Here's an article citing research published this year that disputes the idea that our large brain was directly a result of access to extra protein from hunting meat:
"They concluded that the evidence for increased carnivory in our ancestors is merely an effect of increased sampling of the archaeological record at certain time intervals starting around two million years ago, meaning that there is no strong relationship between eating more meat and the evolution of larger brains in our ancestors."
The way we used arxiv worked well in physics, though this is 15 years ago now so might have changed since.
arxiv was about distribution. It didn't replace peer review - articles were still submitted to journals and published there too.
If an article was posted to arxiv and not a journal, the odds of a citation went down massively. And the journal it was submitted to was a factor in whether or not we read it. When articles were eventually published, most authors also updated the preprint with the post peer review version.
Basically it meant that
(1) it was easy to keep up to date with what everyone was working on, and pick up interesting new stuff
(2) most citations, post 80s, you saw in whatever paper you were reading, you could look up on arxiv and be reading it in seconds.
This is not the case in computer science and particularly machine learning, especially in recent years. You'll find many papers where a majority of references are to preprints that stay preprints for ever. You'll also find many papers that have hundreds of citations, all while remaining preprints forever (and many of those citations are from forever-preprints themselves).
In machine learning, for the most part, arxiv is used to avoid peer-review. Or a way to "publish" work that has been rejected by a peer-reviewed publication, of course.
And to be more cynical, it's also a convenient source of references to pad up a Related Work section and make it look like incremental work is part of a growing body of groundbreaking new work. /jaded
Edit: well, I'm not just being cynical. The fact that everyone can put their half-baked papers on arxiv means that the 90% of work that is crap, per Sturgeon's Law, is now a much bigger quantity than ever before and one must sift through reams and reams of crap before finding work that has any meaningful results to report. Again, that's the case in machine learning specifically. I don't know about other fields.
But those Arxiv papers which were not published elsewhere but which got many citations, those were read by others, i.e. reviewed by peers, i.e. peer-reviewed.
Arxiv only lacks the initial quality filter by peer review.
I'm also working in the field of machine learning. In those niche fields I work more specifically (speech recognition), I can usually still get a lot out of Arxiv-only papers. I can pretty easily see the main idea and see if there is some usefulness in the paper or not w.r.t. my own research e.g. by good experimental analysis. In don't really feel overwhelmed in the amount of papers. I don't really see the problem.
Can everyone put their half baked papers on arxiv? I see people on irc discussing about finding sponsors for their paper and what not and how this part not being trivial at all. I don't know the details about how the sponsoring works for arxiv but seems like it doesn't let everyone post their half papers, at the very least.
> Why do we call it "preprints"? The term seems to imply that work is preliminary or unfinished. As far as I can tell, the term introduced by
@arxiv
, the first online repository for scientific manuscripts, is "e-print". Is "preprint" a marketing device invented by publishers?
I think it's because the publisher retains copyright. There is a limit on how "done" the manuscript can be and still be shared for free online. Some universities have started to fight back against this by limiting the scope of copyright restrictions that publishers can impose.
No, in most of physics there is no such limit in practice. The only difference between my published work and the preprint arxiv versions is the font and whether the layout is two columns or one column. They are word-for-word identical with identical figures.
In ML at least, the arXiv version is the “canonical” one. This is because the conferences have onerous page limits, so the official conference version is usually mangled with lots of cut content. The arXiv will have content restored and be more readable.
In theory you should read arXiv and cite the conference version, but often people cite arXiv and nobody cares because google scholar mostly combines things properly.
Good points. I'd add to this that small hands are actively advantageous for a lot of repertoire.
Bach fugues, say, or fast intricate passages can be a nightmare for long-fingered pianists to get their hands around. The OPs focus on big Liszt or Rachmaninov chords is understandable but there's so much more to piano playing.
He and David Wengrow ask why "the myth of 'agricultural revolution' remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors"
I think to some extent they're forced to peak young. I don't believe musicians are actually at their best when they are young and I'd claim recordings of classical artists through their lives supports this.
For classical music, competitions and conservatoires will only take young people and if you don't go through their processes there's no chance of getting auditions for pro gigs.
I wonder if the author is one of those who needs a few more years to understand themselves well enough to perform at the highest level, by which time she'll be to old to pursue music professionally
One point regarding whether or not this is unphysical is that in physical systems, conceptually we work in finite systems and at the only very end of our calculations we take the infinite limit while holding physically observable quantities fixed. This is the essence of the thermodynamic limit.
In these paradoxes, infinities are present from the outset and I think it's this that leads to the unphysical outcome. They're not wrong. They are mathematical paradoxes. But it's not a problem they are unphysical (from a physics point of view) because physics uses mechanisms, like the thermodynamic limit, to handle infinite limits sensitively. Then the paradox goes away.
For instance, the 'physics' version of the Hilbert hotel problem would say there are two hotels, one with N rooms and the other with M rooms. Then do all the renumbering you like, the paradoxical situation of filling both hotels and then putting all guests from both hotels into one of them is no longer possible. Finally, if you want to think about hotels with an infinite number of rooms take N and M to inifinity keeping N/M fixed
Edit: add physicified version of Hilbert hotel problem
"They concluded that the evidence for increased carnivory in our ancestors is merely an effect of increased sampling of the archaeological record at certain time intervals starting around two million years ago, meaning that there is no strong relationship between eating more meat and the evolution of larger brains in our ancestors."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/fourt...