It was helpfully explaining a possibly-confusing conceptual point. It would have made a nice little blog post. Alas! After the authors translated their nice little conceptual clarification into academic-ese, including thorough literature reviews, formalizations, and so on, it came out to 22 pages.
Fwiw I don’t think the main paper would have been much shorter if we’d aimed to write a blog post instead, unless we changed our intended audience. It’s a sufficiently nuanced conceptual point that you do need most of the content that is in there.
We could have avoided the appendices, but then we’re relying on people to trust us when we make a claim that something is a theorem, since we’re not showing the proof. We could have avoided implementing the examples in a real codebase, though I do think iterating on the examples in actual code made them better, and also people wouldn’t have believed us when we said you can solve this with deep RL (in fact even after we actually implemented it some people still didn’t believe me, or at least were very confused, when I said that).
Iirc I was more annoyed by the peer reviews for similar reasons to what you say.
(Btw you can see some of my thoughts on this topic in the answer to “So what does academia care about, and how is it different from useful research?” in my FAQ.)
Fwiw I don’t think the main paper would have been much shorter if we’d aimed to write a blog post instead, unless we changed our intended audience. It’s a sufficiently nuanced conceptual point that you do need most of the content that is in there.
We could have avoided the appendices, but then we’re relying on people to trust us when we make a claim that something is a theorem, since we’re not showing the proof. We could have avoided implementing the examples in a real codebase, though I do think iterating on the examples in actual code made them better, and also people wouldn’t have believed us when we said you can solve this with deep RL (in fact even after we actually implemented it some people still didn’t believe me, or at least were very confused, when I said that).
Iirc I was more annoyed by the peer reviews for similar reasons to what you say.
(Btw you can see some of my thoughts on this topic in the answer to “So what does academia care about, and how is it different from useful research?” in my FAQ.)
Oops. Thanks. I should have checked more carefully before writing that. I was wrong and have now put a correction into the post.