Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#61

Post by yurlungur » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 11:11 PM UTC

v_lisivka wrote: post #20

aluren wrote: post #3

Regarding "literally everyone does it" (fishing for results, removing negative ones, and so on): it's very true, and much more prevalent than what people think. Even at top-level universities with big shots. Especially at top-level universities with big shots. I know someone, upon entering a lab to do electronic microscopy, who found out that the image data her lab had written multiple papers on very high-impact jour…

Science is not when you publish something. Science is when at least two independent labs can reproduce your published result.

While I have a similar disillusion with the academia, I think sometimes people misinterpret the difficulty with reproducibility, especially on a field they are not familiar with. It seems to me it's imprudent and a bit disrespectful to jump to the gun when a certain research fail to get reproduced, especially when it comes to biology, because the experimental procedure can be incredibly complex and prone to all kinds of errors. I know of cases where even within a group only one person can successfully perform a certain protocol with a good enough success rate and it takes a lot of learning to get on their level. Without expertise in the field and knowledge of how the reproduction is done, it's really hard to examine all the data and judge the integrity of the science behind it. To me the much bigger problem is how so much of the research is warped by what gets funding, fast.

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#62

Post by munin » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 11:40 PM UTC

tonysdg wrote: post #24

munin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Scientists optimizing for what is likely to be published (read: what is likely to earn money), sacrificing elsewhere. Maybe if we payed them enough so that they don't have to do this to survive, then we wouldn't have this issue. How do you do this in a society with scarce resources? With scarcity, you need to have a measure of success, otherwise everyone could just say they were a scientist and get a six figure sal…

> With scarcity, you need to have a measure of success, otherwise everyone could just say they were a scientist and get a six figure salary to do nothing. Any metric you choose will be gamed. As a current grad studrnt, I'm calling BS. We (meaning academics, even the ones gaming the system) _know_ what strong, reproducible, well-designed research projects look like. It doesn't take a genius to develop an experiment, r…

I'm also a grad student.

We do know what good research looks like, that's not the problem, at least not directly. We're both told "go do good research" and then we go and each write one paper. The government then says "okay this is fine, but next year, I can only fund one of you, so, now whoever brings me the most papers next year will keep their job, and the other will hit the bricks." This is where the problem starts.

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#63

Post by bacon_waffle » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 11:53 PM UTC

jboggan wrote: post #34

aluren wrote: post #3

Regarding "literally everyone does it" (fishing for results, removing negative ones, and so on): it's very true, and much more prevalent than what people think. Even at top-level universities with big shots. Especially at top-level universities with big shots. I know someone, upon entering a lab to do electronic microscopy, who found out that the image data her lab had written multiple papers on very high-impact jour…

Related story: When I was in grad school I was doing graph theoretic analysis of human metabolic networks. I had some really interesting and promising preliminary results about the structure of various metabolic pathways and had been invited to present my unpublished work in a multi-departmental lecture. I was making some new visualizations for my talk and spotted something odd, which led me to a bug in my source cod…

From someone with no connection to analysis of human metabolic networks (besides having one, I guess): Thank you!

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#64

Post by jeromebaek » Sun, Aug 19, 2018, 12:03 AM UTC

jboggan wrote: post #34

aluren wrote: post #3

Regarding "literally everyone does it" (fishing for results, removing negative ones, and so on): it's very true, and much more prevalent than what people think. Even at top-level universities with big shots. Especially at top-level universities with big shots. I know someone, upon entering a lab to do electronic microscopy, who found out that the image data her lab had written multiple papers on very high-impact jour…

Related story: When I was in grad school I was doing graph theoretic analysis of human metabolic networks. I had some really interesting and promising preliminary results about the structure of various metabolic pathways and had been invited to present my unpublished work in a multi-departmental lecture. I was making some new visualizations for my talk and spotted something odd, which led me to a bug in my source cod…

Graph theoretical analysis of human metabolic networks sounds very interesting, can you elaborate on that and/or point to a few papers?

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#65

Post by analog31 » Sun, Aug 19, 2018, 12:19 AM UTC

v_lisivka wrote: post #20

aluren wrote: post #3

Regarding "literally everyone does it" (fishing for results, removing negative ones, and so on): it's very true, and much more prevalent than what people think. Even at top-level universities with big shots. Especially at top-level universities with big shots. I know someone, upon entering a lab to do electronic microscopy, who found out that the image data her lab had written multiple papers on very high-impact jour…

Science is not when you publish something. Science is when at least two independent labs can reproduce your published result.

So, build two more LHC's. ;-)

In my view it should be a judgment call whether a particular result needs to be replicated. I'm aware of the so called replication crisis. But adding more arbitrary rules will simply invite people to figure out how to game those rules, if they were gaming the original rules (deliberately or unwittingly).

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#66

Post by pjscott » Sun, Aug 19, 2018, 12:41 AM UTC

aluren wrote: post #26

yodsanklai wrote: post #22

This is a recurring topic on HN. My (European) experience is that academia provides a great work environment. If you have tenure, you're free to work on whatever you want, you have very low pressure (beside the pressure you decide to inflict on yourself), you're basically paid to learn new things and teach them to others. You can easily visit other institutes abroad. You get to meet interesting people. Age discrimina…

Yes, I believe we have it easier in Europe. I realize my other post sounds rantish but the reason I'm still in academia, beyond the very valid points you've mentioned, is that I don't believe the nepotism and dishonesty issues are specific to academia. >You get to meet interesting people. I want to stress that part because I don't feel it does the environment justice. You get to meet fantastic and very intelligent pe…

This is also one of the great things about working in Silicon Valley.

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#67

Post by yodsanklai » Sun, Aug 19, 2018, 12:45 AM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #59

yodsanklai wrote: post #22

This is a recurring topic on HN. My (European) experience is that academia provides a great work environment. If you have tenure, you're free to work on whatever you want, you have very low pressure (beside the pressure you decide to inflict on yourself), you're basically paid to learn new things and teach them to others. You can easily visit other institutes abroad. You get to meet interesting people. Age discrimina…

Life is also pretty great if you win the lottery. But it's not wise to plan on it. One of the main points brought up here and elsewhere is that getting a tenure-track position is hard: you're basically in a giant tournament. And that tournament continues to actually get tenure. So I don't disagree with you, but you're starting from the assumption that one has tenure, which is very much not a given for the vast majori…

Getting a job in academia is not entirely random :) Just like for any competitive job, it's important to objectively assess chances of success and reconsider them along the way.

There are many things to consider. How bright you are, what is your research topic and will it be popular in a few years, who is your PhD advisor, are you willing to work abroad and so on...

But I agree that there is uncertainty for most people and graduate students should have an exit plan, e.g. keep their research or teaching work relevant to the job market.

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#68

Post by jboggan » Sun, Aug 19, 2018, 1:13 AM UTC

jeromebaek wrote: post #64

jboggan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related story: When I was in grad school I was doing graph theoretic analysis of human metabolic networks. I had some really interesting and promising preliminary results about the structure of various metabolic pathways and had been invited to present my unpublished work in a multi-departmental lecture. I was making some new visualizations for my talk and spotted something odd, which led me to a bug in my source cod…

Graph theoretical analysis of human metabolic networks sounds very interesting, can you elaborate on that and/or point to a few papers?

Papers, not really since I was out on the edge at the time and I haven't caught up with the field since then. Nothing I did ever made it into publication but it was pretty interesting. Mostly was focusing on the redundant connectivity of various metabolic pathways in healthy human cell lines and comparing them to the reduced pathways in cancer cells where mutations and large scale chromosomal loss restricted the ability to process and regulate several key compounds. The general idea was to look for pathways that were nearly always preserved even when cancer cells were extremely evolved/mutated from their original lines and map those to drugs that would target the enzymes mediating those reactions. Basically you'd try and knock out a weak link in the cancer metabolic network for which a healthy cell had significant redundancies.

A major conceptual difficulty was the somewhat nebulous definition of a metabolic pathway, beyond what reactions were drawn together in a textbook diagram. Also somewhat thorny was the concept of building a network with any sort of transitive property with a notion of mass conservation built in. I wrote about 30k lines of terrible Perl code exploring this stuff, if I had independent backing I would definitely dust it off and finish the project but it's pretty far in the rearview mirror at this point.

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#69

Post by joefourier » Sun, Aug 19, 2018, 1:17 AM UTC

throwawayjava wrote: post #60

joefourier wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clear and cogent communication of my own thoughts lead to me having lower grades. Lower grades lead to fewer opportunities - less chances of getting a scholarship, recommendation, access to certain programs, etc. It depends on what you seek from university. Unfortunately at the undergraduate level, its role has largely shifted from a place of learning into a provider of credentials that act as a signal to employers.…

This post only reinforces my point: GPA hacking is an intentional choice on the part of students, and GPA hacking is not specific to the humanities. You got nothing out of your humanities courses. The fault was not in your courses but in yourself. You certainly could have chosen to improve your prose, refine your theses, and strengthen the presentation of your arguments. Instead, you chose to GPA hack. One of the gre…

It all depends on your goals, I agree. You can certainly use university as a means to come out a better educated, well-rounded citizen, or simply a method of acquiring the credentials necessary to get hired. If you can afford the former, great, but for many, it may be come across as a luxury.

Re: Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

#70

Post by im3w1l » Sun, Aug 19, 2018, 1:35 AM UTC

pasabagi wrote: post #45

joefourier wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the humanities really succeed at accomplishing those goals? In my own college experience, the humanities courses I took mostly taught me how to parrot the professor's opinions, how to write long-winded dissertations with overly complicated language with the goal of appearing intelligent rather than being understood, and how to insert meaning into literary works that author likely never intended. And while I was ve…

I don't think the humanities departments are particularly successful - but they've been underfunded and horribly hamstrung by political and administrative interference for about half a century now. It's also not that Shakespeare's going to make anybody a better thinker. It's more that stuff like this sets the tone for the culture in general. If you don't really teach hard, interesting culture, then all the people who…

> History shows this kind of thing is just incredibly dangerous. If everybody likes culture that's enjoyable and easy, easy, self-satisfied thinking predominates. Then suddenly everybody is marching waving big flags and wearing funny hats, because it's a lot of fun, and makes you feel great to be part of something.

Please provide a reference for this. It sounds too much like a just-so story for me to take that at face value.