Conversation

I think one of my major frustrations with most scientific papers is they don’t take the semantic concept graph seriously. They treat the summary and conclusion as a place to write marketing material, not to seriously describe the knowledge work which motivated the experiment.

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Laura Deming

@LauraDeming

Sep 9, 2020

This is not taking conceptual work seriously - one of the failures of modern biology is we don’t have a strong theoretical practice, and don’t understand how to value this work. "It should be obvious what data to collect, and how to interpret the results". This is utter baloney.

Laura Deming

@LauraDeming

Sep 9, 2020

Not externalizing this work means a massive loss in creative potential, as everyone attempts to recreate the same semantic graphs from scratch, in parallel.

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Replying to

@LauraDeming

This seems to be a huge problem In HCI, too. “Vision papers” are more or less taboo, so bread-and-butter papers are all grasping at conceptual aims which remain implicit and poorly-understood (including by the investigators, I feel).

6:22 PM · Sep 9, 2020Twitter Web App

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José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente

Replying to

and

Huh interesting. Why might this be, sociologically? Random guess: In the spectrum from concrete(but risking nongenerabizability) to very abstract (but potentially a deepity) they are on the latter.

José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente

@ArtirKel

Sep 9, 2020

(On a personality level. E.g. preferring to build tools because a concrete product seems limited and obvious)