So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering • Hacker News Board

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#91

Post by gowld » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:15 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #43

viburnum wrote: post #21

Economics is the most cliquish field by far. There are basically five universities that matter, they get all the citations, no matter how dumb their research is. It's just fashion (and grant money). Everybody else desperately tries to win favor with the elite and just replicates their worst tendencies. In a real science you get citations all over the place. In economics all the citations are Harvard/Yale/Princeton/St…

The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to constituents. And a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry. Major financial players have incentives to push theories that favour wealth accumulation to big players. I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economi…

Keynesianism and MMT are totally compatible with labor owning companies. Keynesianism in particular is strongly pro worker/consumer (aggregate demand), and both are pro debt fueled spending to combat unemployment.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#92

Post by sytelus » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:15 AM UTC

This article doesn't do good job describing the gory details. In AI/ML research, this is so unpleasantly prominent that its nauseating. How does workshop speakers at top conferences gets selected? How does keynote speakers get selected? Whoes workshop proposals goes through? Who gets to be area chair? Why are there 18 people listed as authors when almost 100% of work was done by one student? I call it favor economy. You invite X to be your workshop speaker and then you get to be speaker in X's workshop. You add X as co-author in your paper even if X has no real contribution and then expect that X does same for you. This leads to people bragging about having 16 papers in NeurIPS which indicates how deep there are in this favor economy. If you are unwilling to be participant in this favor economy, your citation count, number of papers, awards etc quickly becomes insignificant compared to those who are. The honesty and ethics are perhaps all time low in the history of modern scientific research.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#93

Post by BanzaiCharge » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:18 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #69

rayiner wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect pervasive co-op style businesses combined with a reasonably permissive lending environment would be absolute economic powerhouses. Based on what? The data seems to point in the opposite direction: successful, innovative businesses are driven by singular leadership. Apple since Steve Jobs died has not only lost much of its innovative spark, but quality has plummeted. See also Tesla, Amazon, etc. I don't li…

Steve Jobs didn't own Apple; he'd apparently sold his entire stake around the time he was ousted in 1985 [0]. Your evidence doesn't quite say what you think it does; you are talking about day-to-day management, I'm talking about ownership structure and how day-to-day management gets appointed/fired. But no specific evidence, just first principles reasoning. It is hard to see why it would do badly. [0] https://www.bus…

The danger with arguing from first principles is that a lot of real-world failures sound pretty fantastic. Take communism, or the satirical "A Modest Proposal".

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#94

Post by aazaa » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:19 AM UTC

Point 2 in the conclusion states:

> Academia, like any other working environment, is full of prominent, successful, well-connected bluffers. The striking thing is not that a decorated professor and A/Chairman @WhiteHouseCEA made a statistical error, nor should we be surprised that a prominent academic in economics (or any other field) doesn’t understand statistics. What’s striking is that the professor and A/Chairman doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. I’m struck by his ignorance of his ignorance, his willingness to think that he knows what he’s talking about when he doesn’t.

The first sentence sounds like it's going to lead to something about bluffers, but the remainder looks like a re-iteration of the Dunning-Kruger effect. A little surprising to not see it mentioned in the article or comments.

> In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#95

Post by fastball » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:19 AM UTC

chadlavi wrote: post #5

s/academia/every career/g

Fun fact: you can use sed's replace syntax to do a replace in your last message on Discord.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#96

Post by euix » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:22 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #92

This article doesn't do good job describing the gory details. In AI/ML research, this is so unpleasantly prominent that its nauseating. How does workshop speakers at top conferences gets selected? How does keynote speakers get selected? Whoes workshop proposals goes through? Who gets to be area chair? Why are there 18 people listed as authors when almost 100% of work was done by one student? I call it favor economy .…

Putting people on the author list who made no contributions to the paper is known as academic fraud. I am surprised this is allowed.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#97

Post by int_19h » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:22 AM UTC

leto_ii wrote: post #72

hammock wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Great concentrations of wealth are built and maintained by keeping capital ownership in as few hands as possible That's a tautological and zero-sum way to look at it

The implication was that concentrations of wealth are not a law of nature, but rather an emergent property of how capitalism is set up to be. This idea is not tautological, just a casual relationship. Regarding the 0-sum aspect, I don't know how else you can look at it. Ownership of capital has to follow a certain distribution, which can in turn be more or less egalitarian, depending on how we decide to set the syste…

To be more specific, it's all down to how the society understands and enforces property rights. If land and real estate can only be held in usufruct, for example (i.e. if society only protects violation of those rights), then capital cannot be concentrated indefinitely.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#98

Post by Finnucane » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:23 AM UTC

dasudasu wrote: post #3

This is seen even in very technical fields, such as physics. As the saying goes in poker, if you are in academia and can't spot this person, then it's probably you. It's also a slightly cynical take on imposter's syndrome, in a way.

I thought the saying in poker was "if you look around the room and don't know who the mark is, it's you." Which is a little different problem.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#99

Post by didibus » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:24 AM UTC

vivekd wrote: post #49

kbos87 wrote: post #40

So much of everything is about connections and reputation. Tech in particular holds up a guise that people are chosen and ascend because they are “good”, meaning, they are good at what they do. That’s part of it, but it’s an insufficient part, and you can do pretty well in a career being solidly average at what you do. The real currency in my experience is one thing - relationships. Do I think this person likes, resp…

Yes, this was the opinion I came here to post, certainly my own profession of law is like this, at least where I practice in Toronto Canada but I can't imagine other places being much different. I think one advantage of computers is that what you produce at the end has to work - and if the code doesn't work or you don't know what you're doing, you're quickly exposed as a fraud. This is not the case in other fields li…

This is one reason I believe computer science should be thought in school just like mathematics. The experience is very humbling, you've got all this logic, all the rationale, to you, it must work, but the computer knows it doesn't make any sense.

I've learned that most problems are easily dismissed by people as being "easy", "simple", just do this, just do that. I've found software forces you to really think through, "just do this" is easier said then done, how to do it?

Real problem solving is hard, and I do think computer science humbles you in that sense.

Here's an example, my friend always tells me he thinks we shouldn't take anymore refugees. Alright, I'm not even going to debate the the morals or anything like that. He just think, whoever is letting the refugees in is dumb and shouldn't do that. That's surface level thinking to me. How do you do that? There's a boat arriving to the shore, full of refugees, it's not turning around? What do you do?

This is a hard problem, no matter what you think you want the features or use case to be, how do you do it? The logistics are difficult, how do you scale it? What about all the edge cases? What about the cost?

In that sense I think CS can help you learn how to really think through a problem from understanding the full implications and complexities and the challenges. We learn this by trying to model problems and their solutions very formally.

Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering

#100

Post by babesh » Sat, May 16, 2020, 1:25 AM UTC

kbos87 wrote: post #40

So much of everything is about connections and reputation. Tech in particular holds up a guise that people are chosen and ascend because they are “good”, meaning, they are good at what they do. That’s part of it, but it’s an insufficient part, and you can do pretty well in a career being solidly average at what you do. The real currency in my experience is one thing - relationships. Do I think this person likes, resp…

The way a former boss explained it to me is that bosses need to form pyramids to support their own ascension. It is just subtribes within the big tribe fighting for power and dominance.

Those networks that you form to support your own rise are used by your boss to support their rise. You get promoted because you will make your own boss look better in the future. The second this ceases to be the case, you get discarded like a used tissue. Competence is very far down this equation.

I suspect this is almost universal. The only forcing function is what features the ultimate power selects for. A great CEO forces the subtribes to compete on the basis of value added.

We pretty much act the same way as those chimps in nature shows.