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Sometime I feel that research is just a bunch of guys trying to sell useless stuff (myself included).
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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A bit of a more serious comment on that: knowledge is never useless. Many, maybe most, researchers agree with that. It's why we do what we do. Publishers and sources of funding (be they third party or governmental), however, disagree. So we have to sell them on the importance of our research this way.
"Knowledge is never useless"
Going on a tangent here: While I fully agree with the above, there is an amount of knowledge after which fact checking becomes bothersome, and some people just skip fact checking overall. One could argue that, while knowledge is never useless, unchecked knowledge might become bothersome or dangerous.
See flatearthers, scientology, etc. for extreme examples.
Counter-point:
There are also many widely accepted beliefs in the scientific community that are based on misinterpreted data/results published by others, unconfirmed, and out-dated beliefs. I agree with you, but I also think we too quickly dismiss those who question the paradigm and many in translational/translated fields (like medicine) continue operating on out-dated beliefs because they don't want to or don't have the time to keep up with current research.
Case in point: the justification for 6-foot spacing at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Particles do not magically drop off after a few feet, this was justified in medical textbooks based on a misinterpretation of a particle physicist's publication. Another example: many organic chemistry classes still teach that FTIR is a qualitative method only despite many examples of FTIR quantitation and the widespread adoption of this method throughout companies that produce instruments and analysis software.
We should encourage trying to disprove that which we think is true and unquestionable so that we can fix our past mistakes and better inform our future work.
Depends. What's your field?
Condensed matter - basic research. No actual real world applications, independently of what the abstracts/introductions may claim.
Awesome! Two questions: 1. Could you pitch some of your material as having a possible future application of radically increasing packing efficiency for airline bound luggage? And, 2. What's your favorite kind of nuclear pasta?
This one comment of 4 words triggers me so hard that it momentarily stumped me
How about this one: 'Useless doesn't mean valueless'
Thoughts?
Me: Polish my abstract:
"The development of ..."
ChatGPT: "Wypoleruj moje streszczenie...β
#shittyskynet
I get a full on boner whenever someone uses "thusly" in a sentence. Such a great word.
what are your thoughts on βwhenceβ?
It's a big w for hence
If you suffix it with "forth" I'm in, you son of a bitch
I misread that as prefix and, honestly, forthwhence doesn't sound half bad.
thatβs an extremely rare sighting but itβs so satisfying to read
Does it have to be used correctly? If not, i could thusly use it incorrectly, possibly?
π°π°π°π°π°πππ¦π¦π¦π¦π¦π¦
I fucking love "thereto" and "therein", alwo "which" and "whence" and things like that, such simple words that make sentences less awkward
Ergo
Concordantly
Vis-Γ -vis
Perchance?
you can't just say perchance
I have a visceral reaction to words like elucidate, and other fluff. My writing has to be very to the point, and technically accurate. Because of this, I carve up drafts from juniors like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Most "professional" writing is just a bunch of phrases interspersed with a few chunks of information.
I'm involved with bidding and grant proposal stuff for software and it's 90% empty words. I draw two diagrams and a page of text, sales deletes 60% of the text, misinterprets the rest and then puffs it up to 30 pages.
It doesn't have to be like that. Sure, context is important, but parroting phrases or other crap that the client has in the RFP is bullshit. They don't want you blowing smoke up their ass, they want a technically sound product that addresses the exact issues they asked you to address. They also want you to show them how you're going to get there, and achieve the objectives they set out.
I realize you're on the tech side; I'm just venting my frustrations with the corporate/PM spheres.
I thankfully don't have to deal with RFPs anymore, but when I did, I'd either go line-by-line or ignore the prospect's text entirely. There is an in-between, but it's wishy-washy crowd-pleasing nonsense, and even the people entrenched in those bureaucracies see straight through it.
That, and parroting makes it sound like you don't know what they want, or that you're stupid, and the best that you could come up with is their own text with slight variation
I work in IT, and by now, every single 3-letter-abbreviation makes my eyelid twitch.
My industry is three-letter-acronym (TLA) heavy
Well, actually you're kind of wrong, at least in some contexts.
So I'm not sure, how that works in other countries, but here in Germany, a large bid for some public contact has to parrot the requirements. The process includes a bloke essentially ticking all of the boxes in their request, and if you say (just for example) "we will deploy that in our k8s cluster" but they require a cloud ready solution, the bloke will not tick the box. Yes, that's incredibly stupid.
Apart from that, who reads the bid texts? Not technical people, but bean counters and MBAs. The technical people on the other side are only asked for comment, they have no say.
I wish you would be right, but in a world full of people desperately trying to justify their existence, fluff is essential.
They let the ad guys write grants and then wonder why they don't end up getting them
Doing the Lord's work. The longer I work in academia, the more radical I become about keeping it simple.
It's heartening to see comments like this. Busybody buzzwords and marketing maneuvering infiltrating real scientific study has been a hallmark of the de-intellectualisation of society for a long time, in my mind.
Your writing could use a little polishing.
You guys are allowed to say novel?!
My group abuses this word and I fucking despise it. Every manuscript I see has "novel" in it, I call out unless it actually is displaying novelty in that context.
Hitherto!
I'd like to see someone hand an LLM as many abstract sections as they can possibly find, and then have it generate the most generic, meaningless, fluff piece abstract/grant proposal/possibly silicon valley startup loan application, the world has ever seen.
a stunning %0.1 improvement in prediction accuracy
