supported by a dead tree publication, like the ones Elsevier publishes for a fortune. You could be a prominent, highly respected full professor, but unless your research paper has made it into one of these publications, and actually gone out the door, your research won't be included in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is great for the kind of stuff that used to be published in print encyclopedias, but if you want to find out about cutting edge research, arXiv.org is a better source.
  - ImaCake 6y ago
    Maybe the wider adoption of arXiv in other fields (taking off in biology right now) will lead to wiki's acceptance of these sources?
  - ta988 6y ago
    There is a lot of crap on arXiv as well... So I respect the position of Wikipedia editors to have someone vet the information before them. To be fair many editors of Wikipedia have a better understanding of their fields than reviewers (at least in my domain)
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    That's like the purpose, man. Wikipedia wouldn't be what it was if it didn't do that. In CS, we have these things called DSLs (domain specific languages) and usually one strives to not make them Turing complete because the restrictions give you advantages in reasoning. Wikipedia's strength is that it represents the viewpoints shown by (relatively) famous sources.
Demigod33 6y ago
> free access to arbitrary literature was not exactly the limiting step in anyone’s research career in my experience. What are limiting steps?
- ta988 6y ago
  There are a lot... I agree with that person point on that not being a limiting factor. SciHub and all the networks of exchange of publications before that (I've seen exchange of proxy accounts and forums to do that since 2003, unsure about what existed before) have helped with that a lot. Just to list a few points that come to mind: Environment: - A university that doesn't provide the ressources necessary (equipment, computing ressources with adequate expertise) - Colleagues that are not supportive or worse putting you down for internal competition (just fame, attracting the most promising grad student of the year, or funding lines for grad students and postdocs) - Intellectualy poor environment, colleagues that have no understanding and no willingness to understand your field of research Money: -Difficulty to compete when it takes you 80% of your budget to do 1/10 of a big lab (behind the name of a single person but really a group of 10s employees) can do with their large fundings. This is especially true of US vs many other countries. Sociological: - Gender (we know that women are not "allowed" to grow as much as men in some domains) - University delivering a PhD, I still see people in their sixties being presented as a graduate from (pick an Ivy) and people ignored in discussions at a table of Ivy league graduates (despite that person being an expert)
ta988 6y ago
Increase the gain, you will increase the signal, and some of the noise as well. I would not be as extreme, wiki* (data, pedia,...) and Internet made a lot of research possible. Internet enhanced collaborations across the globe (no need to be a big name so people talk to you) and openly accessible data I believe facilitates understanding (ok not deep understanding, but enough for creating common bases for communication).

lotsofpulp 6y ago

>Just like Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way (actually it made it worse), free access to arbitrary literature was not exactly the limiting step in anyone’s research career in my experience. Changing everyone's ability to know things is a much taller order than changing some people's ability to know things. I would not be where I am without Wikipedia or the internet. Growing up, I had no educated adults around me. If I grew up without the internet, I do not see how I could have learned many of the things I did, especially due to time and money constraints. I would certainly dispute the claim that knowing things in a meaningful way (whatever that means) with the internet is worse than without the internet.

musicale 6y ago

> Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way (actually it made it worse) Are you making a claim of knowledge (e.g. epistemology) or of learning (e.g. pedagogy?) If you're talking about learning, then I would say things like Khan academy, MOOCs, online course materials, online textbooks and digital libraries seem like powerful counterexamples. Personally I've learned a lot of interesting and practical things from youtube, github, and HN, not to mention non-paywalled research papers. The internet's enabling of billions of people to get access to thousands if not millions of newspapers, books, television programs, movies, songs, and other sources of information and culture from all over the world, and to talk with each other at minimal cost (compared to traditional telephony), seems like an astonishing achievement If you're making an epistemological claim, I would suggest that the internet era allows you to compare more sources more easily, for example more newspapers than you would have been able to read easily in the pre-internet era. Although it's possible that news outlets have become more opinion-based in the US recently, opinion-based (or opinion-biased if you prefer) print news is basically as old as the printing press, and was certainly well-represented in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

esturk 6y ago

What a strange qualification of "everyone". Surely, someone or some group of people must have benefited greatly. Even in the aggregate the average person must have benefited as well.

jancsika 6y ago

> Just like Wikipedia and the internet didn’t change everyone’s ability to know things in any meaningful way What are you talking about? Wikipedia substantially changed everyone's ability to know things. In fact, Wikipedia was so good at increasing everyone's ability to know things, I wonder if we're now having to build back a way to synthesize and ponder our desired context for all those things. That problem may be exaggerated due to unregulated app casinos sucking out any surplus time to reflect and wonder, but I think the problem is definitely there either way.

inetsee 6y ago
My biggest criticism of Wikipedia is that it refuses to publish anything that isn't supported by a dead tree publication, like the ones Elsevier publishes for a fortune. You could be a prominent, highly respected full professor, but unless your research paper has made it into one of these publications, and actually gone out the door, your research won't be included in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is great for the kind of stuff that used to be published in print encyclopedias, but if you want to find out about cutting edge research, arXiv.org is a better source.
- ImaCake 6y ago
  Maybe the wider adoption of arXiv in other fields (taking off in biology right now) will lead to wiki's acceptance of these sources?
- ta988 6y ago
  There is a lot of crap on arXiv as well... So I respect the position of Wikipedia editors to have someone vet the information before them. To be fair many editors of Wikipedia have a better understanding of their fields than reviewers (at least in my domain)
- renewiltord 6y ago
  That's like the purpose, man. Wikipedia wouldn't be what it was if it didn't do that. In CS, we have these things called DSLs (domain specific languages) and usually one strives to not make them Turing complete because the restrictions give you advantages in reasoning. Wikipedia's strength is that it represents the viewpoints shown by (relatively) famous sources.

Demigod33 6y ago

> free access to arbitrary literature was not exactly the limiting step in anyone’s research career in my experience. What are limiting steps?

ta988 6y ago
There are a lot... I agree with that person point on that not being a limiting factor. SciHub and all the networks of exchange of publications before that (I've seen exchange of proxy accounts and forums to do that since 2003, unsure about what existed before) have helped with that a lot. Just to list a few points that come to mind: Environment: - A university that doesn't provide the ressources necessary (equipment, computing ressources with adequate expertise) - Colleagues that are not supportive or worse putting you down for internal competition (just fame, attracting the most promising grad student of the year, or funding lines for grad students and postdocs) - Intellectualy poor environment, colleagues that have no understanding and no willingness to understand your field of research Money: -Difficulty to compete when it takes you 80% of your budget to do 1/10 of a big lab (behind the name of a single person but really a group of 10s employees) can do with their large fundings. This is especially true of US vs many other countries. Sociological: - Gender (we know that women are not "allowed" to grow as much as men in some domains) - University delivering a PhD, I still see people in their sixties being presented as a graduate from (pick an Ivy) and people ignored in discussions at a table of Ivy league graduates (despite that person being an expert)

ta988 6y ago

Increase the gain, you will increase the signal, and some of the noise as well. I would not be as extreme, wiki* (data, pedia,...) and Internet made a lot of research possible. Internet enhanced collaborations across the globe (no need to be a big name so people talk to you) and openly accessible data I believe facilitates understanding (ok not deep understanding, but enough for creating common bases for communication).