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Ask HN: What are the best papers you read in your life?
237 points by toombowoombo on July 21, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 106 comments
I'm trying to get an understanding on what quality means in terms of publishing research and I learn best through examples. Any recommendation is highly appreciated ^^.

I'm also interested in papers from many disciplines, so the wider the range of domains, the higher the value!




Claude Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication"[1] is often considered a classic. I think this is because:

1. It's quite readable as a narrative.

2. The maths is not pages of first principle derivations as if the reader is not familiar with the basics of algebraic substitution.

3. The diagrams and graphs are genuinely useful and remove the need for many, many thousands of words that others may have used instead of, or in addition to, the core narrative.

4. It deals with an abstract concept but roots it in concrete mathematical and physical terms. He touches on specific examples.

5. It's quite short given the breadth of subject area.

[1] https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...


His “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems”, from a few years prior, is right up there too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_Theory_of_Secr...

IMO Shannon does an amazing job laying out the foundational ideas behind cryptographic security in a way that is very accessible to anyone with a basic understanding of probability.

The clarity and simplicity that he achieves is especially striking when you compare his approach to what you’ll see from modern cryptographers. No offense to those guys - they’re amazing - but accessible their stuff is not.


I agree with you but what’s so amazing is that it is a first principles analysis. He postulates a few criteria information must satisfy and generates a whole field of study as a consequence


His easily-understandable yet mind-blowing ideas of hyperspheres of information (and a reliable communications channel having a definition!? What?) changed my brain permanently.

This is the paper I was going to cite as well.


This is probably among the best I have read: https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1462&co...

In a system with growing inequality where the rich benefit at the expense of the poor, this artificial redistribution can go on for some time, but once the inequality gets so bad that people revolt, then the amount of "guard labor" that needs to be performed goes up. Poverty and desperation makes people more likely to perform "guard labor" because it gives them a chance to escape poverty and avoid being targeted themselves which further feeds into authoritarian politicians gaining more power as they have no trouble finding soldiers willing to maintain the inequality. This works but only until guard labor reaches such a critical mass that half the population engages in it. Once that point is crossed, guard labor will start defecting against the current political leadership and conduct a military coup.


Paths, Trees, and Flowers from Jack Edmonds (1965) https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/canadian-journal-of-...

Presents a beautiful algorithm (maximum matching in general graphs) and is very well written


Congestion Avoidance and Control (1988) by Van Jacobson: https://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf

Often called "the paper which saved the internet" due to solving congestion collapse on the ARPANET, and inventing the fundamentals of TCP Congestion Control still used countless times every single day on all computers everywhere. It's very readable and presents complex math in easily understood graphs for non-math people.


The Bitcoin whitepaper. It started my curiosity in the computer security industry (employed for 5 years now) and the rabbithole of trying to understand every design decision behind the cryptosystem.


Nice! It's really well written. I have followed a similar path, but for me, the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" [0] paper was the one that sent me down the rabbit-hole.

[0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...


The Bitcoin whitepaper is one of my cherished reads. The other is the BitTorrent whitepaper. Both technologies changed the technical and non-technical worlds, and the fundamental protocols are clearly explained in their respective papers.


If you like bittorrent and bitcoin's white papers, you're gonna love chia's green paper. (It was created by the bit torrent guy)


Agreed, this is a must-read, very well-written paper. Even though it turned out the world didn't really need cryptocurrencies.


Agree with your assessment of cryptocurrencies in general but having seen the adoption of Bitcoin in authoritarian and inflationary regimes, the world most certainly does need access to a digital peer-to-peer currency that is censorship-resistant and virtually immune to debasement.

Even if you argue that Bitcoin as it has evolved has flaws, it is the best implementation we’ve come up with so far. Like democracy, it isn’t perfect but it is much better for its use case than anything else we have come up with to date.


It took a while for the tinfoil-hat stance on privacy to catch on, but it's safe to say that today it has lost its fringe status. Similarly, it might still be years before we see widespread acceptance of the importance of an unrestricted, global value-transfer mechanism.

You miss something only when it's gone.


"On Bandwidth"-- a paper version of a Shannon Lecture by Slepian.

The abstract begins with "It is easy to argue that real signals must be bandlimited. It is also easy to argue they cannot be so. This paper presents one possible resolution of this paradox"

http://web.eng.ucsd.edu/~massimo/ECE287C/Handouts_files/On-B...


“I’m Not Mopping the Floors, I’m Putting a Man on the Moon” How NASA Leaders Enhanced the Meaningfulness of Work by Changing the Meaning of Work.

The best leadership paper I've read.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0001839217713748


New Directions in Cryptography (WHITFIELD DIFFIE AND MARTIN E. HELLMAN, MEMBER, IEEE), https://www-ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/publications/24.pdf


Whatever you think the Sokal Squared hoax[0] does or does not demonstrate, you have to admit the papers are pretty humorous:

Who Are They to Judge?: Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework for Fat Bodybuilding [1]

Separately, Alan Sokal has written a measured take on Robin DiAngelo's best selling book on "White Fragility"[2], which thrived on the mania post-George Floyd.

[0] https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21604851.2018.14...

[2] https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/white_fragility_FINAL2.pdf


>Sokal Squared hoax[0]

Can you give some context for this that isn't a 47 minute read? What might someone think it does or does not demonstrate?


Dijkstra's "Solution of a Problem in Concurrent Programming Control" from 1965

https://rust-class.org/static/classes/class19/dijkstra.pdf

The entire paper is just one side of one page. In it he describes a basic, fundamental concurrency problem, gives a solution, and then provides a proof of the solution.


Not sure anybody here appreciates social science, but I will never not give a shout-out to "Decoupling Rape" by Whiteman and Cooper. Such an authentic account, while still managing to stay relevant to abstract and higher-order debates in my field. I suspect many have not read it because it is so heart-wrenching though.


That's Whiteman*, not white man ;)


Autocorrect strikes again :)


Not a paper, but The Extravagant Universe by Robert Kirschner describes decades worth of observation and data collection in astronomy, coming together with experimental discoveries from particle colliders and evolving theory in order to eventually converge upon the now-standard ΛCDM model in cosmology. Also includes an enormous background on the century worth of discoveries that eventually resulted in the type-1A supernova becoming a sufficiently reliable standard candle to measure the distance to galaxies far enough away that the redshift demonstrated accelerating expansion of the universe. So many things they needed to work out, from dust diffraction patterns to the differences in how spectrum evolves over the two weeks or so from the initial explosion event to figure out exactly when in the timeline each observation is taking place. Combine that with the logistics of telescope scheduling and the sparsity of observations when you're looking at something as large as the entire universe and your telescope can only cover so much at any one time. It gives you a tremendous appreciation for the sheer amount of work and patience that goes into this, slowly collecting evidence over decades, waiting for technology to develop before certain evidence is even possible to collect, and eventually seeing lines of evidence all point in the same direction, but only after a literal lifetime of work to get there.

Nothing else has ever made me appreciate how hard science really is and how little the general public understands it.


The Conjugate Gradient Method without the Agonizing Pain https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake-papers/painless-conjugate-grad...

Presents a really nice conceptual/intuitive explanation of how/why it works, rather than the traditional algebra based definition/proof you get in many linear algebra courses.


Thanks a lot for the recommendation, read this over the weekend and learned a bunch. If you have other papers to recommend in similar categories I'm all ears :)


If you are looking for quality I suggest you look at the IPCC reports. Each word is carefully chosen, every claim backed by mountains of evidence. They're written to be read and understood by non-experts. They exist to inform decision making that will literally determine the fate of our species. As such, they may be failing at their goal, but not for a lack of effort by the authors.


I disagree. The IPCC may contain a lot of scientific evidence but the way it is presented is highly political. Every word in it had to be negotiated and that is not the same as “carefully chosen”. If you want to dive into climate change I’d suggest to take a look at “The Warming Papers” [1], an edited compilation by David Archer and Raymond Pierrehumbert.

[1] https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Warming+Papers%3A+The+Scient...


Agreed, with one caveat. Over time governments have more and more been trying to influence the reports. It all came to a head with the last one, where a set of researchers released their draft ahead of time in protest over undue influence. They still synthesize relevant research from past years, but there are some problems now. Research published after the first draft cannot be included, so the report is somewhat outdated by the time it's released. Beautifully crafted though.


One of the best pitches I’ve ever read for an IPCC report. They are good reads too! Maybe not very joyful.


How to write Fast Numerical Code

https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~franzf/papers/gttse07.pdf


Nice!

Related: You might find the book Matters Computational - https://www.jjj.de/fxt/#fxtbook and the FXT library it describes - https://www.jjj.de/fxt/ useful.


Oh absolutely. That work is a gem, I've used it for quite some research. Good idea to refer to this, too!


The Universe Of Minds:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.0369.pdf

Possible Girls:

https://philpapers.org/archive/SINPG


I remember seeing “Possible Girls” cited somewhere as an example of the pointlessness of contemporary academic philosophy, but for years I couldn't find it again. A very entertaining re-read, thanks for sharing.


My idea of being explicit and clear changed dramatically after I was exposed to D. Harel's "Statecharts: a visual formalism for complex systems".

Ironically, I think the paper presents more than just the idea and examples of statecharts, rather it also _implicitly_ contains a _method_ for discovering mechanism - the long winded example of the author's digital watch, in my eyes, is a marvel.


Would you recommend Miro Samek's Practical UML Statecharts in C/C++ a good book to learn this technique from ?


Personally, no. I did go through it, but didn't get much from it. Beyond the original paper, I'd recommend David Khourshid's talks, which you can find on YouTube.

For C++ I used Kris Jusiak's library [boost].sml extensively. He too has a few talks on the subject, in particular his c++now 2017 talk.


Thank you and appreciate it very much.

I came to know of Statecharts (from UML) long ago, but had not bothered to study it properly, thinking it was just a "more complicated State Machine representation". Seems i was wrong and there is much to learn here - https://statecharts.dev/


A few fun ones from finance:

https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/simon-peyton-jone...

http://www.thierry-roncalli.com/download/smart-beta-minimum-...

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3211951


I would really love more recommendations in this area if you have them


"A Security Kernel Based on the Lambda-Calculus" by Jonathan A. Rees is pretty high up there: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/5944

I read this a few years back as I was going down an object-capability rabbit hole and found it extremely compelling. (And also made me disappointed that most of the systems we use today do not work like this! Code execution vulnerabilities would be so much less immediately hazardous if they did.)


Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0110...

You’ll Never Guess Who Wrote That: 78 Surprising Authors of Psychological Publications

https://scottlilienfeld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/lilie...

Interest as the Missing Motivator in Self-Regulation

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dustin-Thoman/publicati...


That first one is amazing!


Principles of Design (1998) by Tim Berners-Lee. Especially its Principle of Least Power.

https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html


“What is it like to be a bat” (Nagel)

“The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm”, (Gould et al)

“ A quantitative description of membrane current and its application to conduction and excitation in nerve” (hodgkin and huxley)

a few other that don’t come to mind right now


Ctrl+F “bat”


Like Kleobis and Biton, we won't know until I am dead.

However thus far, a paper that literally changed my life: "Value Dependence Graphs: Representation Without Taxation", D. Weise, R. F. Crew, M. Ernst, B. Steensgaard, POPL 1994. (This was the proverbial butterfly flap that moved me through three countries).

There are many many other good papers and it's not a one-dimension metric so it's hard to pick out winners.


"Retinoic Acid and Arsenic Trioxide for Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia" by Lo-Coco et al. from 2013.[0]

This paper presents a cure for an extremely aggressive cancer using vitamin A and arsenic. Its a unique, relatively benign treatment strategy that completely avoids chemotherapy. As far as I know this is the best result in all of oncology, though the cancer it treats is very rare.

The most well known paper in oncology that is probably more interesting to a general audience is "The Hallmarks of Cancer" by Hanahan and Weinberg.[1]

[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1300874

[1] https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(00)81683-9?_re...


This one from psychology remains a classic: "The weirdest people in the world?" - https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/WeirdPeople.pdf (warning, the introduction is "NSFW").


Why Functional Programming Matters is super readable and interesting.

https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/whyfp90.p...


https://www2.math.upenn.edu/~kazdan/425S11/Drum-Gordon-Webb.... is a great paper on hearing the shape of a drum

Life at Low Reynolds Number makes you think of things which arent visible but move :https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/purcell.pdf

There are more but lets see if the above two work for you first


My favorite: Herbert Simon & Alan Newell's ACM Turing Award Lecture - "Computer Science as an empirical inquiry: Symbols & Search" :

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/360018.360022

Their work on list processing was an inspiration for John McCarthy's famous paper on Lisp:

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf


Each year, I put up lists of interesting papers I've read across CS, math, econ, etc. Here's the list from 2022: https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-articles-2022/.

That should give you dozens of recommendations and a bit of rationale for them.

It's hard to say what best means, but some papers play their part better than others. Not every paper should change the field, nor should they all be the length of a novel.


Do you have more recommended reading on differential privacy from recent years?


Here are a few papers on some scattered DP topics. I'm working on a guide to learning DP now similar to one I've written on measure theory in the past.

The Matrix Mechanism (2015) https://people.cs.umass.edu/~miklau/assets/pubs/dp/Li15matri... Good introduction to the select-measure-reconstruct approach to answering large sets of linear queries (e.g. histograms, averages, ...). This paper is important for the statistics approach to DP synthetic data (which is what I primarily work on): https://differentialprivacy.org/synth-data-1/

Differentially Private Quantiles (2021) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.08244.pdf It turns out that medians are difficult to deal with under DP. This paper introduces a method called JointExp to estimate several quantiles at once. One innovation here is that the user doesn't have to know anything about the distribution of the variable in advance for it to work.

Boundary Differential Privacy (2020) https://www.computer.org/csdl/journal/tq/5555/01/09286504/1p... The main motivation for DP is to protect the privacy of people whose data is used to compute some statistic. This paper, instead, uses DP techniques as a way to inject controlled noise into the output distribution of a classifier to defend against model reconstruction attacks.


Thanks! I know some basics about DP and have adapted some of their results for my non-privacy related work, but it’s not an area I know much about the cutting edge of. Your blog post inspired me to catch up on some results from the past few years!


Nice! If you ever want to chat about DP stuff, feel free to shoot me an email.


This was a very interesting read for me: "WhoTracks .Me: Shedding light on the opaque world of online tracking (2018)" https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.08959

Also this one: "The Internet (Never) Forgets (2017) PDF" https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1037&con...


Two classics as relevant today as ever:

End to end principle: https://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoe...

The rise of "worse is better": https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html


I haven't seen anyone mention the EPR (Einstein Podolski Rosen) paper. It's one of the most influential papers to modern physics, having essentially laid out an opposition to how quantum theory works. Leading to Bell's inequalities and their later experimental verification (which essentially proved the EPR argument "wrong").

It is very clearly written does not contain any maths and can be understood by a non expert (IMO) definitely worth a read.


my 2 cents are two ignobel papers formthe same italian physic professor.

The firs one form 2010 tries to find using multi agents simulation the best approach to solve the Peter Principle in organizations (If you do not know what is the Peter principle is the reason why your boss is so incompetent but still earns more than you)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037843710...

the second is from the same author a work (ignobel 2022) that demonstrate that in the long run it does not matter how prepared and skilled you are.Your income depends more from the fortune and chances that you had in your life than on how prepared you are.

http://www.andrea-rapisarda.it/ig-nobel-2022


Probably this paper [1] is very well known among the classic HN audience, but I dare to leave this link here for the ones who missed it. It is an easy read and it just explains with plain words the backbone of the UNIX system as it was envisioned 50 years ago.

[1] https://dsf.berkeley.edu/cs262/unix.pdf


Computers and Automata by Claude Shannon - https://fermatslibrary.com/s/computers-and-automata.

Absolutely fantastic paper summarizing the field of automata in the 1950s. Amazing how amazing of a surveyor Shannon was. I wish there was a present-day analog for the field now.


Have most people read a paper? I see threads like these with some many interesting suggestion, but are they read by people outside of their general area of study or expertise? I read quite a bit of fiction, but I've never really been able to read anything much past an abstract which much understanding. I have no science background. Am I missout on something?


Generally you need background knowledge to read papers. A quick way to gain necessary background knowledge is to read literature reviews or surveys. If you can't understand even reviews, surveys, or introductions, it is time to read textbooks.


Solid advice. It's hard to break into a new field, but it helps to read/skim a lot of papers to get the vocabulary and then slowly assign meaning to the words. What you'll find over and over is that many concepts are the same across many fields, but invariably gets different names.


Of course we are missing out. Why would one make the effort to study if there was nothing to gain?


http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf


This is a great one and one that I think will be useful to you particularly concerning your goal.

These quotes in particular may be of interest to you if you are unsure or limited in time. If they sound interesting, read through the rest of the paper.

“We lecturers naturally worry about the content of our lectures rather than the emotions we express in giving them. As human beings, students respond immediately to the emotive charge, even if they do not understand the content. The lecturer may have tried to give a balanced account of the debate between X and Y, but his preference for Y shines through. When the students come to write the essay on the relative merits of X and Y, they know where to put their money. The lecturer might try to balance the lecture by suppressing his enthusiasm for Y, but this 'objective' presentation will make a mystery of the whole exercise. The students will wonder why they have to sit through all this stuff about X and Y when even the lecturer does not seem to care much for either of them. The better strategy is for the lecturer to plunge into the works of X, reconstruct X's mental world and re-enact X's thoughts until he shares some of X's intellectual passions. We can be sure that X had intellectual passions, else we would not now have the works of X.”

“Remember Dr. Richards on Tolstoy? If Tolstoy's view really is 'plainly untrue then there is no point mentioning it. If Tolstoy's view is worth mentioning, then it is worth inhabiting Tolstoy's position, reconstructing his thought and thus feeling the force of his motives. Nothing less will bring Tolstoy's thought to life, which you have to do if the students are to see any point in learning about it. Victory over a corpse is no less pyrrhic than victory over a straw man.”

https://uhra.herts.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2299/5831/903260.p...


Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination

Their methodology is brilliant. I want this research replicated, all over the place, all the time, with different variables.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873


"Inhomogeneous Electron Gas" written by Hohenberg and Walter Kohn which discuss how the equilibrium state of interacting electrons can be modeled with just electron density (3 dimension) and doesnt need the full electron state (3xN dimension). This is an extrordinary result that is so simple to follow that its crazy it took almost 6 decades of discovery if quantum theory to identify this.

The work provided an elegant and tractable way to model complex chemisry and a lot of physics. Most of molecular level modeling that cuts across electronics, energy and pharma are based on this work.

[1] https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.136.B86...


One I particularly liked: "FastDTW: Toward Accurate Dynamic Time Warping in Linear Time and Space" by Stan Salvador and Philip Chan.

[0] https://cs.fit.edu/~pkc/papers/tdm04.pdf


Didn't think I'd come across a DTW paper here.

Have you seen anything worth reading in that line of literature which addresses a more practical issue of segment sizing and segment overlap on accuracy?


Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03697

Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451

Simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237005499_Simple_Ma...


"Information theory and statistical mechanics" by E.T. Jaynes [0]. Starting from a Bayesian/information-theoretic perspective, he derived statistical mechanics in just a few pages. This approach finally made stat-mech 'click' for me.

It's a paradigm shift. Entropy (in the Bayesian sense) is fundamentally a subjective quantity. Maximizing entropy is just minimizing the assumed information. When dealing with large complex systems over long timescales, the only pieces of information one is justified in assuming are the values of those quantities that are conserved globally by the dynamics (eg, total energy, total mass, etc). The "thermodynamic entropy" S is just the maximum entropy, given a certain set of conserved quantities (an "ensemble") -- it is therefore more or less objective, modulo the conserved quantities.

The second law of thermodynamics is just the information processing inequality: you don't have any more information about the future state of the system than you do about the present state. If anything, you have less, because if you have any information about the current state of non-conserved quantities, that information is not valid at other times (assuming you don't have complete information & the ability to fully simulate the dynamics). From this perspective, entropy does not generate the "arrow of time": the argument is symmetric in time.

Another from Jaynes worthy of mention: "Prior probabilities" [1] discusses the use of group theory to derive "non-informative" prior distributions by considering the set of transformations that result in equivalent inference scenarios. This is resolved another question I had when studying stat mech: "How come we start with an assumption of uniform probability in phase space as expressed in (x,p) coordinates -- if we transformed to a different coordinate system, it would look like a non-uniform distribution!" The answer is that we assume Galilean invariance. The concept applies outside stat mech as well.

Plenty of other interesting stuff [2].

[0] https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/theory.1.pdf [1] https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/prior.pdf [2] https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/node1.html


Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It?

by Jim Gray

https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/tandem/TR-85.7.pdf


I'm originally from CS but have an interest in linguistics. I can highly recommend any paper by the late Charles J. Fillmore who over many decaded developed ideas that rivaled the standard Chomskian school of thought.

His wikipedia page lists a few publications that could serve as starting points:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_J._Fillmore#Publicatio...


There's a lot of non-Chomskian linguistics out there. Basically if you look for "linguistic typology" there's a probably at least 90% chance that Chomsky will be totally irrelevant.

(Some of my favourites in that area used to be Martin Haspelmath, Balthasar Bickel, Gilbert Lazard, ... - but I haven't kept myself up to date with the literature for years now)


Vitousek and Howarth, 1991. "Nitrogen limitation on land and in the sea: how can it occur?"[1]

This classic in the field of biogeochemistry is so well written --its both technical and accessible, digging into a fundamental puzzle that underlies so many patterns in life on earth.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/bf00002772


"Randomness at the edge: Theory of quantum Hall transport at filling ν=2/3" by Kane, Fisher, Polchinski impressed me the first time I read it and still impresses me. Concise, (relatively) accessible, and ingenious.

On the other end of the spectrum is "Anyons in an exactly solved model and beyond" by Kitaev. It's very long, and yet densily filled with ideas. I'm getting back to it after years, and still finding out new things.


A quantitative description of membrane current and its application to conduction and excitation in nerve A L HODGKIN, A F HUXLEY J Physiol. 1952 Aug;117(4):500-44.


Gerbasi, et al, "Why So FURious", DOI: 10.1163/156853011X578965

A footnote in scientific research on folk, this two-page-worth of text is a rebuttal to the scientific journal equivalent to a Hacker News comment in which the authors come close to very nearly questioning the validity of someone's PhD.

Just goes to show: No matter what field you're in, someone is going to incorrect you.


I don't read a lot of papers TBH, so YMMV. I liked the Meltdown & Spectre papers from https://meltdownattack.com/.

What did I like about these papers? The content I guess. :p Come to think of it, the accompanying website is good too. Much better than just the paper!


Lisanne Bainbridge, Ironies of Automation. Especially timely now when every company is bolting a LLM onto the side of their software.


Thank you for posting this! As a direct result, I have printed copies and we're going to discuss it tonight in Toronto at mondays.pizza :) thanks!


I recommend the book "Research methods for business students" (Saunders et al) for a comprehensive guide to conducting and writing research projects. It's written very clearly so is applicable beyond just business research, but similar books may exist in other disciplines.


Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System

Is the paper that has influenced me the most.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/35037.35059


Proof of an external world, G.E. Moore, 1939.

https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil201/Moore1.pdf


I can give example of one of worst papers.

Original IPFS paper is one of worst papers that I had read.


worse sounds like a topic. You haven't explained why btw.


Some of my favorites have been mentioned so I’ll add:

“On the Common Law Origin of the Infield Fly Rule”

A rare blend of honest academic inquiry and parody writing


"Brain over body"-A study on the willful regulation of autonomic function during cold exposure


In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russel


there was one about meter and rhyme that was written in meter and rhyme, can't find it anymore


https://www.kith.org/words/2022/06/11/best-linguistics-paper...


thank you <3


Greenland et al on pvalues is an excellent read.


Gillian Russell, “Epistemic Viciousness in the Martial Arts,”

It is about traditional martial arts masters, trapped in their echo chamber, sniffing their own farts. The whole industry gets its ass kicked by mixed martial arts. Basically street thugs versus shaolin kung fu masters.

it describes in-group bias, echo chambers, and cognitive dissonance in large groups. Very applicable in modern science, politics and so on.


Interesting; something off the beaten track.

While i agree that many treat "Traditional Martial Arts" almost like a "Religion" (i.e. The Ancients knew everything and thou shalt not question) we also need to be careful that we don't throw the "baby out with the bathwater". Almost all of current-day martial arts are "Sports" (including MMA etc.) with rules and refereeing in place to avoid serious injury/death. Thus while we have a lot of modern knowledge w.r.t. Anatomy/Physiology etc. much of the mental training needed for "life-or-death" situations have been lost. A technique by itself is nothing; it is the "killing mentality" needed to go with it that is everything. I think that is what we need to refocus on from "Traditional Martial Arts" while at the same time interpreting them in the light of Modern Science/Psychology.


I think most traditional martial arts are also practiced, taught, and competed in as sports these days. They're not gladiators.

Specialized people (military, self defense contractors, etc.) might optimize for lethality. Maybe Krav Maga has a greater focus on that than most. But most of the famous Eastern arts aren't delaying with life and death stuff anymore either. It's not Kill Bill.


That was my point.

The paper bemoans the BS in "Traditional Martial Arts" but misses the point that they are no longer taught with the same level of intensity/seriousness/viciousness/ruthlessness that it was originally developed with. Lacking this training mindset the "Martial" art becomes merely a "Sport". But many of the ancient texts cover these principles quite well and are worth learning and interpreting in modern physiological/psychological terms.


I see. Thanks for the clarification!


I read this paper and it's interesting, even though I'm not interested in martial arts (but I am interested in what the author calls "epistemic vices"). I didn't see where it's saying that "The whole industry gets its ass kicked by mixed martial arts" and it seems very respectful to martial arts masters, also, saying, e.g. that:

So am I advocating scoffing at the word of your sensei or senpai? No. That’s not being an epistemically responsible agent, that’s just being an asshole. All the old constraints on your behaviour still apply. I’m arguing for the importance of being cautious in what you believe.

Instead of saying they are "trapped in their echo chamber, sniffing their own farts". Although I guess you inevitably sniff a few things you wouldn't normally chose to in a dojo (such as other peoples' sweat or foot smell).

Interestingly the author then goes on to quote "the words of the Buddha "copied from their place of honour on the wall of Harry Cook’s dojo":

Do not believe on the strength of traditions even if they have been held in honour for many generations and in many places; do not believe anything because many people speak of it; do not believe on the strength of sages of old times; do not believe that which you have yourselves imagined, thinking that a god has inspired you. Believe nothing which depends only on the authority of your masters or priests. After investigation, believe that which you have yourselves tested and found reasonable, and which is for your good and that of others.

And while that sounds very enlightened to the modern reader, there's at least this guy who thinks it's a mistranslation adjusted to that modern reader's sensibilities:

https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/do-not-believe-in-anything-simp...

Anyway an interesting read, so thanks for linking.


I haven't read the whole paper, but isn't one reason MMA wins because it has less restrictions on what moves you can do? Other martial arts have strict rules on what kind of moves you do, so a practitioner of Taekwondo will be at a disadvantage against MMA practitioner, for obvious reasons. This doesn't mean one martial art is necessarily better, they just have different rules. It seems silly to compare them that way.

Imagine a hypothetical new martial arts that allows all the moves of MMA, but with biting and eye poke allowed, so practitioners of this arts is at a definite advantage against MMA. Would you say that this martial art is any better?


I think the generally accepted context most people evaluate martial arts in is "How well does it allow one to weaponize their body to defend themselves?"

In this context, some martial arts are dramatically better than others.

MMA + Eye-poking martial art: Yes.




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