I wish I'd seen this impossibility result long ago: https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.aoms/1177728077 …
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Replying to @johnmyleswhite
So, what is it about papers from mid-20th century that make them so god-damned lucid and readable? Is it just survivor bias?
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Replying to @scheidegger
Don't they just come from a world with less broken incentives because the number of future professors was constantly growing?
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Replying to @johnmyleswhite
Yeah, that's the explanation I _want_ to give, for sure. But beware motivated reasoning and all that.
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Replying to @scheidegger @johnmyleswhite
More people naturally leads to more division of labour and more specialization, which in turns leads to more specialized terminology, which makes papers harder to read.
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @johnmyleswhite
Ah, I like that. So if we think of science over time as a branching diagram, we should expect reading papers "up the tree" (back in time) to be easier than reading papers "along the siblings". Very nice.
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I like the visual! It's interesting to watch fields split in real time. I believe this is happening in ML at the moment, for instance. (Rapid growth -> too many papers -> people specialize -> subfields split off.)
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