It's a Good Thing I Don't Care What You Think

> 3) We (academics) could try to judge research by how many people read the work in question and get something out of it. Maybe we need a system for recording readers’ ratings of philosophical articles.

> 5) We could continue the status quo. Almost everyone just keeps ignoring almost all academic writing.

The philosophy is weird.. in both CS and physics, having your paper read is very important. People pay a lot of attention (sometimes too much attention) to personal "number of citations" and "impact factor" of the journals/conferences where one gets published. And seeing the number of citations of your paper grow gives you a nice fuzzy feeling that what you are doing is not useless.

And thinking about, this makes a lot of sense -- over my grad student carrer, I have looked at thousands of papers, and fully read/understood at least a hundred. At the same time, I have produced less than a dozen papers myself. Even with a "long tail" distribution, this means that I should expect hundreds of readers for any paper, and at least a few citations.