I have a lot of respect for Stuart and Wei, so this discussion is very interesting to me. That said, my own experiences with academia were a bit more pleasant, and I know many “normal” folks who regularly get their work published in journals. It certainly takes a ton of “academic market research”, which is hard. But in the end I feel that it makes the work stronger and more appealing.
My hypothesis based on this discussion is that it could be a lot harder to publish stuff outside of current academic mainstream. IIRC Hinton had trouble accepting foundational DL papers in the beginning. MIRI type stuff (and possibly Wei’s crypto, though not sure about the details) could have been far enough from the mainstream to increase the hardness a lot.
I have a lot of respect for Stuart and Wei, so this discussion is very interesting to me. That said, my own experiences with academia were a bit more pleasant, and I know many “normal” folks who regularly get their work published in journals. It certainly takes a ton of “academic market research”, which is hard. But in the end I feel that it makes the work stronger and more appealing.
My hypothesis based on this discussion is that it could be a lot harder to publish stuff outside of current academic mainstream. IIRC Hinton had trouble accepting foundational DL papers in the beginning. MIRI type stuff (and possibly Wei’s crypto, though not sure about the details) could have been far enough from the mainstream to increase the hardness a lot.