3 ms·

scientific papers are not a good medium of knowledge transfer. show me the code and or a demo.

• jampekka 5y ago
  As a researcher I would gladly do this. Unfortunately the funding game doesn't support this at all. I agree that papers are not good for knowledge transfer, but they are required if you want to keep a roof on your head. Academic community seems to be unable do little else than complain about this. Even though at least in countries I'm familiar with (Finland and UK), academic community mostly runs the funding system as well, although some outside politics do shape it too. I think what is needed is public pressure to academia and politicians to fix this mess. Unfortunately any criticism of science from the outside seems to be thrown into conspiracy theory category, but this is done mostly by non-academics.
  • fridif 5y ago
    Feeling bad for you
    • jampekka 5y ago
      It's not that bad personally, I can and do do demos and show code. Just have to do the chore of writing a paper, but otherwise in academia people are quite free to do what they want. I find it to be more a disservice to society that funds academia.
• jpeloquin 5y ago
  If COVID-19 did come from a (accidental) leak from gain of function research, presumably the pandemic itself counts as a demo. Which leads to the posted article's point---it may be better to not do any gain of function research on viruses that are already well-understood, regardless of how well the research is or isn't communicated.
• jltsiren 5y ago
  Papers are good for communicating the big picture: what is being done, why certain choices were made, and how things are supposed to work. Writing them is useful, because it forces you to think about the big picture. It's common that people who have spent months or years working on a project suddenly understand some aspects of it better when they try to communicate it to other people. Code is good for communicating details, but very few people actually read research code. Those who do usually just check a few details, because it's hard to justify spending weeks or months studying a single project. It doesn't help that the code was probably written before anyone understood what was the exact problem they were trying to solve and what would be a good way of solving it.