You can’t stop the signal

It’s time to get ruthless about actually managing my epic writing backlog. You can rewind to a previous Substack newsletter with a search or for you subscribers you can check your previous email for the epic 2024 predictions post on January 19, 2024. That was according to my records the post for week 156. Instead of starting up a season two of the podcast I’m just going to lean into the signal of things and publish this missive as week 157 of the Lindahl Letter. For those of you who are new to this ongoing chautauqua of learning and consideration, welcome to the journey. Let’s refocus on working to fix that problematic backlog. Right now it is a Google Doc stored backlog with 147 line items or topics (years worth) that were cataloged for future coverage. At this point in that writing journey, I’m not entirely sure that during that backlog acceptance process a degree of good judgment was used. A lot of things piled up and were not ruthlessly screened for quality or the best possible adventure. 

You can’t stop the signal. We as a society have opened the door to a never ending, always growing, or perpetually flooding stream of content. Even experts in their respective fields of study are facing more content being created than can be consumed. At that point, even the experts are having to gate, limit, or constrain the universe of possible material to consider. We may have hit that weird tipping point where no matter what the amount of content that exists it is greater than what can be consumed. Not only are we at the edge of technology intersecting with modernity, but also we have crossed the maximum of human consumable knowledge. No matter what as we go forward even the best specialized experts will have a limited view of the possible universe of knowledge. You have to pick the best possible window of understanding. That means that really only the researchers at the edge of what is possible will be able to define what’s next, but only for a certain window of time which will quickly be reframed by new windows.

One way to look at the flooding of academic articles is to evaluate how reviewers (functionally the gatekeepers) are being impacted by the flooding of content [1][2]. Maybe just maybe the review system itself will break down and something else will need to be created. I actually favor a system where each university willing to do the work as a department would be the home of a journal and the system is generally more open for people to be able to read academic research. I think this will focus and push clear research trajectories forward. That system might just help push things along toward a system where the answer is to conduct more research and publish it. All that research will beget more writing at the edge of knowledge. Questions will be answered. New questions will appear and that cycle will continue going forward. A lot of academic articles should be sorted by contribution level to the academy. That might help researchers limit the universe of articles that need to be reviewed during any given research project. 

Footnotes:

[1] Hanson, M. A., Barreiro, P. G., Crosetto, P., & Brockington, D. (2023). The strain on scientific publishing. arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.15884. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15884 

[2] Thelwall, M., & Sud, P. (2022). Scopus 1900–2020: Growth in articles, abstracts, countries, fields, and journals. Quantitative Science Studies, 3(1), 37-50. https://direct.mit.edu/qss/article/3/1/37/109076/Scopus-1900-2020-Growth-in-articles-abstracts 

What’s next for The Lindahl Letter? 

• Week 158: All the future AI features

• Week 159: The next level of featurization

• Week 160: Increasingly problematic knowledge graph updates

• Week 161: Structuring really large knowledge graphs

• Week 162: Indexing facts vs. graphing knowledge

If you enjoyed this content, then please take a moment and share it with a friend. If you are new to The Lindahl Letter, then please consider subscribing. Stay curious, stay informed, and enjoy the week ahead!