Comment by ksk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksk | Hacker News Reader

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You are choosing to not engage with the author and simply repeating your own opinion. Its obvious to me that your disagreement is actually not even relevant to the article or to what the author is saying.

>There is no statement about giving proper credit (vanity) or not being allowed to reinvent the wheel without first making damn sure that you are indeed reinventing.

The article isn't a discussion about what science means. Its a discussion about the principles of research that all of our current scientific progress is based upon. One of those principles is the organization and structuring of knowledge. Citations are one of the means of linking knowledge that allows easy navigation between topics and ideas for people both inside and outside the field. Because of the collective effort of people citing other work, it saves time and money of everyone involved since they can easily hop between topics and ideas without having to read a million unorganized pages of scientific data and figure it out every single time.

> I think there is something seriously wrong if that is not perceived as a crisis in the academic world.

Um, you don't really get to tell someone they're doing it wrong, when what they're doing has worked out brilliantly for the human race.

I might not have been clear enough about the point I was trying to make. OP's comment on the Super Mario Bros neural network was really insightful to me: "Seen as tinkering, that work and video is good work; seen as research, it is atrocious because of the complete lack of scholarship". This made me understand his, and most likely the academic, point of view. What I tried to convey is that I believe that there is value in embedding your knowledge in the network of previous knowledge but the academic world has perhaps gone too far in focusing on this aspect and too little on making sure that the created knowledge is applied.

In regard to saying that something is seriously wrong; There is no doubt that the academic world has produced a lot of valuable knowledge during her existence. It's the current academic world that is in crisis. With the H-index as its ultimate false god. The H-index exists only since 2005. Why should I not be allowed to criticize that? If the system is still good, it will survive the criticism.

>but the academic world has perhaps gone too far in focusing on this aspect and too little on making sure that the created knowledge is applied.

Okay, now I understand the point. But why is it necessarily the responsibility of a researcher to find industry applications? The industry has to figure out which portions of these ideas can be realistically turned into applications or products based on market criteria. Of course industry can and often does contribute papers to further our knowledge. And when they do invest in doing research they're probably going to be motivated to find applications.

> It's the current academic world that is in crisis. With the H-index as its ultimate false god. The H-index exists only since 2005. Why should I not be allowed to criticize that? If the system is still good, it will survive the criticism.

I was using 'don't get to' as a rhetorical device. In my view it was like walking up to Usain Bolt and telling him how to fix the problems with his form cause hes doing it all wrong. Sure, you can do that, but most people won't take you seriously. Or in other words, simply being able to identify surface level problems, doesn't mean much without a ton of analysis, explanations, etc, etc. But yeah, obviously you can opine on any subject you like, and people too have the freedom to respond.

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