I, for one, have a long (to me) list of fascinating academic articles I’m probably not going to read
! This sentence deserves some consideration.
Part of my work now is reading through all the papers a previous graduate student thought were important enough to save. Some of them have been very valuable- but about half of them have been totally inappropriate for my research, and it’s bothersome to have to slog through enough of them to be sure that they are actually irrelevant. This is making me more pessimistic about a general repository of papers than I probably should be.
I think we’re more at the point where we could use popularizers- like lukeprog’s article on procrastination- than reference lists. But popularization is far more work, and so a reference database may be a better first step.
Thanks for the ultimately encouraging comment. Agreed that there is such a great quantity of possible papers to read that some care must be taken in what one recommends. To some extent, I think we’d have to wait-and-see how conscientious/well-targeted fellow LessWrongers are in their recommendations.
! This sentence deserves some consideration.
Part of my work now is reading through all the papers a previous graduate student thought were important enough to save. Some of them have been very valuable- but about half of them have been totally inappropriate for my research, and it’s bothersome to have to slog through enough of them to be sure that they are actually irrelevant. This is making me more pessimistic about a general repository of papers than I probably should be.
I think we’re more at the point where we could use popularizers- like lukeprog’s article on procrastination- than reference lists. But popularization is far more work, and so a reference database may be a better first step.
Thanks for the ultimately encouraging comment. Agreed that there is such a great quantity of possible papers to read that some care must be taken in what one recommends. To some extent, I think we’d have to wait-and-see how conscientious/well-targeted fellow LessWrongers are in their recommendations.