One very interesting implication. If this applies to fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology and artificial intelligence it probably applies to any field that is not so diseased that there’s no there there. Thus the barriers to going from knowing nothing about a field to being able to write a publishable paper are actually relatively low in quite a few fields, particularly those where you don’t need lab equipment or great mathematical sophistication.
Academic paper reading slackers of Lesswrong, to the social science and law paper writing! It’ll get you into a good grad school!
Thus the barriers to going from knowing nothing about a field to being able to write a publishable paper are actually relatively low in quite a few fields, particularly those where you don’t need lab equipment or great mathematical sophistication.
I think your impression is wrong. You are right that in many areas, if you’re reasonably smart and have a strong amateur interest, it doesn’t take very much time and effort to start asking questions and possibly even generating insight at the same level as accredited scholars. However, in such areas, and in many others as well, the most difficult obstacles are of different sorts.
First, a perfectly clear, logical, honest, and readable account of your work is often ipso facto unpublishable: what is required is writing according to unofficial, tacitly acknowledged rules that are extremely hard to figure out on your own. (If anything, academic publishing is so competitive that unless you have an earth-shattering breakthrough, it is difficult or even impossible to publish without intensely optimizing for passing the actual review and editorial process, rather than following some idealistic criteria of quality.)
Second, of course, there is the factor of brand-names, networking, and patronage. Each publication venue has some minimal status threshold for authors and their affiliation, below which your chances of publication are practically nil no matter what the content of your paper may be. (Again, with the possible hypothetical exception of evident stunning breakthroughs.)
A perfectly clear, logical, honest, and readable account of your work is often ipso
facto unpublishable: what is required is writing according to unofficial, tacitly
acknowledged rules that are extremely hard to figure out on your own.
This has not been my experience. My experience with journal editors and reviewers has been that they want a clear and readable account, but it probably varies a great deal from field to field.
Your point about brand names and networks, however, is very well taken.
This has not been my experience. My experience with journal editors and reviewers has been that they want a clear and readable account, but it probably varies a great deal from field to field.
In many fields—but not all, as you note, and it’s hard to speculate on the exact proportion—there’s an evil arms race in fundamentally dishonest self-promotion. Basically, you must employ every imaginable spin short of outright lying to blow up your contribution out of all proportion and minimize the perceived shortcomings of your work. If instead you write up a complete, straightforward, and honest account that will leave the reader informed as accurately as possible, there’s no way you’re getting published unless it’s a very extraordinary breakthrough.
Of course, even in such circumstances, you want your paper to be clear and readable in the sense that the reviewers will read it easily and end up convinced by your claims and impressed by its high-status qualities, without too may unpleasant questions occurring to them. But this is mostly about Dark Arts, not real clarity of exposition.
It is true that people in academia, as everywhere else, have a combination of low and high motives for what they do. The question is, on what grounds should one assume an average less-wronger is better in this respect than an average academic?
In my experience the biggest barrier in “mathy” areas is getting up to speed. Getting ideas accepted is a significantly bigger hurdle than getting ideas published. Most stuff that gets published is either not great or not useful (obscure) and often both.
edit: to clarify: I don’t see that the way one thinks about spreading lesswrong memes is different from the way one thinks about spreading “what I have published” memes. Both high and low motives are involved in both cases, and suboptimal equilibria are involved in both cases in the sense that one must think of ways of competing with other people’s memes.
This sounds an awful lot like the situation in job hunting, at least in IT—you have to lie as much as you can get away with because if you don’t, the position will go to someone who did and you starve. The required level of bullshit increases over time in the manner of a dollar auction.
For professional academics I suppose it is job hunting, in a sense. I wonder if it generalizes to any situation where there’s a surplus of competitors for a difficult-to-measure result and opting-out of the competition isn’t an option.
I agree. I wasn’t saying that anyone will pay attention to what you get published, (but IIRC from a Vassar comment somewhere, most tenured academics outside top departments don’t get any attention either.)
I didn’t say that you could published in top field journals after six months work, but I suspect that in at least some fields that would be possible, albeit maybe only in low quality journals. Without a doubt you need to conform to the unpublished as well as the public criteria for publication; otherwise you might as well do it as a blogpost. But if you can’t figure out those criteria on your own there are still grad students and professors at low prestige universities who might co-author with you if you’ve got the start of something publishable and are persistent with enough of them.
Do you have any specific evidence on the prestige factor? Double blind peer review would seem to argue against this but then again papers are often refused before reaching this stage as “not suitable for us”.
Getting papers published is probably not the most efficient way of spreading knowledge, except in highly technical fields where the criteria are likely to be relatively transparent and high anyway, but it would make getting into a graduate programme substantially easier, and might be worthwhile for other purposes.
Do you have any specific evidence on the prestige factor? Double blind peer review would seem to argue against this but then again papers are often refused before reaching this stage as “not suitable for us”.
Well, clearly, I can’t give any anecdotal evidence with too much detail in public. I’ll just say that “prestige” is probably the most diplomatic term one might choose to use there.
Regarding double-blind review, it has always seemed to me as a farce. Any particular research community is a small world, so how can you possibly be competent to review a paper if you can’t guess who the author might be based on the content and the work it builds on? Then, of course, there are the editors, who know everything, whose discretion is large, and who can often drop hints to the reviewers one way or another.
This actually seems unlikely—first year PhD students publish papers in string theory all the time. My guess is that it would suffice for you to have the right conversations with the right people.
Whatever the field, there is probably a lot of perfectly do-able research problems that no-one has yet gotten round to doing. The problem being, of course, that it’s pretty hard to recognise which these problems are without having the sort of in-depth knowledge that comes from years studying inside the field.
One very interesting implication. If this applies to fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology and artificial intelligence it probably applies to any field that is not so diseased that there’s no there there. Thus the barriers to going from knowing nothing about a field to being able to write a publishable paper are actually relatively low in quite a few fields, particularly those where you don’t need lab equipment or great mathematical sophistication.
Academic paper reading slackers of Lesswrong, to the social science and law paper writing! It’ll get you into a good grad school!
I think your impression is wrong. You are right that in many areas, if you’re reasonably smart and have a strong amateur interest, it doesn’t take very much time and effort to start asking questions and possibly even generating insight at the same level as accredited scholars. However, in such areas, and in many others as well, the most difficult obstacles are of different sorts.
First, a perfectly clear, logical, honest, and readable account of your work is often ipso facto unpublishable: what is required is writing according to unofficial, tacitly acknowledged rules that are extremely hard to figure out on your own. (If anything, academic publishing is so competitive that unless you have an earth-shattering breakthrough, it is difficult or even impossible to publish without intensely optimizing for passing the actual review and editorial process, rather than following some idealistic criteria of quality.)
Second, of course, there is the factor of brand-names, networking, and patronage. Each publication venue has some minimal status threshold for authors and their affiliation, below which your chances of publication are practically nil no matter what the content of your paper may be. (Again, with the possible hypothetical exception of evident stunning breakthroughs.)
This has not been my experience. My experience with journal editors and reviewers has been that they want a clear and readable account, but it probably varies a great deal from field to field.
Your point about brand names and networks, however, is very well taken.
In many fields—but not all, as you note, and it’s hard to speculate on the exact proportion—there’s an evil arms race in fundamentally dishonest self-promotion. Basically, you must employ every imaginable spin short of outright lying to blow up your contribution out of all proportion and minimize the perceived shortcomings of your work. If instead you write up a complete, straightforward, and honest account that will leave the reader informed as accurately as possible, there’s no way you’re getting published unless it’s a very extraordinary breakthrough.
Of course, even in such circumstances, you want your paper to be clear and readable in the sense that the reviewers will read it easily and end up convinced by your claims and impressed by its high-status qualities, without too may unpleasant questions occurring to them. But this is mostly about Dark Arts, not real clarity of exposition.
It is true that people in academia, as everywhere else, have a combination of low and high motives for what they do. The question is, on what grounds should one assume an average less-wronger is better in this respect than an average academic?
In my experience the biggest barrier in “mathy” areas is getting up to speed. Getting ideas accepted is a significantly bigger hurdle than getting ideas published. Most stuff that gets published is either not great or not useful (obscure) and often both.
edit: to clarify: I don’t see that the way one thinks about spreading lesswrong memes is different from the way one thinks about spreading “what I have published” memes. Both high and low motives are involved in both cases, and suboptimal equilibria are involved in both cases in the sense that one must think of ways of competing with other people’s memes.
This sounds an awful lot like the situation in job hunting, at least in IT—you have to lie as much as you can get away with because if you don’t, the position will go to someone who did and you starve. The required level of bullshit increases over time in the manner of a dollar auction.
For professional academics I suppose it is job hunting, in a sense. I wonder if it generalizes to any situation where there’s a surplus of competitors for a difficult-to-measure result and opting-out of the competition isn’t an option.
I agree. I wasn’t saying that anyone will pay attention to what you get published, (but IIRC from a Vassar comment somewhere, most tenured academics outside top departments don’t get any attention either.)
I didn’t say that you could published in top field journals after six months work, but I suspect that in at least some fields that would be possible, albeit maybe only in low quality journals. Without a doubt you need to conform to the unpublished as well as the public criteria for publication; otherwise you might as well do it as a blogpost. But if you can’t figure out those criteria on your own there are still grad students and professors at low prestige universities who might co-author with you if you’ve got the start of something publishable and are persistent with enough of them.
Do you have any specific evidence on the prestige factor? Double blind peer review would seem to argue against this but then again papers are often refused before reaching this stage as “not suitable for us”.
Getting papers published is probably not the most efficient way of spreading knowledge, except in highly technical fields where the criteria are likely to be relatively transparent and high anyway, but it would make getting into a graduate programme substantially easier, and might be worthwhile for other purposes.
Well, clearly, I can’t give any anecdotal evidence with too much detail in public. I’ll just say that “prestige” is probably the most diplomatic term one might choose to use there.
Regarding double-blind review, it has always seemed to me as a farce. Any particular research community is a small world, so how can you possibly be competent to review a paper if you can’t guess who the author might be based on the content and the work it builds on? Then, of course, there are the editors, who know everything, whose discretion is large, and who can often drop hints to the reviewers one way or another.
I think it would take me a very long time to get good enough at category theory or string theory to publish a paper.
This actually seems unlikely—first year PhD students publish papers in string theory all the time. My guess is that it would suffice for you to have the right conversations with the right people.
Whatever the field, there is probably a lot of perfectly do-able research problems that no-one has yet gotten round to doing. The problem being, of course, that it’s pretty hard to recognise which these problems are without having the sort of in-depth knowledge that comes from years studying inside the field.