Part 1: https://mander.xyz/post/13579080
this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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Science devolved into politics. :-(
I find it especially amusing that in my Lemmy feed the post right before this one is a quote from a book by a Nobel laureate talking about the importance of self-marketing, politicking and ladder climbing in academia. You know, all the stuff that isn't science that plays a part in what Yann LeCun considers to play a vital role in what counts as science.
ladder climbing in academia is not fun, but I feel like communicating (or marketing) science is a essential part of scientific process, as we are often the only person able to describe our work in great technical detail.
A famous professor once told me "we are all entertainers", which seems absurd from an outside prospective, but is a notion that I and many of my colleagues have now found peace with.
Scrambled and unreadable mathematics should seldom be valued in modern scientific community, IMO; not everyone is Ramanujan after all. Even among geniuses, from Poincaré to Hilbert to Godel to Grothendick and to Tao, most genius are able to communicate their research quite well, and thrive in academia.
Although I have no doubt that, like every other field, academia is filled with politics; and publishing process probably helps enforce such politics.
However, I would argue that modern academic publishing is absolutely necessary to produce "useful" science. In order for people to build upon others' result, they will need strong guarantee of correctness, which necessitates the review process ; and top conferences can also save researchers a lot of time to find impactful new research, especially new ideas.
That being said, I am absolutely not suggesting the publishing system is not without its problems; but I kind of agree with LeCun here, publishing is a important part of the process, and it is will probably out-last both Tesla and Elon.