Please commit more blatant academic fraud • Hacker News Board

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#291

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Sun, May 30, 2021, 7:14 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #252

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> All you need is a pile of cloud VMs, and industry can get you that. That is true if by "AI research" you mean "applications", as opposed to contributing anything new. To contribute new knowledge what is needed is time and the resoruces to study the work of those who have contributed new knowledge before you, and to become an expert in that knowledge. In theory, that's half the job of a PhD student. The other half…

If the noble of heart can get good work done in academia despite the pressures on them, why can they not get good work done in industry despite the pressures on them?

Because the "pressures" in industry is that you get fired if you don't do the work you're hired to do. There's still a modicum of "academic freedom" in academia, the freedom to pursue your research interests, whatever those may be. In industry, you pursue your employer's interests and if they are not also your interestes, tough.

Speaking in this with the experience of working in the industry for a few years, then going into academia, precisely because I got bored doing other peoples' work and I wanted to do what I'm interested in.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#292

Post by vimy » Sun, May 30, 2021, 7:14 PM UTC

tomjakubowski wrote: post #286

wyager wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ve recently started using the term “BIPOC” to clarify that Asians are excluded, and when they want to include Asians they’ll say “BIPOC and AAPI”.

No, by any good faith source that I have read, BIPOC does not at all exclude Asians. "The acronym BIPOC refers to black, indigenous, and other people of color and aims to emphasize the historic oppression of black and indigenous people." Incidentally, one of the co-founders of the "BIPOC Project" is an Asian-American woman. * https://www.thebipocproject.org/ * https://dbpedia.org/page/Person_of_color * https://www.ve…

European activists have started using BIPOC as well. They don’t seem to realize that indigenous means white in Europe.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#293

Post by fighterpilot » Sun, May 30, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

szarnyasg wrote: post #285

fighterpilot wrote: post #157

I 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.

Was it Mike Stonebraker's talk "My 10 Fears about the Future of the DBMS Field"? (2018 Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lecture, presented at the University of Illinois): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFKl_5JTnA

Yeah that's it.

Some other notable points from that talk:

- He thinks it's not an overly difficult problem to solve. It just needs some grassroots push from a handful of people in each of the top CS departments. It's just that not many are really trying to push for it. (I assume there would be people staked in the current system, though, who want to maintain the status quo.)

- Nowadays he sees people trying to split research up into Least Publishable Units in order to maximize the number of papers.

- Coming up with Postgres would've been impossible in today's climate since the time it took would entail an insufficient number of papers to get hired or promoted.

- He thinks part of the reason that the culture has deteriorated is that Western universities have adopted cultural norms of East Asian universities, for whatever reasons.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#294

Post by anewhnaccount2 » Sun, May 30, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #247

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what part of falling in love with people in the lab, people in the lab falling in love with you, and that affecting concentration and productivity, is so evil as to get someone fired? Sorry, honest question. Being from a different culture, I honestly fail to get this kind of outrage. For me it's just a description of humans being human...

The controversial part is where he suggests that this is a "problem" and might be a good reason to exclude women from working in the lab alongside with males. That looks like he's starting out with a very sexist attitude and trying to justify it with flimsy excuses.

That part was the joke. He's saying it's a real problem, but that's clearly the wrong solution. For him, it's obviously a bad solution, and so worthy of ridicule.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#295

Post by zitterbewegung » Sun, May 30, 2021, 7:39 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #184

zitterbewegung wrote: post #85

I think we need to rethink the core concept of Universities having publish or perish as a part of being a Professor. The reason why fraud exists is because of the incentive structure and due to the nature of research you have intelligent people that will game the system. So, we have to figure out how to change the incentive structure so that professors don't attempt to perform Academic Fraud or we h ave to figure out…

> So, we have to figure out how to change the incentive structure so that professors don't attempt to perform Academic Fraud or we h ave to figure out if fraud does exist after the fact. One possible way: increase funding to the arts and sciences. The total NSF budget was ~$8B, or 0.03% of US GDP. We could double that and no one would even notice. Increased funding means more money to go around, means higher acceptan…

Increasing the budget doesn’t solve the problem. You would need to create a set of well funded auditors that have domain experience but the problem with that is no one would want the job.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#296

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Sun, May 30, 2021, 7:50 PM UTC

jacobbuckman wrote: post #223

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right. Btw, I think the author is wrong. This is not "out in the open" now. It's been "out in the open" since for ever. And those who act all surprised about it are probably the ones who knew it better than most. I don't mean the author, of course, but he is pointing to some of his own papers as bullshit. Why did he publish bullshit papers if he knew they were bullshit? Or doese he mean those papers are bullsh…

When I published those papers, I was new to the field. I was guided by the standards set by the community, by my mentors, by my peers. I was proud of each of those papers. At publication time, I believed I was doing good science, and the belief was re-affirmed by acceptance at top conferences. My thinking has evolved since then. The community norms have not.

Oh, er, sorry for the harsh words, anyway I hope they didn't come across as too harsh.

So I think you're saying the papers you linked to where "bullshit with hindsight", not that they were unethical at the time. Or at least you didn't think they were.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#297

Post by b3morales » Sun, May 30, 2021, 7:53 PM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #290

b3morales wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's painfully reductive and one-dimensional. What about envy and hate, hero worship, and other emotional attachments? Those have no effect on working environment? What about men and women who aren't romantically attracted to (respectively) women and men? Are gay men relegated to the women's lab? But only one per batch, lest they fall in love with each other? (And bisexual people can only be trusted to do science on…

Feelings of love are notoriously hard to "manage". This is the plot line of most Rom-Coms for instance.

Romantic comedies are fiction, though, intentionally exaggerated for entertainment. I don't deny there's a kernel of truth to that kind of story -- or else they wouldn't be interesting at all -- but I hope we're not taking them as a model of workplace behavior.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#298

Post by andromeduck » Sun, May 30, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #199

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…

I get the distinct impression that the Twitter sphere isn’t genuinely concerned about people of color, or else they would express concern over, say, inner city violence. Instead they work hard to brand any such concern as “far-right”.

It's mostly just wingnuts & entitled folks trying to make a name for themselves.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#299

Post by andromeduck » Sun, May 30, 2021, 7:55 PM UTC

root_axis wrote: post #196

the_lonely_road wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

I have never heard the suggestion that Asian people aren't considered "PoC".

According to Twitter we're "multiracial whites".

BIPoC is also often used as a dogwhistle to exclude Asians and Latinos when convenient.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#300

Post by stevenbedrick » Sun, May 30, 2021, 8:01 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #152

dalbasal wrote: post #123

The 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 si…

Ding-ding-ding! This is indeed the root cause of much of the pressure that drives academic researchers to publish All Of The Things. Funding agencies care very, very, very much that you have a published track record of having done something similar to whatever it is that you are proposing to do, and regularly will reject otherwise solid applications due to the PI not having sufficient relevant publications. Not saying it’s right or wrong (that’s too big of a question for an Internet comment) but it’s one of the main motivating forces behind anything that a researcher does.