Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaavl2821 | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see more academic scientists blogging, especially if they wrote "laypersons" summaries of their scientific papers. I think this would be a clear net positive for the world: scientific literacy would increase, people would learn about all the amazing things going on in academic labs, and professors and grad students could get more recognition (and maybe income?) for jobs that are quite demanding but often dont pay a ton

But I wonder if blogging / social media would be viewed as "not serious" by academics, or even make the blogger's peers think they are sell outs? I've heard of grant funding decisions getting denied because a researcher issued a press release, which one reviewer thought was too self-promotional. No idea how widespread this attitude is however

View on HN

Most academics spend the rest of the time they're not doing research trying to simplify their jumbled ideas so that academics in their field can understand it. Most of the "epiphanies" you'll see presented in TED talks or in intro guides on the front page of this site are far downstream from what cutting edge academics are trying to express, and often take upwards of decades to purify into an easy-to-digest message.

I recently spent some time trying to explain my research to my mother, and it took me about 30 minutes just to get her familiar with the general field. Thus, everything I explained to her could apply to the thousands of other people doing nearly the same research. If you tried to write "layperson" summaries of the papers, by the time you've gotten them up to speed on the developments that don't distinguish you from them, your contributions seem trivial or overly complicated. But this is because the cutting edge is thin and poorly understood by everyone, including you.

Publishing in high impact conferences and journals is the only thing that is guaranteed to yield success. The information will eventually get out there if it's good, but it takes many years to determine that.

Here's the flow: conferences -> journals -> survey papers/wide referencing -> advanced class lectures -> monographs/textbooks -> university class curriculums -> blogs/Youtube. Each step filters out the junk, of which there is incalculable amounts. I'd estimate that for a top conference in a field, only about 1-5% of the papers will have a serious broader impact.

I blog about my research applying industrial engineering to life at home.

Today my website is popular, but it's hard to direct traffic when getting started. I should be the top Google result for Save Money On Food, but I'm beat out by others with bigger name websites.

I've been to your website before. I think the other issue is that there just aren't enough articles. I was also somewhat disappointed in the polyphasic sleep articles since I found them pretty lacking in content

> professors and grad students could get more recognition (and maybe income?) for jobs that are quite demanding but often dont pay a ton

I try to do a bit of academic blogging, and did when I was a student too, but it's tricky. To do it right still takes time, but it's generally not something that can go on a CV., and unless you have a very popular blog (and even then), it's unlikely to get you a job, or help you secure tenure. So I think it's really more a matter of time than anything else.

Honestly, its hard to boil "we found nothing of statistic significance" down to laymens terms and still sound like you made a major breakthrough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com