They are typically formally trained for 0 of those jobs.
As well, academia is much more focused on individual proof of effort (and ‘novelty’) than on results. In companies, people work in large teams and specialize to their narrow focus, because making the best product is the primary goal; in academia, people generally do most parts of their work themselves.
Agree that blogs are a superior method of scientific progress than publishing in journals. Disagree that we need a class of super-scientists thinking great thoughts, and journeymen implementing those thoughts; this is the sort of thing that can organically evolve from the science blogosphere. Consider the Polymath Project.
As well, academia is much more focused on individual proof of effort (and ‘novelty’) than on results. In companies, people work in large teams and specialize to their narrow focus, because making the best product is the primary goal; in academia, people generally do most parts of their work themselves.
This may have been true a hundred years ago, but it hardly seems true of academia right now. Maybe you’re thinking of some specific field with these characteristics, and broadly generalizing? I feel I’ve been to a diverse enough set of conferences to disagree with you significantly.
Agree that blogs are a superior method of scientific progress than publishing in journals.
Also strongly disagree.
EDIT:
Disagree that we need a class of super-scientists thinking great thoughts, and journeymen implementing those thoughts; this is the sort of thing that can organically evolve from the science blogosphere. Consider the Polymath Project.
The Polymath project is exactly an example of some super-mathematicians crowd-sourcing the implementation details of their great ideas....
This may have been true a hundred years ago, but it hardly seems true of academia right now. Maybe you’re thinking of some specific field with these characteristics, and broadly generalizing?
I should have been clearer that the claim was that industry cares more about results, less about novelty, and less about individual effort than how much academia cares about those three, not that academia strictly prefers novelty to results. I’m aware that the average number of authors per paper is increasing, and have been involved in projects with ~10 PhD physicists (plus many graduate and undergraduate students) all collaborating on experiments run on a single device, and know that when you look at astronomy or plasma physics or particle physics you find hundreds if not thousands of people working on huge experiments—but I’m under the impression that those are more government projects than they are academic projects.
The comparison I’m making is between, say, three graduate students who work together on a project and three cofounders who work together on a company. In the first group, each person is expected to produce and defend work that will stand alone with just their name on it; in the second group, each person succeeds or fails with the group. I’m not aware of any set of multiple graduate students all working together on the same project, and get the impression that many (if not most) software startups have multiple founders these days.
The Polymath project is exactly an example of some super-mathematicians crowd-sourcing the implementation details of their great ideas....
As I understood Stefan_Schubert’s suggestion, we would have external agents (like grant agencies) identifying the super-scientists to think great thoughts, and the journeymen to implement them. My claim was that the external agents, and the classification system, were not necessary, but I recognize that was not worded as obviously as it could be.
Science writing should have three primary characteristics: precise, clear, and brief. It’s not clear to me that blogs as a medium necessarily detract from any of those three, and the one they are most likely to detract from (brief) is the one that seems least important.
I can imagine the argument that submitting to a journal forces one to be more precise and clear; but I can also imagine the argument that without actual interaction with your audience, you cannot be sure what is precise or clear.
Peer review seems better implemented by linking and post aggregation than by anonymous judging, and criticisms made in the open seem more likely to be influential. (I’ve read a number of papers where a seemingly throwaway comment, if you think about it, turns out to significantly change the result of the paper- and I don’t know how many people glossed over the comment without thinking about it. Starting a discussion on that point in threaded comments seems like a good solution to that.)
Most of the benefits of the journal system accrue in the future- it’s easier to read old papers than it is to read old blog posts- but at tremendous cost to the present (papers generally describe work done ~3 years ago; as Krugman puts it here, linked in the OP:
Partly this was because of the long lags — by the time my most successful (though by no means best) academic paper was actually published, in 1991, there were around 150 derivative papers that I knew of, and the target zone literature was running into diminishing returns.
Compare to blogging about work currently under development, bouncing ideas off other people, getting unstuck by others, collaborating with people you never would have met otherwise.
Do you want to elaborate on what you don’t like about it?
We should distinguish communicating established science from creating new science and from checking new science by peers.
I am sure new internet tech like wikis, reddit or /. style comment systems, online version control, dropbox, etc. is helping people create better. Blogs seem great for communicating to laypeople, and marketing your stuff.
I think the dominant forces that establish peer review as a different process from what you envision are:
(a) academics function on a dual currency: $$$ and kudos, and guard kudos jealously
(b) there are personal rivalries within fields, but we still need to get work done
(c) quality peer review takes a long time, and people often view it as a chore
I am not aware of any problem w/ journals/peer review that internet tech conclusively solves, because all these problems are either social (can’t solve social problems w/ tech), or are due to the fact that proper peer review is hard and takes a long time. I reviewed a paper with a 50 page proof before.
Do you want to elaborate on what you don’t like about it?
The only math blog I know of worth reading is Tao’s, and he’s a massive outlier. Same for CS and Aaronson.
LaTeX/web integration is horribly broken, and will be essentially forever.
Most of the benefits of the journal system accrue in the future—it’s easier to read old papers than it is to read old blog posts- at tremendous cost to the present
Preprint archives fix this problem entirely.
The narrow field I’m currently working in is almost two years old; if Krugman were right there wouldn’t be any published papers on it. Of course, there are around thirty or so.
Compare to blogging about work currently under development, bouncing ideas off other people, getting unstuck by others, collaborating with people you never would have met otherwise.
They fix the journal publication lag problem, but not the draft writing problem, unless there are people uploading preprints with the hypotheses to experiments they haven’t run yet, or with current things they’re thinking about. (I know there are experiment registration systems in a handful of medical fields in order to cut down on the file drawer effect, and those seem like an okay example of this sort of thing, but I’m not aware of those in fields like physics or CS or so on.)
Sounds like a den of priority disputes, political drama, and other malfeasance to me.
Sure. But I’d rather optimize for generating knowledge quickly than for generating status in an orderly way, because I think it’ll be positive on net.
Would you rather we went back to making musicians audition in front of their judges?
I think you’ll have to unpack this one for me, because I’m not sure what specifically you’re trying to imply and I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
Thanks for the link! Very interesting. I read the post that started the thing off, which was very good. How are they doing? A major problem must be the “who gets the credit thing”, or? It seems to me that fear of theft of ideas is a major impediment to progress in science.
I agree that the academica should be more collective and cooperative. People do of course cooperate—e.g. they comment on other people’s stuff on seminars, etc. - but often it is done in a quite unsystematic way. Public forums with an adequate incentive structure seems to me to be a good way of getting around this problem.
Regarding differences in capability: in my own field, philosophy, the difference in capability between researchers is just vast. Perhaps other fields are different but I doubt it. If what I am sketching concerning what you term “super-scientists and journyemen” could “evolve organically” from blog/public fora systems I’d be happy. I don’t really have a take whether that is realistic at this point (perhaps I will tomorrow...).
Regarding smart people: my point was that it is probably best for science and society if they concentrate on what they do best—create great ideas—and do that on the highest possible pace. The best thing would be if they realized that themselves. Perhaps that’s what Yudkowsky and other bloggers have done. Those who haven’t, or have but won’t act on that (perhaps they’re not sufficiently altrustic) needs to be given incentives to do so, if we wish to maximize scientific progress.
I’m open for the possiblity that monetary rewards or titles aren’t the best incentives (but that, e.g. peer respect is) but all-in-all I think that we do need to make use of such incentives at present.
A major problem must be the “who gets the credit thing”, or?
I think the credit goes to the project, and the project lists its contributors. It seems like this is done mostly (or completely) for free, like open source software, which necessitates some other source of funding (like what happens with open source software). People in the project are fairly good at figuring out how various people helped (as is the case in open source), but the further you are from the details the blurrier it gets, and most people probably overestimate their contribution by a significant amount.
If what I am sketching concerning what you term “super-scientists and journyemen” could “evolve organically” from blog/public fora systems I’d be happy.
Scientists in academia have three primary jobs:
Management of graduate students and postdocs.
Teaching of undergraduate and graduate students.
Selling their work to the scientific community.
They are typically formally trained for 0 of those jobs.
As well, academia is much more focused on individual proof of effort (and ‘novelty’) than on results. In companies, people work in large teams and specialize to their narrow focus, because making the best product is the primary goal; in academia, people generally do most parts of their work themselves.
Agree that blogs are a superior method of scientific progress than publishing in journals. Disagree that we need a class of super-scientists thinking great thoughts, and journeymen implementing those thoughts; this is the sort of thing that can organically evolve from the science blogosphere. Consider the Polymath Project.
This may have been true a hundred years ago, but it hardly seems true of academia right now. Maybe you’re thinking of some specific field with these characteristics, and broadly generalizing? I feel I’ve been to a diverse enough set of conferences to disagree with you significantly.
Also strongly disagree.
EDIT:
The Polymath project is exactly an example of some super-mathematicians crowd-sourcing the implementation details of their great ideas....
I should have been clearer that the claim was that industry cares more about results, less about novelty, and less about individual effort than how much academia cares about those three, not that academia strictly prefers novelty to results. I’m aware that the average number of authors per paper is increasing, and have been involved in projects with ~10 PhD physicists (plus many graduate and undergraduate students) all collaborating on experiments run on a single device, and know that when you look at astronomy or plasma physics or particle physics you find hundreds if not thousands of people working on huge experiments—but I’m under the impression that those are more government projects than they are academic projects.
The comparison I’m making is between, say, three graduate students who work together on a project and three cofounders who work together on a company. In the first group, each person is expected to produce and defend work that will stand alone with just their name on it; in the second group, each person succeeds or fails with the group. I’m not aware of any set of multiple graduate students all working together on the same project, and get the impression that many (if not most) software startups have multiple founders these days.
As I understood Stefan_Schubert’s suggestion, we would have external agents (like grant agencies) identifying the super-scientists to think great thoughts, and the journeymen to implement them. My claim was that the external agents, and the classification system, were not necessary, but I recognize that was not worded as obviously as it could be.
No way, strongly disagree.
Science writing should have three primary characteristics: precise, clear, and brief. It’s not clear to me that blogs as a medium necessarily detract from any of those three, and the one they are most likely to detract from (brief) is the one that seems least important.
I can imagine the argument that submitting to a journal forces one to be more precise and clear; but I can also imagine the argument that without actual interaction with your audience, you cannot be sure what is precise or clear.
Peer review seems better implemented by linking and post aggregation than by anonymous judging, and criticisms made in the open seem more likely to be influential. (I’ve read a number of papers where a seemingly throwaway comment, if you think about it, turns out to significantly change the result of the paper- and I don’t know how many people glossed over the comment without thinking about it. Starting a discussion on that point in threaded comments seems like a good solution to that.)
Most of the benefits of the journal system accrue in the future- it’s easier to read old papers than it is to read old blog posts- but at tremendous cost to the present (papers generally describe work done ~3 years ago; as Krugman puts it here, linked in the OP:
Compare to blogging about work currently under development, bouncing ideas off other people, getting unstuck by others, collaborating with people you never would have met otherwise.
Do you want to elaborate on what you don’t like about it?
We should distinguish communicating established science from creating new science and from checking new science by peers.
I am sure new internet tech like wikis, reddit or /. style comment systems, online version control, dropbox, etc. is helping people create better. Blogs seem great for communicating to laypeople, and marketing your stuff.
I think the dominant forces that establish peer review as a different process from what you envision are:
(a) academics function on a dual currency: $$$ and kudos, and guard kudos jealously
(b) there are personal rivalries within fields, but we still need to get work done
(c) quality peer review takes a long time, and people often view it as a chore
I am not aware of any problem w/ journals/peer review that internet tech conclusively solves, because all these problems are either social (can’t solve social problems w/ tech), or are due to the fact that proper peer review is hard and takes a long time. I reviewed a paper with a 50 page proof before.
Did you think about this for five minutes?
The only math blog I know of worth reading is Tao’s, and he’s a massive outlier. Same for CS and Aaronson.
LaTeX/web integration is horribly broken, and will be essentially forever.
Preprint archives fix this problem entirely.
The narrow field I’m currently working in is almost two years old; if Krugman were right there wouldn’t be any published papers on it. Of course, there are around thirty or so.
Sounds like a den of priority disputes, political drama, and other malfeasance to me. Would you rather we went back to making musicians audition in front of their judges?
They fix the journal publication lag problem, but not the draft writing problem, unless there are people uploading preprints with the hypotheses to experiments they haven’t run yet, or with current things they’re thinking about. (I know there are experiment registration systems in a handful of medical fields in order to cut down on the file drawer effect, and those seem like an okay example of this sort of thing, but I’m not aware of those in fields like physics or CS or so on.)
Sure. But I’d rather optimize for generating knowledge quickly than for generating status in an orderly way, because I think it’ll be positive on net.
I think you’ll have to unpack this one for me, because I’m not sure what specifically you’re trying to imply and I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
Thanks for the link! Very interesting. I read the post that started the thing off, which was very good. How are they doing? A major problem must be the “who gets the credit thing”, or? It seems to me that fear of theft of ideas is a major impediment to progress in science.
I agree that the academica should be more collective and cooperative. People do of course cooperate—e.g. they comment on other people’s stuff on seminars, etc. - but often it is done in a quite unsystematic way. Public forums with an adequate incentive structure seems to me to be a good way of getting around this problem.
Regarding differences in capability: in my own field, philosophy, the difference in capability between researchers is just vast. Perhaps other fields are different but I doubt it. If what I am sketching concerning what you term “super-scientists and journyemen” could “evolve organically” from blog/public fora systems I’d be happy. I don’t really have a take whether that is realistic at this point (perhaps I will tomorrow...).
Regarding smart people: my point was that it is probably best for science and society if they concentrate on what they do best—create great ideas—and do that on the highest possible pace. The best thing would be if they realized that themselves. Perhaps that’s what Yudkowsky and other bloggers have done. Those who haven’t, or have but won’t act on that (perhaps they’re not sufficiently altrustic) needs to be given incentives to do so, if we wish to maximize scientific progress.
I’m open for the possiblity that monetary rewards or titles aren’t the best incentives (but that, e.g. peer respect is) but all-in-all I think that we do need to make use of such incentives at present.
I think the credit goes to the project, and the project lists its contributors. It seems like this is done mostly (or completely) for free, like open source software, which necessitates some other source of funding (like what happens with open source software). People in the project are fairly good at figuring out how various people helped (as is the case in open source), but the further you are from the details the blurrier it gets, and most people probably overestimate their contribution by a significant amount.
Well, one recent example of this here might be RobbBB’s Building Phenomenological Bridges, specifically this comment.
I see...but are they publishing lots of stuff, solving lots of problem, etc?
Thanks for the links. From the second:
“The aim is to write up open problems in Friendly AI using as little Eliezer-time as possible. It seems to be working so far.”
Well that seems to be exactly what I am talking about. People here don’t seem to like it, though, which surprises me a bit.