This has been my single major frustration with academia. Papers are getting long and complex (and very often unnecessarily so) and reviewers like rejecting with "not innovative" or "too little work".
I mean there is a great amount of actual work where the complexity is inevitable, say homomorphic encryption or zero-knowledge proofs, but they are based on solid foundations, starting with the definition of group theory with just four axioms and building up and so on, where every definition is either simple or has lots of uses elsewhere. In contrast, in machine learning and operating systems research, people just seem to like to build algorithms from scratch and make it look incredibly complex (whether it actually is complex) and that just makes my life harder just to read the paper. It's getting close to the point where reading the paper takes more cognitive load than conducting the research myself (having to understand 100s of papers to find the one that's useful for my case). When it does, what would be the point of publishing it?
I recognize there is a lot of useful work in academia but it's really hard to enjoy doing it when the results you would be most proud of is not likely to be well recognized.
It’s funny that you mention this. The most helpful research papers I’ve read have been written by private companies. Here’s a couple off the top of my head[0][1]. Short and straight to the point.
I mean there is a great amount of actual work where the complexity is inevitable, say homomorphic encryption or zero-knowledge proofs, but they are based on solid foundations, starting with the definition of group theory with just four axioms and building up and so on, where every definition is either simple or has lots of uses elsewhere. In contrast, in machine learning and operating systems research, people just seem to like to build algorithms from scratch and make it look incredibly complex (whether it actually is complex) and that just makes my life harder just to read the paper. It's getting close to the point where reading the paper takes more cognitive load than conducting the research myself (having to understand 100s of papers to find the one that's useful for my case). When it does, what would be the point of publishing it?
I recognize there is a lot of useful work in academia but it's really hard to enjoy doing it when the results you would be most proud of is not likely to be well recognized.