3 ms·

Is this just academics having fun, or is there some additional context/purpose here?

by dcow 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jiveturkey 4y ago
It's a commentary that scientific papers are inscrutable and a slave to form, over intelligible content. I find it a weak argument. The author's conference presentation of it, though, is brilliant, a masterpiece. I'd always thought it was an example of how peer reviewed journals are scammy. That this paper got accepted as peer reviewed science of some sort. But while of course peer reviewed science isn't objective (there are studies on this, peer reviewed naturally), this apparently isn't that. It dates to 2003. I'm so surprised to see new commentary on this (blogs and what not) in 2021 and even later. I mean actual commentary and attempt to derive some insight from it on independent blogs/journals. Not just repeated link farming.
- dcow 4y ago
  I understand your critique. I guess I was also wondering if there is an actual backstory here. Was this critique the author's intent? Or is the author just into verbal-slapstick academic humor?
jerf 4y ago
If you've read a lot of papers and/or attended conference presentations, you will find that you almost know what he is saying in the presentation version: https://youtu.be/yL_-1d9OSdk https://youtu.be/yL_-1d9OSdk. The same charts in every presentation; up and to the right, my thing higher than previous thing, here's some boxes and lines that really mean nothing in this context, some standardized statistical distribution with my dots scattered about... there's a fairly standard presentation that one could give with almost just a few made up payload words for your thing and it would apply to almost anything. I particularly remember in one of my machine learning classes where we had to give project presentations, the degree to which you could almost substitute the slide decks for each other and it would have been hard to notice. It doesn't mean that they have no content necessarily, merely that there is some ground to riff on here. I particularly like the presentation as one of the few bits of humor I know where you can make a two year old laugh and you can make a veteran professor laugh, and everyone in between, yet they are all laughing about different things at incredibly different levels of intellectual sophistication. The presentation is truly a humor masterpiece.

Is this just academics having fun, or is there some additional context/purpose here?

by dcow 4y ago

Is this just academics having fun, or is there some additional context/purpose here?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jiveturkey 4y ago

It's a commentary that scientific papers are inscrutable and a slave to form, over intelligible content. I find it a weak argument. The author's conference presentation of it, though, is brilliant, a masterpiece. I'd always thought it was an example of how peer reviewed journals are scammy. That this paper got accepted as peer reviewed science of some sort. But while of course peer reviewed science isn't objective (there are studies on this, peer reviewed naturally), this apparently isn't that. It dates to 2003. I'm so surprised to see new commentary on this (blogs and what not) in 2021 and even later. I mean actual commentary and attempt to derive some insight from it on independent blogs/journals. Not just repeated link farming.

dcow 4y ago
I understand your critique. I guess I was also wondering if there is an actual backstory here. Was this critique the author's intent? Or is the author just into verbal-slapstick academic humor?

jerf 4y ago

If you've read a lot of papers and/or attended conference presentations, you will find that you almost know what he is saying in the presentation version: https://youtu.be/yL_-1d9OSdk https://youtu.be/yL_-1d9OSdk. The same charts in every presentation; up and to the right, my thing higher than previous thing, here's some boxes and lines that really mean nothing in this context, some standardized statistical distribution with my dots scattered about... there's a fairly standard presentation that one could give with almost just a few made up payload words for your thing and it would apply to almost anything. I particularly remember in one of my machine learning classes where we had to give project presentations, the degree to which you could almost substitute the slide decks for each other and it would have been hard to notice. It doesn't mean that they have no content necessarily, merely that there is some ground to riff on here. I particularly like the presentation as one of the few bits of humor I know where you can make a two year old laugh and you can make a veteran professor laugh, and everyone in between, yet they are all laughing about different things at incredibly different levels of intellectual sophistication. The presentation is truly a humor masterpiece.