new galaxy brain hypothesis of how research advances: progress happens when people feel unhappy about a bad but popular paper and want to prove it wrong (or when they feel like they can do even better than someone else)
this explains:
why it’s often necessary to have bad incremental papers that don’t introduce any generalizable techniques (nobody will care about the followup until it’s refuting the bad paper)
why so much of academia exists to argue that other academics are wrong and bad
why academics sometimes act like things don’t exist unless there’s a paper about them, even though the thing is really obvious
new galaxy brain hypothesis of how research advances: progress happens when people feel unhappy about a bad but popular paper and want to prove it wrong (or when they feel like they can do even better than someone else)
this explains:
why it’s often necessary to have bad incremental papers that don’t introduce any generalizable techniques (nobody will care about the followup until it’s refuting the bad paper)
why so much of academia exists to argue that other academics are wrong and bad
why academics sometimes act like things don’t exist unless there’s a paper about them, even though the thing is really obvious