Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse • Hacker News Board

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#171

Post by p4bl0 » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:10 PM UTC

Paul-ish wrote: post #151

dasmoth wrote: post #22

“If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to…

I could see this working in mathematics and many branches of computer science. How would this work in environments that require large outlays of money to do experiments? Do you just hand untested individuals large sums of money and leave them alone?

I believe letting academic communities in autogestion (as in capacity of workers' self-management) is the way to go. For really large projects you can also include citizens (selected by sortition) and elected politics in addition to the temporarily mandated members of the community in the committee taking the decision. Of course the citizens and politics would have to be trained a bit so the decision process might be long, but these kind of projects are never in a hurry.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#172

Post by ThomPete » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:10 PM UTC

Jhsto wrote: post #165

ThomPete wrote: post #120

I think we need to rethink what we consider academically important which should be taught at universities and then what should be taught as self studies. I can't help but thinking that one of the real problems is that a lot of academia isn't that valuable anymore as a field of study. Don't get me wrong I consider ex. philosophy as one of the most important fields but I also feel like it doesn't belong as an indiepend…

> That way the fields are put to good use rather than being self servant. I am a student and the way I see is that this is the writing on the wall. The university (and BSc in specific) gives you the basis to develop yourself into the direction you feel passionate about. You can take computer science and mathematics if you want to become a great software engineer or you can mix computer science with communications and…

Exactly. The field of psychology or philosophy has much more value in the sense that it provides alternate perspectives on another subject matter when applied to them.

As I said I do believe ex. philosophy is important, just not as a field onto itself. It's the way of thinking by the best of them thats valuable (careful thinkers, making sure we don't do circular reasoning, be aware of a priori thinking etc) but as a field it doesn't add more to human knowledge besides a lot of junk because of the demand to publish or vanish.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#173

Post by naravara » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:12 PM UTC

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #97

alphonsegaston wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people misunderstand about these metric-based systems in the US is that their purpose is not to reform systems or improve performance. It's to create a layer of interference that either channels control into a new managerial class or to wrest it back into the hands of higher-level administrator from whom it was somehow ceded. The purpose of business consultants is to make money for business consultants. Pushing…

I'm fairly anti-capitalist, and even I can see this is a bit of a stretch. The way managers are taught is that you can't improve upon a process unless you know exactly what to improve. They look for something definite like metrics because a change in those can actually mean something and it's more definite than "they're doing good work." The drive to use metrics actually kind of revolutionized how we improve work. Th…

There is a more subtle wrinkle to it. One of the reasons managerial culture in the US leans so heavily on 'objective' metrics is because we have a history of racial discrimination that rewards people from certain demographic backgrounds while punishing others.

Charitably, metrics are supposed to be a way to introduce objectivity and minimize implicit/unacknowledged biases in decision making, especially where performance is concerned. Even less charitably, it gives companies and managers cover for discriminatory practices by giving them objective standards to point at as justification for their decisions.

We'd all probably be much more comfortable with a less metric dependent world if we didn't also have the nagging feeling that it would lead to the same-old types of people scratching each others' backs.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#174

Post by Chaebixi » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:13 PM UTC

Lxr wrote: post #49

If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability. Absolutely, could not agree more. This is the only way to beat gamification of metrics in my opinion. There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. I fun…

> There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance

And not just in academia. Technology has allowed the collection of metrics and data to a degree unheard of previously, and it takes wisdom and restraint to know when they do more harm than good.

Unfortunately, I think the idea of collecting metrics and doing data-driven evaluation of people's performance has being one of those "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" things. It gets done unthinkingly because it's safe "conventional wisdom" regardless if it's the right call or not.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#175

Post by jessriedel » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:14 PM UTC

metaphorm wrote: post #167

jessriedel wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pathological != "in crisis". And in any case, if your only criticism of a field is a characteristic that is shared by many fields, then you should either assert that your preferred fix is general to all of them, or explain why it's specific to academia. (For instance, it is not enough so say that medicine should be socialized because of imperfect information alone since imperfect information exists in many other indu…

"in crisis" is the end state of a pathology, where it has gone untreated for far too long and begun to have ruinous consequences. Academy is in crisis. Other fields suffering from the same pathology are at different points in their breakdown. Some of them will never breakdown, others will enter their own crises sometime soon if they haven't already (and many of them already have). surely I'm allowed to criticize and…

> in crisis" is the end state of a pathology

No, things can be pathological indefinitely. I'm not disputing pathology. Rather, no one has justified "crisis", i.e., some reason to think there will be abrupt change, or will not continue to produce as expected.

> surely I'm allowed to criticize and highlight social issues without having a "preferred fix"

I'm not saying that, I'm saying that it doesn't make sense to discuss academia specifically if one's comments apply to a million other fields. This applies to fixes or to just analysis of the pathology.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#176

Post by cr0sh » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:22 PM UTC

This article, and the follow-up on it (link is in the article) is about something very important, and should be more widely known about and discussed by anyone with an interest in science, research, and funding for it all.

It points (yet again - as we've all seen the various p-hacking commentary) to the very real problems in scientific research that seemingly threaten to undermine it - especially from the public's point of view.

It has been said that "religion poisons everything" - there is probably a corollary of "politics poisons everything" as well; both of these are really just social control and exhibition proxies. Ultimately, human nature rears its head, and the want for more money, power, and prestige (at all levels) leads to these results.

...and society becomes poorer for it.

The questions and the proposed ideas aiming at solutions to the problems discussed sound plausible (or workable) on the surface, but I tend to wonder if any and all solutions will just be able to be gamed anyhow?

At any rate, I'm glad that this was posted, though I despair at it leading to any solution, as it seems the problems lie within our psychology and society, and are thus nearly intractable.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#177

Post by stinkytaco » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:25 PM UTC

Lxr wrote: post #49

If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability. Absolutely, could not agree more. This is the only way to beat gamification of metrics in my opinion. There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. I fun…

For the sake of discussion, do you feel measurement is a way of reducing politics and discrimination, not just creating cogs? So building to that argument:

1. Right now academia is both absurdly political and largely government funded.

2. Since you can't pay people tax money to do nothing, you need managers.

3. Academics in management roles also have their own reputations to defend or their own biases.

4. That leaves academia open for political manipulation and bias. This could have the result of limiting innovation (publish what you need to get tenure) or even limiting jobs for underrepresented groups (women in science and engineering, for example).

I don't have the answer here, but it does occur to me that objective measures can be a good thing for many people.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#178

Post by kem » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:30 PM UTC

ThomPete wrote: post #120

I think we need to rethink what we consider academically important which should be taught at universities and then what should be taught as self studies. I can't help but thinking that one of the real problems is that a lot of academia isn't that valuable anymore as a field of study. Don't get me wrong I consider ex. philosophy as one of the most important fields but I also feel like it doesn't belong as an indiepend…

As a professor, I probably agree that a lot of academia probably isn't that valuable, and probably could be reorganized.

However:

1. I think the same arguments could be made about just about anything anywhere. People forget that.

2. I think there's a collision of reality with assumptions about how progress works. We tend to think that supergeniuses come in and revolutionize everything, and I think things are instead very piecemeal and incremental. As a result, we fret about worthless academics when the real problem is our expectations about how things work. I realize that sounds a bit like "we should downgrade our expectations" but what I really mean is that great work requires a lot of small contributions that don't look important at any given point in time, but we expect great work to be lots of big contributions all the time. It's sort of like expecting building construction to happen by waiting for one mutant superhuman to come in and put the pieces together, and then blaming the workers for not building quickly enough.

3. Relatedly, it's impossible to know what's important and what not at any given time. I'm struck by the number of times obscure results from decades ago are dragged out and used as the basis of some new finding.

4. About psychology and neuroscience: there's the bootstrapping problem. Let's say you want to explain something like attention. At some point you have to invoke neurons. But to get there you have to have a way of measuring attention, a definition of what attention even means. To do that you have to have a model of the thing you're explaining. We're nowhere near a clear framework for that sort of thing. Similar sorts of arguments could be made about philosophy. Sure, philosophy's great when it intersects with other fields. But there are some problems that wouldn't have any sort of outlet anywhere else other than philosophy publications. Emergence is a good example of this.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#179

Post by TheAdamAndChe » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:31 PM UTC

naravara wrote: post #173

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly anti-capitalist, and even I can see this is a bit of a stretch. The way managers are taught is that you can't improve upon a process unless you know exactly what to improve. They look for something definite like metrics because a change in those can actually mean something and it's more definite than "they're doing good work." The drive to use metrics actually kind of revolutionized how we improve work. Th…

There is a more subtle wrinkle to it. One of the reasons managerial culture in the US leans so heavily on 'objective' metrics is because we have a history of racial discrimination that rewards people from certain demographic backgrounds while punishing others. Charitably, metrics are supposed to be a way to introduce objectivity and minimize implicit/unacknowledged biases in decision making, especially where performa…

Do you have any source on your claim? Because it sounds like an attempt to see racism in something that isn't racist.

Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

#180

Post by stinkytaco » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 4:34 PM UTC

worldsayshi wrote: post #15

jrs95 wrote: post #6

While I think there is a lot of truth to this, I don't see how it can effectively be applied to our existing educational institutions. They've sort of become a self-serving bureaucracy at this point, so even without misguided policy pushing them in the wrong direction, I don't think doing the best work they can is actually their primary focus.

Naive response: Throw out the bureaucrats. Leave those with subject knowledge. Tell them to do their work to the best of their ability? Stop measuring things. Talk to them once in a while.

How do you determine they have subject knowledge? Without measuring, I mean?