MY COMMENTS ADDRESSING SOME COMMENTS POSTED ON "IN THEORY" (Some of the following comments are revised and/or ellaborated versions of the originals that I posted) 1. ON THE "INTELLECTUAL" VS "iNSTRUMENTAL" DICOTHOMY. My view of this dicothomy is explained at the beginning of the essay, and it makes no reference to any specific area of TOC. (Thus, I strongly object DE's reading! (*)) It is also clarified that the two "faces of science" are closely related, and yet different, and that I see no fault in the instrumental face. I'm concern of the possible decline in importance attributed to the intellectual face and values. 2. THE HISTORICAL MOTIVATION VS THE ONE PRESENTED IN THE PAPER. I am well aware of the gap between the historical motivation and the motivation presented (which at some point I call "ideal"). I have no issue with researchers that decide to present an instrumental motivation in order to increase the chances of their paper to be accepted; I have an issue with the culture that promotes (or causes) this behavior. That is, I ask why does such a presentation increase the chances of the paper to be accepted? 3. FOR THE RECORD: THE MARX'S QUOTE AND MARXISM. Marx's fabolous saying "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." was misinterpreted as being anti-intellectual. I strongly disagree with that. In the context of the current discussion Marx's saying may be interpreted as a warning against totally neglecting the instrumental face of science. As should be clear from my essay, I would object such a neglect as fiercely as I object the neglect of intellectual values. The same post also claimed that Marxism is anti-intellectual. If the claim refers to Marxism as a school of thought, then it seems wrong by definition. So I assume it refers to Marxism as a political movement, but then I'd disagree too and claim that no other political movement has ever placed a comparable emphasis on understanding. (One may say that the Marxist understanding is wrong, but I cannot see how anybody may say that Marxism does not seek to understand.) 4. ON THE DRAWBACK OF MY STUDY. My study suffers from great drawbacks, which are explicitly stated in my essay. (But I find it unfair to call it a "back of envelop calculation", since I spent about three weeks on it...) One of the problems, admitted in the essay, is that I used a classifier while being unable to extract the classifying rule. This, in my opinion, is not the worst drawback of my study, and TOCers should be well-aware of this situation (which is mentioned a lot in COLT research). I did compile an annotate list of all papers I read, but decided not to publish it because *I believe* that such a publication will make more harm than good. (See, e.g., DE's abuse of the example I gave in a footnote (*)). *) See Footnote (10), which lists four examples, including the one abused by DE. My own intention was to say that *if* that is the statement in the paper, then I take this statement as of an "instrumental" motivation. And note, again, that -- in my opinion -- there is nothing wrong with such a motivation! 5. BEING ALARMED BY EVIDENCE PROVIDED BY "OCCUPY THEORY". The issue at hand is whether the current status of intellectual values in TOC is satisfactory. PB and others (incl myself) have argued it is not. I'm most alarmed by the personal experience of "Occupy Theory"; if researchers feel that an "instrumental motivation" increases the (social) acceptability of their work, then that's a reason to worry. I wish to stress that I do not desire a situation where claiming an "intellectual motivation" increases the acceptablility, I just don't want it to be decreased. 6. LABELING+DISCARDING PEOPLE VS LEARNING FROM ALL. I think it is unhelpful to label people, and to discard their claims based on such a labeling. In my essay, I cited both Durkheim and Weber for things I learned from them, although they held quite opposite positions regarding most issues. Btw, regrading label, a friend of mine has just commented that in the last decade much of my research was algorithmic in nature, although some "core algorithms people" may not think so... 7. WHAT IS THE REASON FOR ALL THIS HOSTILITY? Suppose that somebody has invested a month of his life conducting a study and writing a corresponding essay. (He says he spend 3 weeks doing exhaustive study, and you may add a week of fun in writing.) The essay has some faults; its style is clumsy, it fails to articulate some points clearly enough, it uses too many assumptions, etc. Why try to mock this person? Oh, I forgot that you think that he was trying to promote himself. Do you have any proof for that? Is there not evidence to the opposite? And if he was trying to promote himself and the idea is bad, will such an attempt not harm him instead? But if the idea is good and he also benefits, is that so bad? Can you not consider it a fair fee? Let me reassure you that I wasn't really insulted, I'm just wondering about this behavior. Or maybe you feel insulted by my own essay and feel that I tried to insult you? In such a case, let me restate loud and clear that I did not mean to insult any person; my entire point was the social dynamics of TOC at large. 8. ON THE CHOICE OF MOTIVATION. The very same result may be classified by my analysis as either "intellectual" or "instrumental" or as a "mixed", depending on the motivation that the paper offers! Note that, indeed, these adjectives refer to the motivation given to the reader. The point of my essay is to ask of the change in this aspect over time; firstly, whether it exists at all, and secondly what are its causes. My main thesis is that the current *culture* of TOC discourages "intellectual motivation", and that this in turn is caused by two social phenomena (described in my essay). The question of whether a change in this culture has *already* cause a change in the profile of the research was not addressed in the essay! I assume we all agree that it is bound to have such an effect on the long run. But even without such a consequence, I am very concern of phenomena as reported by "Occupy Theory"; I have heard and seen much of that in the past (**), but it was handy to have this supportive evidence (although it was intended to refute my theses). **) A good question is how frequent are works that were truly motivated by intellectual consideration and/or present results that are mainly of intellectual appeal and yet are motivated by instrumental considerations, vs the frequency of the opposite. My clear impression from my study is that there are much more of the former type nowadays! 9. INTELLECTUAL VALUES BEYOND LIPS SERVICE. My point is that intellectual values should be acted upon in real-life situations, not merely used as lips service. That is, experts should also evaluate the intellectual contribution of research, not merely its instrumental contributions. In both cases, this calls for understanding the work, rather than trying to rely on superficial objective-looking measures of unclear meaning (such as paper counts, citations counts, etc). This is doable in the real world, not in an ideal one. The "real world" (of TOC venues and procedures) is not a given thing, it is what has evolved in history by the agents of the TOC community, and it can be changed in a similar manner (i.e., by our behavior, especially when "socially coordinated", which admittingly has also to overcome external social forces discussed in my essay). This being said, let me confess that I'm far from enthusiastic about the current state of our conferences, and especially of STOC/FOCS. As I see it, the original and well-motivated function of these venues is to serve as channels for dissemination and exchange of ideas and knowledge. But, as PB noted, this function is largely lost in current STOC/FOCS, which currently serve merely as "weight-lifting competitions". That is, authors do not really make an effort to communicate their ideas to the TOC community at large, the PCs don't really insist on this, and the audience no longer expects it. Everybody seem merely concerned with which papers deserve the "award" of being published in STOC/FOCS, and which papers got that award. This being the situation, I lost all interest in submitting papers and/or attending these venues, and I think TOC will be better of if they are abolished (if not restored to their original function). 10. ON DEPTH AND NECESSARY BACKGROUND. Personally, I'm not that keen on the adjective "deep" nor do I take the amount of background material required (for understanding a scientific work) as a measure of great importance (towards evaluating this work). What I care about most is interest and importance (of the work). Whether research nowadays more or less interesting and/or important than a decade or two or three ago is an interesting question, but one that I did not entertain. For sure, I see recent PhD students that understand things that I don't, and I deeply respect them (well, here I just used "deep", but applied differently, I think...). All this has nothing to do with my concerns and with my essay, which may mean that my essay does not address the most important or interesting social question regarding TOC... Still, my essay addresses a certain question, which I find important and interesting, as well as some questions derived from it. Forget my essay, here are the questions. i. Is there a decline in the status of intellectual values (not of intellectual activities!) in TOC? ii. Is this good or bad? iii. Assuming we agree it is bad, can we do anything about it? iv. Assuming we can try, what should we try? Or replace (i) by (i') reading (i') Is there an increase in what I called "vulgar competition" in TOC? By this I mean an *excessive* preoccupation with competitions of various types (e.g., the current way that STOC/FOCS opertate and are viewed)? 11. COMPLAINT VS RESPONSIBILITY. It seems that some readers got the impression that I am complaining on the younger generation of researchers. I deny such an intention. Note that the focus of my essay is on the social aspects of TOC, whereas the *responsibility* for these aspects rests with the more senior researchers. This is not said to exclude others, but rather to assert that if blame is to be distributed (which is not my intention at all), then it will go to the seniors. 12. REITERATING MY CONCERN RE the ACCOUNT OF "OCCUPY THEORY". Regarding the questions of change, balance, and desireable, I wish to call attention again to the report of "Occupy Theory", which I believe to be representative: A person reports that an introduction offering a motivation of one type was replaced by an introduction offering a motivation of another type in order to increase the paper's chances of being accepted in a conference. Should we not be shocked by this? (Regardless if the 1st was intellectual and the 2nd instrumental, or the other way around!) 13. MORE ON THE "INTELLECTUAL" VS "INSTRUMENTAL" DICOTHOMY. My distinction between "intellectual" to "instrumental" is conceptual, it is neither institutional nor personal. That is, I do not apply these labels to institutes or to individual but rather to specific scintific work and to motivations offered in such works. Specifically, looking at any work, I can ask what values does it promote (or what face does it serve), and the answer may be A or B or both. This does not mean that individuals or groups are characterized in this way (e.g., an individual may have both "intellectual" and "instrumental" works). This conceptual division reflects things that are going on in reality, in the evaluation of individual works (either in formal or informal forums; e.g., in PCs and in the classroom), which in turn may affect future research. The issue is the importance assigned by the community to the two "faces" and value-clusters. I claim that too little importance is currently assigned to intellectual considerations and values, and that this is bad. This is not an "academic" discussion about semantics, but rather has very concrete consequences (as examplified by "Occupy Theory" story). 14. ON THE VALUE OF MY STUDY. I do not expect people to simply say "amen" to the analysis that I provided. I think it is totally reasonable and fair to object to any of the assumptions listed in Sec 2.3 of my essay. In particular, as admitted in the essay, I cannot formalize my classification rule (and I believe that doing so is as infeasible as trying to formulate what is makes important and/or interesting paper (although the two classification tasks are very different)). Thus, indeed, my own classification cannot be verified by others, but what others can do is carry out their own study by using themselves as classifiers. I would welcome such a study, but do warn that I invested 3 full working weeks in my study... Let me spell out the reason that I will not publicize my detailed comments regarding the papers (although I do have a record of them). Firstly, I think this will be of *little* help wrt the reasonable concerns that refer to the validity of my assumptions. But more importantly, I fear that such a publication will generate great hostility; just see what is going on in this blog and extrapolate. I do agree that competition and various related aspects were very present also in the 1980's. My claim is that it has increased significantly from that level (which I also found excessive...), and that the attention given to other aspects (i.e., the actual contents of the scientific work, and its motivation -- especially when it is intellectual) has significantly decreased. PB objects the last assert. So who is right? This is the question that puzzled me before I went into that study: That is, there was my feeling (supported by other researchers who felt the same) and there was the opposite feeling (expressed by other researchers). The study I conducted has increased my confidence in the correctness of my feeling, but I cannot expect it to have a similar effect on everybody. I expect (and expected) that it may be instructive for some people (and at different levels). This is why I published it. In addition, I seized the opportunity to advocate the importance of intellectual values and to call for action aimed at promoting them; one can join this call regardless of one's belief in the validity of my study. 15. ON THE EFFICIENCY CONSIDERATIONS THAT FAVOR INSTRUMENTALISM. APO claimed that an instrumental motivation is easier to evaluate and thus should be preferred. I disagree, of course. Let me just make a few brief comments: (1) in contrast to the impression given by APO, applicability is also determined by subjective judgment; (2) the fact that something is easier does not mean one should do it (or the fact that something is more difficult does not mean it should be abandoned); and (3) I did hint to these considerations in my essay... Indeed, as stated in my essay, I believe that the evaluation of scientific work must be based on understanding it. 16. ON THE PURPOSE OF MY ESSAY. [INT == intelectual values, INS == instrumental values.] I agree to the claim that I did not provide any argument as to why the previous balance between INT and INS was better. But I did say explicitly that a bias against instrumental papers would be bad too. The question (*) is what is the right balance. It is not clear how to resolve (*), in the sense of reaching a consensus on it or making arguments about it. Note that we are unable to agree even on simpler issues such as what is the INT-vs-INS dichotomy and whether the balance regarding it has changed at all during the last three decades... I cannot hope to convince anybody about the importance of promoting INT, nor did I intend to do that. I can only try to articulate my view as to why INT is crucial for a field of Science (and the same holds for INS!); maybe I will do that some day (i.e., write a short essay re this). The point of articulating is triggering thought, appealing and helping those who are similarly oriented, not necessarily convincing (i.e., changing opinions of people from one disposition to an opposite one). Anyhow, I tried to articulate some issues (but not all issues...), but I did not try to convince those who think differently. 17. ON THE TERM "INTELLECTUAL VALUES". Some objection to the term "intellectual values" seem to stem from the confusion of "intellectual activity" with "intellectual values". The very first comments in the essay explicitly make this distinction, and this is further clarified several times. The key issue here is the way I define this term. Please see the definitions. In particular "intellectual values" are not associated with curiosity (and a few other things), but are rather defined that way. Thus, in every place where you see "intellectual values" you may read specific values such as curiosity, study, and desire to understand. The essay distinguishes these important values from another cluster of *important* values called "instrumental" (aimed at measurable progress, applicability, etc). Lastly, I claim that my choice of these terms/labels is quite reasonable and consistent with the common understanding of these terms. The suggestion to use "curiosity-driven research" rather than "intellectual values" is fair, but it does not capture well what I want to capture (let alone that it is not of the right "category" -- it refers explicitly to the activity rather than to the value that underlies it). In particular, I wish to talk of values, not merely motivations. Indeed, in my opinion, values are reflected by the motivations (both the ones stated explicitly and those that can be inferred), but these two things are not identical. I wish to refer to a cluster of values, one being "curiosity-driven", but others (which I view as no lesser) are study and quest of understanding. One may say all three are related, but (as in many other cases where I insist that related things are neither identical nor reducible to one another) I maintain that the latter two are not reducible to the former. Now, I take this cluster-of-values (not activities!) and label it "intellectual values" (not activities), which seems quite fair to me. In any case, it is but a name, and what counts is how it is defined. Of course, the name is not arbitrary, it is supposed to reflect and/or evoke the definition. This is all standard stuff; the way we do things, so I really do not understand the fuss about it. 18. ON THE IMPLICATIONS OF MY STUDY. I do agree that the data I present only asserts, under some assumptions, that there was a decline in the explicit statement of intellectual motivations. Using add'l assumptions, I infer that this represent a decline in the status of intellectual values. All of this is explicit in my essay, which also provides a discussion of the various assumptions including the one supporting the last inference. It is fair to dispute the assumptions and/or remain unconvinced by my arguments, but one cannot just ignore all of that. [Oded Goldreich, Nov. 2011]