= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wedrifid comments on Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (141)
This is actually a pretty frustrating place to start from. Often, the so-built "frame" is setting out to flatter the authors mentioned therein, instead of pointing out what's useful or informative. Moreover, since these sections are more about giving credit and inflating egos than about informing the reader, you're much more likely to see the paper in which an idea was introduced, rather than a more-informative survey paper, written 10 years later, after the important aspects of the concept are really understood.
I lament this state of affairs with the subdued passion of a 1000 brown dwarf suns.
It's ridiculous that wikipedia is more structured and useful that most of the academic literature. I would like to start some kind of academic movement, whereby we reject closed journals, embrace the open source mentality, and collaborate on up-to-date and awesome wikis on every modern research area.
Ok, your next task is to figure out a way to make academics gain status by participation in that plan. :)
That is the heart of the social engineering problem at hand.
Programmers gain status by creating and contributing to open source projects, and by answering questions on StackOverflow, etc. I think that is a stable equilibrium, both for programmers and for academics. The question is how to get to that equilibrium in the first place.
First, I think it needs to become generally accepted that the current equilibrium is broken and that there are alternatives. To that end I encourage all academics to discuss it as openly as possible. Once that happens I think (hope) it will just be a matter of high status individuals throwing their weight around properly.
An 'open-source science' original-research version of Wikipedia, perhaps? With everything explicitly licensed under an attribution-required copyright?
Edit - please disregard this post
Seconding the recommendation of following the Open Source model, particularly Stack Overflow. I'm also a big fan of the many OSS-focused IRC channels, where you'll typically be able to find grouchy-but-helpful people to advise you on the fine points of nearly any nearly piece of software.