Extra stuff as I get dm’s; will go into book in 3-12 months; expect these to be more messy than the post above
1: Masters,PHD’s etc isn’t a very strong indicator of skill level for AI ; like- they probably aren’t able to implement a cutting edge paper with no code (even in the same subfield); they might struggle to implement a paper with code,too.Can’t say much about other fields ; this was my bad I knew the skill levels were vague but didn’t realize how mixed of an indicator it has become
2:humanities is in such a “strange” spot
jreg has more impact than most phd’s—not just in the sense he’s a political pundit for zoomers, but he has created new research ideas/topics
but besides that- there’s a weird vibe in social science of using circular logic to prove things (not all the time obviously)
I think it’s also just that polsci especially is very much “believe whatever you want”, arguments is a glorified game of chess- the more you know the book moves, the more you can counter
as for like- psych? there is def some groups doing online stuff here, especially anyone looking into children of the internet stuff
more rare; it’s both walled off by academia, but also sometimes misrepresented via video essayists
(i.e- picking papers to fit an agenda; rather than using papers as a datapoint- which goes back to arguments and counters being a glorified game of chess)
as for philosophy
I’m going to be honest,I cannot,for the life of me,figure out what philosophy is
other than it being values and views on things from a bunch of old dead people
it does feel like a lot of kids and teens get into philosophy cause its some kind of mythical subject
at least, like 10 years ago, but i think it’s also because a lot of stuff that im assuming fall under philosophy i’d place into other fields eg:
rationalism and accelerationism etc is cultural (social?) theory
bias spotting? metascience and psychology memetics? - it’s its own field now,(something relating to psyops or something)
by this definition of philosophy- it does feel like if theres more non academics producing useful works than academics
I think this is also partially cause of the replication crisis
impact factors are lower than described, and sometimes inversed or no impact at all especially because these things are non linear something important to ask yourself, what shapes what people research?
it feels like more popular ideas tend to get researched more; even if the ideas aren’t from academia; though this might be bias as i haven’t fully looked into it
3: having juniors do good first issues for a github project of a research tool is nice, but I think with the rise of claude etc; the skill floor has increased so a lot of good first issues probably require you to spend like a week or two looking at the codebase,which might scare people off because of reasons i mentioned somewhere in the post.Google summer of code fixed this issue by having a few weeks to talk to the mentor,look at the codebase,
4:DAO’s can be swapped with the word desci and not too much changes but Desci is to opensci as the labs are to DAO’S
desci is the larger landscape for the crypto bros, opensci labs is the larger landscape for the independent research labs
5: yes,publishing negative results somewhere is good.
6:scicomm issues run a lot deeper with scientists just being busy etc
7:paper lengths could be both longer and shorter; maybe more meta analysis?
Extra stuff as I get dm’s; will go into book in 3-12 months; expect these to be more messy than the post above
1: Masters,PHD’s etc isn’t a very strong indicator of skill level for AI ; like- they probably aren’t able to implement a cutting edge paper with no code (even in the same subfield); they might struggle to implement a paper with code,too.Can’t say much about other fields ; this was my bad I knew the skill levels were vague but didn’t realize how mixed of an indicator it has become
2:humanities is in such a “strange” spot
jreg has more impact than most phd’s—not just in the sense he’s a political pundit for zoomers, but he has created new research ideas/topics
but besides that- there’s a weird vibe in social science of using circular logic to prove things (not all the time obviously)
sci-comm,like real research sciomm, helps https://x.com/joliegans/status/1964062256561619025
I think it’s also just that polsci especially is very much “believe whatever you want”, arguments is a glorified game of chess- the more you know the book moves, the more you can counter
as for like- psych? there is def some groups doing online stuff here, especially anyone looking into children of the internet stuff
more rare; it’s both walled off by academia, but also sometimes misrepresented via video essayists
(i.e- picking papers to fit an agenda; rather than using papers as a datapoint- which goes back to arguments and counters being a glorified game of chess)
as for philosophy
I’m going to be honest,I cannot,for the life of me,figure out what philosophy is
other than it being values and views on things from a bunch of old dead people
it does feel like a lot of kids and teens get into philosophy cause its some kind of mythical subject
at least, like 10 years ago, but i think it’s also because a lot of stuff that im assuming fall under philosophy i’d place into other fields eg:
rationalism and accelerationism etc is cultural (social?) theory
bias spotting? metascience and psychology memetics? - it’s its own field now,(something relating to psyops or something)
by this definition of philosophy- it does feel like if theres more non academics producing useful works than academics
I think this is also partially cause of the replication crisis
impact factors are lower than described, and sometimes inversed or no impact at all especially because these things are non linear
something important to ask yourself, what shapes what people research?
it feels like more popular ideas tend to get researched more; even if the ideas aren’t from academia; though this might be bias as i haven’t fully looked into it
3: having juniors do good first issues for a github project of a research tool is nice, but I think with the rise of claude etc; the skill floor has increased so a lot of good first issues probably require you to spend like a week or two looking at the codebase,which might scare people off because of reasons i mentioned somewhere in the post.Google summer of code fixed this issue by having a few weeks to talk to the mentor,look at the codebase,
4:DAO’s can be swapped with the word desci and not too much changes but Desci is to opensci as the labs are to DAO’S
desci is the larger landscape for the crypto bros, opensci labs is the larger landscape for the independent research labs
5: yes,publishing negative results somewhere is good.
6:scicomm issues run a lot deeper with scientists just being busy etc
7:paper lengths could be both longer and shorter; maybe more meta analysis?