Tiny creation, but not a small feat

AISDL Team

October 1, 2024

[SCIENCE COMMUNICATION]

About six weeks ago, our post referred to the long-winding path to a new theoretical innovation as the pursuit of “useless knowledge” in Flexner’s terms [1]. That little creation is the freshly minted informational entropy-based definition of value, presented in a very short paper, initially regarded by its authors as a research note [2]. (And it still is.)



Illustration. “Not a small feat” generated by Bing Co-pilot.

Well, only two and a half months since its birth, this new concept of value has had enough time to power up several of our publications in different disciplinary fields. The first published paper using the new definition deals with climate change denialism [3]. The second paper (forthcoming) discusses the problem of academic retractions amidst the growing influence of generative AI [4]. And the third, just accepted, explains the underlying mechanism of submission rejection employed by journal editors and peer-reviewers, and the information-value nexus associated with it [5].

The key point here is without this “little” innovation, overcoming the challenges of publishing the above submissions would have been an overwhelming task, or worse, even impossible in many circumstances.

Most probably, you will agree with us that albeit “useless”, this tiny creation has enabled quite a decent feat. This shows the power of “useless knowledge”, don’t you think?

References

[1] AISDL Team. (2024). The pursuit of “useless knowledge”. https://mindsponge.info/posts/334

[2] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH. (2024). Further on informational quanta, interactions, and entropy under the granular view of value formation. https://ssrn.com/abstract=4922461

[3] La VP, Nguyen MH, Vuong QH. (2024). Climate change denial theories, skeptical arguments, and the role of science communication. SN Social Science, 4, 175. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-024-00978-7

[4] Nguyen MH, Vuong QH. (2024). Artificial intelligence and retracted science. AI & Society. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-02090-z

[5] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH. (2024). Exploring the role of rejection in scholarly knowledge production: insights from granular interaction thinking and information theory. Learned Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1636