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Comment by skosuri | Hacker News Reader

I don't know. I think people overblow this publish or perish thing. Shipping something and regularly is a thing that's important to practice; whether in industry or academia.

The reason it's important is that both cases, at some level, one needs to justify the use their use of resources. Places without some real world feedback are usually not a great thing long term.

Same goes for publishing in glamour journals/conferences. In the end it's a competition for attention, and things often have to be judged by presentation and storytelling as well. Prioritizing your time on working on your best projects is likely a good thing. If you feel something strongly that no one else sees, you will likely have less resources to accomplish it. That's life everywhere.

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Journal referees are about as far from "real world feedback" as you can get.

There's an interesting clash of incentives -- the grant-funding agencies optimize for stuff that is low-risk, but they claim to want highly-novel work, which also what gets published in better journals. So often what you must do is dress up incremental progress as revolutionary progress. It's soul-sucking.

What would you propose as an alternative to peer-feedback? I really enjoyed academia and didn't find it soul sucking. Does it suck to get rejected sometimes? Yes. Does the work eventually get out; yes? With pre-prints these days, most of the people that are in the field already read the paper before acceptance if it's good. So the journal/conference name itself is largely a symbolic judgement of your peers.

I don't think we should go without some form of review -- just that other academics are not representative of the real world. Perhaps a system where the 'relevance' claims are evaluated by industry reviewers, and the scientific claims are evaluated by academics?

Post-publication (I'm counting arxiv here as publication) review is an improvement. My branch of science doesn't use arxiv to any real extent, unfortunately.

Edit: I left a word out.

However, the other big product of universities is education (and I think it’s fair to say that most people who would think of attending one see the value in universities through how they can educate, rather than whatever research is going on). And “shipping” good lessons, close connections with students, and great results is rarely recognised, and doesn’t help you get a job in the future. (It might help you look better compared to someone publishing equally as many or impactful papers, but it’s the papers first).

The other thing that this publish-regularly mentality can prevent is very long-term forward-looking projects - for some problems it is not clear what an answer should even look like, let alone how to get there. The closest thing to compare it to might be starting a new company - perhaps it takes 6 to 12 months to work on a product enough to start selling it. This is time that people simply don’t have in some academic fields, where they will be seen as underperforming, so it discourages these long-term projects entirely.

Totally agreed with you Re: teaching. I think universities are systematically not valuing teaching enough in my opinion. That said, at my university (UCLA), if you are a great teacher, teaching large, popular and impactful classes; you will get recognized and promoted for it. But when people bring up the publish or perish trope, it's not about spending time building better classes and teaching material.

In terms of 6-12 months, if you don't have that much time, it's likely your past bets haven't paid off and people aren't that willing to give you more resources. I definitely had lots of projects that still haven't paid off 7 years into them; but I get to keep playing on them because some of my other bets have. That's the way it works, but I don't think that is that bad. There are many professors with terrible ideas that they think are great and are indignant that no one will support them unconditionally.

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