Ask HN: How and where can I publish my research on AI as a college dropout?
81–88 of 88 posts
Re: Ask HN: How and where can I publish my research on AI as a college dropout?
#82Since you mention that you are a "dropout", another interesting path to consider is to use your publications to eventually get a PhD. Since in many countries there is a financial incentive for universities to deliver people with a PhD title, it should be easy to find a professor and committee willing to help you get a PhD, once you have a number of publications. But you should choose your publication channels wisely…
Re: Ask HN: How and where can I publish my research on AI as a college dropout?
#83Vide: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/756xt2/p_e...
Academic journals are not a good starting point for pushing your findings, unless you are already very familiar with the field (publications, style of writing, etc). It does not suffice to have a new idea. And very easily you can get discouraged, for no good reason.
Re: Ask HN: How and where can I publish my research on AI as a college dropout?
#84Since you mention that you are a "dropout", another interesting path to consider is to use your publications to eventually get a PhD. Since in many countries there is a financial incentive for universities to deliver people with a PhD title, it should be easy to find a professor and committee willing to help you get a PhD, once you have a number of publications. But you should choose your publication channels wisely…
Do you think I could possible use this path for psychology? I was diagnosed with schizophrenia at 18 and bipolar at 31. I spent a few years doing research to create an alternate model of understanding and experimenting on myself have had amazing success without psychiatric medications. I've also helped other people through sharing my experience and coaching them. When I shared my story with Rick Doblin from maps.org…
A PhD by publication still needs a supervisor so I'd suggest contacting all the academics involved in psychedelic research and asking. For obvious reasons there aren't very many of them, so it shouldn't take long! I imagine you'll have to face a bunch of issues with legality and subjectivity that most researchers don't, but they will be the best people to ask.
Re: Ask HN: How and where can I publish my research on AI as a college dropout?
#85Re: Ask HN: How and where can I publish my research on AI as a college dropout?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Writing a scientific paper requires both solid science (both good results and good scientific practices) and solid writing skills to convey an important idea in a clear and precise way. The only person who would read a journal paper and say that the the author has good writing skills is another academic. No one outside of the research community would look at a typical journal paper and claim that the writing skills…
> The only person who would read a journal paper and say that the author has good writing skills is another academic. You lack an understanding of the purpose and target audience of journal papers. Papers are written by experts, for experts, to be the most concise presentation of new, field-advancing facts as possible. Prior knowledge of basic, and even intermediate-level knowledge has to be assumed, otherwise it pla…
I understand that fully. You are merely restating the original complaint, which was "gatekeeping higher education"
Essentially, it's: "We write only for insiders".
And it's not for any expert, but an expert in a subfield of a subfield. Someone who is merely an expert in the field will understand it broadly, but often not well enough to reproduce, and often not well enough to even gauge the legitimacy of the techniques.
This becomes quite clear when you see some of the inane stuff reviewers write, which often indicates they did not understand your paper - yet they were picked as experts who were asked to review.
>otherwise it places too much burden on the authors.
There are multiple reasons I do not believe this is the reason:
I can understand a lot of researchers not wanting to bother, but the reality goes deeper than that. They actively do not want others to put in more explanations. If an author wants to put in the time, why are they getting in the way? It's not unusual for a reviewer to ask to excise material that is explanatory.
And frankly, in many research teams in universities, we have grad students who are just starting out and are not to the point of being productive yet. It is very beneficial to have them write the more intermediate stuff. It's not at all time wasted for them.
I'm not saying we need to include standard text book material in all papers. Often an additional 1-5 pages (depends on the scope of the work) will suffice. Any researcher who complains about writing an extra page or two for some project that they worked months on cannot say they care about propagating knowledge with a straight face. The additional time it will take you to write those few pages is vastly offset by the savings everyone (including experts) who reads the paper. That equation that took me days to derive will likely take most experts days as well. Whereas a few pages of derivation would save them all the effort (and would help a reviewer find errors).
I've heard mathematicians be proud if they've read N pages a day (where N is in {1,2,3}) of a typical paper in their field. Yet when I've asked, they've all admitted that had the author put in more effort, that N would be much larger.
They're written for experts, as you say, but even experts have trouble reading them. However, since they mostly only deal with experts, their baseline is very low compared to what the rest of the world would consider "readable". If I wrote a report in my industry that would take some expert a day to read and understand 6 pages, I would be in trouble.
Again, this may vary from discipline to discipline. I definitely have read papers that don't suffer from the above. Ultimately it's a cultural issue. Some are more welcoming of it, others are not.
Re: Ask HN: How and where can I publish my research on AI as a college dropout?
#87I really like this question. I’ll make a few brief points: - Most computer science research can be categorized into one of three forms: preprints published on arxiv or similar websites, papers published in conference proceedings, and source code. In artificial intelligence research, it’s typical for research, if there’s demand, to be promoted from a preprint, to a paper published in a conference proceeding, to public…
Curiously: what does that username mean!?