I've given up trying to predict people's reactions. Some researchers or post-grads, when I contact them, seem thrilled to answer any questions I have or provide unpublished data; other seem to completely ignore me and as far as I can tell, pretend the thesis never existed. I'll give a recent Evangelion example: http://eva.onegeek.org/pipermail/evangelion/2012-October/007214.html
I reviewed a like >200pg PhD thesis which as far as I can tell has been neither discussed nor cited anywhere online; I excerpt it, praise and criticize parts, point out several specific problems which could be fixed in it or places where new material would add substantially to her discussion, submit it to Reddit where it gets 3 praising comments. Then I ping her on Twitter and... nothing in almost a month despite occasional tweets posted by her.
I don't understand how she could not reply, if only to defend herself: she must have spent years working on the thesis, and given the lack of Google hits, I might be one of maybe 10-20 people in the world to ever read it. If I had spent years working on something and someone sent me such an email, I don't think I could ignore it: I'd be prostrate with joy that someone knowledgeable read it carefully, or I'd be berserk with rage that they would dare do anything but praise it and would reply tearing them a new one. Silence, however, I simply cannot understand.
The end result of PhD programs is a degree, and finishing a thesis is instrumental to this.The thesis might end up a sunk cost labor of hate that you just want to forget afterwards, even if it did take years, if you mostly just want the degree. Don't know how much this happens at PhD level.
Over the last year, VincentYu, gwern, myself and others have provided 132 academic papers for the LessWrong community (out of 152 requests, a 87% success rate) through the Free research, editing and articles thread. We originally intended to provide editing, research and general troubleshooting help, but article downloads are by far the most requested service.
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