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Interesting but I don't know how to make sense of it. How can it be that "close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web"?

Interesting but I don't know how to make sense of it. How can it be that "close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web"? - Is the information that makes science actually work mostly in images that the machines don't yet understand? - Was the information paywalled or in private databases and inaccessible to this researcher? - Are the papers mostly just advertisements for researchers to come gab with each other at conferences and doodle on cocktail napkins, and that's where all the "real science" happens? - (From the comments) is the information needed to make sense of papers communicated privately or orally from PI's to postdocs and grad students, or within industrial research labs? Something is missing from my mental picture here. Don't real scientists mostly learn how to think about their fields by reading textbooks and papers? (This is a genuine question.) If so, isn't it likely that our tools just aren't advanced enough to learn like humans do? If not, what do humans use to learn how to think about science that's missing from textbooks and papers?

hoseja 5y ago
As the article states, papers are mostly career advancement tools and scientists are incentivized to put the least amount of useful information into them they can get away with. Real scientists mostly learn from their instructors who possess all the jealously guarded institutional knowledge. Yes, it is very broken.
- jokteur 5y ago
  It is always difficult to try to understand and implement the theory explained in papers which seem fine on the surface, but when you look more closely, you find a bunch of mistakes, there are giant holes in the details, and you end up trying to redo the whole paper. There should be journals/websites/blogs dedicated to trying to reexplain / implement papers.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Doing a good review is hard. I've been reviewing a few C++ papers (things proposed to C++23) lately. Many of them are over my head and all I can find are a few spelling errors. The ones I've understood took me 3 readings before I found some giant holes in the details (which I pointed out to the authors, the next revision corrected them). In one case I actually started implementing the feature myself, and only then did I realize there was something ambiguous in the paper (after talking with the author we decided to document an implementors choices as it doesn't matter for the 99% use case, and the rest could go either way depending on hardware and data details so better to allow choice) The vast majority if papers I'm far too laze to go into that level of detail on. I just assume the authors is a smart person and so I trustingly let them go. It may well be if I understood the paper I'd be horrified, ask me in 2043 when we have 20 years of hindsight... I have to believe that peer review is the same - many reviewers are just reading and looking for something obvious but not really understanding details.
    - Mezzie 5y ago
      SO difficult, especially given that just because you're in the 'same' field and technically qualified to do a peer review doesn't mean you actually understand what you're reading. For example, I'm qualified to review papers on educational programs for children. I should never be asked to do that.
    - mellavora 5y ago
      Someone once said that they enjoyed one of my papers, and that even though they thought the writing was very clear they still had to read it 3 times to understand it. I told them that I had to write it 100 times and spend two years before I understood it. So if they could pick it up in 3 readings over 3 days, they were doing pretty good.
- civilized 5y ago
  It's hard for me to even comprehend how this could be true, but it does sound familiar enough from credible sources that maybe it's right regardless of what makes sense to me.
- anonymousDan 5y ago
  I mean honestly this is just total bullshit. There is plenty of value in academic papers. It's just that there is very little money to be made in developing tools such as those mentioned by the OP as there is very little money in academia.
  - viewfromafar 5y ago
    I understood the criticism directed at the value of papers as instruments of knowledge sharing. The argument is not that papers are completely useless in terms of knowledge sharing but that this pure purpose of dissemination is largely overshadowed by considerations of carreer, prestige, funding or any interest other than knowledge sharing. This is the world we live in. A scientist is a person that needs to make a living and is subject to various constraints. The reason that there is little money to be made is that society hasn't found a way to set up the scientific process in such a way that the constraints would value the increase in public domain knowledge higher than the incentives to hold some knowledge back. Part of this may stem from leaving specialized knowledge to academia while letting only companies reap the monetary rewards of putting the knowledge to use. Society benefits only indirectly (better drugs, machines, etc) but industry players will rather shield knowledge and adapt its representation to their own needs.
  - Fomite 5y ago
    Very little money, and more than that, very little unallocated money. I'm fortunate enough to have a decently well funded lab, but almost all of that funding is spoken for. Your Compelling New Product needs to be compelling enough for me to put it into grants anticipating it'll still be around in several years, often enough to get around most grants not being funded.
- mellavora 5y ago
  Hard disagree. With a caveat -- I do acknowledge that for an important number of professional academics your statement may be true, and I have heard a former post-doc at ETH Zurich describe their papers as career points (so also a grain of truth at elite institutes). But for most of the academics I have known and worked with, publications are taken quite seriously, and institutional knowledge is freely shared. There is an incentive to reduce the content in papers, but it is out of respect for the reader (a paper is not a textbook) and an honest attempt to limit the discussion to the core hypothesis of the work. You have 6 pages to 1) describe the content of 6*100 pages (the 100 other relevant papers on the topic), 2) present your addition to this body of knowledge, 3) discuss the insights your work brings, again referring to the content of 600 pages. and those 600 pages you are summarizing are as information-dense as your work.
  - Fomite 5y ago
    Also hard disagree. Everyone I know takes papers quite seriously, there's a major push to get more information into the literature (publish null effect estimates!), etc. This feels a lot like the graduate students on the Academia StackExchange who are convinced the moment they present their idea it will get stolen, while every faculty member is like "I have a list of my own ideas that I don't have time to work on as long as my arm."
amcoastal 5y ago
Try: Paperswithcode.com If its not there I won't use it! If you dont provide code with your paper it better have a really useful concept in it otherwise not citation. Which beckons to the problem in the article where most important information in basic research papers is: "Hey, this concept works" as opposed to a rigorous test of exactly what makes the concept work and how to use it in other situations.
Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
I can't speak for biomedicine, but speaking as an academic in CS the claim that "close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web" looks like a huge hyperbole to me. It's true that the so-called "folk knowledge", knowledge that exists in the community but no one bothers to publish in the form of papers, is a real problem, but at least in my field, it's by no means the majority of knowledge. As someone from a peripheral university where you can't just drive a few miles and talk to the best in your field, I have successfully started in new subfields of study (getting to the level of writing research papers in top-tier venues) by reading the literature. While this essay provides a very interesting point of view, I suspect it's heavily colored by the authors' failure to monetize the technology (which is related to the fact that people doing most of the grunt research work, who would benefit the most for this, are PhD students and postdocs who have no money to pay for it - in the text, the author hints at this). I wouldn't take it as an accurate description of academia.
- viewfromafar 5y ago
  Also CS, my interpretation of "what makes science work" is a little different and I would argue that - despite a lot of foundations and techniques being shared in research papers - this field more than any other is constraining the free circulation and application of knowledge. The equivalent to those biomedical industry players are the big tech who develop closed source and push the edge in some area. They will publish but that does not mean you can replicate any of it. Software is also fragmented, crippled by IP lawsuits, patent trolls and so on. This does inhibit ability of society to benefit from software since it depends on the private sector to sort things out. The PhDs go and build businesses to "make the science work" in that sense. The ideal of detached pursuit of knowledge is not a complete fiction (despite the hyperbole), but it does remain an ideal that can only be approximated.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
    As an academic, all my papers from the last 5 or so years have associated github repos where all the code is accessible under free licenses. Most of my peers in academia do the same. Documentation quality is admittedly quite hit-and-miss, because we aren't paid for that and we need to jump to the next paper, but all the code is there and everything can be replicated even if it takes some effort due to rushed code or suboptimal documentation. Industry is a different world, and indeed there are plenty of opaque industry papers that aren't replicable at all because much of the model is essentially a trade secret, and the paper is more an avenue for bragging than for developing new knowledge together with the rest of the community. To be honest, I would just outright disallow that kind of papers. But that's not a popular opinion, and taking into account that big tech companies sponsor our conferences and provide grants, I can't blame those who think otherwise.
mellavora 5y ago
<disclaimer: former real scientist> Science is a profession like others. When you are earning your Ph.D. you learn to think about the field by reading papers and discussing with peers and colleagues, yes. The intro of a well-structured research paper should follow this pattern: - This is a really important topic and here is why. - What is the current state of the art in this field? (this comes from reading 100-1000 publications on the topic and selecting the 5-10 most relevant to the next point). HOWEVER, the state of the art leaves this question unanswered. - Here are some reasons why the idea in this paper can help answer that question (cite another 3-10 papers). - Our hypothesis is that XXX can answer the important unanswered question (where X is derived from the prior section). So, what I am getting at, a scientific publication is part of a conversation. When I'm citing the 5-10 papers to summarize the state of the art, I'm assuming the reader has read 50% of the 100-1000 papers which I also read, and knows where the 5-10 which I cite fit into that broader context. So any paper, in isolation, only has a fraction of its meaning in the publication. The real information is the surrounding context. Pro tip: if I'm reading a paper and want to understand it better, I also read one or two of the papers it cites, and one or two papers which cite it. Also, it can take a few times through before I start to understand what the author is trying to say.
- stevenbedrick 5y ago
  Exactly! Scientific papers are not meant to stand on their own -- they are pieces of a much larger jigsaw puzzle. In order to make heads or tails out of a paper, one really needs to have a sense of where the paper fits into its larger picture. Building up necessary base of knowledge to develop that sense, both in terms of explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge, is part of what a PhD student is actually doing while they are working on their PhD, and is part of why the process takes as long as it does. Also, the mechanical process of effectively reading a paper is highly non-linear, and is a skill in and of itself. In a lot of ways, it is more akin to high-level pattern matching than it is to more "normal" reading. At least at my institution, it is something that we actually teach our students to do in formal ways (the obligatory "How to read a scientific paper" lecture during the first term or two) and then make them practice over and over again for years (journal clubs, etc.). The original author eventually figured this out, which is to their credit.
rm445 5y ago
The 'what makes science work' is stored in the scientists. They learn by reading the literature, but also by communicating, and by an active process of testing their own understanding and resolving gaps and inconsistencies. Even when a self-taught genius like Ramanujan comes along, they benefit from being brought into the community. The question of how one would determine the state of the art in a field has an answer, but at present it would be indistinguishable from training a scientist, rather than running a clever software tool that could synthesize from the literature.
- civilized 5y ago
  Well that's an interesting idea, isn't it (even if completely impractical today)? Self-training AI robot scientist who not only reads the literature but actually chats with other scientists and tries to do science to improve its understanding. AlphaZero but for science.
  - Vetch 5y ago
    AlphaZero cannot chat and interact outside moving pieces. For science, self-training would be too wasteful, intractable and impossible to boot, given there's no simulator. An AlphaZero for science would instead be like the recent deepmind paper where the pattern matching capabilities and internal features of a neural network were used to navigate some domain's decision space of conjecture formation and testing.
aimor 5y ago
In my experience useful scientific knowledge is accumulated in people actively working. Documents (books, papers, guides, programs, talks, blog posts, etc) are communication tools, but are limited by the medium and the ability of the authors. People can consume documents and create analogies to their specific work, but from there it's the process of working that produces: experts, systems, tools. Sometimes those products are again documented.
Fomite 5y ago
Current real life scientist in biomedicine: "Interesting but I don't know how to make sense of it. How can it be that "close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web"?" I'm not convinced this assertion is true. Difficult to parse by a non-expert? Sure. Often stored in pictures rather than text? Absolutely - indeed, a number of journals directly ask reviewers if the text and graphs are duplicative and consider this a negative. Harder to "disrupt" and monetize than many companies have expected it to be? Certainly. "Is the information that makes science actually work mostly in images that the machines don't yet understand?" In my mind, this is the most credible bit of the author's complaints. A lot of science in biomedicine is done in information dense graphics. The author picks especially hard to approach ones, but this is definitely a thing. "Was the information paywalled or in private databases and inaccessible to this researcher?" For an outsider without institutional access to journals, this can be a problem. More acutely, there is some lag between "What I'm currently working on" and "What's in the literature" simply because the literature is slow (and has gotten way slower during the pandemic). "Are the papers mostly just advertisements for researchers to come gab with each other at conferences and doodle on cocktail napkins, and that's where all the "real science" happens?" In biomedicine, papers are the product. Conferences tend to have a couple uses: 1) Previews of coming attractions - things I'm working on that are close enough to done to talk about, but not so close as to be making the rounds yet. These talks will often have less detail than a paper would, because we've all sat through a presentation that does into a ton of implementation detail and they're agonizing. Also I only have fifteen minutes. 2) Looking for postdocs - either from the hiring or seeking end. 3) Building professional networks - this is mostly so when someone comes to me with a problem, I know who might be working on say...causal inference with time-varying exposures...and can reach out to them. Usually to ask what papers I should read to get caught up. Or to bring them in on a paper/grand proposal. 4) Looking for problems other people are having that I can solve, and then reaching out. "(From the comments) is the information needed to make sense of papers communicated privately or orally from PI's to postdocs and grad students, or within industrial research labs?" Only insofar as my graduate students and postdocs have access to my time and expertise, and a job that is expressly meant to encourage understanding things. "I don't know, why don't you spend a couple weeks figuring out how they did that" is a perfectly good use of a graduate student's time, but something I find is rarely encouraged elsewhere. "Don't real scientists mostly learn how to think about their fields by reading textbooks and papers? (This is a genuine question.) If so, isn't it likely that our tools just aren't advanced enough to learn like humans do? If not, what do humans use to learn how to think about science that's missing from textbooks and papers?" One of the things that's likely missing, because those are all finished products, is the process. For example, I spent an hour chatting with a graduate student about three or four different ways they can approach their problem - what assumptions come with each one, tradeoffs, etc. But only the branch that actually got used is going to be published.

hoseja 5y ago

As the article states, papers are mostly career advancement tools and scientists are incentivized to put the least amount of useful information into them they can get away with. Real scientists mostly learn from their instructors who possess all the jealously guarded institutional knowledge. Yes, it is very broken.

jokteur 5y ago
It is always difficult to try to understand and implement the theory explained in papers which seem fine on the surface, but when you look more closely, you find a bunch of mistakes, there are giant holes in the details, and you end up trying to redo the whole paper. There should be journals/websites/blogs dedicated to trying to reexplain / implement papers.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Doing a good review is hard. I've been reviewing a few C++ papers (things proposed to C++23) lately. Many of them are over my head and all I can find are a few spelling errors. The ones I've understood took me 3 readings before I found some giant holes in the details (which I pointed out to the authors, the next revision corrected them). In one case I actually started implementing the feature myself, and only then did I realize there was something ambiguous in the paper (after talking with the author we decided to document an implementors choices as it doesn't matter for the 99% use case, and the rest could go either way depending on hardware and data details so better to allow choice) The vast majority if papers I'm far too laze to go into that level of detail on. I just assume the authors is a smart person and so I trustingly let them go. It may well be if I understood the paper I'd be horrified, ask me in 2043 when we have 20 years of hindsight... I have to believe that peer review is the same - many reviewers are just reading and looking for something obvious but not really understanding details.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    SO difficult, especially given that just because you're in the 'same' field and technically qualified to do a peer review doesn't mean you actually understand what you're reading. For example, I'm qualified to review papers on educational programs for children. I should never be asked to do that.
  - mellavora 5y ago
    Someone once said that they enjoyed one of my papers, and that even though they thought the writing was very clear they still had to read it 3 times to understand it. I told them that I had to write it 100 times and spend two years before I understood it. So if they could pick it up in 3 readings over 3 days, they were doing pretty good.
civilized 5y ago
It's hard for me to even comprehend how this could be true, but it does sound familiar enough from credible sources that maybe it's right regardless of what makes sense to me.
anonymousDan 5y ago
I mean honestly this is just total bullshit. There is plenty of value in academic papers. It's just that there is very little money to be made in developing tools such as those mentioned by the OP as there is very little money in academia.
- viewfromafar 5y ago
  I understood the criticism directed at the value of papers as instruments of knowledge sharing. The argument is not that papers are completely useless in terms of knowledge sharing but that this pure purpose of dissemination is largely overshadowed by considerations of carreer, prestige, funding or any interest other than knowledge sharing. This is the world we live in. A scientist is a person that needs to make a living and is subject to various constraints. The reason that there is little money to be made is that society hasn't found a way to set up the scientific process in such a way that the constraints would value the increase in public domain knowledge higher than the incentives to hold some knowledge back. Part of this may stem from leaving specialized knowledge to academia while letting only companies reap the monetary rewards of putting the knowledge to use. Society benefits only indirectly (better drugs, machines, etc) but industry players will rather shield knowledge and adapt its representation to their own needs.
- Fomite 5y ago
  Very little money, and more than that, very little unallocated money. I'm fortunate enough to have a decently well funded lab, but almost all of that funding is spoken for. Your Compelling New Product needs to be compelling enough for me to put it into grants anticipating it'll still be around in several years, often enough to get around most grants not being funded.
mellavora 5y ago
Hard disagree. With a caveat -- I do acknowledge that for an important number of professional academics your statement may be true, and I have heard a former post-doc at ETH Zurich describe their papers as career points (so also a grain of truth at elite institutes). But for most of the academics I have known and worked with, publications are taken quite seriously, and institutional knowledge is freely shared. There is an incentive to reduce the content in papers, but it is out of respect for the reader (a paper is not a textbook) and an honest attempt to limit the discussion to the core hypothesis of the work. You have 6 pages to 1) describe the content of 6*100 pages (the 100 other relevant papers on the topic), 2) present your addition to this body of knowledge, 3) discuss the insights your work brings, again referring to the content of 600 pages. and those 600 pages you are summarizing are as information-dense as your work.
- Fomite 5y ago
  Also hard disagree. Everyone I know takes papers quite seriously, there's a major push to get more information into the literature (publish null effect estimates!), etc. This feels a lot like the graduate students on the Academia StackExchange who are convinced the moment they present their idea it will get stolen, while every faculty member is like "I have a list of my own ideas that I don't have time to work on as long as my arm."

amcoastal 5y ago

Try: Paperswithcode.com If its not there I won't use it! If you dont provide code with your paper it better have a really useful concept in it otherwise not citation. Which beckons to the problem in the article where most important information in basic research papers is: "Hey, this concept works" as opposed to a rigorous test of exactly what makes the concept work and how to use it in other situations.

Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago

I can't speak for biomedicine, but speaking as an academic in CS the claim that "close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web" looks like a huge hyperbole to me. It's true that the so-called "folk knowledge", knowledge that exists in the community but no one bothers to publish in the form of papers, is a real problem, but at least in my field, it's by no means the majority of knowledge. As someone from a peripheral university where you can't just drive a few miles and talk to the best in your field, I have successfully started in new subfields of study (getting to the level of writing research papers in top-tier venues) by reading the literature. While this essay provides a very interesting point of view, I suspect it's heavily colored by the authors' failure to monetize the technology (which is related to the fact that people doing most of the grunt research work, who would benefit the most for this, are PhD students and postdocs who have no money to pay for it - in the text, the author hints at this). I wouldn't take it as an accurate description of academia.

viewfromafar 5y ago
Also CS, my interpretation of "what makes science work" is a little different and I would argue that - despite a lot of foundations and techniques being shared in research papers - this field more than any other is constraining the free circulation and application of knowledge. The equivalent to those biomedical industry players are the big tech who develop closed source and push the edge in some area. They will publish but that does not mean you can replicate any of it. Software is also fragmented, crippled by IP lawsuits, patent trolls and so on. This does inhibit ability of society to benefit from software since it depends on the private sector to sort things out. The PhDs go and build businesses to "make the science work" in that sense. The ideal of detached pursuit of knowledge is not a complete fiction (despite the hyperbole), but it does remain an ideal that can only be approximated.
- Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
  As an academic, all my papers from the last 5 or so years have associated github repos where all the code is accessible under free licenses. Most of my peers in academia do the same. Documentation quality is admittedly quite hit-and-miss, because we aren't paid for that and we need to jump to the next paper, but all the code is there and everything can be replicated even if it takes some effort due to rushed code or suboptimal documentation. Industry is a different world, and indeed there are plenty of opaque industry papers that aren't replicable at all because much of the model is essentially a trade secret, and the paper is more an avenue for bragging than for developing new knowledge together with the rest of the community. To be honest, I would just outright disallow that kind of papers. But that's not a popular opinion, and taking into account that big tech companies sponsor our conferences and provide grants, I can't blame those who think otherwise.

mellavora 5y ago

<disclaimer: former real scientist> Science is a profession like others. When you are earning your Ph.D. you learn to think about the field by reading papers and discussing with peers and colleagues, yes. The intro of a well-structured research paper should follow this pattern: - This is a really important topic and here is why. - What is the current state of the art in this field? (this comes from reading 100-1000 publications on the topic and selecting the 5-10 most relevant to the next point). HOWEVER, the state of the art leaves this question unanswered. - Here are some reasons why the idea in this paper can help answer that question (cite another 3-10 papers). - Our hypothesis is that XXX can answer the important unanswered question (where X is derived from the prior section). So, what I am getting at, a scientific publication is part of a conversation. When I'm citing the 5-10 papers to summarize the state of the art, I'm assuming the reader has read 50% of the 100-1000 papers which I also read, and knows where the 5-10 which I cite fit into that broader context. So any paper, in isolation, only has a fraction of its meaning in the publication. The real information is the surrounding context. Pro tip: if I'm reading a paper and want to understand it better, I also read one or two of the papers it cites, and one or two papers which cite it. Also, it can take a few times through before I start to understand what the author is trying to say.

stevenbedrick 5y ago
Exactly! Scientific papers are not meant to stand on their own -- they are pieces of a much larger jigsaw puzzle. In order to make heads or tails out of a paper, one really needs to have a sense of where the paper fits into its larger picture. Building up necessary base of knowledge to develop that sense, both in terms of explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge, is part of what a PhD student is actually doing while they are working on their PhD, and is part of why the process takes as long as it does. Also, the mechanical process of effectively reading a paper is highly non-linear, and is a skill in and of itself. In a lot of ways, it is more akin to high-level pattern matching than it is to more "normal" reading. At least at my institution, it is something that we actually teach our students to do in formal ways (the obligatory "How to read a scientific paper" lecture during the first term or two) and then make them practice over and over again for years (journal clubs, etc.). The original author eventually figured this out, which is to their credit.

rm445 5y ago

The 'what makes science work' is stored in the scientists. They learn by reading the literature, but also by communicating, and by an active process of testing their own understanding and resolving gaps and inconsistencies. Even when a self-taught genius like Ramanujan comes along, they benefit from being brought into the community. The question of how one would determine the state of the art in a field has an answer, but at present it would be indistinguishable from training a scientist, rather than running a clever software tool that could synthesize from the literature.

civilized 5y ago
Well that's an interesting idea, isn't it (even if completely impractical today)? Self-training AI robot scientist who not only reads the literature but actually chats with other scientists and tries to do science to improve its understanding. AlphaZero but for science.
- Vetch 5y ago
  AlphaZero cannot chat and interact outside moving pieces. For science, self-training would be too wasteful, intractable and impossible to boot, given there's no simulator. An AlphaZero for science would instead be like the recent deepmind paper where the pattern matching capabilities and internal features of a neural network were used to navigate some domain's decision space of conjecture formation and testing.

aimor 5y ago

In my experience useful scientific knowledge is accumulated in people actively working. Documents (books, papers, guides, programs, talks, blog posts, etc) are communication tools, but are limited by the medium and the ability of the authors. People can consume documents and create analogies to their specific work, but from there it's the process of working that produces: experts, systems, tools. Sometimes those products are again documented.

Fomite 5y ago

Current real life scientist in biomedicine: "Interesting but I don't know how to make sense of it. How can it be that "close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web"?" I'm not convinced this assertion is true. Difficult to parse by a non-expert? Sure. Often stored in pictures rather than text? Absolutely - indeed, a number of journals directly ask reviewers if the text and graphs are duplicative and consider this a negative. Harder to "disrupt" and monetize than many companies have expected it to be? Certainly. "Is the information that makes science actually work mostly in images that the machines don't yet understand?" In my mind, this is the most credible bit of the author's complaints. A lot of science in biomedicine is done in information dense graphics. The author picks especially hard to approach ones, but this is definitely a thing. "Was the information paywalled or in private databases and inaccessible to this researcher?" For an outsider without institutional access to journals, this can be a problem. More acutely, there is some lag between "What I'm currently working on" and "What's in the literature" simply because the literature is slow (and has gotten way slower during the pandemic). "Are the papers mostly just advertisements for researchers to come gab with each other at conferences and doodle on cocktail napkins, and that's where all the "real science" happens?" In biomedicine, papers are the product. Conferences tend to have a couple uses: 1) Previews of coming attractions - things I'm working on that are close enough to done to talk about, but not so close as to be making the rounds yet. These talks will often have less detail than a paper would, because we've all sat through a presentation that does into a ton of implementation detail and they're agonizing. Also I only have fifteen minutes. 2) Looking for postdocs - either from the hiring or seeking end. 3) Building professional networks - this is mostly so when someone comes to me with a problem, I know who might be working on say...causal inference with time-varying exposures...and can reach out to them. Usually to ask what papers I should read to get caught up. Or to bring them in on a paper/grand proposal. 4) Looking for problems other people are having that I can solve, and then reaching out. "(From the comments) is the information needed to make sense of papers communicated privately or orally from PI's to postdocs and grad students, or within industrial research labs?" Only insofar as my graduate students and postdocs have access to my time and expertise, and a job that is expressly meant to encourage understanding things. "I don't know, why don't you spend a couple weeks figuring out how they did that" is a perfectly good use of a graduate student's time, but something I find is rarely encouraged elsewhere. "Don't real scientists mostly learn how to think about their fields by reading textbooks and papers? (This is a genuine question.) If so, isn't it likely that our tools just aren't advanced enough to learn like humans do? If not, what do humans use to learn how to think about science that's missing from textbooks and papers?" One of the things that's likely missing, because those are all finished products, is the process. For example, I spent an hour chatting with a graduate student about three or four different ways they can approach their problem - what assumptions come with each one, tradeoffs, etc. But only the branch that actually got used is going to be published.