Comment by ianbicking | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianbicking | Hacker News Reader

"This problem cannot be solved by appointing non-experts to review panels – that merely creates incentives for research that’s easy to comprehend."

That doesn't sound SO bad. Selection criteria seems like a major issue here, and the author only talks about the validity of the results.

Why do we care about physics? Or psychology? There are answers to these simple questions, but I don't think the answers inform the selection criteria. We don't care about physics because academic researchers need to publish papers or get funding.

Having any old non-expert on the panel could be problematic. Especially if they become political tools, and right now they'd definitely become political tools. But it would seem reasonable to me if there were adjacent experts. What do engineers or chemists want to see in physics? These aren't hostile interlopers. But if nobody outside a field cares about a line of research, or trusts a line of research, then maybe that's a bad line of research.

You’re right. What we should also do is that all critical code that may significantly impact lives and people’s wealth and security should be written in a manner that can be understood by laymen.

So functional programming is right out. Anything more complex than BASIC is probably not a solution. Probably only literate programming is allowed.

There was some short Ted Nelson video I watched a while ago (I'm afraid I'll never find it) where he made this claim: they needed SQL and a separation of concerns (i.e., DBA) to build up a financial system where it was hard to embezzle money. And it's not JUST ACID and transactions that you need (though you definitely need those things!) but also the ability to audit access to the database-of-record, which SQL gives you.

Maybe the corollary is that you should build up an appropriate domain DSL so that you can express your important claims or transactions in a comprehensible way. It's not to say that you can't misimplement the DSL to your advantage, but there's an implicit good-faith claim you are making that is different from raw vertically-integrated code.

It sounds like a straw-man argument, but you're probably exactly right.

There are still billions of lines of production COBOL code out there, about as complex as BASIC, running all our financial and infrastructure systems.

Simple is sometimes much, much, better than performant or elegant.

> But it would seem reasonable to me if there were adjacent experts. What do engineers or chemists want to see in physics?

A natural experiment in this already exists: there are interdisciplinary journals and conferences with heterogeneous editorial boards. From the outside looking in, I suspect mostly what happens is that either people stick to reviewing the subset of papers from their own community or else do a poor job of reviewing papers from outside their own community.

> But if nobody outside a field cares about a line of research, or trusts a line of research, then maybe that's a bad line of research.

I'm skeptical; a lot of research is useless until it's groundbreaking, and the phase shift is rather late in the development.

Agreed. The article also said that having outsiders on the panel would just be an incentive to write easy to understand research proposals, and I was reminded of the idea that you need to understand something really well to be able to explain it clearly. If a physicist cannot explain their research proposal to an engineer or physicist, perhaps they need to go off and think about it some more.

> perhaps they need to go off and think about it some more.

Well, that's exactly what they're asking for funding for.

The entire crux of the issue is that these are not complete ideas, and need to be developed further; which takes time, and therefore, money.

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