The framing of academia as primarily attempting to optimize for novelty sounds right to me. This is the biggest beef I have with academic mathematics, where novelty never feels to me, personally, like the interesting thing to strive for. I’d much rather distill; that’s the actual skill I’ve been practicing, and unfortunately it’s both badly needed and basically not rewarded at all.
I don’t see this as an unnoticed problem in academia. Tenure helps with this problem, and prominent mathematicians usually spend years distilling decades of progress into books. If anything, there’s an abundant wealth of way too many new math books that very few people read. Similarly, survey papers are appreciated these days: there are dedicated journals for expository material, and they usually get an enormous number of citations.
It is true that graduate students are not taught or incentivized to do distilling work, but it’s not obvious to me where the problem lies.
Well, for starters, I wish I’d been allowed to write a PhD thesis consisting of distillation instead of original research. As far as I know this was never an option and I’m annoyed about that.
Many masters degrees have thesis and non-thesis tracks. What if PhD programs had a track for searchers (equivalent to currently existing PhDs) and separate tracks for replicators and distillers? They could even have different (by still positive) stereotypical virtues (like creativity, rigor, and clarity, respectively).
The framing of academia as primarily attempting to optimize for novelty sounds right to me. This is the biggest beef I have with academic mathematics, where novelty never feels to me, personally, like the interesting thing to strive for. I’d much rather distill; that’s the actual skill I’ve been practicing, and unfortunately it’s both badly needed and basically not rewarded at all.
I don’t see this as an unnoticed problem in academia. Tenure helps with this problem, and prominent mathematicians usually spend years distilling decades of progress into books. If anything, there’s an abundant wealth of way too many new math books that very few people read. Similarly, survey papers are appreciated these days: there are dedicated journals for expository material, and they usually get an enormous number of citations.
It is true that graduate students are not taught or incentivized to do distilling work, but it’s not obvious to me where the problem lies.
Well, for starters, I wish I’d been allowed to write a PhD thesis consisting of distillation instead of original research. As far as I know this was never an option and I’m annoyed about that.
Many masters degrees have thesis and non-thesis tracks. What if PhD programs had a track for searchers (equivalent to currently existing PhDs) and separate tracks for replicators and distillers? They could even have different (by still positive) stereotypical virtues (like creativity, rigor, and clarity, respectively).