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backus's profile
John Backus
John Backus
John Backus
@backus

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John Backus

@backus

Seeking alternative compression. Hopefully wrong on average. Shameless. Started @getcognito and @bloom

San Francisco, CA
Joined August 2012

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    John Backus‏ @backus Jun 28

    The internet created a lot of new mediums. Blogs, vlogs, tl;dr culture, explainer videos, Twitter, podcasts, clickbait, ELI5, etc. It seems like we never saw new mediums emerge for academia. Probably because the same institutions are consuming and generating the content?

    12:09 AM - 28 Jun 2018
    • 2 Retweets
    • 18 Likes
    • Suresh Venkatasubramanian Tyler Whirty michael_nielsen Nadia Eghbal divraj Jacob Arluck Justin Poirier Troy SK Mohammad bin Mohamed
    7 replies 2 retweets 18 likes
      1. John Backus‏ @backus Jun 28

        Independent research sounds especially interesting if it encourages researchers to choose a medium that best fits their work. Great post by @nayafiahttps://nadiaeghbal.com/independent-research …

        0 replies 1 retweet 11 likes
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      2. michael_nielsen‏ @michael_nielsen Jun 28
        Replying to @backus

        I don’t think of it like that. Journals build brands, and academics who contribute to the journals convert those brands into reputation for themselves, and thus into jobs. So the journals are competing on brand (mostly impact factor and similar), not the quality of the medium.

        1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
      3. michael_nielsen‏ @michael_nielsen Jun 28
        Replying to @michael_nielsen @backus

        To pick a slightly self-interested example: most ML researchers would (currently) rather have a NIPS paper than a distill paper, even though the latter is a much more interesting medium. Why? The former has a better chance (at present) of getting you a job

        2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
      4. michael_nielsen‏ @michael_nielsen Jun 28
        Replying to @michael_nielsen @backus

        This can and does change, but usually very slowly. One of the cleverest things done in establishing the preprint arXiv was to recruit leading physicists like Andy Strominger and Ed Witten to contribute in the first few days. Wham! Brand established.

        1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
      5. John Backus‏ @backus Jun 28
        Replying to @michael_nielsen

        Great points. I was talking from a fuzzier perspective. Distill represents one shift where more time and effort goes into a paper, but going in the reverse direction and embracing more casual mediums also seems interesting

        1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
      6. John Backus‏ @backus Jun 28
        Replying to @backus @michael_nielsen

        For a lot of "learning in public" as @nayafia put it, there aren't expectations about the medium you use in the first place. People can pick between blog posts, tweets, emphasizing visuals, switching up tone, playing w/ how data-oriented vs argument oriented their writing is, etc

        3 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
      7. John Backus‏ @backus Jun 28
        Replying to @backus @michael_nielsen @nayafia

        I'll be the 1st to admit that idk what more casual mediums might look like for academia. I may be totally off base. I'm just curious about how much is filtered out or obscured by a fixed medium that assumes a certain format, length, breakdown, rigor, presentation, etc

        2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
      8. John Backus‏ @backus Jun 28
        Replying to @backus @michael_nielsen @nayafia

        related question: Who on the internet is playing the "gentleman scientist" part but isn't trying to interface w/ academia? These people likely played with the medium a lot @gwern seems like an obvious example. @DanLuu probably? A lot of LW especially back in the day?

        2 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
      9. michael_nielsen‏ @michael_nielsen Jun 28
        Replying to @backus @nayafia and

        A few: Bret Victor, 3Blue1Brown, Vi Hart, Satoshi, Eric Drexler, Ted Nelson (in a sense), Alan Kay (ditto). I decided to (mostly) stop writing papers in 2008, and to concentrate on more experimental media.

        0 replies 1 retweet 12 likes
      10. End of conversation
      1. New conversation
      2. Nadia Eghbal‏ @nayafia Jun 28
        Replying to @backus

        Yup, and it's interesting to me that open science seems to be about replicating those forms in an open context (ex. open journals) instead of innovating on the medium itself. (@michael_nielsen may disagree? 😊)

        1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
      3. michael_nielsen‏ @michael_nielsen Jun 28
        Replying to @nayafia @backus

        In principle, I disagree - I’ve always been interested in open science as a venue for new media. In practice, there’s some of that, but many open science advocates focus mostly on old media.

        1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
      4. 1 more reply
      1. mrgunn‏ @mrgunn Jun 29
        Replying to @backus

        I see a few new science-specific forms. The "citizen science" crowdsourcing stuff like @galaxyzoo & @inaturalist are new forms of science, in which scientists make up much of the crowd. There's growing uptake of scholarly annotation using tools like @hypothes_is

        0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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      1. dabacon‏ @dabacon Jun 28
        Replying to @backus

        I might argue that the arXiv was very much a new medium, it's just hard to remember how the old system of mailed and photocopied preprints worked and how novel a daily email of preprints was.

        0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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      1. Mark Nagelberg‏ @MarkNagelberg Jun 28
        Replying to @backus

        This is a mystery. Seems like if the same institutions are consuming and generating the content, that would provide more incentive for innovation, not less: more knowledge of the target audience and their needs, greater personal stake and interest in improvements.

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      1. Mike Mahlkow‏ @MikeMahlkow Jun 28
        Replying to @backus

        Just thought about that and realized that I couldn't think of any new medium in terms of research. There are only new mediums in the teaching part of academia: Online courses, MOOCs and virtual classrooms, etc.

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