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Comment by voxl | Hacker News Reader

How do you not cringe at a comment that so matter-of-factly states that our modern researchers all have this assumed negative propensity that somehow the wisend researchers, thinkers, and leaders of the past did not have.

You must be speaking of personal experience, because otherwise your comment is completely ridiculous. But if you are, you certainly have no personal experience with historical figures. So how can you judge a day-to-day interaction with the greatest hits of someone dead?

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Top modern researchers/practitioners do seem to value simplicity heavily, but can't say the same for most. The propensity for misuse of abstraction/models/data/theories is pretty high from what I've seen. That's my view. You are free to disagree!

PS: It is always better to rely on older sources for illustrations, because they have lived their life fully and you have documentation of their lives + effects of their efforts. It is not a good idea to rely on living people to illustrate principles.

Largely, it seems top modern researchers are able to free themselves from many of the perverse incentives of the academic game. You might be surprised how many who have not reached such a level also value simplicity, but simply must play the game. It's very common to see a clear and simple (in the good sense) paper grow increasingly complex in response to reviewers demands, going through a sequence of one or more rejections before finally getting accepted.

I'm merely commenting on the output. Maybe a good number of people in academia do care about simplicity. Or it is simply that society is falsely incentivizing people to enter into these territories, when they should be doing something else.

Yeah it's a very common generalisation. Modern researchers all think the same thing, people in the past used to think something different.

"The days of old have turned to dust" as it says in the Epic of Gilgamesh (ie one of the earliest surviving works of literature includes a moan than things are not as good as they used to be).

Distilling the GPs argument to its simplest form:

The past thinkers did not reason under a hanging "publish or perish" sword that current researchers do

Source: me. I was a researcher at a national research institution for 7 years.

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