Re:Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?
by w10-1 on Friday September 16, 2022 @01:16PM
(#32869166)
As you suggest, journals are a critical area for society.
Since we're on HN, we get to take off our technical hat and put on our product hat -- not the fit-to-customer product, but disrupt-the-industry product.
What are the incentive structures that would destroy this or make it work?
Consider the scenarios today...
- What's wrong with the thousands of similar-sounding journals popping up on China publishing research that is either unvetted or copied from other journals, so researchers can satisfy their publish-or-perish needs?
- How do you deal with reviewer networks?
- How do you get the best of the best, people with no time and plenty of opportunities and money, to provide effective feedback on an avalanche of articles?
- How do you get the support of, without being dominated by, the big research companies and universities?
- Look at the history of reputation systems, from quora to stackexchange to games, on a matrix with the difficulty of determining correctness of questions:
-- Who won the game?
-- Does this code work?
-- Which library should I use?
-- Is this paper correct and valuable?
- What about prediction markets, which try to use money/investment as a measure of seriousness: how would that help or hurt? (and isn't that what we're doing by insisting academics publish for tenure?)
In the spirit of MVP, you might consider a pivot to a much smaller problem: how to professional groups establish and document their standard of care? A team wiki? (gets stale, disconnected from operations) Run books? (too stepwise to convey meaning needed to transform the system) Slack-capture? email? documentation?
What about capturing the benefit in a change of format, from opaque text/pdf to something like a per-domain semantic web, with connections to empirical methods and findings? That could provide incentives for everyone. Like the professional-group scenario, the killer feature would be something that grows incrementally with multiple authors (as code does for developers).
Since we're on HN, we get to take off our technical hat and put on our product hat -- not the fit-to-customer product, but disrupt-the-industry product.
What are the incentive structures that would destroy this or make it work?
Consider the scenarios today...
- What's wrong with the thousands of similar-sounding journals popping up on China publishing research that is either unvetted or copied from other journals, so researchers can satisfy their publish-or-perish needs?
- How do you deal with reviewer networks?
- How do you get the best of the best, people with no time and plenty of opportunities and money, to provide effective feedback on an avalanche of articles?
- How do you get the support of, without being dominated by, the big research companies and universities?
- Look at the history of reputation systems, from quora to stackexchange to games, on a matrix with the difficulty of determining correctness of questions:
-- Who won the game?
-- Does this code work?
-- Which library should I use?
-- Is this paper correct and valuable?
- What about prediction markets, which try to use money/investment as a measure of seriousness: how would that help or hurt? (and isn't that what we're doing by insisting academics publish for tenure?)
In the spirit of MVP, you might consider a pivot to a much smaller problem: how to professional groups establish and document their standard of care? A team wiki? (gets stale, disconnected from operations) Run books? (too stepwise to convey meaning needed to transform the system) Slack-capture? email? documentation?
What about capturing the benefit in a change of format, from opaque text/pdf to something like a per-domain semantic web, with connections to empirical methods and findings? That could provide incentives for everyone. Like the professional-group scenario, the killer feature would be something that grows incrementally with multiple authors (as code does for developers).