paper-machine comments on Division of cognitive labour in accordance with researchers' ability - Less Wrong

10 Post author: Stefan_Schubert 16 January 2014 09:28AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 17 January 2014 08:28:43PM *  0 points [-]

Do you want to elaborate on what you don't like about it?

  1. The only math blog I know of worth reading is Tao's, and he's a massive outlier. Same for CS and Aaronson.
  2. LaTeX/web integration is horribly broken, and will be essentially forever.

Most of the benefits of the journal system accrue in the future - it's easier to read old papers than it is to read old blog posts- at tremendous cost to the present

Preprint archives fix this problem entirely.

The narrow field I'm currently working in is almost two years old; if Krugman were right there wouldn't be any published papers on it. Of course, there are around thirty or so.

Compare to blogging about work currently under development, bouncing ideas off other people, getting unstuck by others, collaborating with people you never would have met otherwise.

Sounds like a den of priority disputes, political drama, and other malfeasance to me. Would you rather we went back to making musicians audition in front of their judges?

Comment author: Vaniver 17 January 2014 09:57:20PM *  2 points [-]

Preprint archives fix this problem entirely.

They fix the journal publication lag problem, but not the draft writing problem, unless there are people uploading preprints with the hypotheses to experiments they haven't run yet, or with current things they're thinking about. (I know there are experiment registration systems in a handful of medical fields in order to cut down on the file drawer effect, and those seem like an okay example of this sort of thing, but I'm not aware of those in fields like physics or CS or so on.)

Sounds like a den of priority disputes, political drama, and other malfeasance to me.

Sure. But I'd rather optimize for generating knowledge quickly than for generating status in an orderly way, because I think it'll be positive on net.

Would you rather we went back to making musicians audition in front of their judges?

I think you'll have to unpack this one for me, because I'm not sure what specifically you're trying to imply and I don't want to put words in your mouth.

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