I find a lot of value in academic papers, especially in STEM fields, and am going to spend some time outlining my defense for writing them. That being said, I’m not necessarily looking at them as a “discussion forum for EAs”. I think there are many reasons why academic papers can be useful to Effective Altruism even if they’re not directly geared towards promoting EA-type ideas (though they certainly can be). Specifically, I think they’re hugely important in research, and not just for helping secure a research-type job.
Academic papers are, in general, more mathematically rigorous than books. This is not to say that books can never be as rigorous as academic papers, but the overall trend is that books tend to summarize information or lay out information in layman’s terms, whereas academic papers lay out detailed information in very data-heavy terms. Thus, academic papers may or may not be good for discourse depending on the audience’s interests. Take Kahneman’s books on cognitive psychology/behavioural economics—although his books are probably more popular than his papers (by people-at-large), his books reference his papers. It would be folly to try to publish his experimental results as a book (where would you store the results and supplemental materials)?
Academic papers also take less time/energy to write than books, especially for incremental research. For instance, if you’re trying to demonstrate the efficacy of a particular anti-malarial drug, it’s much less time consuming to publish this in a paper than it is to write a book about it.
Most importantly, academic papers are peer-reviewed. You can trust that papers that have come out in reputable journals have the support of experts in the same field. You really can’t do the same for books. Take the large amount of books that exist in support of intelligent design. None of these would hold a dime in any reputable genetics or biology journal. In many cases, the reputability of a book is often dependent on the number of citations it has to journal papers or other material. (Again, this is not to say that books can never be reputable—you just have less confidence about whether one is or not.)
I’m more curious about specific cases of where these book-vs-journal-paper questions arise.
I find a lot of value in academic papers, especially in STEM fields, and am going to spend some time outlining my defense for writing them. That being said, I’m not necessarily looking at them as a “discussion forum for EAs”. I think there are many reasons why academic papers can be useful to Effective Altruism even if they’re not directly geared towards promoting EA-type ideas (though they certainly can be). Specifically, I think they’re hugely important in research, and not just for helping secure a research-type job.
Academic papers are, in general, more mathematically rigorous than books. This is not to say that books can never be as rigorous as academic papers, but the overall trend is that books tend to summarize information or lay out information in layman’s terms, whereas academic papers lay out detailed information in very data-heavy terms. Thus, academic papers may or may not be good for discourse depending on the audience’s interests. Take Kahneman’s books on cognitive psychology/behavioural economics—although his books are probably more popular than his papers (by people-at-large), his books reference his papers. It would be folly to try to publish his experimental results as a book (where would you store the results and supplemental materials)?
Academic papers also take less time/energy to write than books, especially for incremental research. For instance, if you’re trying to demonstrate the efficacy of a particular anti-malarial drug, it’s much less time consuming to publish this in a paper than it is to write a book about it.
Most importantly, academic papers are peer-reviewed. You can trust that papers that have come out in reputable journals have the support of experts in the same field. You really can’t do the same for books. Take the large amount of books that exist in support of intelligent design. None of these would hold a dime in any reputable genetics or biology journal. In many cases, the reputability of a book is often dependent on the number of citations it has to journal papers or other material. (Again, this is not to say that books can never be reputable—you just have less confidence about whether one is or not.)
I’m more curious about specific cases of where these book-vs-journal-paper questions arise.