Comment by isthatart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by isthatart | Hacker News Reader

I'm an academic researcher. I disagree with most of the article. The main distinction I see between "research" and "tinkering" is not what the author calls "scholarship". From personal experience the only serious distinction is that "researchers" tend to have a very long time attention span compared with "tinkerers".

As for the rest, the goal of academic research, lately, seems to be to produce as many as possible units for the benefit of the publishing industry. In the case of very successful articles, you can fit all the readers in a (small) bus. Most of the articles are badly written, because they follow old habits from the age when printing was expensive. Citations are done in a very selective way. Not so long ago there was no need to give the source of an "unpublished" article, "preprint" was enough. Tinkerers work is almost never cited, even if it is read and used. Blogs? are you kidding me? that's not "scholarship". Heck, even arXiv still seems exotic in some fields, despite the fact that it is a good, standard communication mean for the researchers in other fields. Finally, peer review. How does it work? Researcher B reads what researcher A reports and expresses an opinion, just like any honest reader could.This passes for validation. Magic.

In conclusion I believe the future of academic research comes from "tinkering" with a long time attention span. The dissemination is technically trivial. Peer review will be supplemented by more rigorous validation (although there is no absolute solution here). The same kind of validation will be applied to tinkerers results.

> The main distinction I see between "research" and "tinkering" is not what the author calls "scholarship". From personal experience the only serious distinction is that "researchers" tend to have a very long time attention span compared with "tinkerers".

Many aspects of "scholarship" become inevitable when "tinkering over a long timeframe". You build up a knowledge base about the problem and/or methodology you're tinkering with, you eventually form a community around your tinkering, etc.

Lots and lots of tinkerers gratify themselves without contributing any modicum of knowledge to the world. But the most successful tinkerers are almost always effectively scholars in the sense of this post. In the sense that they're familiar with a body of knowledge/the people producing that knowledge. And they contribute genuinely new ways of doing things, or new ideas of things to do, or excellent executions on existing ideas that achieve the aspirations of previously articulated ideas. E.g., Linus is certainly a successful OS scholar in the sense of this post.

> In the case of very successful articles, you can fit all the readers in a (small) bus

This is off by at least an order of magnitude for any even remotely reasonable definition of "successful".

> Researcher B reads what researcher A reports and expresses an opinion, just like any honest reader could

First, the author explicitly kinda-sorta agrees with you here (...Third, it's not really the publication...), so it's pretty clear that publication venue != scholarship.

As an aside, peer review != validation!!! This is something that every young Ph.D. should explicitly learn early on.

Yes, I hope that evolution will produce something new from the available academic and tinkerer genes. The academic lives longer in a stable medium, the tinkerer dies young but multiplies faster in chaotic conditions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com