Although I have no doubt that, like every other field, academia is filled with politics; and publishing process probably helps enforce such politics.
However, I would argue that modern academic publishing is absolutely necessary to produce “useful” science. In order for people to build upon others’ result, they will need strong guarantee of correctness; and top conferences saves researcher a lot of time to find impactful new research, especially new ideas.
That being said, I am absolutely not suggesting the publishing system is not without uts problem, but I am kind of agreeing with LeCun here, publishing is a important part of the process, and it is will probably last longer than tesla or elon.
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
I find it especially amusing that in my Lemmy feed the post right before this one is a quote from a book by a Nobel laureate talking about the importance of self-marketing, politicking and ladder climbing in academia. You know, all the stuff that isn’t science that plays a part in what Yann LeCun considers to play a vital role in what counts as science.
baseless_discourse@mander.xyz 1 year ago
ladder climbing in academia is not fun, but I feel like communicating science is a essential part of scientific process, as this is the only way for our work to maximize their impact.
A famous professor in my field once told me “we are all entertainers”, which seems absurd from an outside prospective, but is a notion that I and many of my colleague has taken peace with.
scrambled and unreadable mathematics in the end should seldom be valued in modern science community, IMO, not everyone is Srinivasa Ramanujan. Even among geniuses, from Poincaré to Hilbert to Godel to Grothendick and to Tao, most genius are able to communicate their research quite well, and thrive in academia.