YC Research • Hacker News Board

Re: YC Research

#361

Post by puredemo » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 8:50 AM UTC

arjunnarayan wrote: post #324

zatkin wrote: post #298

I want some evidence that you're actually a PhD student at MIT before I start believing that the education system there is broken.

I mean, I didn't go to MIT, but I just finished a PhD in CS from UPenn, and I'll attest that he's not wrong. Perhaps excessively pessimistic on it, but like, what he's expressed is not an uncommon sentiment. Like you'd hear the same thing from like a third of the grad students I personally know (across the entire spectrum of top-20 CS departments). I myself was fairly ambivalent on my own PhD, but ended up finishing…

Why was any future academic career out of the question?

Re: YC Research

#362

Post by emanuelev » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 8:53 AM UTC

biswaroop wrote: post #148

aresant wrote: post #36

I love this idea. Not sure if this is driving your thinking but this would open a desperately needed alternative to Academia if you can scale this idea as successfully as you've scaled startups. I've watched my genius brother-in-law (PhD Materials Science & Chemistry / Biomimicry) be consumed by a very broken UC system over the past decade. Started with an exceptionally bright, curious, and inventive man who created…

Seconded. This is brilliant. As a physics PhD student at MIT who's leaving to build a startup, I'm finding it a relief to leave a broken system. The academic community is fraught with politics, mismanagement, and inefficiency. Researchers are driven by a need to get published and get grant funding, not to expand the frontiers of human knowledge. Impact is currently measured by citation pagerank, and broader impact is…

Totally agree. Just wanted to stress how the grant funding systems is totally nonsensical. While as a PhD you could get funding for your entire 3/4 year program (at least here in the UK), if you decide to go for a post-doc things get dramatically complicated as your employment is (usually) tied to a particular grant. When the grant expires, you're out if there isn't another source of money. Is that a decorous situation for a highly skilled person who devoted much of his life to studies? Not sure about that.

Re: YC Research

#363

Post by emanuelev » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 8:55 AM UTC

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #360

emanuelev wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

J Strother Moore would disagree with you, the development of ACL [1] is going on from 40 years! [1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/acl2/acl2-doc.html

An interesting project - thanks for pointing it out. I'm not saying that such long-term projects are impossible, just that they are rare due to institutional and human reasons. And because they are rare, we don't have much experience with how to design successful support institutions.

Yes I do agree with you. ACL is just an example of as the devotion of one or two persons can bring unexpectedly successful results. Achieving the same in bigger organisation is a much harder challenge.

Re: YC Research

#364

Post by amelius » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 9:26 AM UTC

p4bl0 wrote: post #353

amelius wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rely on peers' opinions to measure merit and you just reward back-scratching. Rely on objective measures like citation counts and h-index and you incentivise people to focus on these instead of research quality. In the meantime, Google seems to have developed a pretty good ranking system that is difficult to game.

The problem is not that it is gameable or not. Even if it is, most researchers won't try to game it. The problem is that they will focus on optimizing these counters by necessity (they have no choices, it is that or goodbye), rather than doing what they want to do: great research. I wouldn't call prioritizing quantity over quality gaming the ranking system, it is merely playing by its rules. I would call gaming it if…

It seems you have reduced my argument to the last part only. Google's system is pretty good even if you don't focus on gaming. By the way, even when it comes to websites, most users (admins) don't try to game the system.

Re: YC Research

#365

Post by amelius » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 9:30 AM UTC

grkvlt wrote: post #278

amelius wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rely on peers' opinions to measure merit and you just reward back-scratching. Rely on objective measures like citation counts and h-index and you incentivise people to focus on these instead of research quality. In the meantime, Google seems to have developed a pretty good ranking system that is difficult to game.

Don't citation indexes work pretty much exactly like Google's PageRank, with cites taking the place of href links? A parent comment seems to suggest the same thing, so it looks like the ranking is gameable. In practice I understand this happens via citation-swapping (similar to link swapping, or paid links in blogs) and poor-quality journals accepting articles for a fee, or without review (much like paid content, or…

> and bolt on empirically determined heuristics above the pure mathematical model of PageRank

The impact of Google doing this is, in financial terms, probably much larger than if the same type of approach would be applied in the academic situation. So if Google is allowed to do this, why can't we allow the same approach for research? Apparently, the system works quite well.

Re: YC Research

#366

Post by netcan » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 9:54 AM UTC

Wow! This seems cool and potentially very useful.

A lot of "how do we fix academia" discussions might be (kind of) asking the wrong questions. Academia is a very wide cover over a lot of varied things. That cover is an institution. It has values, rules and ways of doing things. There might not be anything wrong with the institution per se, rather its success has brought to many things under its cover. For people, idea or pursuits that don't really belong there, it seems broken.

Take publishing. Publishing is a great practice and a lot of the conventions around it are really useful. But, it's not the only way to make information available, accessible, trustworthy, etc. There are other ways that might make more sense for some other project.

Re: YC Research

#367

Post by pjf » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 10:14 AM UTC

How to apply?

Re: YC Research

#368

Post by quantum_state » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 10:38 AM UTC

This is simply brilliant n fundamentally good ... as a former Bell Lab researcher in fundamental physics, I hope this will allow people with profound ideas to pursue the ideas ...

Re: YC Research

#369

Post by jpt4 » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 12:16 PM UTC

toomim wrote: post #315

cossatot wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessarily the 'brokenness' of the system that forces people out but the consequence of producing PhDs faster than new positions are being created. "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here". No one expects that all high school students will become high school teachers. Why should it be the same for PhDs? A lot of what is wrong with the academic system is this expectation, which is bewilderingly pr…

I'm an independent researcher as well after giving up on the academic community. There aren't that many of us; let's band together.

From one independent to another, send me an e-mail [0] about your work sometime, toomin.

[0] In my profile.

Re: YC Research

#370

Post by tonypace » Thu, Oct 08, 2015, 12:34 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #365

grkvlt wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't citation indexes work pretty much exactly like Google's PageRank, with cites taking the place of href links? A parent comment seems to suggest the same thing, so it looks like the ranking is gameable. In practice I understand this happens via citation-swapping (similar to link swapping, or paid links in blogs) and poor-quality journals accepting articles for a fee, or without review (much like paid content, or…

> and bolt on empirically determined heuristics above the pure mathematical model of PageRank The impact of Google doing this is, in financial terms, probably much larger than if the same type of approach would be applied in the academic situation. So if Google is allowed to do this, why can't we allow the same approach for research? Apparently, the system works quite well.

Honestly, funding a research team to develop a science ranking engine that was both being continually developed to thwart gaming and effectively independent of university and science-funding politics would be a truly excellent use of YCombinator's money.