I hate the academic publishing industry. There is so much about it that is utterly broken. The publishing fees, the access fees, the fucking closed access, the massive delay to publication, the pressure to follow hypes and push out quantity, the pressure to stick to tiny clearly solvable problems rather than bigger and more important underlying issues, to knock out tons of tiny irrelevant papers rather than one proper book, the targeting of subfields rather than an interdisciplinary scope, the fact that peer review is often really not the objective measure of improvement that it should be, but just a way for the reviewer to force your to cite their unrelated stuff and avoid statements they dislike… and yet, the basic idea of peer review and minimum standards and easily citable work and pressure to make things mathematically precise has a hell of a lot going for it. I’ve shown articles from here to people working in machine learning, and they basically went “never heard of the author, I assume there is a reason for that, and that my journals have reasons for rejecting them” or “this is not tied back to code and math sufficiently for me to judge it at all; I can’t even say it is wrong, I am not even sure what it is supposed to mean”. They often get the impression that they need to do a lot of work to turn your paper into something meaningful and useful, and they see no reason to do so for you.
Pragmatically, it is impossible to be heard in scientific circles, where you want and need to be heard, if you do not publish. It disqualifies you from jobs, from funding, from conferences, from simply being read. They won’t be aware you exist, because you do not turn up in their journals, and if they learn that you exist, they likely still won’t engage, because they think that if you had a concrete point and were serious about it, you would have written it in a paper by a journal they trust and that has vetted it, and you haven’t, so you either can’t, lacking skills they consider basic, or you don’t respect them and the topics and approaches they work on, so they do not feel like respecting yours.
I am not saying only consider academic metrics in your actions; after all, academia is not doing well on the questions we care about here. I think pushing out text outside of academic journals, to fellow interested parties, but also to the general public, is fucking important. I think engaging with big questions is important.
But you need the grounding from getting feedback from scientists. They will often be able to tell you very quickly that a cool idea you had simply is not practical on a technical level. Or may point out that they are aware of this concern of yours, though their terminology is different and they are not debating it publicly. Also, if you want to make a difference, you need them to change what they are doing.
I know it is frustrating, and not all of these standards are justified and fair. But they are not arbitrary, they do reflect underlying important standards, and they simply have significant real world importance.
Strongly agree. I went in a similar direction here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Tw944k5t6tq82CFNm/portia-s-shortform?commentId=H9ffSnAasjwz8CRRc#H9ffSnAasjwz8CRRc
I hate the academic publishing industry. There is so much about it that is utterly broken. The publishing fees, the access fees, the fucking closed access, the massive delay to publication, the pressure to follow hypes and push out quantity, the pressure to stick to tiny clearly solvable problems rather than bigger and more important underlying issues, to knock out tons of tiny irrelevant papers rather than one proper book, the targeting of subfields rather than an interdisciplinary scope, the fact that peer review is often really not the objective measure of improvement that it should be, but just a way for the reviewer to force your to cite their unrelated stuff and avoid statements they dislike… and yet, the basic idea of peer review and minimum standards and easily citable work and pressure to make things mathematically precise has a hell of a lot going for it. I’ve shown articles from here to people working in machine learning, and they basically went “never heard of the author, I assume there is a reason for that, and that my journals have reasons for rejecting them” or “this is not tied back to code and math sufficiently for me to judge it at all; I can’t even say it is wrong, I am not even sure what it is supposed to mean”. They often get the impression that they need to do a lot of work to turn your paper into something meaningful and useful, and they see no reason to do so for you.
Pragmatically, it is impossible to be heard in scientific circles, where you want and need to be heard, if you do not publish. It disqualifies you from jobs, from funding, from conferences, from simply being read. They won’t be aware you exist, because you do not turn up in their journals, and if they learn that you exist, they likely still won’t engage, because they think that if you had a concrete point and were serious about it, you would have written it in a paper by a journal they trust and that has vetted it, and you haven’t, so you either can’t, lacking skills they consider basic, or you don’t respect them and the topics and approaches they work on, so they do not feel like respecting yours.
I am not saying only consider academic metrics in your actions; after all, academia is not doing well on the questions we care about here. I think pushing out text outside of academic journals, to fellow interested parties, but also to the general public, is fucking important. I think engaging with big questions is important.
But you need the grounding from getting feedback from scientists. They will often be able to tell you very quickly that a cool idea you had simply is not practical on a technical level. Or may point out that they are aware of this concern of yours, though their terminology is different and they are not debating it publicly. Also, if you want to make a difference, you need them to change what they are doing.
I know it is frustrating, and not all of these standards are justified and fair. But they are not arbitrary, they do reflect underlying important standards, and they simply have significant real world importance.