81–90 of 227 posts
Estimating from my own reading, 1% of research is fraud and 80% is worthless for other reasons. Numbers vary between fields. If that's the case, what's the argument for why we should spend time doing something about the 1%? Solving 100% of the 1% wouldn't change the overall situation much. Possible arguments include: - Fixing the 80% is hard, but fixing the 1% is satisfying (to the aggressively conventional-minded, a…
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> Industry kinda already has. Products launched. This suggestion is so detached from both the problem and the very nature of academia that it's straight-out laughable. I mean, what do product launches have to do building knowledge on the state of the art, identifying a novel idea, doing the iterative work to refine the idea, and finally document it to the public? Product launches at best require you to manage people…
Spoken like someone toiling away on their third postdoc position.
- "only 39 scientists from 7 countries have been subject to criminal sanctions between 1979 and 2015 (Oransky and Abritis, 2017)" That seems...very low.
- "The Retraction Watch database—the largest of its kind—currently includes more than 18,500 retracted articles (Retraction Watch database, 2019). A recent analysis of 10,500 retracted papers up to 2016 showed that 0.04% of papers are retracted." This is once again a lower-bound; presumably if you account for additional authors and p-hacking the numbers go up a lot.
Pushing for replication and improved methodology can help, but some of these issues seem to be related to scale. There are many more people outputting papers than there are people willing to vet them (outside of peer review). Furthermore, when you have many people researching hot fields, you should expect false positives and overestimates to dominate published results, even when everyone is trying to practice good statistical hygiene. (https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...)
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The private sector does do research, and for RoI /it actually has to work/. Academia is a cesspit of politics and dishonesty. Forming the most effective cartels, sensationalizing your results, and being well networked with other academics is not aligned with getting results on actual problems.
> The private sector does do research, and for RoI /it actually has to work/. The private sector does research with researchers, not product managers. The process is exactly the same. It's not a public vs private thing. It's a research vs production thing. Research is open-ended and iterative and exploratory. Product design is close-ended, focused, and with hard requirements. Research has zero to do with product mana…
And in my experience teams with these academic data "scientists" are far worse cesspools than normal engineering teams who deliver actual products and value.
Also, what are publications supposed to show? They are often a negative indicator of actual capability. Ever interviewed a data scientist who looks good on paper with tons of publications who can't even write a for loop? I have.
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This is absolutely not the reality of a PhD. On what planet do people with those backgrounds get those positions out of their PhDs? What's the basis for this entire comment?
The basis is spending 15 years in NYC high finance and having multiple close groups of friends who graduated from Stanford, work in tech, raised VC, etc
The root of the problem is that we allow people with high esteemed credentials to run society. They jumped through a hoop. "You got straight As at 14 - 18 years old and got into an ivy league school as a result? Here run this venture fund." "You got a PhD in Economics with a good publication by P-hacking your secret data? Here take a run at the FED with power over the US Economy. Your Phd shows that you are the man f…
Publications really only look impressive to outsiders and gra d students.
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> Industry kinda already has. Products launched. This suggestion is so detached from both the problem and the very nature of academia that it's straight-out laughable. I mean, what do product launches have to do building knowledge on the state of the art, identifying a novel idea, doing the iterative work to refine the idea, and finally document it to the public? Product launches at best require you to manage people…
The private sector does do research, and for RoI /it actually has to work/. Academia is a cesspit of politics and dishonesty. Forming the most effective cartels, sensationalizing your results, and being well networked with other academics is not aligned with getting results on actual problems.
Equalize the field, radically remove research hierarchies. Liberate research funding from pointless bureaucracies and 4-year grants and instead pay scientists to work on whatever they like most. Let science be fun again I always return to this article from David Hubel (of Hubel&Wiesel): https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(09)00733-8 I arrived at his lab around noon and found him working alone, recording f…
> Liberate research funding from pointless bureaucracies and 4-year grants and instead pay scientists to work on whatever they like most. Bureaucracy exists to ensure that funds are indeed spent on research instead of jet skis and shiny toys, and hierarchies are established to focus work on specialized topics pertaining to the state of the art of a field of research. All your suggestions do is ensure that less funds…
hierarchies are established to ensure that the PI gets citations from the work of postdocs and postgrads
typical grants encourage shallow trend-chasing or incremental continuation of the research of - often disinterested - senior PIs who simply get grants because they have gotten a lot of grants.
The chase of the state of the art is just another incremental step - that 's shallow
a research partner is not necessarily a subordinate
I've read that before 2003, the whole of humanity has published as many scientific papers as from 2003 to 2016. So what happened around 2000? Who has turned the scientific mission into a blind competition for superficial metrics? So many people in science I meet (apart from the few who benefited from this system, and therefore were selected by it) are frustrated by publishing for the sake of publishing (not science)…