btrettel comments on LessWrong 2.0 - Less Wrong
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In STEM fields, there is a great deal of necessary knowledge that simply is not in journals or articles, and is carried forward as institutional knowledge passed around among grad students and professors.
Maybe someday someone clever will figure out how to disseminate that knowledge, but it simply isn't there yet.
Interesting point. Can you give an example of this knowledge?
I'm working on a PhD myself (in engineering), but the main things I feel I get from this are access to top scholars, mentoring, structure, and the chance to talk with others who are interested in learning more and research. One could also have access to difficult to obtain equipment in academia, but a large corporation could also provide such equipment. In principle I don't think these things are unique to academia.
Sure, not 100% unique to academia, there are also industrial research environments.
My phd was in physics, and there were lots of examples. Weird tricks for aligning optics benches, semi-classical models that gave good order of magnitude estimates despite a lack of rigour, which estimates from the literature were trust worthy (and which estimates were garbage). Biophysics labs and material science lab all sorts of rituals around sample and culture growth and preparation. Many were voodoo, but there were good reasons for a lot of them as well.
Even tricks for using equipment- such and such piece of equipment might need really good impedance matching at one connection, but you could get by being sloppy on other connections because of reasons A, B and C,etc.
A friend of mine in math was stuck trying to prove a lemma for several months when famous professor Y suggested to him that famous professor Z had probably proven it but never bothered to publish.
Jason Mitchell writes in "On the emptiness of failed replications" that there certain knowledge you need to replicate experiments that's not in the paper:
How best to give those pep talks would be an example.
Yes I think even in math a lot of what is called "mathematical sophistication" is implicit knowledge that's hard to communicate without being steeped in the social context in which math is developed and read.
As an example, do you mean something like correctly understanding how to "abuse" mathematical notation in a way that remains rigorous?
It's hard to explain, it's the way you think and talk about math, it's not about visible signs like notation.
I like the Scott Bakker analogy for magic, there is the visible part of math (formulas, etc.), and the corresponding mental habits. The visible part without the correct way of thinking behind the scenes doesn't work.
I guess one example is an ontology of "the type of math that's being done" in one's head, that lets people quickly figure out what the paper is trying to do after reading relatively little of it.
The guy is profoundly misguided about the purpose of food X-D
And food photography is a specialized and lucrative field for a reason.