Hacker News Reader

Comment by akyu | Hacker News Reader

I really love this effort. Research papers are low bandwidth way to get information into our brains. They take a lot of effort to read, even if the ideas are not particularly complicated. Often when reading complicated material, I have to come up with metaphors in my mind to make sense of it. This is somewhat of a wasted effort, as the author who wrote the material surely had metaphors for their own mind when writing, but too often they don't share these metaphors, and stick to purely technical writing. I think this is one reason why ideas like general relativity are so popular, even though the material is actually quite complicated. The average educated person can give a reasonable explanation of general relativity because the metaphors used to explain it are so powerful, even though its very unlikely they understand any of the math involved.

View on HN

I've often thought it would be great for the Arxiv to make it easy to link to a video of the 'talk' that generally goes with a paper. The talk is very often the distillation of the ideas in the paper, as conducted by one of the involved researchers. Indeed, one of the main points of conferences is to allow us to trade these distilled versions of our research with one another and place them in the context of everything else going on...

> I've often thought it would be great for the Arxiv to make it easy to link to a video of the 'talk' that generally goes with a paper.

This has been in the idea pipeline for a while, but the arXiv is slow-moving. (They probably wouldn't host the actual video files for cost reasons, but that's not a big deal.)

http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/09/02/additional-material-on...

> The talk is very often the distillation of the ideas

This seemed a major omission of the OP.

The distillation quality hierarchy goes something like 'conversation among best-in-field researchers', 'conversation with principals' and 'research talk by principals, plus subsequent questions/conversations', 'review paper', 'journal commentary' and 'papers' but... in many fields, papers really need some of the above to provide critical context.

So a distillation system exists - it's just very very narrowly scoped. It's sad to see graduate students and young faculty who haven't "plugged-in", and so are not spending their time well.

And it's depressing to see a 'conversation among best-in-field researchers' excoriating a perspective on a topic, knowing that broken perspective is how the topic is pervasively taught, graduate down to high-school, and it's not going to change any year soon. There being few incentives or mechanism to pipeline such insight into educational content.

So yes, starting to build an expectation that talks become available as video, and are easily found, could be a non-trial step forward.

Research posters too (which sometimes end up on FigShare). At least there are several journals that accept video abstracts, like: http://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1367-2630/videoabstract/li...

> Noise – Being a researcher is like standing in the middle of a construction site. Countless papers scream for your attention and there’s no easy way to filter or summarize them.2 We think noise is the main way experts experience research debt.

This is a big part of how I don't understand why some type of annotation standard hasn't taken off for research papers. Everyone does the same duplicative, time-consuming work of turning a paper into knowledge in their own head, so many wheels are reinvented. Where is the GitHub for research ideas?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com