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MartianTomato t1_ixhle92 wrote

Reply to comment by Insighteous in [D] Schmidhuber: LeCun's "5 best ideas 2012-22” are mostly from my lab, and older by RobbinDeBank

Yes. In my conversations with people thinking about what topics / research to work on, I'd say number of citations / marketability is top 3 factor in their decision making. I also see people draw an equivalence between # of citations and impact.

The flaw in this reasoning is that most highly cited work (in "hot" topics) is, by its nature, replaceable. If you don't do it, someone else inevitably will. And this kind of research feels empty in the same way that software engineering does... the researcher has become a replaceable cog in the machine learning machine. Yet somehow, I see people are more motivated to pursue topics they feel they will be "scooped" on if they delay even one conference cycle...

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DevFRus t1_ixihbol wrote

I feel you.

> I see people are more motivated to pursue topics they feel they will be "scooped" on if they delay even one conference cycle...

I also see this often and so I use the inverse of this as the guiding principle in much of my work. If I feel like this is a topic I'd get 'scooped' on if I didn't publish quickly enough then I look for another topic to work on. It usually feels nicer to do 'slow' research. However, it can be a bit isolating.

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