In my opinion, a real intellectual is interested in the topic and assorted problems and will critically read whatever fuels their interest. Even papers that are not good can be interesting and worthwhile reading. Wise men know the principle "garbage in, garbage out", though, and that their time during life is limited, so they choose their readings carefully. However, that doesn't mean that they shouldn't include fairly bad literature, too. For example, it's necessary to read seminal papers that are part of a canon, no matter how stupid they seem to be.
When I started studying philosophy a long time ago, some tutor whose name I've forgotten gave us two pieces of advice that would have been very valuable to me if I had taken them seriously earlier:
1. Never dismiss a book or paper quickly because you believe you've found a mistake. Read them until the end and take the authors seriously!
2. Aim for writing 1 DIN A4 page a day, no matter what you write (could be personal, could be professional, doesn't matter). You will write much less but as a goal about 1 page a day is good.
For example he says "full of mistakes", not one mistake.
There is nothing wrong with choosing your literature carefully, but that's far from the original suggestion. You can and should use your bullshit detector.
Because of this formulation, the standards are set rather high. Bryan Caplan's point is that if the best two papers out of a field of hundreds are not above these standards, then there is little value to be gained by slogging through the hundreds.
>Bryan Caplan's point is that if the best two papers out of a field of hundreds are not above these standards, then there is little value to be gained by slogging through the hundreds.
And why would anyone need criteria for that? What kind of person would need to justify to themselves or others that they prefer to study topology instead of, say, financial mathematics?
Caplan apparently needs some criterion to be able to be dismissive about someone else's work or discipline rather than pursuing his own scientific goals and interests. Yes, I find that kind of anti-intellectual, or at least small-minded.
> And why would anyone need criteria for that? What kind of person would need to justify to themselves or others that they prefer to study topology instead of, say, financial mathematics?
We need criteria to assess the value to papers, because generally the whole assumed point of writing a paper is to add value.
> Caplan apparently needs some criterion to be able to be dismissive about someone else's work or discipline rather than pursuing his own scientific goals and interests. Yes, I find that kind of anti-intellectual, or at least small-minded.
Ad hominem much. Also, Caplan doesn't say that, and you are talking about the original proposal. You don't seem to have read the article further than the title and the premise, though interestingly you seem able to judge the author itself and convict him with bad thinking. This very much contradicts your own previous piece of advice
> 1. Never dismiss a book or paper quickly because you believe you've found a mistake. Read them until the end and take the authors seriously!
which, to me, seem rather like virtue signaling than a real advice; all the more when you don't apply it thoroughly in reality.
I simply objected to the idea on the linked web page that you can ask someone to give you the two best articles in a field, then assess these, and use your resulting opinion to somehow evaluate the whole field as an outsider.
That idea is silly and small-minded. If that feels like an ad hominem attack to you, so be it.
It's not - it's a realization that life is short and much research is just writing.
You stumble on a bunch of psychology papers in which psychologists noticed that whenever 6+ kids get together, there are either three mutual friends, or three mutual non-friends.
The psychologists think this has something to do with child psychology and have written 10,000 pages on it.
You immediately recognize it has nothing to do with psychology and is just basic Ramsey Theory [1]. Should you have to review thousands of pages before being allowed to chip in?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsey%27s_theorem#Example:_R(...
A less hypothetical example: You're Bertrand Russel and you discover Russel's paradox, a one-liner which negates thousands of pages of Frege's not-yet-published logic textbook. Do you have to wait for him to publish it, and then you read it, before raising your voice?
If you mean that 10000 pages in total in 10-page papers, you have read the literature, and become the hero child psychology needs by writing a paper refuting this.
On the other hand, if you did not read the literature wider, how do you know that you are first to do so, or that the misconception is even shared by other than the authors of those papers. Of course, the implicit assumption in all this is that psychologists are stupid.
But there's a crucial difference between that and the way original rule is phrased.
The fields one has to dismiss are characterized by things one knows is false by physics or combinatorics or other common sense things. Theories of telepathy, the flat earth, creation science or whatever.
The "you can't show me one good paper on the subject" is an appealing-seeming pronouncement but it's really dumb way to do it. Just say, "that doesn't make sense and you'd need huge evidence to prove it". Paper quality isn't really the question.
https://www.sheldrake.org/research/animal-powers/a-dog-that-...
In one of his experiments monitored by another scientist, when the dog didn't respond in a way that met Sheldrake's criteria, Sheldrake changed the criteria in mid-experiment.
That one incident alone should be enough to dismiss any results coming from Sheldrake. He's not only dishonest but blithely unaware that he's being blatantly so.
On the other hand....Ramsey’s theorem applies to compelete (undirected) graphs. Friendship is not necessarily symmetric: Alice could consider Bob a friend, but not vice versa. It could also be context-dependent, especially with kids: Alice and Charlie get along, but not when Bob is around.
The thousands of pages that you don’t want to read probably address some of these “details” that your spherical cow model totally ignores. I think it’s totally fair for someone to say “That’s interesting, but have you read X,Y, and Z? They show that your model doesn’t apply because....”
My bigger point was that the literature on any given topic is chock full of discussions like this. Is friendship directional? Is it binary, or does it make more sense to consider weights on these edges (casual acquaintance/best friend)? Can an outside observer infer friendship, or do you need to rely on self-reports? If so, how consistent are they? And so on.
The more patient researchers are happy to walk you through these sorts of considerations, especially when you're introducing them to a new tool or something. However, if you catch someone who's busy—or grumpy—you might get blown off with "That won't work. Haven't you read the literature?" Personally, I think this happens too often, but you can sorta see how people might get sick of regurgitating the same arguments over and over.
This is not to say that "read it and come back" can't be used as a moat, or that ideas "from the literature" shouldn't be revisited and questioned, but I think insisting that people do a bit of reading is not usually meant in bad faith.
So yes, if kids' friendships form a complete undirected graph, then sure, your result is not at all surprising. But maybe they don't.
R(3,3) doesn't seem universal enough here to be touted as "isomorphism"; it is not giving any particular insight except the most trivial (that child cliques sometimes can be represented as monochromatic sets of a complete graph). Am certain one can do a number of other graph-theoretic or algebraic relationships here with zero insight or predictive force.
You always need to read all relevant literature to be able to constructively participate in a debate.
Non-adherents can't attack an idea because someone simply says "well have you read X paper? No? Well, then you need to read more.".
And then when you can back and say "but this paper is wrong too", the process just repeats.
However, if you show you haven't engaged with the relevant literature and don't address the arguments in sufficient detail, then your paper is likely not going to pass peer review, and rightly so.
If they are supposed to be an expert in the field, that seems like a fair test.
Although, the original paper of an idea, I often find, has the most human-readable explanation. Pearl's 1986 paper of Bayesian Networks, Gauss' 1800-whatever paper on the normal distribution, the original bitcoin/blockchain paper by that Japanese-sounding name, etc. They're still trying to sell the idea so they really need to talk to the idiots.
This is one of worst ideas I've ever read. Wouldn't you just be cheating yourself?
How is tying your own learning to someone else's ability to find the best papers in any way a smart thing to do? It would be much better to doubt the person who gave you the papers (perhaps he miscalculated which two papers were the best), than to dismiss the entire field.