Science is not about innovation. Science is about tiny little results that by themselves have no immediate benefit, but slowly improve our overall understanding, and eventually lead to an unexpected benefit. Science is not developed in order to solve a business problem - it is purely an advancement in overall knowledge of the world (the traditional aim of natural philosophy). In this sense, science is not compatible with business interests.
The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications
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Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications
#92> My biggest mistake was that I didn't have experience as a biotech researcher or postdoc working in a lab.
That is is big problem - good to recognize it as such.
I can tell because the article, though lengthy, never seems to state an explicit problem to be solved. Rather, various ways to apply technology to a field are discussed.
This is a recipe for failure. You need 3 things:
1. a problem to be solved
2. a customer who has that problem
3. money in the customer's pocket waiting to be transferred to yours
The article never even gets to (1).
Regarding (2), if academic groups are the target customer, you're going to have a bad time. They have little money and they tend to be all to happy to build something that sort-of replicates the commercial product you've created for them.
This leaves scientific for-profit companies. They have lots of problems (and these days money), but these problems tend to be quite difficult to discover and solve because of the extensive domain and industry knowledge required.
Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications
#93One thing that strikes me about most academic knowledge tools is that they seem to focus on parsing the current set of academic literature and producing supposedly interesting insights out of them (which quickly tends to snowball into wanting some kind of generalized model for knowledge as a whole). What I think is much more interesting is creating tools that help people create better academic writing in the first pl…
Exactly! Assist me in my process of researching and writing. and use what I have already done in e.g. putting and classifying paper in Endnote. It's interesting that the author seemed to have a similar idea for a brief second but then tossed it away:
> similar: an app that pops up serendipitous connections between a corpus (previous writings, saved articles, bookmarks ...) and the active writing session or paragraph. The corpus, preferably your own, could be from folders, text files, blog archive, a Roam Research graph or a Notion/Evernote database.
Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications
#94Having invested quite a bit of my own time into various aspects of the scientific knowledge extraction morass, I’d say the author is largely on point, but there’s a significant, and potentially valuable distinction to be made between extracting research outputs and research inputs.
At least in the field of materials science, papers are by and large a record of research outputs. We made material X and it achieved performance Y - here are a bunch of measurements to prove that this is in fact what we made and that it truly achieved performance Y at relevant conditions, etc. In this sense, papers really function as an advertisement: look at what we achieved.
What papers do not do is rigorously document inputs, or provide a step-by-step guide to reproduce said results, for obvious reasons.
My current take on this topic is that it would be both feasible and valuable to build a knowledge extraction system to compile and compare outputs across a specified field. Think the big “chart of all verified solar cell efficiencies over time” [1], but generated automatically. This would at least immediately orient researchers to the distribution of state of the art results, and help ensure that they don’t omit relevant references in their reviews.
But extracting and making sense of inputs (methods), or even “knowledge”? Forget about it.
Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recall seeing a Show HN post a while back about a research focussed web browser that helps as a thinking tool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28446147
A sign-in/sign-up necessary just to see the browser in action? Hard pass.
Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications
#96I can confirm that in my current area of interest (how to synthesize a cello or saxophone sound), there are hundreds of academic papers published over decades, each of them says "our method sounds more realistic than others", but code and audio samples are never available, and verbal descriptions always skip crucial details. I have no doubt that academics have a ton of expertise, but their output in paper form is bas…
> I have no doubt that academics have a ton of expertise, but their output in paper form is basically unusable, I'm not sure it achieves any purpose besides resume padding. If you think the entire field of academia doesn't achieve any purpose, you may want to reconsider your position. Most likely, almost everything that you do today on a computer was an academic paper. Yes, it was without code and data. Yet, it was n…
Balaji Srinivasan had a good take on this recently in his conversation with Tim Ferris. I quote:
"The thing is, I don’t care if something has a thousand retweets, what I care about is if it has two or three independent confirmations from economically dis-aligned actors. This is the same as academia, by the way, everybody’s optimizing citations. What you actually want to optimize is independent replication. That’s what true science is. It’s not peer review. It is physical tests."
Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications
#97> My biggest mistake was that I didn't have experience as a biotech researcher or postdoc working in a lab. That is is big problem - good to recognize it as such. I can tell because the article, though lengthy, never seems to state an explicit problem to be solved. Rather, various ways to apply technology to a field are discussed. This is a recipe for failure. You need 3 things: 1. a problem to be solved 2. a custome…
Yes. I wonder if the author had first worked on the patent side (I'd be interested to hear more about this idea). Perhaps working on patents first would be a path to get experience (and product-market-fit). From there, one could branch out into other domains (e.g. bio).
Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may be a bit cynical, but at least in my former field (experimental physics), the main purpose of papers seems to be to "lock in" a finished achivement. You do the actual research, pass internal reviews and peer review, and then publishing the paper is just to make it "official". Unfortunately, many papers are never expected to be read. The crucial information exists, but you usually get it from personal communicat…
I did my phd in experimental physics and I have to say my realisation of this large point, that papers are little more than resume padding to lock in an achievement was a significant contributor towards destroying, and I use destroying seriously here, any faith or trust that peer review or publishing has anything at all to do with the scientific method at all. Your results replicate, or they don't. Your calculations,…
+1
Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What can help make the literature more accessible? Review articles, sometimes called surveys. I've always thought that new PhDs would be excellent authors for those, having digested lots literature for their dissertation.
> Review articles, sometimes called surveys. Is this field specific? I have read survey articles in math and biology, and was told by some of my profs that they use these articles as an introduction to a new field. A quick Google search seems to show these exist in CS (along with tutorial papers), physics, and chemistry but I'm having a little difficulty finding statistics survey papers (survey methods come up instea…
For Stats, check out https://www.annualreviews.org/journal/statistics
Please suggest others if you find them.
Annual Reviews has a bunch of journals for surveys of various fields. Most of them are paywalled, but there's ways around that.
Re: The business of extracting knowledge from academic publications
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have no doubt that academics have a ton of expertise, but their output in paper form is basically unusable, I'm not sure it achieves any purpose besides resume padding. If you think the entire field of academia doesn't achieve any purpose, you may want to reconsider your position. Most likely, almost everything that you do today on a computer was an academic paper. Yes, it was without code and data. Yet, it was n…
Balaji Srinivasan had a good take on this recently in his conversation with Tim Ferris. I quote: "The thing is, I don’t care if something has a thousand retweets, what I care about is if it has two or three independent confirmations from economically dis-aligned actors. This is the same as academia, by the way, everybody’s optimizing citations. What you actually want to optimize is independent replication. That’s wha…
Yes and no. Literal replications are less valuable than people think - what you really want are independent tests of different parts of the causal network of the underlying model.