No Papers, No Problems: Sharing Ideas Without Academic Vanity
1/ If you didn’t cared about academic vanity/score keeping, would it still be preferable to disseminate ideas as paper vs a web page somewhere? I know you can do both but former is just unnecessary tax and requires mastering too many evils consciously or unconsciously.
2/ Paper tradition promotes twisted verbiage hurting readability, avoid fine details needed to make things work, chasing page count, must fit conf theme vs covering all aspects, no details on author’s journey+intuitions, hide bad parts to get through reviews, never talk code etc.
3/ When conference rejects 80% of papers, it’s not because all of those were bad. What prevents to accept all good papers for inclusion in electronic proceedings? The artificial scarcity that we like to create to promote elitism at the expense of sharing knowledge is puzzling.
4/ Perhaps why @geoffreyhinton hasn’t yet turned his RMSProp slide in to a paper. Who wants to spend hours of their lives trying to fill N pages for what you already said very nicely in just one slide?