(Not-terribly-informed rant, written in my free time.)

Terminology note: When I say “an aesthetic”, I mean an intuitive (“I know it when I see it”) sense of what a completed paper, project, etc. is ideally “supposed” to look like. It can include both superficial things (the paper is properly formatted, the startup has high valuation, etc.), and non-superficial things (the theory is “elegant”, the company is “making an impact”, etc.).

Part 1: The aesthetic of novelty / cleverness

Example: my rant on “the psychology of everyday life”

(Mostly copied from this tweet)

I think if you want to say something that is:

(1) true,
(2) important, and
(3) related to the psychology of everyday life,

…then it's NOT going to conform to the aesthetic of what makes a “good” peer-reviewed academic psych paper.

The problem is that this particular aesthetic demands that results be (A) “novel”, and (B) [...]

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Outline:

(00:37) Part 1: The aesthetic of novelty / cleverness

(00:43) Example: my rant on “the psychology of everyday life”

(04:14) Example: Holden Karnofsky quote about academia

(07:17) More examples

(09:44) Part 2: The aesthetic of topicality (or more cynically, “trendiness”)

(09:51) General discussion

(11:15) A couple personal anecdotes from my physics experience

(13:57) “The other Hamming question”

(15:08) Extremely cynical tips to arouse academics’ interests

(16:32) Part 3: The aesthetic of effort

(19:29) Part 4: Some general points

(19:34) This obviously isn’t just about academia

(19:50) Aesthetics-of-success can be sticky due to signaling issues

(20:15) Aesthetics-of-success are invisible to exactly the people most impacted by them

(21:49) If your “aesthetics of what success looks like” are bad, so will be your “research taste”

(22:19) Homework problem

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First published:
March 11th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LZJJK6fuuQtTLRSu9/some-problematic-aesthetics-of-what-constitutes-good-work-in

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Some (problematic) aesthetics of what constitutes good work in academia” by Steven Byrnes

LessWrong (30+ Karma)