- https://distill.pub/2018/building-blocks/ - https://distill.pub/2017/feature-visualization/ - https://distill.pub/2016/augmented-rnns/
He explains his personal mission, doing research distillation to reduce research debt, in this essay: https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/
I don't think academia is going to contribute to this mission as it's mostly governed by a make-it-look-ridiculously-difficult-so-people-won't-find-it-approachable-and-thus-give-you-much-credit-for-doing-impressive-work culture.
Academics don't get rewarded for confusing each other, they have to create research that their peers appreciate, understand, and value.
There's plenty of incentive to dress something up as more complex and impressive and using more high powered machinary than needed, e.g. impressing reviewers, qualifying for a particular conference, convincing the funding body that your pet technique can actually be useful etc
I don't think you'd find many academics that dispute this, though hopefully they'd think a lot of people are trying to do good research.
It'd be like open source software if it was done as a hobby; a lot of academics get public funding.
I suspect you'd find thousands of academics who dispute your claims. Nobody is going to claim perfection, but the problems you're describing are not systemic and basically absent from anyone with a career.
I should have chosen my words more carefully; we can probably find 1000s of academics to dispute a lot of perspectives on academia.
> are not systemic and basically absent from anyone with a career.
So, leaving aside criticism of any particular field, and to take just one pretty big cross-discipline trend, there's this 'replication crisis' thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis (wiki links to plenty of reputable sources).
I find it difficult to reconcile that with the idea that incentives to over-inflate claims were 'basically absent from anyone with a career'.
Maybe we think everyone was just really bad at statistics?
Again, by no means is academia perfect. But insisting that its primary problem is that grant writers are a pack of pathological liars is both incorrect and unhelpful in solving actual problems, that's all.
And yeah. I would say that most people would benefit from regular refreshers on statistics... in or out of academia.
I didn't say the replication crisis lead to bad incentives. I cited it as evidence bad incentives exist.
> But insisting that its primary problem is that grant writers are a pack of pathological liars
I didn't say remotely that.
Academics have incentives to make their work sound overly impressive, and many are playing this game. That doesn't mean every grant writer is a pathological liar, but it's very naive to think they aren't incentivised to oversell findings, and many do.