Something about the aesthetics of what makes a “good” peer-reviewed physics paper, based on my personal experience, probably including my anecdote about solar cell R&D from here
I followed this link thinking that it looks relevant to my question, but the way Holden delineates what academia is interested in, it should totally be interested in my ideas:
I, today, when I think about what academia does, I think it is really set up to push the frontier of knowledge, the vast majority, and I think especially in the harder sciences. I would say the vast majority of what is going on in academic is people are trying to do something novel, interesting, clever, creative, different, new, provocative, that really pushes the boundaries of knowledge forward in a new way.
versus what Holden says are important questions that academia neglects:
There’s an intellectual topic, it’s really important to the world but it’s not advancing the frontier of knowledge. It’s more figuring out something in a pragmatic way that is going to inform what decision makers should do, and also there’s no one decision maker asking for it as would be the case with Government or corporations.
The rest of your comment seems to be hinting that maybe academia is ignoring my ideas because it doesn’t like the aesthetics of my writing? (Not sure if that was your point, or if those bullet points weren’t supposed to be directly related to my question...) Even if that’s true though, I’m still puzzled why academia hasn’t reinvented any of my ideas (which have been independently invented multiple times outside of academia, e.g. Nick Szabo and Satoshi with b-money, Paul Christiano with UDASSA).
Hmm, yeah I guess what I wrote wasn’t too directly helpful for your question.
the way Holden delineates what academia is interested in, it should totally be interested in my ideas…
I think Holden forgot “trendy”. Trendy is very important. I think people in academia have a tacit shared understanding of the currently-trending topics / questions, within which there’s a contest to find interesting new ideas / progress. If an idea is important but not trendy, it’s liable to get neglected, I think. It’s kinda like in clothing fashion: if you find a brilliant use of beads, but beads aren’t fashion-forward this year, roughly nobody will care.
Of course, the trends change, and indeed everyone is trying to be the pioneer of the next hot topic. There are a lot of factors that go into “what is the next hot topic”, including catching the interest of a critical mass of respected people (or people-who-control-funding), which in turn involves them feeling it’s “exciting”, and that they themselves have an angle for making further progress in this area, etc. But trendiness doesn’t systematically track objective importance, and it’s nobody’s job to make it so.
At least, that’s what things felt like to me in the areas of physics I worked in (optics, materials science, and related). I’m much less familiar with philosophy, economics, etc.
Remember, aside from commercially-relevant ideas, success for academia research scientists (and philosophers) is 100% determined by “am I impressing my peers?”—grants, promotions, invited talks, etc. are all determined by that. So if I write a paper and the prestigious people in my field are unanimously saying “I don’t know about that thing, it’s not an area that I know or care about”, the result is just as bad for me and my career as if those people had unanimously said “this is lousy work”.
it doesn’t like the aesthetics of my writing
To be clear, when I said “the aesthetic of what makes a good X”, I meant it in a really broad sense. Maybe I should have said “the implicit criteria of what makes a good X” instead. So “the paper concerns a currently-trendy topic” can be part of that, even though it’s not really “aesthetics” in the sense of beauty. E.g., “the aesthetic of what makes a good peer-reviewed experimental condensed-matter physics paper” has sometimes been greatly helped by “it somehow involves nanotechnology”.
From the years in academia studying neuroscience and related aspects of bioengineering and medicine development… yeah. So much about how effort gets allocated is not ‘what would be good for our country’s population in expectation, or good for all humanity’. It’s mostly about ‘what would make an impressive sounding research paper that could get into an esteemed journal?’, ‘what would be relatively cheap and easy to do, but sound disproportionately cool?’, ‘what do we guess that the granting agency we are applying to will like the sound of?’. So much emphasis on catching waves of trendiness, and so little on estimating expected value of the results.
Research an unprofitable preventative-health treatment which plausibly might have significant impacts on a wide segment of the population? Booooring.
Research an impractically-expensive-to-produce fascinatingly complex clever new treatment for an incredibly rare orphan disease? Awesome.
I was thinking of writing a short post kinda on this topic (EDIT TO ADD: it’s up! See Some (problematic) aesthetics of what constitutes good work in academia), weaving together:
Holden on academia not answering important questions
This tweet I wrote on the aesthetics of what makes a “good” peer-reviewed psychology paper
Something about the aesthetics of what makes a “good” peer-reviewed AI/ML paper, probably including the anecdote where DeepMind wrote a whole proper academia-friendly ML paper whose upshot was the same as a couple sentences in an old Abram Demski blog post
Something about the aesthetics of what makes a “good” peer-reviewed physics paper, based on my personal experience, probably including my anecdote about solar cell R&D from here
Not academia but bhauth on the aesthetics of what makes a “good” VC pitch
maybe a couple other things (suggestions anyone?)
Homework problem for the reader: what are your “aesthetics of success”, and how are they screwing you over?
I followed this link thinking that it looks relevant to my question, but the way Holden delineates what academia is interested in, it should totally be interested in my ideas:
versus what Holden says are important questions that academia neglects:
The rest of your comment seems to be hinting that maybe academia is ignoring my ideas because it doesn’t like the aesthetics of my writing? (Not sure if that was your point, or if those bullet points weren’t supposed to be directly related to my question...) Even if that’s true though, I’m still puzzled why academia hasn’t reinvented any of my ideas (which have been independently invented multiple times outside of academia, e.g. Nick Szabo and Satoshi with b-money, Paul Christiano with UDASSA).
Hmm, yeah I guess what I wrote wasn’t too directly helpful for your question.
I think Holden forgot “trendy”. Trendy is very important. I think people in academia have a tacit shared understanding of the currently-trending topics / questions, within which there’s a contest to find interesting new ideas / progress. If an idea is important but not trendy, it’s liable to get neglected, I think. It’s kinda like in clothing fashion: if you find a brilliant use of beads, but beads aren’t fashion-forward this year, roughly nobody will care.
Of course, the trends change, and indeed everyone is trying to be the pioneer of the next hot topic. There are a lot of factors that go into “what is the next hot topic”, including catching the interest of a critical mass of respected people (or people-who-control-funding), which in turn involves them feeling it’s “exciting”, and that they themselves have an angle for making further progress in this area, etc. But trendiness doesn’t systematically track objective importance, and it’s nobody’s job to make it so.
At least, that’s what things felt like to me in the areas of physics I worked in (optics, materials science, and related). I’m much less familiar with philosophy, economics, etc.
Remember, aside from commercially-relevant ideas, success for academia research scientists (and philosophers) is 100% determined by “am I impressing my peers?”—grants, promotions, invited talks, etc. are all determined by that. So if I write a paper and the prestigious people in my field are unanimously saying “I don’t know about that thing, it’s not an area that I know or care about”, the result is just as bad for me and my career as if those people had unanimously said “this is lousy work”.
To be clear, when I said “the aesthetic of what makes a good X”, I meant it in a really broad sense. Maybe I should have said “the implicit criteria of what makes a good X” instead. So “the paper concerns a currently-trendy topic” can be part of that, even though it’s not really “aesthetics” in the sense of beauty. E.g., “the aesthetic of what makes a good peer-reviewed experimental condensed-matter physics paper” has sometimes been greatly helped by “it somehow involves nanotechnology”.
From the years in academia studying neuroscience and related aspects of bioengineering and medicine development… yeah. So much about how effort gets allocated is not ‘what would be good for our country’s population in expectation, or good for all humanity’. It’s mostly about ‘what would make an impressive sounding research paper that could get into an esteemed journal?’, ‘what would be relatively cheap and easy to do, but sound disproportionately cool?’, ‘what do we guess that the granting agency we are applying to will like the sound of?’. So much emphasis on catching waves of trendiness, and so little on estimating expected value of the results.
Research an unprofitable preventative-health treatment which plausibly might have significant impacts on a wide segment of the population? Booooring.
Research an impractically-expensive-to-produce fascinatingly complex clever new treatment for an incredibly rare orphan disease? Awesome.