Please commit more blatant academic fraud • Hacker News Board

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#111

Post by bonoboTP » Sun, May 30, 2021, 1:35 PM UTC

alisonkisk wrote: post #104

teachingassist wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> several journals are pushing for reproducibility as a requirement The current requirement for academic publishing is peer-review, i.e.: "Colleagues in my field looked over it briefly and said it's ok [because it doesn't challenge their work]" This inevitably leads to whole fields of science being corrupted and biased in ways that we can't easily identify. Science publishing standards could be improved in any number…

Modern science doesn't have peer review! Peer review works within a community, scientists review each other's work to decide who to trust. But the public and funding agencies are not part of that review! So why to we believe or fund the results? Either we are not their peers and should not engage with them, or we should be reviewing their work as part of the publication process. We also have "peers" in criminal prose…

The problem is that laypeople or bureaucrats can't judge highly specialized technical contributions. It's already difficult to do if your subfield is a different niche.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#112

Post by alisonkisk » Sun, May 30, 2021, 1:35 PM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #52

The motivation behind it is very simple: eye-watering salaries in the field. Moneyed people are ready to pay these salaries because a lot of them have succumbed to hype equating "AI" (that phrase alone is complete bullshit) to something bordering on "magic," and bringing equally magical money making opportunities. The prospect for business owners to get rid of white collar workers in a manner not unlike how machines…

The eye watering salaries come from passing a whiteboard interview, not publishing papers.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#113

Post by hnuser123456 » Sun, May 30, 2021, 1:36 PM UTC

throwaway45209 wrote: post #74

AussieWog93 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I can't see it that way. He is open about his own weaknesses as well. We don't have to look up to him for saying this, but that doesn't make it your typical one-sided bashing.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#114

Post by turbinerneiter » Sun, May 30, 2021, 1:37 PM UTC

If this, and the stuff coming up in this thread, is true about academia ... Trump is our fault.

How can we tell the people to trust science, if science is a clusterfuck of underpaid PhD students who are incentivized to cheat?

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#115

Post by dalbasal » Sun, May 30, 2021, 1:40 PM UTC

tlb wrote: post #59

The idea that a field can be reformed by making it worse until it suddenly faces a reckoning and emerges much better is ... I don't know where people keep getting the idea that this might work. It has never worked in any field ever in history. The thing that can happen: fields gradually split into rigorous and non-rigorous camps. Like with evidence-based medicine, or chemistry/alchemy. Depending on the field, either…

In politics and other areas, the concept is known as "accelerationism."

It tends to be associated with political extremism... "bring on the revolution/war/etc." As an angry or disillusioned response, I think it's a close relative of nihilism. Cover for being destructive.

That's not to say "worse before better" isn't a thing... it's just not a thing we can do usually.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#116

Post by mjburgess » Sun, May 30, 2021, 1:42 PM UTC

tlb wrote: post #59

The idea that a field can be reformed by making it worse until it suddenly faces a reckoning and emerges much better is ... I don't know where people keep getting the idea that this might work. It has never worked in any field ever in history. The thing that can happen: fields gradually split into rigorous and non-rigorous camps. Like with evidence-based medicine, or chemistry/alchemy. Depending on the field, either…

Well it does apply to individual people.

Since animal psychology is mostly design to keep animals safe (not, eg., to flourish), we can persist in severely bad circumstances merely because they arent unsafe.

What "getting to rock bottom" does is drive a person to acute unsafety so they are able to overcome the inherent risk of change.

This "personal accelerationism" does work, indeed, it may be the only thing that works.

I do agree that this likely does not generalise to institutions.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#117

Post by Cyril_HN » Sun, May 30, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

In undergrad, my professor explained to me in very candid terms (from the position of being a generous mentor) that the optimal path to success in the Arts and Social Sciences is:

1. Find a niche only a couple of people operate in.

2. Make friends with them at all costs and work in their area.

3. Review each others work, amassing enormous citations in highly respected (albeit sometimes niche) journals.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#118

Post by oldnews193 » Sun, May 30, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

aabaker99 wrote: post #100

I'm really happy to see this article here. I quit my PhD where I was working on AI partly because of the "mundane day-to-day fraud" that the author and I observed in the field. Once you've read enough papers, you can easily see a kind of recipe to an academic paper. Present a new method, compare against a baseline, discuss the differences in the results found. To me, some researchers just follow this recipe and do no…

> I felt a lot of anxiety about sharing my research in this environment and felt pressure to make my work seem like it was the best solution for every problem when in reality there are more nuances.

I am curious what kind of pressure you are referring to. It's your work and your decision how to present it to the world.

As far as other people's research is concerned, academics can express their opinions by participating in peer review and expressing their opinions vocally at program-committee meetings (for instance, proposing artifact evaluation as a part of the review process).

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#119

Post by [deleted] » Sun, May 30, 2021, 1:46 PM UTC

tlb wrote: post #59

The idea that a field can be reformed by making it worse until it suddenly faces a reckoning and emerges much better is ... I don't know where people keep getting the idea that this might work. It has never worked in any field ever in history. The thing that can happen: fields gradually split into rigorous and non-rigorous camps. Like with evidence-based medicine, or chemistry/alchemy. Depending on the field, either…

[deleted]

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#120

Post by Igelau » Sun, May 30, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

bonoboTP wrote: post #31

Either way, even if the problem will be solved it will be the small guys who get screwed. The top dogs have built their careers on this bullshit, now they pull up the ladder and would want to make the playing field harder for anyone else. 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 s…

That was my gut feeling about the ACM article that the author here refers to. The vague exposé in ACM is made by someone in the comfortable position of "Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Computer Science at Brown University" about people who aren't anywhere near that. It is like saying: please stop treading water so desperately, you are splashing those of us in the lifeboats.