gwern comments on Open Thread, December 2-8, 2013 - Less Wrong

2 Post author: ChrisHallquist 03 December 2013 05:10AM

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Comment author: gwern 06 December 2013 06:08:15PM *  9 points [-]

Wouldn't it be more practical to simply adopt a personal rule of jailbreaking (if necessary) any paper that you cite? I know this can be a lot of work since I do just this, but it does get easier as you develop the search skills and is much more useful to other people than an idiosyncratic personal vocabulary.

Comment author: hyporational 07 December 2013 04:44:23AM *  1 point [-]

Any how-to-advice on jailbreaking? Do you just mean using subscriptions at your disposal?

I wonder if "pirating" papers has any real chance of adverse repercussions.

Comment author: gwern 07 December 2013 02:30:15PM 6 points [-]

Any how-to-advice on jailbreaking?

I think there have been past threads on this. The short story is Google Scholar, Google, your local university library, LW's research help page, /r/Scholar, and the Wikipedia Resource Request page.

I wonder if "pirating" papers has any real chance of adverse repercussions.

I have 678 PDFs on gwern.net alone, almost all pirated, and perhaps another 200 scattered among my various Dropboxes. These have been building up since 2009. Assuming linear growth, that's something like 1,317 paper-years (((678+200)/2)*3) without any warning or legal trouble so far. By Laplace, that suggests a risk of trouble per paper-year of 0.076% (((1+0)/(1317+2)) * 100). So, pretty small.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 10 December 2013 12:41:26AM 0 points [-]

There is no dichotomy. Word choice is largely independent of action. You set a good example, but you cite very few papers compared to your readers. Word choice to nudge your readers might have a larger effect. Do your readers even notice your example?

My question is how to get people to link to public versions, not how to get them to jailbreak. I think that when I offer them a public link it is a good opportunity to shame them. If I call it an "ungated" link, that makes it sound abnormal, a nice extra, but not the default. An issue not addressed by my proposal is how to tell people that google scholar exists. Maybe I should not provide direct links, but google scholar links. Not search links, but cluster links ("all 17 versions"), which might also be more stable than direct links.

Comment author: gwern 10 December 2013 01:58:32AM 0 points [-]

Do your readers even notice your example?

I don't know. I know they often praise my articles for being well-cited, but I don't know if they would say the same thing were every citation a mere link to Pubmed.

My question is how to get people to link to public versions, not how to get them to jailbreak. I think that when I offer them a public link it is a good opportunity to shame them. If I call it an "ungated" link, that makes it sound abnormal, a nice extra, but not the default

If you just want to shame them, then there's much more comprehensible choice of terms. For example, 'useful' or 'usable'. "Here is a usable copy" - implying their default was useless.