31–40 of 365 posts
Typical strategy also with startup companies that skirt the dark gray zone of the law when they are small, but then when they extract enough money, they suddenly demand regulation so the rest of the up and coming are smacked down.
One surprising discovery about AI: There's nothing inherently wrong with cherrypicking. I used to think it was this dirty thing. Oh, you're only showing your best results? But the best results are what matters. If you can create an amazing song from scratch by telling a computer what to do, you only need to do it once. The song is still good. And it's easy to automate. If you have a way of detecting a good song, or a…
So often the filtering technique is a human in the loop, manually going through the output. Humans become the hidden, undifferentiatable and undisclosed loss function.
There's another solution: give up on academia. The model of academia works well when some part of society is willing to fund researchers spending time on open-ended basic research, even if it produces no results. Saying "Don't engage in unethical behavior" is well and good, but if the incentives are towards unethical behavior, you shouldn't expect very much. Academic funding and employment is very closely linked to t…
There's another solution: give up on academia. The model of academia works well when some part of society is willing to fund researchers spending time on open-ended basic research, even if it produces no results. Saying "Don't engage in unethical behavior" is well and good, but if the incentives are towards unethical behavior, you shouldn't expect very much. Academic funding and employment is very closely linked to t…
Could be that, or could just be that the student couldn't imagine himself not doing academic research despite knowing of the rest of the world.
It's sad nevertheless, of course, and I'm not trying to say you're wrong in any way. It's just that people's motives and the reasons they feel trapped can be difficult to guess.
I ran into these issues in an adjacent field a generation ago. Many candidly spoke to me about having to be a ‘team player’. This is all due to the criteria for survival and graduation. Let’s be honest, not every idea will work and this does not reflect badly on the researcher who came up with it. But the only way to graduate and put food on the table is to keep getting funding through novel papers that have great re…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With laws, there are full time police officers, investigators, and prosecutors working to catch people. And even then, most crimes go unsolved and unpunished. Even without the complicity, stopping fraud and bad behavior is a difficult problem. Part time reviewers and reputation seem woefully insufficient counters.
Yes, I'm very skeptical of Buckman's claim that more fraud will help. Seems similar to a claim around 2015-2016 that voting for Donald Trump will inspire America to clean up its act politically. Institutions aren't biological systems that operate according to mysterious hormetic processes. Institutions are created by humans and thrive or decay based on whether they effectively channel human effort. Be the change you…
We forget all the not quite as awful things that were just let slide and normalized.
I ran into these issues in an adjacent field a generation ago. Many candidly spoke to me about having to be a ‘team player’. This is all due to the criteria for survival and graduation. Let’s be honest, not every idea will work and this does not reflect badly on the researcher who came up with it. But the only way to graduate and put food on the table is to keep getting funding through novel papers that have great re…
> But the only way to graduate and put food on the table is to keep getting funding through novel papers that have great results.
So in the way in which it matters, it does reflect badly on the researcher who came up with it.
Which is why several journals are pushing for reproducibility as a requirement and dedicated reproducibility tracks where there are opportunities to call bluff on established papers. As an academic from a small lab in an unknown university it is shocking for me when we are unable to reproduce performance numbers from papers by popular institutions.
Wow, the amount of depravity in some academic circles is astonishing. The article links [1] the case of a PhD student at the University of Florida who was forced to participate in such a publication collusion ring and was pressured to commit scientific fraud by fabricating results and submitting them to a conference [2], being threatened with physical harm should he decide to go public. This student saw no way out an…
How is it possible that professors with impeccable academic credentials get fired for jokes nearly instantly [1], yet this student's professor was allowed to carry on until he resigned two years later [2]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Tim_Hunt_contro... [2] https://eu.gainesville.com/story/news/education/campus/2021/...
Contrary to victims of discrimination, dead people can't easily organize into coordinated legal action.
Yes, as someone in the system, it's all true and an open secret, everyone knows it and we complain about it over some beers all the time. But isn't something like this true everywhere? And blaming the individual is futile. I like Scott Alexander's Moloch [0] concept more useful. If you apply a high standard against your own research regarding thoroughness, not overclaiming etc. never looking at the test set etc., you…
Then why not speak out publicly against it?
Obviously because you know that there are still a significant number of individuals that want the system to work this way. Your fear of those individuals is why you don't speak out against it.
So who are they? Who are you scared of?