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Please commit more blatant academic fraud

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Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#101

Post by zaphod12 »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #86
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/...

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"

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#102

Post by raphlinus »

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…

I'll give my reading, and a tip to the author.

To me, this did not read as a serious proposal to actually commit more fraud. Rather, it was a "modest proposal" in the tradition of Swift, in which the actual call to action was for the field to be more critical of papers, especially to be on the lookout for all fraud, both the obvious kind and the more subtle variants, the latter of which also do great damage to the field.

The tip: humor like this is fun and appreciated by people who run in the same circles as the author, but an essay like this will be read by a diverse cross-section of people. Some won't have the cultural references, some won't have English as a first language, etc. Almost always when I've snuck jokes into my writing, I've found it causes confusion.

So I might have written this a slightly different way, something along the lines of: the community is structurally more equipped to deal with blatant than subtle fraud. Ironically, now that we're seeing more egregious examples of fraud, there's a better chance that things will get better; we would have tolerated the subtle types for a long time, as lots of people benefit from the status quo.

If the author were actually legitimately calling for more fraud, then I apologize for misunderstanding.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#103

Post by weasel_words »

The actual "smoking gun" is three levels deep:

1) https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/6/252840-collusion-rings... then 2) https://medium.com/@tnvijayk/potential-organized-fraud-in-ac... then 3) https://huixiangvoice.medium.com/evidence-put-doubts-on-the-...

Not to try and dissuade this internet mob...but instead of doing the whole internet-mob-get-eyeballs-to-my-blog-by-rehashing-someone-elses-blog thing, get to basics and be precise like a scientist would be. Examples. Forensics. Details.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#104

Post by alisonkisk »

teachingassist wrote: post #67
vinni2 wrote: post #24

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.

> 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 prosecution. Would you allow a criminal trial where only the scientist's colleagues were in the jury?

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#105

Post by raverbashing »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #86
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/...

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.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#106

Post by bonoboTP »

StandardFuture wrote: post #58
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…

So, in other words, there really is not any "publish or perish" in academia. It's simply that to outcompete your fellow graduate students in getting a top job in industry (or a tenured position in academia) you need to have the most publications with the most "novelty". And that can be justified at any cost. So, is this, at the end of the day, that the ratio of students willing to study graduate level studies, and jo…

Yes, the would be the outside solution if you were an all seeing God. But in the real world we have to make do with local incentives. And that is leading to a ballooning of academia, professors want more grad students for more papers and more prestige, some of whom also turn into profs and it snowballs. It's great while the music is playing, but then when winter comes back, what will all these people do then? Things are already insanely competitive to the degree that many profs even say they couldn't make it into a graduate program now, you already need top conference papers just to get accepted at grad school (in better groups).

In a way, I think a lot of the internal squabbles regarding diversity etc. in the AI community come from the animosity due to a shrinking cake and more hungry mouths.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#107

Post by alisonkisk »

teachingassist wrote: post #67
vinni2 wrote: post #24

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.

> 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! Not even scientists in tangentially related fields (such as statisticians or methodology experts) are consulted.

Furthermore, "peer review" is limited to pre publication. Follow up research by others has mininal effect on the impact of a paper on a scientist's career.

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 prosecution. Would you allow a criminal trial where only the scientist's colleagues were in the jury?

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#108

Post by hnuser123456 »

alisonkisk wrote: post #99
teddyh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the missing context here? That he used an important public speaking opportunity to actually mock the women he was assigned to help, and we misunderstood it as a serious appeal? That he was being fake offensive because it would be funny or enlightening? This wasn't an opportunistic pun. Humor is rooted in one's worldview.

He also implies that if you're too good of a student, at least around him, he might fall in love with you and become a worse teacher, and he's just being honest about it. You could mock men for being bad at suppressing feelings equally from the same comment.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#109

Post by teddyh »

alisonkisk wrote: post #99
teddyh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the missing context here? That he used an important public speaking opportunity to actually mock the women he was assigned to help, and we misunderstood it as a serious appeal? That he was being fake offensive because it would be funny or enlightening? This wasn't an opportunistic pun. Humor is rooted in one's worldview.

I don’t know anything about this specific case. It might be the exception which proves the rule.

In general, I try to follow the HN guideline: “Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”

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