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Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

This is very true.

This is why conferences are important. A lot of knowledge is sociological in nature. Failures and tricks of the trade are discussed at the bar after 5. I've experienced this first hand.

Academic publications and lectures, in their (rightful) pursuit of rigor, aren't usually the right space for conversations around hunches and experiences. Reputations are at stake, and most people are doing impression management. When experienced readers read a journal publication, they read it with the implicit understanding that it is a highly curated view of the messiness behind the scenes.

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It seems toxic to me that there's no accepted public venue for that stuff, though. The fact that people are too afraid to relay certain useful information until they're tipsy; the emphasis on "doing impression management".

Maybe it should remain separate from the rigorous stuff, but where's the "Op-Ed section" of academic publishing?

I feel the word "toxic" is maybe a bit too pejorative for what it is? Another framing is that it is "guild knowledge". The incentives in academia are complex and it affects how open some folks are or can afford to be with such knowledge.

That said, there are certain open avenues for making such knowledge public. MathOverflow is one. Some academics document their guild knowledge in "technical papers" which they put up on their website. The ML community (which I'm not part of, but that I'm able to observe as an outsider) seems to be particularly open when it comes to publishing blog posts -- sometimes to gain reputational points?

In some journals, arguments over publications are carried out in the Letters to the Editor section. Sometimes this leads to public feuds however, and some academic communities are small enough that if you make too many enemies your publications may be visited upon with disfavor when it comes time for peer review. It's not worth getting into public tiffs unless there's a principle at stake.

> The incentives in academia are complex and it affects how open some folks are or can afford to be with such knowledge.

> Sometimes this leads to public feuds however, and some academic communities are small enough that if you make too many enemies your publications may be visited upon with disfavor when it comes time for peer review. It's not worth getting into public tiffs unless there's a principle at stake.

This is more the kind of thing I was using the word "toxic" to describe. Of course I know this is a widespread and deep-seeded problem and not one that could be fixed overnight, I was just commenting on it

That's why publishing and presenting outside the formal academic realm is important. Especially presentations that have one level of indirection from original creators often provide much better intuition and also the presenter isn't afraid sharing that he/she doesn't know certain things or they present content in a more creative funny way.

Personally I've wanted a 1-page IEEE publication for a while that accepts smaller contributions, where people can share these kinds of insights. Just a "we tried this, this is what happened" or "we were not able to repeat this" or "we found this interesting, but we need more data".

You could argue it's kind of like a long abstract, but a long abstract really indicates you intend to probe it further, but in actual fact you might just want to indicate that there might be something there for somebody else.

People have been floating the idea of doing this for the life sciences too, where the cost of performing an experiment can be very high (animals, enzymes, local permitting and legal considerations etc. on top of the man hours). It would be very useful to see the results of an experiment you want to do(or something resembling it) but didn't follow up on it for whatever reason and would definitely accelerate research. And would probably help with the weird incentive structure and secrecy issues academia is pointlessly built around.

When I worked in crypto 20 years ago there was a journal like this which took papers that were only a few paragraphs long for quick results. I think it was called Electronics Letters.

I'm not sure that would be a net benefit over research blogs or something like a technical report directly published by a lab/working group to be quite honest. In a few domains I've recently looked at these notes to the editor / commentary sections seem to only be pseudo-reviewed and I'd say the likelihood of an IEEE rubberstamped one pager on perpetual motion would be non-zero.

> I'm not sure that would be a net benefit over research

> blogs or something like a technical report directly

> published by a lab/working group to be quite honest.

I think this is kind of the problem, half of this stuff sits on a webpage somewhere completely unread and not really reference-able.

> I'd say the likelihood of an IEEE rubberstamped one pager

> on perpetual motion would be non-zero.

I would hope that each single page would be reviewed with the same integrity as a six pager. Of course, it's not impossible crap leaks through to any conference/journal.

It’s the stuff you 60-80% believe but you don’t want to put your name on it because once you do people assume you believe it 99% or more. That’s unfortunately how publishing it works.

There is a venue for that stuff and it's in blog posts. The main problem however is that for a hype topic like this there are so many blog posts that it's hard to find the gems with valueable insights between all of the badly regurgitated common knowledge.

I'm curious which category you put this one in. :D

Definitely not the latter ;) I think it's too new of an article to already qualify as a gem, but it's certainly made me think about a few things with a new perspective, so there is that :)

All of this stuff already exists. By design it excludes people who would likely disparage the lack of rigor. And sometimes other people get caught in that net.

That's a good way. It's called knowing your audience. No one wants to be savaged on HN or Reddit by a bunch of people.

Require people to publish their code.

Good tricks or intuitions don't stay hidden for long. Everything good is quickly published, can easily be found in high quality implementations, and is discussed on GH issues, Pytorch forums, r/MachineLearning, or Twitter.

That just kicks the can down the road a step, though: that just makes the folklore knowing where to find the good GitHub issues.

The point is, the experts do freely share this knowledge. Making it accessible to "casual reader" would be low on my priority list.

Other fields have their popular message boards. It's not just programmers.

What are the popular message boards for practicing physicists and mathematicians?

The Mathematics Stack Exchange has consistently surprised me (in a good way) in their helpfulness and rigor.

There are blogs

But, then again, lots of academics will outright ignore blogs - if they're ever brought up in "serious" discussion.

> Reputations are at stake, and most people are doing impression management

What's the saying about academia? The politics are so vicious because stakes are so small? It's pretty ironic because the stakes are larger for a lot of decisions made by engineers in industry, but we seem content with swapping best practices.

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