There is a half-joke in our lab that the more times a paper is rejected, the bigger or more praised it will be once it's accepted. This simply alludes to the fact that many times reviewers can be bothered with seeing value in certain ideas or topics in a field unless it is "novel" or the paper is written in a way that is geared towards them, rather than being relegated to "just engineering effort" (this is my biased experience). However, tailoring and submitting certain ideas/papers to venues that value the specific work is the best way I have found to work around this (but even then it takes some time to really understand which conferences value which style of work, even if it appears they value it).
I do think there is some saving grace in the section the author writes about "The Science Thing Was Improved," implying that these changes in the paper make the paper better and easier to read. I do agree very much with this; many times, people have bad figures, poor tables or charts, bad captions, etc., that make things harder to understand or outright misleading. But I only agree with the author to a certain extent. Rather, I think that there should also be changes made on the other side, the side of the reviewer or venue, to provide high-quality reviews and assessments of papers. But I think this is a bit outside the scope of what the author talks about in their post.
Sure it's framed in terms of "helping you get published" (which feels kind of gross) but I think ultimately it's really about tips for authors to get their points across in a clear and engaging way.
It's the difference between being a Cassandra or the Oracle at Delphi. Maybe the only difference between the two was presentation? (Classicists, feel free to roast my metaphor).
In the old days, scientific careers were largely restricted to the independently wealthy or those who could secure patrons.
I also feel like there's a sort of tension with what Hacker News broadly wants out of science. There's often a lament that there aren't enough staff science positions, or positions where people can have a career beyond a postdoc that's just devoted to research.
Those things have to be paid for. Postdocs are expensive. Staff scientists are expensive - and terrifying, because they have careers and kids and mortgages. Postdocs are expensive.
That ends up eating a lot of a PIs time, because the success rate on proposals are low. Even worse now.
Would I love to be able to just sit in my office, think my thoughts, and occasionally write those thoughts up? Sure. But I'd also like to give people an opportunity to have careers in science where they can get paid.
From the first article in the series [0]:
> Insiders ... understand that a research paper serves ... in increasing importance ... Currency, An advertisement, Brand marketing ... in contrast to what outsiders .. believe, which is ... to share a novel discovery with the world in a detailed report.
I can believe it's absolutely true. And yikes.
Other than the brutal contempt, TFA looks like pretty good advice.
The most disturbing thing about it is the way advice to forget about science and optimize for the process is mixed with standard tips for good communication. It shows that the community is so far gone that they don't see the difference.
If anyone needs a point of reference, just look at an algorithms and data structures journal to see what life is like with a typical rather than extreme level of problems.
The number of accepted papers is absolutely currency and measure of worth in academia.
Both of which are currency.
This tends to not manifest as "We need one of these" but "If we have one of these, lets be sure to use it."
This article is spot on. what are you talking about? have you ever published a research paper and gone through peer review?
I think it's ultimately due to a lack of theory, which creates the expectation that the results from trying an idea will be a random draw. From that point, you get the behaviors of trying as much as possible and taking each attempt as a fixed object to then go try and get over the threshold.
> "The primary objects of modern science are research papers. Research papers are acts of communication. Few people will actually download and use our dataset. Nobody will download and use our model—they can’t, it’s locked inside Google’s proprietary stack."
The author is confusing the concept of 'science as a pursuit that will earn me enough money and prestige to live a nice life' - in which, I'd say, we can replace 'science' with 'religion' and go back to the 1300s or so - with science as the practice of observation, experiment and mathematical theory with the goal of gaining some understanding of the marvelously wonderful universe we exist in.
Yes, the academic system has been grotesquely corrupted by Bayh-Dole, yes, the academic system is internal blood sport politics for a limited number of posts, yes, it's all collapsing under the weight of corporate corruption and a degenerate ruling class - but so what, science doesn't care. It can all go dormant for 100 years, it has before, hasn't it? 125 years ago you had to learn to read German to be up on modern scientific developments.
Wake up - nature doesn't care about the academic system, and science isn't reliant on some decrepit corrupt priesthood.
P.S. Practically speaking, new graduate students should all be required to read Machiavelli as an intro to their new life.
> And it’s not just a pace thing, there’s a threshold of clarity that divides learned nothing from got at least one new idea.
But these days, ideas are quite cheap: in my experience, most researchers have more ideas than students to work on them. Many papers can fit their "core idea" in a tweet or two, and in many cases someone has already tweeted the idea in one form or another. Some ideas are better than others, but there's a lot of "reasonable" ideas out there.
Any of these ideas can be a paper, but what makes it science can't just be the fact that it was communicated clearly. It wouldn't be science unless you perform experiments (that accurately implement the "idea") and faithfully report the results. (Reviewers may add an additional constraint: that the results must look "good".)
So what does science have to do with reviewers' fixation on clarity and presentation? I claim: absolutely nothing. You can pretty much say whatever you want as long as it sounds reasonable and is communicated clearly (and of course the results look good). Even if the over-worked PhD student screws up the evaluation script a bit and the results are in their favor (oops!), the reviewers are not going to notice so long as the ideas are presented clearly.
Clear communication is important, but science cannot just be communicating ideas.
As an academic I need to be up to date in my discipline, which means skimming hundreds of titles, dozens of abstracts and papers, and thoroughly reading several papers a week, in the context of a job that needs many other things done.
Papers that require 5x the time to read because they're unnecessarily unclear and I need to jump around deciphering what the authors mean are wasting me and many others' time (as are those with misleading titles or abstracts), and probably won't be read unless absolutely needed. They are better caught at the peer review stage. And lack of clarity can also often cause lack of reproducibility when some minor but necessary detail is left ambiguous.
By “idea” researchers usually imply “idea for a high-impact project that I’m capable of executing”. It’s not just about having ideas, but about having ideas that will actually make an impact on your field. Those again come in two flavors: “obvious ideas” that are the logical next step in a chain of incremental improvements, but that no one yet had time or capability to implement; and “surprising ideas” that can really turn a research field upside down if it works, but is inherently a high-risk/high-reward scenario.
Speaking as a physicist, I find the truly “surprising ideas” to be quite rare but important. I get them from time to time but it can take years between. But the “obvious” ideas, sure, the more students I have the more of them I’d work on.
> Any of these ideas can be a paper, but what makes it science can't just be the fact that it was communicated clearly. It wouldn't be science unless you perform experiments (that accurately implement the "idea") and faithfully report the results. (Reviewers may add an additional constraint: that the results must look "good".)
I kinda agree with this. With the caveat that I’d consider e.g. solving theoretical problems to also count under “experiment” in this specific sentence, since science is arguably not just about gathering data but also developing a coherent understanding of it. Which is why theoretical and numerical physics count as “science”.
On the other hand, I think textbooks and review papers are crucial for science as a social process. We often have to try to consolidate the knowledge gathered from different research directions before we can move forward. That part is about clear communication more than new research.
But I think your most significant change was changing the "what" to "why".
Reading the original, we can see that most sentences start with "we did..." "we did..." and my impression as a reader was, "Okay, but how is this important?" In the second one, the "what" is only in the first part of the sentence, to name things (which gives a sense of novelty), and then only "whys" come after it.
"Whys" > "Whats" also applies to good code comments (and why LLM's code sometimes sucks). I can easily know "what" the code does, but often, I want to know "why" it is there.
If you're submitting to a control theory journal, you better have some novel theorems with rigorous mathematical proofs in that "rest of the paper" part. That's a little nontrivial.
fl4tul4•3h ago