Luís Batalha: Explaining technical papers expands the audience and invites more questions
Luís Batalha · Fermat's Library Cofounders João Batalha and Luís Batalha · Y Combinator · Jul 6, 2018 · at 55:28
Luís Batalha, co-founder of Fermat's Library, reflects on the dynamics of scientific annotation and how clarifying complex concepts expands the circle of inquisitive readers.
0:00 / 0:19exact quote · 19.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The more you annotate a paper, there are more people there are that are at the edge of starting to understand what the paper is about. So you start getting more and more questions because the circle expands, and then you just have more people that are, like, starting to understand this topic about number theory or physics or whatever. So you get more and more questions about the paper.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Luís Batalha
Luís Batalha: Open journals can match Science and Nature in prestige
“And I think it's totally possible that these open journals get to a point where they have you know, a reputation like science or nature. As long as you convince people to, you know, publish their papers on these journals, it's, there's nothing about science or…”
Luís Batalha: Machine learning moves too fast to wait for academic journals
“Archive is, is super important because the papers are, the new papers are coming out at such a high rate that people don't wait before the papers go to journals, before they start working on top of it and using the stuff that other people discover.”
Luís Batalha: Initial discovery papers are not always the most impactful
“One of the things that we noticed, or at least I noticed from reading papers is that sometimes it's not like the discovery paper that is the most impactful paper.”
Luís Batalha: Citation metrics misalign incentives for accessible scientific writing
“If the metric is just number of citations, sometimes it's not aligned to making the paper understandable and comprehensible to a large audience.”
Luís Batalha: Educational textbooks should be open-sourced and updated incrementally
“It would make sense for books to be annotated and also be open source so that in that sense you would just you know, commit a new chapter a new explanation for that and keep all the other chapters and then just change that bit. Instead of having to write a new…”