“There’s a startup for that” is a harmful dogma

Just having the piece of literature doesn’t solve the problem

The way to get around journals is to focus on non-paper artifacts

‘Someone is working on that’

Grigory Tikhomirov Conversation 21 Apr 2021

# ‘I published a paper on that’ 
People often cite earlier work - a paper, an email, etc. instead of explaining something.  If you actually want to communicate, you swallow your pride and unpack the thing.  It is a form of compression similar to Jargon. [[Jargon is mystifying to people without the relevant context]]. It’s worse than Jargon because if you need to mention the paper, you know for sure that the person hasn’t heard of it so it never helps communication. It has the benefit of at least telling someone where to get the context.

People do this for two reasons:
1.  To stake a claim on a topic or assert authority. [[Full-time thought leaders try to become gatekeepers to knowledge]]. Sometimes you do need to quickly establish authority or knowledge. When you’re dealing with someone who understands a discipline, this is where using Shibboleths is a good idea. [[People like to create shibboleths to distinguish their tribe]].
2. Because they’re lazy and don’t want to explain something 

It’s isomorphic to ‘I put it in the email’ and  ‘read the docs’

### Related
- [[Just having the piece of literature doesn’t solve the problem]] 
- [[“There’s a startup for that” is a harmful dogma]]
- [[“There’s a thing for that” is a bad signal]]



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Life Style Guide

‘I published a paper on that’

Robert Smith conversation 27 Apr 2021

# “There’s a thing for that” is a bad signal	
Means someone doesn’t actually care about a solution

This manifests as 
- “I wrote a paper/book about that”
- 
## Questions
## Related
[[“There’s a startup for that” is a harmful dogma]]
## References



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Making a game more fair reduces its variance

§Demystification and Thought Leaders

Andy Matuschak Conversation 2/2/20

The internet has broken gatekeeping

Intellectual rent seeking

‘Have your cake and eat it too’ life-games have led to a toxic society

Evolution of a Renegade - David Sloan Wilson - The Jolly Swagman

The Guru Effect

# Full-time thought leaders try to become gatekeepers to knowledge
### Related
[[There are secretly three kinds of experts]] - thought leaders are generally *Platform Experts*

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Explain it like I’m Five

Creating legible interfaces is expensive

Demystification involves a lot of context

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering - Book

The less shared context you have the higher the coordination costs

Explaining things like I’m five helps avoid the Einstellung Effect

Technical language should be treated like an actual other language

Legibility forces you to fall back on conventional framings which causes you to think about the thing in a conventional way

# Jargon is mystifying to people without the relevant context
When you name something, you create jargon. [[Naming things is Powerful]] and the resulting jargon can enable you to communicate more efficiently with anybody who has relevant context - yourself or others. 

Jargon can act as a Shibboleth and[[People like to create shibboleths to distinguish their tribe]].  This is actually another way that [[Naming things is Powerful]]. It is powerful to have a mystical tribe.

[[The Heilmeier Catechism]] explicitly calls out Jargon because it is designed to be applied by someone outside the applicant’s discipline and therefore probably has little context. 

The upshot here is: jargon is a tool. It can be used for good or bad. 



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There are many pieces of equipment or tacit knowledge that only exist  in one or two places in the world

Most human knowledge is not encoded

Notes and statements should be bloody

Undiscovered public knowledge discovery - UPKD

Academic credit is a first-to-the post system

Academic research is often just the concept half of creating a heuretic

Constraints and assumptions are not directly observable in literature

Ignoring incentives, scientific and technological knowledge will have more impact if it is more public

Technology transfer is a mystifying abstraction

Notes on the changing structure of American Innovation

# Just having the piece of literature doesn’t solve the problem
Even if someone points you to the exact book or paper that addresses the area you’re interested in, [[The creation of a heuretic has two steps - conception and implementation]] and discovery doesn’t accomplish *either* of these steps. Even if I put two papers in front of you and am 100% positive you could use the information in the two of them to come up with an amazing new idea, the burden is still entirely on you to synthesize them, conceive the new idea and implement it. Part of the reason for this is that [[Constraints and assumptions are not directly observable in literature]]

 [[Academic research is often just the concept half of creating a heuretic]]. If you want to actually *use* the thing for something are probably many [[Learning by doing]] heuretics that still need to be discovered  by implementing the thing. [[Implementation is the actualization of the heuretic in the real world]] .

Discovery could only create a heuretic if everything was written in propositional logic.  This is why everybody is obsessed with structured data: [[§Knowledge Graphs]] and ontologies. The approaches to undiscovered public knowledge that are not just pure discovery all rely on areas that are already incredibly structured like [[Using computers to search databases of existing molecules or compounds to suggest new uses]] or areas where people have gone through and painstakingly structured the information ([[Structuring knowledge is expensive]].) The only way [[Using published literature to find causal relationships that can be connected to lead to a new causal relationship]] works is if the causal relationships have been put in a structured format. 

Most [[Undiscovered public knowledge discovery (UPKD)]] approaches aim to surface two or more pieces of knowledge that are related and potentially could be connected through [[Idea sex]]. Discovery is very amenable to modern machine learning techniques that are good at discovering latent patterns.  The most basic version of discovery is search which is why  [[Commercial approaches to UPKD act like specialized search engines]]. 

### Related
- [[Heuretics come out of people’s brains (TECHNOLOGY IS PEOPLE)]] 
- [[Context is important and underrated for knowledge transfer]]
- [[‘I published a paper on that’]]



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Jargon is mystifying to people without the relevant context

Expect GPT-3 is very good at shibboleths

# People like to create shibboleths to distinguish their tribe 
People create shibboleths by naming things that were previously unnamed.

 Shibboleth creation can create fragmentation within disciplines because people who understand the concept ([[Understanding a thing has to do with intuiting the affordances of a thing]]) can be lost. The gap between someone who understands a concept but doesn’t know the shibboleths is why the burden is on you to [[Explain it like I’m Five]] if you actually want to engage someone.

On the other hand, [[Naming things is Powerful]] . Naming thing then is neither good nor bad.

Shibboleths can also be ideas or references that nobody will take you seriously if you haven’t encountered. Idea/reference shibboleths are a two sided coin - on the one hand it is good to have a filter for someone who hasn’t dug into a subject seriously enough. On the other hand it could exclude good out-of-discipline ideas.

### Related
* [[Joel Chan Podcast 27/2/20]]
* [[§Demystification and Thought Leaders]]
* [[There are secretly three kinds of experts]]



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We need more scientific artifacts than papers

The systemization of science since the 1950s treats all fields the same

A system of credit and funding for non-Scientific Paper artifacts should be artifact-type agnostic

Darren Zhu conversation 21 May 2021

Week of 31 May 2021

# The way to get around journals is to focus on non-paper artifacts
There is no first principles reason why the Scientific Paper in its modern form (a ~5-30 page written document primarily made of words with a fairly specific structure) should be a unit of knowledge or research output. Of course, there are many good things about it, it has had hundreds of years to evolve, and it is a useful [[Schelling Point]]  so we should take [[Chesterton’s Fence]] very seriously here. 

Perhaps it’s also useful to distinguish between a paper as a written document that is meant to convey knowledge, and a Scientific Paper as the specific artifact of credit, knowledge transfer, and stake seeped in history and institutional implications. 

Scientific Papers have become tightly coupled to an entire complex of Scientific Journals, Grants, Academic Careers/Tenure, and Peer Review both of the papers as a worthy artifact and of grant applications. This tightly coupled system creates a [[Wicked Problem]] because any piece of the system exerts a restoring force against changing any single piece of the system. If you try to change Scientific Journals (say by getting people to publish Scientific Papers online or in a new journal) the rest of the system will punish you by not giving those papers credit which damages careers and reduces the chance of getting grants. The coupling means that you can’t change any piece without shifting the system to a new, (hopefully better) equilibrium. How do you do that?

Another framing might be to look at what the system’s implicit purpose instead of explicit purpose is. [[Complex emergent systems have purposes not causes and effects]]. Instead of the system’s purpose being to generate as much human knowledge and capability as possible, the system’s real/emergent purpose is to generate legible artifacts of work, award credit for them, and direct funding towards generating more legible artifacts. ([[The purpose of the Scientific Paper system is to generate legible artifacts of work, award credit for them, and direct funding towards generating more legible artifacts]]) Through this lens, the abstract goal is to shift the system’s emergent purpose towards its explicit purpose. 

Classic [[Clayton Christensen]] disruption theory tells us that innovations that aren’t just improving a system along its existing performance axes almost never win by going head on at the incumbent. Incumbents here being organizations, paradigms, and perhaps more importantly, applications. Minimills made steel for completely different applications that could usefully use recycled scrap steel. Similarly transistors were used in situations where vacuum tubes just didn’t work, etc. etc. 

Given this framing, I would argue that it’s important to focus on activities/applications that are currently poorly served by, or outside of, the system. The theory of change is that instead of standing up an entire new system, or trying to incrementally change the existing one, you peel off the poorly served bits of the existing system, build a better way to serve them and then pull the entire system in that better direction because people can now see a different, better, local maximum. Non-paper artifacts may be just the underserved application to focus on. 

Until at least the latter half of the 20th century, word-based papers (and books) were by far the best possible artifact. Paper was the cheapest and easiest way to transmit information at scale, figures and images were hard to both create and print (remember the photocopier wasn’t commercialized until after a human had already been in space). If they weren’t printed, large data sets had to be stored on punch cards, video on reels, etc.  

We no longer live in that world. If the digital revolution did one thing it made creating and disseminating different kinds of media (as long as it can be converted in bits) cheap and easy. As a result research can create many useful artifacts: datasets, code, podcasts, explainers, videos, audio, simulations, tools, CAD models that can be 3D printed, the list goes on. Not all of these are digital nor is that research *didn’t* produce them before, but modern computing has absolutely unlocked the ability to communicate about them without a paper. [[We need more scientific artifacts than papers]].

And yet, under the current system none of these other artifacts ‘count’ unless they are coupled to a Scientific Paper. Put aside for a moment the fact that only having Scientific Papers count forces non-paper artifacts to re-enforce the current system. A (more?) insidious problem is that the need for artifacts to couple to Scientific Papers puts constraints on those artifacts and the incentives to create them. For example, one criterion of Scientific Papers is that they “contribute novel insights to the literature.” Datasets can be painstaking and expensive to collect. They can be incredibly valuable for creating knowledge and capability but in and of themselves, they do not contribute a novel insight. So in order for a dataset to couple to a Scientific Paper, its creators need to both create the dataset *and* use it to generate a novel insight. The researchers will then get credit and attention primarily[^1] based on the Scientific Paper around that insight, rather than the dataset itself. So if the dataset is great but the insight isn’t particularly profound, the entire work bundle might be published in a lower-status journal and reach fewer people. Needing to have a Scientific Paper front for a dataset means that the bulk of the contribution is basically a buried lede. Additionally, the vast majority of the search and discovery infrastructure for scientific knowledge is built around Scientific Papers so disseminating the dataset is just harder. 

The example focused on datasets but the same dynamics apply to other non-Scientific Paper artifacts. I listen to several podcasts by professors and in them they explicitly lament that they get almost no career credit for doing it and as a result the podcast is a pure passion project. 

The one bright spot is that the current system’s terribleness at serving non-Scientific Paper artifacts provides an opportunity to do some [[Clayton Christensen]] style disruption.[^2] Non-Scientific Paper artifacts are all the things that can be built with recycled scrap steel and a system to support them are the [mini-mills](https://www.nytimes.com/1981/09/23/business/the-rise-of-mini-steel-mills.html).  

A natural follow-up question is “what artifacts should this side-system focus on?” Aggressively, I would argue the answer is ‘none.’ [[A system of credit and funding for non-Scientific Paper artifacts should be artifact-type agnostic]].

### Related
- [[Scirate]]
- [Swipe right for science: Papr app is ‘Tinder for preprints’ : Nature News & Comment](https://www.nature.com/news/swipe-right-for-science-papr-app-is-tinder-for-preprints-1.22163)
- [[Most scientific papers are hard to read]]
- [[‘I published a paper on that’]]
- [[Things that are not paper-worthy enough for academia and not product-focused enough for a startup]]
- [[Labs implicitly judge research through the sense of dollars per paper]]
- [[Another downside to importing graduate students to work in labs is that it makes papers less intelligible]]
- [[The peer review and citation system incentivizes people to work on things that other people think is interesting]]
- [[It is much easier to share an artifact than a process]]

[^1]: Obviously there are notable exceptions here. 
[^2]: I cringe a little at using the term “disruption” because of its overuse but I think in this case I think it’s actually just the right textbook term. 

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Ben's working notes

‘I published a paper on that’

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