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Comment by pizza | Hacker News Reader

You would take the opinion of a random stranger on HN over the article getting past peer reviewed and published in PNAS.. Why that heuristic?

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I'm a researcher in the field, and the amount of new research coming out each day is just way too big to handle. Which means I have to rely on heuristics like this to judge what is worth my time. Otherwise I'd be spending 25 hours/day reading papers, and waste brain capacity digesting worthless findings. Not everything that passes peer review is read-worthy, far from it. It just means there aren't any gaping holes in it. Don't get me wrong, the heuristic is far from perfect. But a random paper on HN (which is not known for its abundance of researchers) that was posted without any context explaining why I should care is not a good signal.

If you're a researcher in the field is it not a fundamental skill to be able to make these judgement calls yourself? And if wasted time is a concern to you, what makes you think others would be willing to put in the time to try and convince a random academic that they should or shouldn't read a paper where they've not even specified what they'd want to get out of it?

I am a researcher in this field and PNAS is fine medium to communicate. This paper actually first appeared in arxiv which is where everything seems to go first. Having it go from arvix to PNAS is a good indicator that it is a good paper, and it is! It would be a shame to dismiss it.

Hinton's paper in 2006 on reducing dimensionality with NNs appeared in Science and nobody paid attention to that either at the time.

OP greatly overestimates the knowledge of the average HN user!

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