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> I just want papers now to “show me the data and the code.” But the code is secondary to the idea. The idea and the discussion around how it was arrived at and what it means is the key thing. The code is just there to implement it. You could code the same idea ten different ways.
The code is there to show that the idea is worth the discussion around.
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I think this almost every time I read the paper. It’s like Linus’ “show me the code.” I just want papers now to “show me the data and the code.” And include a discussion about why these results are important. I think it’s a great time for the scientific community to improve transparency on these fronts. Sincerely, someone who reads a lot of research but contributes none because I’m an amateur. Edit: when I say data,…
Raw data can be on the order of terabytes, not that it can't be shared but this is a real barrier when it comes to raw data
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The code is there to show that the idea is worth the discussion around.
Would the idea be valuable without the code? Yes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The code is there to show that the idea is worth the discussion around.
Would the idea be valuable without the code? Yes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The code is there to show that the idea is worth the discussion around.
Would the idea be valuable without the code? Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Alleg...
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Would the idea be valuable without the code? Yes.
Not if the code is wrong, and therefore the conclusion may be wrong. I'm no scientist, but I don't think the point of scientific papers is to get unfounded ideas out into the world.
For example the paper on polymorphic inline caching, which is the key idea for the performance of many programming languages today, just described the idea, and didn't present any code. How was it evaluated? People sat and thought about it. Holds up today.
You can reason about an idea through other things than concrete code. Code is transient and incidental. Ideas persist.
I think this is a great idea theoretically, but in reality for most papers I don't want to see the data/underlying code. While it would be great to publish data/code with the paper (in the field I've worked on the most, astronomy, most data is already published with the paper anyways), I don't want/need to look through a notebook with the underlying code of the paper in order to just read the intro/conclusions (and m…
Nothing prevents you from having two-column notebooks, if you find that advantageous, as well as abstract and conclusions sections. The part that you don't get with static paper is that of navigating the abstraction ladder[1] up and down with direct manipulation aids, instead of having to work it all in your head or by following dense detailed paragraphs.
[1] As also explained by Bret Victor in http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
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Raw data can be on the order of terabytes, not that it can't be shared but this is a real barrier when it comes to raw data
The whole point of the field of statistics is that you can carry out statistical tests and analysis on a sample; you don’t need all of the data.
As a practicing scientist, I firmly believe the world would be much better off if we simply published version-controlled Jupyter notebooks on a free site, such as GitHub or ArXiv.
> As a practicing scientist > version-controlled Jupyter notebooks That's awfully field specific. It probably wouldn't work for most of STEM. Even for ML I shudder to imagine trying to make sense of the inevitable monstrosities. Writing a paper is part of the thinking process. It forces the author to sit down and work through things in an orderly manner and they're still often difficult to read. I'm definitely in fav…
Explorables have all the same requirements to carefully think them through and prepare them for reading and clarity of exposition, but they also have the interactions that ease the introduction of concepts to their readers through a hands-on approach (rather than forcing them to read the mind of the writer by reverse-engineering their thought process, by running in your short-term memory the examples given in a non-interactive paper).