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Comment by mlthoughts2018 | Hacker News Reader

mlthoughts2018

An underappreciated aspect of this is finding an academic department that would allow you to submit something this concise as a senior thesis.

My experience, mostly in grad school, was that anyone editing my work wanted more verbiage. If you only needed a short, one-sentence paragraph to say something, it just wasn’t accepted. There had to be more.

Jeff Dean is an uncommonly good communicator. But he also benefited from being allowed, perhaps even encouraged, to prioritize effective and concise communication.

Most people aren’t so lucky, and end up learning that this type of concision will not go over well. People presume you’re writing like a know-it-all, or that you didn’t do due diligence on prior work.

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> anyone editing my work wanted more verbiage

I _never_ got that feedback. My mentors all emphasized economy of language and nobody cared how "thick" my thesis was.

This is a pretty amusing story about verbiage.

Back in the old days, you would send a manuscript/research article to colleagues/friends by _snail-mail_ to get their feedback. You'd wait a month, and maybe they would mail a 'red-inked' copy of your manuscript back to you.

My Ph.D. advisor sent out a draft to a colleague who was famous for being harsh with the red-ink.

After a month, my advisor receives the manuscript in the mail.

* He turns to page 1. No red ink!

* He turns to page 2. STILL no red ink! [He must looove the paper]

* Keeps turning pages (no red ink!!).

* On page 10--in red ink--is written, "Start here."

Of course people want you to write less when it means less work for them. But think of an academic review committee for a senior thesis. They aren’t going to heavily read your paper, just decide if it meets compliance standards for some preserved artifact for your graduation. But they can veto what you’ve written and send it back to someone else (your advisor likely) and have that person request edits.

So this puts the reviewer in a situation with misaligned incentives. They might prefer to tell you to prioritize concise communication, but believe the risk is high that such a thing will get vetoed by the committee for Dilberty reasons, and thus their feedback gets optimized for what the committee will superficially think.

When the committee is mostly attentive professors, this isn’t so bad and everybody is aligned on short, to-the-point style.

But my experience is that this is hardly true. Maybe one committee member will be an attentive technical authority, sometimes only your advisor. The others will be deans or directors of various sorts who view it as an administrative chore to even have to sign off, and probably farm that review out to grad students or adjuncts, who are far more likely to take a capricious point of view about e.g. heavy literature review or conclusion sections.

I guess my experience has been different than yours.

I wrote an undergrad thesis and I felt like my advisor and two readers cared about what I was saying and how I said it.

Same is true for my Ph.D. My committee members seemed to care deeply about the work (I think they just didn't want to be associated w/ crap research).

Yes, I agree the two experiences you describe sound very rare from my own experience and my colleagues’ and friends’ experiences in undergrad, grad school and authoring papers in academic and industrial settings.

HN doesn't really encourage memes and other jokes, but this is printed at the wall on the UBC grad lounge, and it seems depressingly accurate https://imgur.com/gallery/wM7udMU

It's kind of remarkable. There really is no literature review in this paper. As a supervisor I would have no problem with a content part of this length, but I would also insist on doing the scholarly work that is not demonstrated here. Don't just throw out some code and describe it but put it into the context of what exists. Give credit to where ideas originate.

That shouldn't add too much. No more than a few pages. It would still concise but then also a scientific work.

That seems to be a key difference between science and engineering. One likes to survey the field and insist that their paper offers something novel - no matter how big or small. The other just wants to do some solid work and get the results.

If you don't do the lit research part, how do you know you are getting results and not reinventing the wheel? Maybe it's fine for an undergrad writing a toy expository paper in an educational setting, not contributing to anything real. But why should I read someone's thesis if there's no reason to expect it's not already covered in my textbook?

> The other just wants to do some solid work and get the results.

How would you know the results are solid without consulting the scientific literature?

If you want to be snarky: The one is research the other is documentation.

I'm not really trying to be snarky, just point out the difference in approach. Research is in fact documentation - of what others have done.

Papers that are entirely surveys or comparisons of different approaches can be excellent and would make good citations in any practical work.

Not really. The point is that in research we want to generate and further knowledge. This is distinct from generating and documenting facts. If you don't link into the web of knowledge there is (implicitly: leave that task up to the reader) you are just documenting facts.

This is not academic. What did reading this Master thesis teach me? That two approaches perform reasonably (by what standard?) with a size trade-off. That's an excellent start but also leaves open many questions: Why these two approaches? Are there reasons to expect they are better suited than other approaches in the literature? Were these results expected? Can I expect them to generalize? Do they paint a coherent picture on the performance of different designs in various contexts or are they surprising?

A lot of this is about generality of the knowledge gained. As a mere fact ("Two implementations of two algorithms that solve one problem perform slightly differently") it's not very interesting unless I have that exact specific problem myself. If I do, I would still need to find the paper. But if it is linked into a wider web of knowledge ("In paper [X] it was found that this algorithm performs well on tasks that have something in common with our problem, paper [Y] and [Z] suggest that we should expect a trade off for small sizes. Generally nothing is known about what should be algorithms well suited to the problem at hand.") it allows me to reason about situations.

>> The point is that in research we want to generate and further knowledge. This is distinct from generating and documenting facts.

Hence the desire to constantly look for novelty in academic work. Engineers don't necessarily care about novelty, they need to solve a problem at hand for practical reasons. Documenting what they've done, how it performed, and what they learned (if anything) is still important to write down for others who may want to solve similar problems.

I personally find the quest for novelty often reads like some kind of desperate need to justify the work or to get it funded. Solid work can stand on it's own even if there's nothing new about it, while mediocre work seems to stand so long as it's go some element of novelty.

If I've already decided what method I want to use to solve a problem, finding a well-done implementation and documentation on it is all I really want. If I don't know what solution to apply to a problem, a survey that documents the various approaches and makes some comparisons is what I want.

From the readers perspective, what would be the point?

To provide context and pointers to previous literature. Very often it happens that only some of the insights from papers fall into fashion and when you go back and read the original you find other things of value that didn't get picked up.

As a reader, I'm often left trying to figure out whether the author is presenting something new, or is rehashing old ideas (which, btw, is a good thing sometimes, but I want to know that's someone tried this once before). I want to know exactly what the new contribution of the paper is, and how it fits in the universe of contributions.

My undergrad "project"'s report had to be of some minimum page count (about 300, I recall). I remember filling the report with the W3C specification of HTTP, Wikipedia articles and what not in order to convince the professor that I had done some "work" in order to build the project (It was based on using a interactive genetic algorithm for generating CSS files for webpages).

Also, I had to be submit 3 identical hard-bind copies of that bullshit report.

That seems absurd. PhD theses (in STEM) are often shorter.

I had to write a 10k word undergrad final paper for law school (in Europe, law school is a regular university study, with a 3 year LLB and 1 or 2 year LLM). At around 8k or so, I went to my supervisor and said 'look, I've said everything I wanted to say, and in a drawn out way already which I' not happy about. If I have to add more, I will need to start another topic, and I'd rather keep this paper focused and continue that other subject in another paper. What do you want me to do?'. Then my supervisor said 'I'll get you in on a dirty secret in legal writing. When you need to hit a word count, you play with the precedent citations here and there. Go back to your desk, cite an extra sentence before and after every citation you have in there, and tadaa you're done'. Turned out that I had to include an extra paragraph here or there but still, golden advice :) And somewhat applicable to other fields as well, if you build in this sort of safety net from the start...

Reminds me of page count requirements in middle school. I'd write 4 pages, and in order to get to 5 I'd make every period and comma a higher font size. This was after they figured out my line spacing and margin tricks.

I'm not sure what a senior thesis is but my undergraduate thesis was I think 34 pages long. (Excluding the source code listing)

I had a friend who's advisor made them make everything longer the way you describe, theirs was in excess of 100 pages. (IIRC this advisor had suggested that while the guidelines say ~50 pages this was the bare minimum sufficient for a pass).

I guess it depends a lot on your advisor.

I have in the past been subadvisor to various bacc. theses.

I value conciseness dearly, and prefer quality over quantity in scientific writing, i.e. I would accept incredibly short theses, if the content is sufficiently presented (reproducible and comprehensive), and most of all, contains a valuable contribution.

The reason I typically have to request "more verbiage" and an own section on the state of the art, is because I need to force my students to confront their sitcom ideas with the history of "what has been done before, and what the actual current problems are".

Unfortunately, the approaches of most students are neither new nor particularly interesting in this regard.

sitcom?

It's strange to expect an undergrad to do new and interesting work when they haven't even finished their basic education in the field. Solve problems that are easy but not important enough for professional academics, sure. Do an application of a standard idea in a specific environment (like porting an pp to Android), sure. But not new approaches to the field.

There are various shades between scientific breakthrough and "yet another app/Server Tool", of which hundreds were implemented in the past, which can be solved by following random blog-posts, and (in the worst case) make no sense, even besides academic rigor.

Scientific work should fulfill at least some standards, and IMHO this includes undergrad theses.

I had just that experience and it took me years to relearn the benefits of conciseness in analyses.

I'm creating my master thesis, and I have been strongly encouraged to keep it short so that it can be submitted as a paper. So mine will end up, I still feel somewhat long, at around 14 pages.

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