Understandable. I’d argue that nod posts should be quite short. But I’ve been disappointed how often what should have been a nod post was new to many folks—hence posting it.
To be clear, despite de-upvoting, I still do like the post and think it pretty easily passes the threshold of “worth posting” :)
But yeah, that might be true about things that seem like common knowledge actually not being common knowledge. I think I’m a little biased in the direction of assuming it’s common knowledge but I also don’t want to overcorrect, so my best guess is still that the research paper stuff is pretty common knowledge.
Note that it’s a post of a fairly well known concept. The intent is to highlight “holy crap y’all, please actually get through papers, like, at all”.
Perhaps I need to converse more interactively with those who haven’t been reading papers to figure out why they don’t. Anyone who found the post to be obvious, but who doesn’t read many papers, can you go into detail about why not?
Wait, these seem like two different things:
If you’re going to read a paper, how do you go about it.
The decision to read papers at all.
Personally I don’t read any sorts of academic papers because, well, it doesn’t seem like the best use of my time and I don’t find it particularly fun. If I was going to read papers though I’d definitely take the multi-pass approach.
So I’m basically the target audience for the OP—I read a lot, of all kinds of stuff, and almost zero papers. I’m an autodidact with no academic background.
I appreciated the post. I usually need a few reminders that ‘this thing has value’ before I finally get around to exploring it :)
I would say, as the target audience, I’m probably representative when I say that a big part of the reason we don’t read papers is a lack of access, and a lack of discovery tools. I signed up for Elicit a while back, but as above—haven’t gotten around to using it yet :D
To be clear, despite de-upvoting, I still do like the post and think it pretty easily passes the threshold of “worth posting” :)
Understood!
Hmm, the argument I was imagining myself to be making by making that linkpost (note that it is a linkpost with mild editing to improve reading speed to my & firstuserhere’s eyes) was to attempt to reduce imagined cost of a skim to people who were putting off papers due to thinking they needed to read sequentially. For me, at least, seeing that link a few years ago was revelatory.
Perhaps I do still need to figure out what I want to say about the decision to read papers at all, then. Because it is my view that unless one is reading a lot of papers a month, you’re not going to have a very strong understanding of the manifold of deep learning programs. And they need to be well selected, diverse papers, driven by both curiosity and news, topically relevant, you likely want ai helping you find them. More or less, my view is that the strongest form of cyborgism is to get everyone up to a reading speed where they can get useful alignment-relevant stuff out of skimming research papers not directly in their part of the alignment field.
For some examples of papers I wish more people—especially ones at miri—would at least skim the abstracts to, see my papers posts.
I see. People’s decision/willingness to read papers at all seems like something plausibly worth exploring more. “Talking to users” seems like a good place to start (not that you haven’t already).
To be clear, despite de-upvoting, I still do like the post and think it pretty easily passes the threshold of “worth posting” :)
But yeah, that might be true about things that seem like common knowledge actually not being common knowledge. I think I’m a little biased in the direction of assuming it’s common knowledge but I also don’t want to overcorrect, so my best guess is still that the research paper stuff is pretty common knowledge.
Wait, these seem like two different things:
If you’re going to read a paper, how do you go about it.
The decision to read papers at all.
Personally I don’t read any sorts of academic papers because, well, it doesn’t seem like the best use of my time and I don’t find it particularly fun. If I was going to read papers though I’d definitely take the multi-pass approach.
So I’m basically the target audience for the OP—I read a lot, of all kinds of stuff, and almost zero papers. I’m an autodidact with no academic background.
I appreciated the post. I usually need a few reminders that ‘this thing has value’ before I finally get around to exploring it :)
I would say, as the target audience, I’m probably representative when I say that a big part of the reason we don’t read papers is a lack of access, and a lack of discovery tools. I signed up for Elicit a while back, but as above—haven’t gotten around to using it yet :D
Understood!
Hmm, the argument I was imagining myself to be making by making that linkpost (note that it is a linkpost with mild editing to improve reading speed to my & firstuserhere’s eyes) was to attempt to reduce imagined cost of a skim to people who were putting off papers due to thinking they needed to read sequentially. For me, at least, seeing that link a few years ago was revelatory.
Perhaps I do still need to figure out what I want to say about the decision to read papers at all, then. Because it is my view that unless one is reading a lot of papers a month, you’re not going to have a very strong understanding of the manifold of deep learning programs. And they need to be well selected, diverse papers, driven by both curiosity and news, topically relevant, you likely want ai helping you find them. More or less, my view is that the strongest form of cyborgism is to get everyone up to a reading speed where they can get useful alignment-relevant stuff out of skimming research papers not directly in their part of the alignment field.
For some examples of papers I wish more people—especially ones at miri—would at least skim the abstracts to, see my papers posts.
see also this comment
I see. People’s decision/willingness to read papers at all seems like something plausibly worth exploring more. “Talking to users” seems like a good place to start (not that you haven’t already).