I read some machine learning research papers among others. The explosion of papers from chee-na, at all quality levels, at orders of magnitude more than a year before.. was/is hard to deal with for me
Care to elaborate why?
Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
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Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fascinating. If I understand correctly, you are saying that you buy paid advertising for academic papers that you have authored, is that right? Can you please elaborate? e.g. what platforms do you use, which keywords / audiences are you targeting?
I buy ads to the arxiv link to a paper I wrote. I tried Twitter (the paper is about Twitter) but seems like the minimum spend is $50 per day. Also got the feeling that they weren't targeted enough based on who followed me. I've had a small promo running on Google search ads for a few years (disclaimer I now work at Google). The keywords are roughly what's in the title. I don't know if it's leading to citations. I don…
Why is this so important to you that you spend money on it?
Do you feel it helps your carrier if you have a highly cited paper?
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cars, planes, and rockets all have optimal shapes for their environment, of course they're not going to change much once they get to that point. Cars are still vastly different today than in the 80s in (at least) performance, efficiency, and safety. Planes are also getting quite a bit better, although adoption of these planes is slow as most airlines want to get as much as they can out of the old fleet.[0] SpaceX has…
I was watching the Boardwalk Empire not so long ago. When the main character was a boy, people were wearing fancy clothes, sending letters, and riding horses. As a grown man, he talked on the phone and flew a plane. Whereas my parents were flying planes when they were young. I fly almost the same planes(yes, more safe and efficient) and it takes the same time to get from A to B.
While your parents have been flying in the same planes, they payed twice as much (inflation adjusted) and a lot less often.
I too wish I was vacationing in Luna City tovarich, but things have gotten better by quite a bit.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-air...
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#164Understandability is waning. Which in many places amounts to the same thing. Newtonian physics could be understood by an average child. General Relativity could be understood by intellectuals somewhat. The cutting edge of physics now is barely understood by the people who are publishing the papers. For additional progress to continue in a lot of fields we're giving up a lot of understanding. If we give a mouse a maze…
This. I don't even bother to read physics article in quanta anymore. I won't compare some theories to astrology but if someone does, I won't run to defend either. I struggle with thwir math articles, but I know that if I find time on weekend, I'll get the theorem (may not be the proof). Knuth books feels the same. Hard reading but rewarding. Biology is always pleasing to read. CS is my bread and butter so I usually b…
As a general rule, if you are hearing about some scientific endeavor in the popular press, it is because that science isn't very important, and they need publicity to get funding.
What a lot of people don't understand is that there is actually a lot of real science going on in physics. There are two branches of physics, what you call condensed matter / atom optics. And then there is Cosmology / High energy physics.
condensed matter / atom optics is where the real science is happening, and those who work in those areas consider the second group to be an absolute joke. The thing is, there is also a feeling of everyone working together to try to get as much money from the government as possible, which is why no one blows the whistle on what a complete scam cosmology and the like is. It is understood at a subconscious level that everyone could be hurt if academics start in fighting, and people would be ostracized for doing it. Also, there are a lot of bad scientists / zealots in condensed matter/ atom optics just as there is in cosmology, and they would try to ruin anyone who said a bad word about the church of academia.
Anyway, as far as real physics goes, there was great article on here a while back about how we finally got to look at the atomic structure of glass, and how we can finally try to work out how it is put together. No one knows how glass is put together, there are a number of different theories, and none of them agree. That is the absolute peek of human achievement in science right now, trying to understand how things like glass are put together.
So if someone tries to tell you they know how the universe was formed and all of creation came about, but they can't explain to you how that window next to them works, then they are clearly a crackpot, not a scientist. The most hilarious part is that if you pull them up on it they will say "Oh well you see the whole creation of the universe and everything in it is actually much less complicated than glass, so that is why we can get results in this area easier".
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not both? Part of why dark matter is such an attractive explanation is because there are no constraints on it. Unfortunately this seems to have relieved pressure to explore and test modified gravity.
What do you mean there are “no constraints” on dark matter. There are plenty of constraints. I think you just have no idea what you are talking about.
Calculations involving dark matter might as well be an experiment in curve fitting.
We won’t find dark matter in your or my lifetime, because it doesn’t exist. It is a convenient, flexible, and inelegant fudge factor.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now you can contact almost anyone on earth using a pocket size computer and even see them, and share with them a very large portion of humanity’s knowledge.
>a very large portion of humanity’s knowledge. I know that's the meme, but I think it's false and a dangerous thing to tell ourselves. Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search? And that's just the things that are publicly documented at all. There's libraries worth of implicit indus…
> Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search?
If you include pirating sites? Close to 100%, most books are scanned into pdf's and can be found free online. So only thing stopping this is legal and not technological.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
>a very large portion of humanity’s knowledge. I know that's the meme, but I think it's false and a dangerous thing to tell ourselves. Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search? And that's just the things that are publicly documented at all. There's libraries worth of implicit indus…
> Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search? If you include pirating sites? Close to 100%, most books are scanned into pdf's and can be found free online. So only thing stopping this is legal and not technological.
> > Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search?
> If you include pirating sites?
Or...just Google’s own collection:
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something has changed. I can't imagine Einstein's generation functioning like that. Have pioneers of innovation moved to private corporations now that they have capital that rivals academia? Private companies can reward innovators with more than just credentials. Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, Google Brain, OpenAI, Tesla, SpaceX, ... Granted, this isn't even across all fields as they are not all economic drivers.
Bell Labs was only pseudo private. The government required they have that research lab in exchange for being allowed to have a monopoly. One should also consider that institutions like that were partly so productive for being at the right place and time in history, when we were developing the tools to exploit the low hanging fruit nature has to offer us. That whole era, we snatched it all up quick. Spaceflight and su…
I was watching a good documentary about Bardeen and Shockley and their development of semiconductor tech in the 50s. The military got their hands on some of their samples and work and put together a team to try to work out how they were doing it. The scientists they were interviewing were very depressed because for every month of progress they made catching up to Bardeen and Shockley, those guys would be a further 3 months ahead of them by then.
My point is, you can make claims about Bell labs being semi private, but that doesn't explain why all the innovation happened at Bell Labs and not at some fully government run lab or the military. The government couldn't even keep up with them when they knew what to do, forget about the government actually initiating that kind of research.
In the last 50 years almost nothing has come out of government research. All innovation has occurred in the private sector, or privately owned research universities. At best, the government has succeeded in some cases where government funded academics managed to get private funding from industry.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#169Imo, it has to do with incentives and rewards.(in CS at the very least) The Hindex is a measure thats become the target. So 1 seminal paper is much much worse than 10 completely forgettable papers. It is also common to divide seminal work into smaller publishable morsels to rack up the hindex at the cost of novelty and clarity. The lack of incentive to pursue novel works, also means that most papers are incremental b…
It's painful because (IMHO) the H index is just a much worse approximation of something that we could actually achieve with PageRank for academic citations. In that case, a bunch of middling papers would be rewarded, but so too would one critical paper that lays a foundation for a field.
I always thought that PageRank was inspired on methods previously used for scoring academic papers. Now I'm wondering if I misunderstood something, or my professor misunderstood it first. Damn.
Re: Too many new papers may mean novel ideas rarely rack up citations
#170Imo, it has to do with incentives and rewards.(in CS at the very least) The Hindex is a measure thats become the target. So 1 seminal paper is much much worse than 10 completely forgettable papers. It is also common to divide seminal work into smaller publishable morsels to rack up the hindex at the cost of novelty and clarity. The lack of incentive to pursue novel works, also means that most papers are incremental b…
Doesn't h-index prevent exactly the scenario of having 10 forgettable papers? Having a couple of great papers yields a high h-index, but 10 forgettable papers would hold the number at a low count because you need N papers with at least N citations each. So a seminar paper would +1 to that h-index indefinitely, whereas low value papers would upper bound the h-index to their citation count.