Streaming Science on Twitch

post by A Ray (alex-ray) · 2021-11-15T22:24:05.388Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

Contents

  What could be done in this direction soon:
None
1 comment

Recently I was watching a livestream of a poker professional.  I was surprised and interested in how it wasn’t purely-gut calls, and also wasn’t purely technical decisions, but a blend of both (with some other stochasticity thrown in).

I’ve been thinking about how to get more good scientists, especially scientists earlier in their career [LW · GW].

I think it should be possible to stream science — the actual practice of it.

I think this would be disproportionally useful for younger/earlier-career people, who I expect would find twitch streams more appealing, and lack the access to advisement/mentorship that often comes later.

This probably only works first with sciences (like mine — I’m biased here) that can happen mostly/exclusively on computers.  Software sciences, data sciences,  and machine learning sciences seem like good candidates for this.

A bunch of it would probably be boring stuff.  Debugging experiments, sorting/processing data, formatting and reformatting plots.

Also, a bunch of the good stuff probably happens internally in ways that wouldn’t be stream-able.  There’s a lot of processing in my head that I don’t have access to, and I assume this is true for a lot of people who work on science.

There’s also probably tasks or modes of work that recording/streaming/broadcasting would be distracting.  I assume this would also be true of video games, so maybe this effect is not that bad.

The stream could also make science better!  It’s possible that (if people watch it and interact live) someone in the audience spots a bug or issue that would have been missed, or proposes a better method of doing something.

A big limitation here is that probably a lot of great science is not share-able (due to company secrets or academic results that cannot be shared before publication to avoid scoops, etc).  This would necessitate working on projects of secondary quality/importance, and using a totally different code base and set of tools.

As I’m writing this, I notice that “science” feels a bit too small of a category.  I would expect policy research, governance and other sorts of topics would also fit in this category.  I expect these (and many others) are also fields where young/early career people have hard times finding advisement/mentorship.

What could be done in this direction soon:

I expect it would be worthwhile to go over and see how some high quality programming streams have gone.  Handmade hero comes to mind, but I would bet there are a lot.  Any best practices from programming streams probably carry over.

If there are scientists that stream their work, it’s probably worth going over a few of those to see what works well.

My experience recently is pretty narrow in terms of “technical alignment on language models” but I expect there’s a bunch which would be interesting and share-able.  Without going into my research that I can’t share, I could do a bunch of work-relevant things:

As I’m writing the list, I think I could go on for a while, so there’s probably a lot to do to start with.

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comment by Jalen Lyle-Holmes · 2022-01-04T08:46:02.453Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I love this idea and would watch this stream!