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Please commit more blatant academic fraud
151–160 of 365 posts
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#152The level of academic unhappiness with publishing and its surrounds is actually surprising to me. First, I never hear the counterargument.. that current publishing is OK. Does it exist, or is everyone unhappy while nothing changes? Second, I'm surprised at how much of a single institution academia seems to be. "Publish or Perish," for example, has to be supported by tenure committees, grant makers and such. Are they…
It’s not the papers per se that get you tenure — it’s the grants you bring in, and you can only get those by going through funding agencies, who are the ones that care about your publications. The grant process is like this: you write a proposal that says “I want to do this. Here’s how it will work. I’ve published these papers to support my idea. Now give me $x million dollars”. That pitch only works if there is a significant publication record to back it up.
That’s why there’s a monoculture — everyone is going through the same agencies: nsf, darpa, and a handful of other government/institutional funding sources. If you are bringing in 10s of millions of dollars worth of funding into the university with only a handful of papers, you’re going to still have a lot of support for your tenure. The flip side is that you can publish all day every day, but if you’re not bringing in grants you’re not getting tenure.
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#153One big problem in our society is that there is a Darwinian selection process occurring which selects for psychopathy. It's only going to get worse. Psycopaths are attracted to power and are willing to do anything for it so they are more likely to get it. Power comes with money. Money allow psychopaths to have more children. The children are more likely to be psychopaths too so they will also end up in positions of p…
Anecdata and not medical advice, but I used to think up a lot of things like this before I started taking SSRIs.
Well, the unfortunate part is that he's at least somewhat correct, and it's been found that psychopaths are much less likely to seek/adhere to mental health treatment such as SSRIs.
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tenure I had a professor in a chemistry lab that was proud of the amount of complaints he received against him. He literally threw the two ring binder it at me while I was in his office. It must have been a hundred pages. He kept it on the wall like a trophy. I talked to a Counselor at the school, and before I could complete my sentance, he said Dr. Berzergian? (I don't remember the exact spelling of his name.). The…
I'm sorry to be this guy, but it's "tenure"
Getting tenure means (ideally) that the system considers you have proven yourself as a competent researcher and therefore accepts to release a bit of pressure on publishing to allow you to pursue more exploratory objectives. It does not mean you're allowed to behave badly and (officially) does not protect oneself from the consequences of such behaviour. Remove tenure and you remove the last bastion of real research we have left in our industrialized and quasi-corporate western research institutions.
Removing tenure would completely trash western science and in practice yield total scientific leadership to eastern powers, who still have old style academic systems with strong tenure positions and less concern for academic mistreatment and "wokeness".
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#155I manage an applied research group in the machine learning space, particularly AutoML and synthetic data generation. That means is we read the latest literature and create applications. Sometimes we build new research, most of the time we patent something new. But the goal is to get research to production as fast and as impactful as possible. The first thing I do when sorting research (papers, blog posts, presentatio…
Maybe this is a dumb question, but what do you mean by "run corrections based on the number of simulations they run"?
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tenure I had a professor in a chemistry lab that was proud of the amount of complaints he received against him. He literally threw the two ring binder it at me while I was in his office. It must have been a hundred pages. He kept it on the wall like a trophy. I talked to a Counselor at the school, and before I could complete my sentance, he said Dr. Berzergian? (I don't remember the exact spelling of his name.). The…
And this is what students pay thousands of dollars per year for? Yeah, there are bad teachers and there's this. Why this kinds of abuse is tolerated is anyone's guess. But school and college management are usually too coward to deal with those issues.
Supply and demand. Everyone wants to do cutting edge research but nobody wants to pay for it. People who know how to get it paid for hold all the cards and can therefore get away with anything.
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#157I watched a lecture by an MIT database professor who recommends that the top 10 schools only allow up to 3 papers on CVs for junior faculty applications and 10 for tenure applications.
He thinks this will be enough to start a culture shift towards quality over quantity, which could go some way towards addressing the fraud and collusion ring issues by removing the incentive for these behaviors.
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#158In 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.
I saw something similar in an academic's blogged advice ten or fifteen ago: "At graduate level, you should cultivate [peers and a concentration] such that your intellectual correspondence is publishable."
I took that as plausible enough at the time to mention the advice once to a graduate student in philosophy. I did not take it at the time as immediately translatable into a [simply translated?] phrase I have heard since: "friendship corruption."
There are some video lectures from a writing consultant employed at UChicago. He accepts that concentrations within fields are to some extent self-defined in the academic game -- in only slightly more generous terms. IIRC his strategic advice for those failing to publish is: learn to frame your abstracts as respecting but advancing the discussion. Perhaps in small enough niches ingratiate yourself would need to be mentioned? Or show that you will play by being selectively generous with citations??
Citations. The academic version of SEO and currency more valuable than money? (Recall where page rank came from.) One kind of power behind institution-sanctioned monsters?
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#159Earlier 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…
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…
‘Doubled down’ on what?
I’m curious if you think any of his statements are untrue?
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#160Earlier 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/...
The tenure system. It protects more bad professors than it retains good ones.
No tenure, no exploratory science and no moonshot. Newton was a dangerous asshole. Would you exchange differential calculus for squeaky-clean academia? I don't think so ...