3 ms·

Most of the points require reading the whole paper first, isn't it?

jckt 13y ago
Skimming, sure. But really reading the paper, ie confirming its soundedness, requires going through most if not all the ideas and steps presented. Depending on the paper it can take weeks or even months. The ten tests in the OP take at most a few hours, I think.
mathattack 13y ago
Lightly reading a paper and working to understand it are two different things, especially for a potentially groundbreaking work.
jfarmer 13y ago
No, not really. One thing that makes an expert an expert is their ability to filter signal from noise. Sometimes they can prematurely bucket ideas into relevant/not-relevant, but usually not. Have you ever seen a novice programmer trying to find information on a StackOverflow page? The answer might be staring them in the face, but they still scroll past it once, twice, three times, etc. until I point it out. A novice has no sense of what's important and what's not so they tend to think everything is whereas an expert has a set of heuristics (like the ones in this blog) which make them much faster. They'll look for familiar ideas, themes, likely mistakes, etc. first before going into full-on, read-this-thing-line-by-line mode.
- Havoc 13y ago
  >One thing that makes an expert an expert is their ability to filter signal from noise. Certainly, but will you be able to spot the breakthrough insight if all your doing is filtering it against your notion of signal vs noise. Breakthroughs tend to come at a problem from a totally different angle & generally it takes a bit of time to understand why its brilliant rather than "noise".
  - jfarmer 13y ago
    Like I said, "Sometimes they can prematurely bucket ideas into relevant/not-relevant, but usually not." I wrote that hoping to preempt your exact response. Alas! ;) Even if I grant your premise (which I don't), just because a breakthrough is likely to be written in crazy-talk doesn't mean something written in crazy-talk is likely to be a breakthrough. At that point it becomes a question of opportunity cost, which is exactly where heuristics come in. In fact, what you said could be true and it could still be true that P(breakthrough | does not seem crazy) > P(breakthrough | seems crazy) So, if I were on the hunt for breakthroughs I'd still be better off ignoring the crazy-seeming things. Regarding your premise, can you name, say, ten mathematical breakthroughs since the Enlightenment that came about the way you described?
    - Havoc 13y ago
      Pretty sure we're talking past each other, but I'll give it a shot anyway. >Even if I grant your premise (which I don't), just because a breakthrough is likely to be written in crazy-talk Who said anything about "crazy talk"?. My point is simply that your signal/noise filter is by necessity driven by information derived from the status quo. The status quo part being a really big problem if you're hunting for something new.

jckt 13y ago

Skimming, sure. But really reading the paper, ie confirming its soundedness, requires going through most if not all the ideas and steps presented. Depending on the paper it can take weeks or even months. The ten tests in the OP take at most a few hours, I think.

mathattack 13y ago

Lightly reading a paper and working to understand it are two different things, especially for a potentially groundbreaking work.

jfarmer 13y ago

No, not really. One thing that makes an expert an expert is their ability to filter signal from noise. Sometimes they can prematurely bucket ideas into relevant/not-relevant, but usually not. Have you ever seen a novice programmer trying to find information on a StackOverflow page? The answer might be staring them in the face, but they still scroll past it once, twice, three times, etc. until I point it out. A novice has no sense of what's important and what's not so they tend to think everything is whereas an expert has a set of heuristics (like the ones in this blog) which make them much faster. They'll look for familiar ideas, themes, likely mistakes, etc. first before going into full-on, read-this-thing-line-by-line mode.

Havoc 13y ago
>One thing that makes an expert an expert is their ability to filter signal from noise. Certainly, but will you be able to spot the breakthrough insight if all your doing is filtering it against your notion of signal vs noise. Breakthroughs tend to come at a problem from a totally different angle & generally it takes a bit of time to understand why its brilliant rather than "noise".
- jfarmer 13y ago
  Like I said, "Sometimes they can prematurely bucket ideas into relevant/not-relevant, but usually not." I wrote that hoping to preempt your exact response. Alas! ;) Even if I grant your premise (which I don't), just because a breakthrough is likely to be written in crazy-talk doesn't mean something written in crazy-talk is likely to be a breakthrough. At that point it becomes a question of opportunity cost, which is exactly where heuristics come in. In fact, what you said could be true and it could still be true that P(breakthrough | does not seem crazy) > P(breakthrough | seems crazy) So, if I were on the hunt for breakthroughs I'd still be better off ignoring the crazy-seeming things. Regarding your premise, can you name, say, ten mathematical breakthroughs since the Enlightenment that came about the way you described?
  - Havoc 13y ago
    Pretty sure we're talking past each other, but I'll give it a shot anyway. >Even if I grant your premise (which I don't), just because a breakthrough is likely to be written in crazy-talk Who said anything about "crazy talk"?. My point is simply that your signal/noise filter is by necessity driven by information derived from the status quo. The status quo part being a really big problem if you're hunting for something new.