= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
nerzhin 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)
I think your impression is wrong. You are right that in many areas, if you're reasonably smart and have a strong amateur interest, it doesn't take very much time and effort to start asking questions and possibly even generating insight at the same level as accredited scholars. However, in such areas, and in many others as well, the most difficult obstacles are of different sorts.
First, a perfectly clear, logical, honest, and readable account of your work is often ipso facto unpublishable: what is required is writing according to unofficial, tacitly acknowledged rules that are extremely hard to figure out on your own. (If anything, academic publishing is so competitive that unless you have an earth-shattering breakthrough, it is difficult or even impossible to publish without intensely optimizing for passing the actual review and editorial process, rather than following some idealistic criteria of quality.)
Second, of course, there is the factor of brand-names, networking, and patronage. Each publication venue has some minimal status threshold for authors and their affiliation, below which your chances of publication are practically nil no matter what the content of your paper may be. (Again, with the possible hypothetical exception of evident stunning breakthroughs.)
This has not been my experience. My experience with journal editors and reviewers has been that they want a clear and readable account, but it probably varies a great deal from field to field.
Your point about brand names and networks, however, is very well taken.
In many fields -- but not all, as you note, and it's hard to speculate on the exact proportion -- there's an evil arms race in fundamentally dishonest self-promotion. Basically, you must employ every imaginable spin short of outright lying to blow up your contribution out of all proportion and minimize the perceived shortcomings of your work. If instead you write up a complete, straightforward, and honest account that will leave the reader informed as accurately as possible, there's no way you're getting published unless it's a very extraordinary breakthrough.
Of course, even in such circumstances, you want your paper to be clear and readable in the sense that the reviewers will read it easily and end up convinced by your claims and impressed by its high-status qualities, without too may unpleasant questions occurring to them. But this is mostly about Dark Arts, not real clarity of exposition.
It is true that people in academia, as everywhere else, have a combination of low and high motives for what they do. The question is, on what grounds should one assume an average less-wronger is better in this respect than an average academic?
In my experience the biggest barrier in "mathy" areas is getting up to speed. Getting ideas accepted is a significantly bigger hurdle than getting ideas published. Most stuff that gets published is either not great or not useful (obscure) and often both.
edit: to clarify: I don't see that the way one thinks about spreading lesswrong memes is different from the way one thinks about spreading "what I have published" memes. Both high and low motives are involved in both cases, and suboptimal equilibria are involved in both cases in the sense that one must think of ways of competing with other people's memes.
This sounds an awful lot like the situation in job hunting, at least in IT -- you have to lie as much as you can get away with because if you don't, the position will go to someone who did and you starve. The required level of bullshit increases over time in the manner of a dollar auction.
For professional academics I suppose it is job hunting, in a sense. I wonder if it generalizes to any situation where there's a surplus of competitors for a difficult-to-measure result and opting-out of the competition isn't an option.