I enjoyed this, as a professor; I must publish in journals regularly and teach students to do the same. Students must always do a literature review; they think the reason is a typical classroom exercise of "prove that you know X" but it really is, as Hanson says, towards the accumulation of knowledge. I get tired of constantly telling every student that the first commandment as soon as an idea has entered their head: find out what is already known about X.
I have so many metaphors for this, e.g., sudents have an idea that is like an island disconnected from the mainland; there must at least be a peninsula; do the work to build the peninsula if you must... Now with AI, I may even send students an AI overview of whatever their question is before we have our first meeting, to keep us from tediously laboring over that territory and having to rediscover the wheel. Students don't understand how important it will be to their progress to understand whether their question is in virgin territory, sparsely settled, or crammed with high-rises. Sigh.
The problem is norm enforcement. In academia you have peer review and an informed readership that each serve to maintain the norms.
It would be nice if the academic quality mechanism (peer review) were decoupled from the distribution channel (publishing in a specific journal). With electronic distribution there's no longer any reason for the two to be tightly coupled. If that decoupling happened then anybody could pay to get their content quality certified to a certain standard of accuracy/novelty – including public intellectuals who otherwise don't have an incentive to navigate the journal submission process.
After, and I’d add that this has become 10-100x easier to do with modern AI. You take your draft, feed it into Claude, and ask:
“If this were an academic paper, who might it be citing? Who writes about these ideas in this essay, and might they have to say about them? Which of my points are more novel and which ones are covering ground well-trodden by others in the past, and specifically who?”.
This simple approach is likely to yield 90% of the value of a full-fledged academic “literature review”. It’s so easy nowadays that there’s no reason not to bother.
I think that situating your essay would have quite a negative impact on reach and engagement. Of course if everyone did it that wouldn't matter, but I'm just skeptical about the degree of compliance you would need to achieve given social media dynamics etc.
Great insight! I wonder if the medium of a public digital forum has anything to do with this. While it is miraculous that the Internet enables learning on anything and everything, there is no longer the same level of guidance one would normally receive in an academic setting. And with the added emphasis on digital anonymity, how are we supposed to even cite some authors accurately if we don’t know who they are?
Fair! But how would we reference this in such a way as to establish a sufficient scholarly trail if an address/link/URL isn't enough? A citation system needs some amount of identifying information to be useful. Aliases aren't always reliable, especially on the Internet.
I enjoyed this, as a professor; I must publish in journals regularly and teach students to do the same. Students must always do a literature review; they think the reason is a typical classroom exercise of "prove that you know X" but it really is, as Hanson says, towards the accumulation of knowledge. I get tired of constantly telling every student that the first commandment as soon as an idea has entered their head: find out what is already known about X.
I have so many metaphors for this, e.g., sudents have an idea that is like an island disconnected from the mainland; there must at least be a peninsula; do the work to build the peninsula if you must... Now with AI, I may even send students an AI overview of whatever their question is before we have our first meeting, to keep us from tediously laboring over that territory and having to rediscover the wheel. Students don't understand how important it will be to their progress to understand whether their question is in virgin territory, sparsely settled, or crammed with high-rises. Sigh.
The problem is norm enforcement. In academia you have peer review and an informed readership that each serve to maintain the norms.
It would be nice if the academic quality mechanism (peer review) were decoupled from the distribution channel (publishing in a specific journal). With electronic distribution there's no longer any reason for the two to be tightly coupled. If that decoupling happened then anybody could pay to get their content quality certified to a certain standard of accuracy/novelty – including public intellectuals who otherwise don't have an incentive to navigate the journal submission process.
After, and I’d add that this has become 10-100x easier to do with modern AI. You take your draft, feed it into Claude, and ask:
“If this were an academic paper, who might it be citing? Who writes about these ideas in this essay, and might they have to say about them? Which of my points are more novel and which ones are covering ground well-trodden by others in the past, and specifically who?”.
This simple approach is likely to yield 90% of the value of a full-fledged academic “literature review”. It’s so easy nowadays that there’s no reason not to bother.
I think that situating your essay would have quite a negative impact on reach and engagement. Of course if everyone did it that wouldn't matter, but I'm just skeptical about the degree of compliance you would need to achieve given social media dynamics etc.
Are you giving general advice, referring to at least one essay that's been submitted to you, or both?
Great insight! I wonder if the medium of a public digital forum has anything to do with this. While it is miraculous that the Internet enables learning on anything and everything, there is no longer the same level of guidance one would normally receive in an academic setting. And with the added emphasis on digital anonymity, how are we supposed to even cite some authors accurately if we don’t know who they are?
You cite the work, not the true name of the author.
Fair! But how would we reference this in such a way as to establish a sufficient scholarly trail if an address/link/URL isn't enough? A citation system needs some amount of identifying information to be useful. Aliases aren't always reliable, especially on the Internet.
A URL + archive system is enough.
Why would a URL not be enough?
This references a previous comment left on this post (this question exacerbates the problem described in the essay above)
That's what hyperlinks are for, yes?
Mere links aren't enough, and even they won't happen sufficiently without a norm to encourage them.