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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Don't over-interpret what I'm saying here. I'm not on some "mission from God" to ignore all high citation count papers. My point is only that sometimes I want to pointedly look through things that aren't "what others are looking at and building on", on the basis that sometimes things get "lost" for whatever reason. Ideas show up, are maybe ahead of their time, or get published in the wrong journal, or get overshadowed by a "hot" contemporaneous item, etc., and then stay hidden due to path dependence. My goal is to make an active effort to break that path dependent flow and maybe dredge up something that is actually useful but that has remained "below the radar".

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The entire point is that experts are doing this triage for you, and building upon fruitful lanes of research.

To think that as an outsider to a field you are qualified to discover 'gems' (and between the lines here is a bit of an assumption that one is more qualified than researchers in the field, who are of course trying to discover 'gems') seems misguided.

I'm not an "outsider to the field" though. I'm just not affiliated with an academic institution and I don't make my living as an academic researcher.

But I am educated in my chosen field and I read the same books and journals and attend the same conferences, as the people you're referring to. The biggest difference is only in incentives and imposed constraints. I have a lot more freedom since I'm not operating within the "publish or perish" paradigm.

Pretty much all tenured researchers are beyond the publish or perish stage, and I’d conjecture they also publish most of the highly cited works, since writing good papers helped them get tenured. There’s millions of such people worldwide.

Assuming there’s some “incentives and imposed constraints” anywhere uniform to academics that you’re magically free from that lets you turn low cited papers into gems at a higher rate than all of academia combined is the most self delusional, simplistic, aggrandizing belief I’ve heard in a long time.

You are completely mis-interpreting what I'm saying. To the point that it seems almost intentional and lacking good faith. As such, I'm done with this conversation. Have a nice day.

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