[mentat]

> People are not supposed to communicate only via papers.

That we use written communication that persists through generations is the basis of science and society in general. If we cannot communicate sufficiently via papers, we're in a world of trouble.

[guygurari]

I used to hold this opinion, but my experience with academic research changed my mind. Much of the scientific knowledge we have is passed from generation to generation by mentoring. The amount of knowledge is so vast, and our means of searching the written literature for relevant facts so poor, that when I want to learn something or solve a specific problem there is no substitute for a discussion with an expert in the field.

The core problem is that human communication is very difficult. It becomes even more difficult when we try to communicate ideas without interaction, as we do when writing a book and expect someone to read and understand it. If I read a paper and I can't understand a sentence, it might take me days to figure out what's going on by myself, whereas asking an expert might yield an answer in less than an hour (sometimes minutes). The difference is really orders of magnitude.

There are whole fields that have effectively died because no one works on them any more. That knowledge doesn't live in anyone's mind. All the literature is there, but actually acquiring that knowledge by reading the literature is incredibly challenging and time consuming.

I have come to believe that the main purpose of hiring scientists in academia is to keep knowledge alive and have it passed on to future generations. Advancing research is of secondary importance. In fact I would say that most new research I see probably has no intrinsic value. I include my own research in this category. We have researchers solving esoteric problems of no value to anyone besides their own personal entertainment. Except, working on such research keeps our neurons firing and keeps knowledge alive. It is a well known phenomenon that taking a break from research very quickly leads to a sort of decay of memory. Our learned ideas and the connections between them wither away without constant reinforcement. In order to keep knowledge alive we have to engage in research, even if it seems pointless.

[eli_gottlieb]

>I have come to believe that the main purpose of hiring scientists in academia is to keep knowledge alive and have it passed on to future generations.

Then these scientists should be devoted to producing textbooks and courses which can then be taught to non-research students. Yes, all knowledge about the scale of what a single individual knows (and keeps on their shelves, hard drives, etc) is embodied as communities and traditions, but we still get far greater redundancy of that knowledge from teaching it as undergraduate or master's-level coursework than from passing it down only via research mentoring.

If 25% of the population gets an undergraduate degree, 11% or so gets a postgraduate degree, and only about 1.7% get a PhD, then we need to be embodying society's knowledge among the larger cohorts for that knowledge to survive. We can't afford to live in a world where only 1.7% know how things work.

[guygurari]

> Then these scientists should be devoted to producing textbooks and courses ...

Textbooks and courses exist for everything but the most cutting edge stuff (which are still in flux anyway), but they are a very inefficient way of transferring knowledge. I would say they are practically useless without expert guidance. At the most basic level, there are so many of them that an expert has to tell you which ones are both good and relevant to what you want to learn. I've once seen a student waste months of his life studying a book he thought was relevant, only to discover that book wasn't building towards the sort of knowledge he needed in that subject. The book was about the correct subject, but was focused on somewhat different aspects than the ones he was interested in. There was no way for him to know this in advance without guidance.

So we don't know how to organize existing books. Also, even the books that exist are usually pretty bad at conveying knowledge. Or perhaps humans are just pretty bad at learning things from books. Either way, no one knows how to write textbooks and courses that are much better than what we have today. I really don't know of a better way to preserve knowledge than the current one. Perhaps technology can improve the situation by making access to knowledge more interactive. But I suspect this would require a real breakthrough.

> We can't afford to live in a world where only 1.7% know how things work.

Why not?

[yakult]

I have a concrete counterexample. Let's say I write a paper presenting a model, plus some numerical results of large simulations. The code is based on gluing together various pieces of open source code. All these codes are typical scientist codes that are held together with duct tape. My paper is short, but I spent a lot of effort munging things together, and I'm fairly certain nobody can reproduce my results without my source code (preferably the whole environment) unless they spend a lot of time on trial and error like I did.

The tweaks I did to glue things together has no theoretical value and don't belong in the paper. As a practical matter, I can't fit a lot of source code into short paper format.

What do?

[erichocean]

Open source the code and supporting data.

[yakult]

It's not that simple. What if some of it is proprietary? What if I'm not allowed to submit code because I need to be anonymous so reviewers can maintain impartiality? What happens when one of the upstreams update and breaks my code? Do I need to keep it updated? Forever?

[adrianN]

At my institute at least, scientists are required to maintain everything that is necessary to reproduce a result for at least ten years. That includes all the data and the software used to produce the results. It's not an easy job, but it's important.

[yakult]

If your institute also mandates they make the data/software publicly available, then that's definitely the exception rather than rule. Also must be hideously expensive.

It almost never happens that a paper I read actually comes with usable source code.

[pixl97]

Then your results are not reproducible and your conclusion is suspect.

[chriswarbo]

A lot of thought has gone into such questions. For example, see the guidelines at https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/about/standards/researchdata/

[Klockan]

> Let's say I write a paper presenting a model, plus some numerical results of large simulations. The code is based on gluing together various pieces of open source code. All these codes are typical scientist codes that are held together with duct tape. My paper is short, but I spent a lot of effort munging things together, and I'm fairly certain nobody can reproduce my results without my source code (preferably the whole environment) unless they spend a lot of time on trial and error like I did.

Then leave out the results since they are just an anecdote. If you want to include experimental results then it has to be done in a scientific fashion.