While I respect this perspective, I think it’s likely post-hoc.
When it comes to spending hundreds of hours on a paper, especially some research which requires signifiant lab costs, what is a few hundred towards paying a freelance video editor? Would this lead to significant increase in citation factor—quite possibly—there’s been some studies showing papers are more likely to be cited after being covered in a major newspaper.
Which is lovely for the type of paper that could get covered in a major newspaper, but the majority of papers are not. If you look at the typical physics paper, you’re gonna have a hard time convincing someone to drop hundreds of dollars promoting “Degeneracy between even- and odd-parity superconductivity in the quasi-one-dimensional Hubbard model and implications for SR2RuO4undefined”. Also, a freelance video editor is not going to understand how superconductivity relates to the hubbard model. What are they going to do, put flashy animations on top of a few intro slides?
A large part of science is about hyperspecialists developing knowledge very slowly, in collaboration with other hyperspecialists. Eventually a lot of cool and useful stuff comes out of it, but most of the steps along the way are mainly of interests to other specialists.
Having said that, I’m not sure how much of this applies to EA, apart from the highly technical stuff. A lot of it is intended to guide a general audience, so i see the appeal in aiming towards said audience.
While I respect this perspective, I think it’s likely post-hoc.
When it comes to spending hundreds of hours on a paper, especially some research which requires signifiant lab costs, what is a few hundred towards paying a freelance video editor? Would this lead to significant increase in citation factor—quite possibly—there’s been some studies showing papers are more likely to be cited after being covered in a major newspaper.
Which is lovely for the type of paper that could get covered in a major newspaper, but the majority of papers are not. If you look at the typical physics paper, you’re gonna have a hard time convincing someone to drop hundreds of dollars promoting “Degeneracy between even- and odd-parity superconductivity in the quasi-one-dimensional Hubbard model and implications for SR2RuO4undefined”. Also, a freelance video editor is not going to understand how superconductivity relates to the hubbard model. What are they going to do, put flashy animations on top of a few intro slides?
A large part of science is about hyperspecialists developing knowledge very slowly, in collaboration with other hyperspecialists. Eventually a lot of cool and useful stuff comes out of it, but most of the steps along the way are mainly of interests to other specialists.
Having said that, I’m not sure how much of this applies to EA, apart from the highly technical stuff. A lot of it is intended to guide a general audience, so i see the appeal in aiming towards said audience.