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Please commit more blatant academic fraud

jacobbuckman.com

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Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#71

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

berndi wrote: post #28
berndi wrote: post #11

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/...

Not all targets and not all campaigns are created equal? If someone has a lot of power within the institution, and the campaign comes mainly from people the institution doesn't care about… you can fill in the gaps.

I seriously doubt that exactly what someone has done is the major factor. People in weak positions can easily lose them over the tiniest of things; people in strong positions can get away with murder!

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#73

Post by geofft »

cycomanic wrote: post #61
geofft wrote: post #26

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…

I find it quite ironic that every time some unethical academic behaviour is published on HN, there's several posts about "move to industry this never happens here". I mean this is HN, a significant portion of the industry is working on optimizing for clicks and keeping people engaged (addicted?) to some platform or the other. Let's not even talk about the blatantly unethical (and often times illegal) things that happ…

Sure, but as an individual researcher, the integrity of your scientific work is not compromised by the unethical goals of your employer or the unethical ways in which it raises funding. That's what I'm claiming. It's rather different from amateur vs. professional athletics, where both have the same goal of "run as fast as possible but within some nebulous concept of natural human ability": the goals are different between academia and industry.

Or put another way: Of the many deep moral questions raised by the Manhattan Project, not a single one was "Did they commit academic fraud and claim that an atomic bomb was scientifically possible when it wasn't?" They were employed to actually get the job done, not to act as if a job were getting done.

And at the end of the day, funding for university AI labs is largely driven by the existence of those same unethical industry goals - governments fund the work because it's good for the economy, students pay to take AI classes in their undergraduate degrees because it's an investment in their future careers, the industry donates everything from fellowships to entire buildings to academia, etc. I don't think you can cleanly wash your hands of industry's ethical concerns by staying in academia but working on the problems that industry finds interesting. If your goal is employment without any ethical concerns, you're going to have a very hard time.

(In the case of this particular post, the co-authorship of papers with industry makes it clear that the research directly benefits industry.)

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#74

Post by throwaway45209 »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #55
throwaway45209 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a lunch for female journalists and scientists, Hunt gave a speech... "It's strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls? Now, ser…

That quote is a textbook example of self-deprecating British humour.

It's actually self-congratulating, while deprecating others.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#75

Post by newswasboring »

throwaway45209 wrote: post #46
berndi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/...

At a lunch for female journalists and scientists, Hunt gave a speech... "It's strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls? Now, ser…

People keep bringing out that this can be a joke, but he said this two days later

"I did mean the part about having trouble with girls. It is true that I have fallen in love with people in the lab, and that people in the lab have fallen in love with me, and it's very disruptive to the science. It's terribly important that, in the lab, people are on a level playing field. And I found these emotional entanglements made life very difficult. I mean, I'm really, really sorry that I caused any offence – that's awful. I certainly didn't mean – I just meant to be honest, actually." [1]

He was given a chance to clarify, he doubled down. While I'm not saying a joke should cause people to be fired, but this is clearly more than a joke.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33077107

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#77

Post by berndi »

the_lonely_road wrote: post #69
berndi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think that allegedly driving a PoC student to suicide would count for something in the PC twitter sphere…

Are Asians PoC? I thought they were not and that was literally the only reason the oft repeated phrase “black and other PoC” didn’t literally translate into “not white”.

Wikipedia says they are. However, the Supreme Twitter Council of Wokeness may have ruled otherwise at some point.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#78

Post by kordlessagain »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #23
2sk21 wrote: post #6

Thank goodness I am retired and don't have to publish stuff in the current environment. Thirty years ago when machine learning was a sleepy backwater, life was a lot easier for us.

As a present-day researcher (or at least someone who aspires to be), I'm eagerly waiting for the hype to die down, and for ML to become a sleepy backwater again. You were lucky to play around with ML during those days. The neat thing is, the next AI winter, we'll still have massive hardware rigs. That's very different from 30 years ago. It's a lot easier to discover new things when you can just test every possibility…

“The hope is that the progress in hardware will cure all software ills. However, a critical observer may observe that software manages to outgrow hardware in size and sluggishness."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#79

Post by teddyh »

throwaway45209 wrote: post #46
berndi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/...

At a lunch for female journalists and scientists, Hunt gave a speech... "It's strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls? Now, ser…

I’ve noticed a pattern where, wherever someone feels the need to write (after a disparaging story about someone else) “They were not joking” or “They really said this”, it’s almost always false, and the disparaged person really was joking, or really did not say that, or it was taken wildly out of context, etc.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#80

Post by guywhocodes »

throwaway45209 wrote: post #46
berndi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/...

At a lunch for female journalists and scientists, Hunt gave a speech... "It's strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls? Now, ser…

It's a self deprecating joke that is praising women.

Go back to primary school and learn the basics of _human_ social interactions.

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