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New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

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Re: New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

#201
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but journals and peer-review enforce this. That's a good thing (though I agree that letting journals do this is stupid – arxiv is out there, why can't they sign up unis to make people review the things there.)

Yeah, but it comes with all the gate keeping, prestige laundering and grant hamster wheel dynamics. Works for some, but not all.

if you do true double-blind reviews and don't do the thing, they do at the great CS conferences (e.g. chair is from FANG, 80% of papers are from FANG; chair passes everything from his FANG).

Open science is great, doing the mixture of boasting over mediocre results (hey, we can classify 10 samples more correctly from MNIST) and outright faking stuff (which is also there) is a problem even with journals. It doesn't get better wirh Arxiv and all the details packed away in never published supporting information (happened to me sometimes now...) - of course you can ask and then with the SI realize: this is bullshit... Good peer review should weed this out.

Re: New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

I've been noticing a variant of this in myself lately. Maybe I think about some problem and stew on it and think to myself that it's probably not possible, or at least I can't come up with ideas. Then I hear that somebody else has made progress and suddenly I have a bunch of ideas. Somehow switching from "how could this work" or "can this work" to "how did they do it" leads me down entirely different paths. I've been…

I often think about this Michael Abrash story: (chapter introduction) http://orangeti.de/OLD/graphics_programming_black_book/html/...

When I'm stuck, or getting close to stuck, I always try to assume what I want to do has already been done in some way. Long Google searches or discussions with domain experts, purposely vague, looking for similar ideas. Even a ridiculously not-so-related paper or mention in a paper will launch me in a idea-generation frenzy and I'll quickly build confidence.

Love M. Abrash's books. Shame he didn't keep writing them, they were inspirational for me.

Re: New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

#203

Half of my PhD thesis is considered "unpublishable" because, after doing the work, my supervisors felt it's actually "unsurprising" that it didn't work out. We took methods that had been exploited to improve on previous results for over a decade to their logical extreme, and found that this method no longer leads to improvements. After doing the work it seems obvious. A paper on the subject would almost be considered…

You could publish this in a blog (summarized of course) At least other scientists/researches would be warned.

Re: New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

#204
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the role of an academic journal in 2020? For me, trustworthiness. Not all journals are equal but some are held in such high esteem that I would grant a lot more credence to the findings of an article published in a journal than one self-published. I have neither the time or will to assess the merits of each individual who might publish something. If a name is sufficiently big within a field, it's usually in…

If a self-published article included full equipment and software to replicate their results in a multimedia fashion (basically included engineering), would that alter your snob-ness?

I don't have time to reproduce results, nor should I be expected to do so. I trust the journal to trust the author. It's a chain of trust.

I shouldn't have mentioned snobbiness; people've gotten caught up on the wrong part of the message.

Re: New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

#205

Half of my PhD thesis is considered "unpublishable" because, after doing the work, my supervisors felt it's actually "unsurprising" that it didn't work out. We took methods that had been exploited to improve on previous results for over a decade to their logical extreme, and found that this method no longer leads to improvements. After doing the work it seems obvious. A paper on the subject would almost be considered…

You could publish this in a blog (summarized of course) At least other scientists/researches would be warned.

That's all well and good, but PhD students have zero incentive to do this, and the blog would likely go completely ignored anyway. Not only does a blog post not help you graduate but in order for anyone to care about the results posted on your blog you have to market it!

Re: New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

#206
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but it comes with all the gate keeping, prestige laundering and grant hamster wheel dynamics. Works for some, but not all.

if you do true double-blind reviews and don't do the thing, they do at the great CS conferences (e.g. chair is from FANG, 80% of papers are from FANG; chair passes everything from his FANG). Open science is great, doing the mixture of boasting over mediocre results (hey, we can classify 10 samples more correctly from MNIST) and outright faking stuff (which is also there) is a problem even with journals. It doesn't ge…

I don't deny that "good" (people may have varying definitions of good, acceptable costs of obtaining sufficient good-ness, whether those costs are assumed to be burdened upon a individual or society unquestioningly, on whether such costs can be minimized and how such minimization might negatively affect those not directly integral to academic pursuits and more integral a current system of manifesting such at non minimized costs) peer review may weed these behaviors out more often than not (boasting over mediocre results, outright faking stuff, etc), but for me, I'm not too concerned because this stuff will happen no matter what to some degree (like you say `It doesn't get better wirh Arxiv`). We are only human.

I'm more interested in making the _costs_ of publishing/disseminating/accessing research cheaper so that individuals/orgs/etc can bypass expensive institutions if they so choose, or even gain the ability to participate because they have no other realistic options now due to current costs of participation in the ecosystem (I personally have to deal with thousands of journals/conferences/orgs every week that use software I write at significantly cheaper costs than say systems MIT has at its disposal, that without such, their works would not be available to society [i've see domains i route for go down when they stopped paying their bills for a month or longer, and we had to redirect publications/data back out from domain so that it could still be available]).

Any system that can drive down the costs for pursing academic interests for both the individual and society will eventually subvert those that came before, relegating them a hollow shell of the purpose they once served, if any aspect of a previous system manages to survive.

Re: New academic journal only publishes 'unsurprising' research rejected by others

#207
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't you ask them "But didn't you say this was uspublishable?" and what was their response?

I did not. Maybe I was being weak or maybe I didn’t want to try and make them look bad in front of their peers but I did not bring up any of the previous conversations during the defense

Thanks for the response. I'm always just curious how people react to things like that.
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