This comment seems to implicitly assume markers of status are the only way to judge quality of work. You can just, y’know, look at it? Even without doing a deep dive, the sort of papers or blog posts which present good research have a different style and rhythm to them than the crap. And it’s totally reasonable to declare that one’s audience is the people who know how to pick up on that sort of style.
The bigger reason we can’t entirely escape “status”-ranking systems is that there’s far too much work to look at it all, so people have to choose which information sources to pay attention to.
It’s a question of resolution. Just looking at things for vibes is a pretty good way of filtering wheat from chaff, but you don’t give scarce resources like jobs or grants to every grain of wheat that comes along. When I sit on a hiring committee, the discussions around the table are usually some mix of status markers and people having done the hard work of reading papers more or less carefully (this consuming time in greater-than-linear proportion to distance from your own fields of expertise). Usually (unless nepotism is involved) someone who has done that homework can wield more power than they otherwise would at that table, because people respect strong arguments and understand that status markers aren’t everything.
Still, at the end of day, an Annals paper is an Annals paper. It’s also true that to pass some of the early filters you either need (a) someone who speaks up strongly for you or (b) pass the status marker tests.
I am sometimes in a position these days of trying to bridge the academic status system and the Berkeley-centric AI safety status system, e.g. by arguing to a high status mathematician that someone with illegible (to them) status is actually approximately equivalent in “worthiness of being paid attention to” as someone they know with legible status. Small increases in legibility can have outsize effects in how easy my life is in those conversations.
Otherwise it’s entirely down to me putting social capital on the table (“you think I’m serious, I think this person is very serious”). I’m happy to do this and continue doing this, but it’s not easily scalable, because it depends on my personal relationships.
Generally, it is about heuristics we can use to find quality in the oceans of crap. If we assume that people are sane to some degree, status is an imperfect proxy for quality. If we assume that people don’t use AIs to polish their writing styles, the writing style is an imperfect proxy for quality.
I have no experience reading research. I suspect that there are also crackpots who can write using the right kind of style. For example, they may be experts at their own line of research, and also speak overconfidently about different things they do not understand.
So if you want to be taken seriously, you probably need to know what kind of crackpot do you remind others of, and then find a way how to distinguish yourself from this kind of crackpot specifically.
At some moment it would probably easier to simply do your homework, once, and then have something you can point at. For example, you don’t need to publish everything in the established journals, but it would probably help to publish there once—just to show that if you want, you can; that this is about your priorities, not about lack of quality.
There are probably other ways, for example if you don’t wont to get involved too much with the system, find someone who already is, and maybe offer them co-authorship in return for jumping through all the hoops.
I guess my model is that the costs of complying with the standard system are high but constant. So the more time you spend complaining about the system not taking your seriously, the greater the chance that complying with the system would have actually been cheaper than the accumulating opportunity costs.
there is always too much information to pay attention to. without an inexpensive way to filter, the field would grind to a complete halt. style is probably a worse thing to select on than even academia cred, just because it’s easier to fake.
This comment seems to implicitly assume markers of status are the only way to judge quality of work. You can just, y’know, look at it? Even without doing a deep dive, the sort of papers or blog posts which present good research have a different style and rhythm to them than the crap. And it’s totally reasonable to declare that one’s audience is the people who know how to pick up on that sort of style.
The bigger reason we can’t entirely escape “status”-ranking systems is that there’s far too much work to look at it all, so people have to choose which information sources to pay attention to.
It’s a question of resolution. Just looking at things for vibes is a pretty good way of filtering wheat from chaff, but you don’t give scarce resources like jobs or grants to every grain of wheat that comes along. When I sit on a hiring committee, the discussions around the table are usually some mix of status markers and people having done the hard work of reading papers more or less carefully (this consuming time in greater-than-linear proportion to distance from your own fields of expertise). Usually (unless nepotism is involved) someone who has done that homework can wield more power than they otherwise would at that table, because people respect strong arguments and understand that status markers aren’t everything.
Still, at the end of day, an Annals paper is an Annals paper. It’s also true that to pass some of the early filters you either need (a) someone who speaks up strongly for you or (b) pass the status marker tests.
I am sometimes in a position these days of trying to bridge the academic status system and the Berkeley-centric AI safety status system, e.g. by arguing to a high status mathematician that someone with illegible (to them) status is actually approximately equivalent in “worthiness of being paid attention to” as someone they know with legible status. Small increases in legibility can have outsize effects in how easy my life is in those conversations.
Otherwise it’s entirely down to me putting social capital on the table (“you think I’m serious, I think this person is very serious”). I’m happy to do this and continue doing this, but it’s not easily scalable, because it depends on my personal relationships.
Generally, it is about heuristics we can use to find quality in the oceans of crap. If we assume that people are sane to some degree, status is an imperfect proxy for quality. If we assume that people don’t use AIs to polish their writing styles, the writing style is an imperfect proxy for quality.
I have no experience reading research. I suspect that there are also crackpots who can write using the right kind of style. For example, they may be experts at their own line of research, and also speak overconfidently about different things they do not understand.
So if you want to be taken seriously, you probably need to know what kind of crackpot do you remind others of, and then find a way how to distinguish yourself from this kind of crackpot specifically.
At some moment it would probably easier to simply do your homework, once, and then have something you can point at. For example, you don’t need to publish everything in the established journals, but it would probably help to publish there once—just to show that if you want, you can; that this is about your priorities, not about lack of quality.
There are probably other ways, for example if you don’t wont to get involved too much with the system, find someone who already is, and maybe offer them co-authorship in return for jumping through all the hoops.
I guess my model is that the costs of complying with the standard system are high but constant. So the more time you spend complaining about the system not taking your seriously, the greater the chance that complying with the system would have actually been cheaper than the accumulating opportunity costs.
there is always too much information to pay attention to. without an inexpensive way to filter, the field would grind to a complete halt. style is probably a worse thing to select on than even academia cred, just because it’s easier to fake.