[2] Moldbug’s “What’s wrong with CS research” is a witty and essentially accurate overview of this situation. He mostly limits himself to the discussion of programming language research, but a similar scenario can be seen in some other related fields too.
With the slight problem that Moldbug appears to be writing as a Systems Weenie, and being someone with cursory training on multiple sides of this issue (PL/Formal Verification and systems), I don’t think his assessment there is accurate.
When assessing an academic field, you should include a kind of null hypothesis: “Academia is investigating interesting problems, but I’m a weenie who doesn’t take a complete or unbiased look at the state of academia.” This is often true.
Further example: a couple weeks ago I emailed Daniel Dewey about his Value Learners paper. I also read the ensuing LessWrong discussion. It turned out that the fundamental idea behind value learners was published in academia as a PhD thesis in ~2003, and someone linked it.
So why didn’t we all know about this? Because we were weenies who didn’t look at the academic consensus before diving in ourselves.
With the slight problem that Moldbug appears to be writing as a Systems Weenie, and being someone with cursory training on multiple sides of this issue (PL/Formal Verification and systems), I don’t think his assessment there is accurate.
When assessing an academic field, you should include a kind of null hypothesis: “Academia is investigating interesting problems, but I’m a weenie who doesn’t take a complete or unbiased look at the state of academia.” This is often true.
Further example: a couple weeks ago I emailed Daniel Dewey about his Value Learners paper. I also read the ensuing LessWrong discussion. It turned out that the fundamental idea behind value learners was published in academia as a PhD thesis in ~2003, and someone linked it.
So why didn’t we all know about this? Because we were weenies who didn’t look at the academic consensus before diving in ourselves.