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

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

#81

Post by gdy »

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…

What is special about "Iranian or Russian people"?

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

#82

Post by mehrdadn »

v_lisivka wrote: post #76
mehrdadn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue I see with this is that it implies anyone who isn't doing work high-profile enough to get independent labs to try to reproduce it isn't doing science.

IHMO, it's correct. They are just sitting on shoulders of giants.

And you're not a developer/engineer until 2 companies independently use your work, right?

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

#83

Post by sktrdie »

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…

But the real question is: how else would you do it?

Having journals/conferences with things like double-blind peer-review processes in place to me is probably the only way to do this. How else would you filter all the noise?

We don't have this in industry and it's a bit sad. I mean we do in the form of some blogs, conferences, etc. But in no way it compares to the system academia has. Have you ever tried publishing to an academic conference compared to an "industry conference"? All you need for most industry-conferences is an abstract, an idea, not even evidence of new sorts; actually you need reputation but that's a different issue.

There are flaws in every system for sure and academia has their hands full of them especially since they have to deal with quite important things like medicine.

But I find it funny that people complain about academia, and yet there's no other system that comes close to producing empirical truths.

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

#84

Post by aluren »

sktrdie wrote: post #83
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…

But the real question is: how else would you do it? Having journals/conferences with things like double-blind peer-review processes in place to me is probably the only way to do this. How else would you filter all the noise? We don't have this in industry and it's a bit sad. I mean we do in the form of some blogs, conferences, etc. But in no way it compares to the system academia has. Have you ever tried publishing t…

You're right, of course. I mostly complain because it feels cathartic to rant, but I am well aware that it's probably the same in the private sector, the government, etc. That's just human structures I guess.

As for designing a better system that's more robust to these flaws, it is a hard problem. There are structural issues when trying to apply traditional scientific virtues to the real world (how do you reasonably ensure reproducibility with a ridiculously expensive experiment, or one spannig decades, or one involving cohorts of tens of thousands of people? How do you ensure peer review is honest and comprehensive when there are exactly three labs specialized in a subject, and they're all competitors? Or even collaborators?), even if you assumed that editorial bias (toward big names, against negative results, toward trendy subjects, etc.), dishonesty and nepotism didn't exist. Plus there's a wide system of power-wielding stakeholders with huge incentives to maintain the status quo: established big shots, publishers (cough cough Elsevier cough cough), and so on.

So yeah, things are broken but we're all trudging along trying to enjoy what we do and make do with what we have. Who knows, things may even get fixed one day.

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

#85

Post by aluren »

gdy wrote: post #81
aluren wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What is special about "Iranian or Russian people"?

The sensibilities of expats from these countries tend to be quite misaligned with that of their governments and a large chunk of their fellow countrymen. It is of course the case with almost every country but the divide can be markedly stronger in some countries.

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

#86

Post by analog31 »

v_lisivka wrote: post #78
analog31 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

LHC is not the first collider in the world, so results from previous experiments are used to calibrate LHC.

Yes, this seems like a much less wasteful, and possibly more fruitful approach. Rather than running identical experiments, one can perform experiments that test different but overlapping aspects of the underlying theory. I suspect this kind of "replication" is done all the time in physics, which has led to a robust knowledge base in spite of less than ideal rigor within any individual experiment.

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

#87

Post by haihaibye »

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…

High / difficult culture like Wagner and Nietzsche?

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

#88

Post by gdy »

aluren wrote: post #85
gdy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is special about "Iranian or Russian people"?

The sensibilities of expats from these countries tend to be quite misaligned with that of their governments and a large chunk of their fellow countrymen. It is of course the case with almost every country but the divide can be markedly stronger in some countries.

Do you have any evidence allowing you to single out these two countries?

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

#89

Post by aluren »

gdy wrote: post #88
aluren wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sensibilities of expats from these countries tend to be quite misaligned with that of their governments and a large chunk of their fellow countrymen. It is of course the case with almost every country but the divide can be markedly stronger in some countries.

Do you have any evidence allowing you to single out these two countries?

Well no, I don't have 'evidence'. I just report what the expats in question tell me. I'm not singling them out, they just came to my mind due to recent conversations. I'm not trying to make a grander point or anything, and not every remark has to be completely exhaustive and evidenced to be 'allowed' into a casual conversation. If you want me to source every statement I make, you're going to have to pay me, just like my boss does when I write papers.

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

#90

Post by jboggan »

kensai wrote: post #74
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…

You might not know it sir. But you are a hero. Definitely my hero! Not all heroes wear capes. This is how Science should be done.

Thank you.
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