Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please commit more blatant academic fraud

jacobbuckman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 365 posts

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#171

Post by L-four »

Q57C3HYc7g wrote: post #155
lettergram wrote: post #89

I 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"?

Say you run 5 simulations and when comparing to the standard approach as a percent the samples are [-1%, -1%, +2%, +2%, +%6]. Your new method is not 6% better the standard it's at best +1.6% better.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#172

Post by dcolkitt »

coldtea wrote: post #27
jollybean wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if this happened in private enterprise, like at Google. The press would be all over it 24/7.

Or rather you'd never had known about it. Much worse things have happened in private companies, only a few of which ever make it out in the press.

Of course a lot of abuse happens in private enterprise. But typically, senior management is much much more proactive about it than department chairs and provosts. There's very few Fortune 500 companies where you could publicly get away with the kind of abuse that's just part and parcel of being a grad student or post doc at a major research university.

It might still happen either because it's well concealed. Or it might happen at smaller or poorly managed companies. But at the typical functional, large corporation, egregious abuse of your subordinates essentially guarantees that you'll be terminated if/when it's brought to senior management's attention.

Academia is different because tenured professors are given far more independence and autonomy. By contrast middle managers are tightly monitored and controlled by their own line managers. The typical large corporation strives very hard to promulgate a homogenous corporate culture across the org. Whereas academia as a system encourages professors to be fiercely independent maverick. That has both pros and cons, but one of the major cons is that it tolerates a lot more abuse and dysfunctional management towards the non-tenured subordinates.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#173

Post by skystarman »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #126
newswasboring wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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...

FUnny you leave out the part where he also said if you criticize a woman in the lab they cry...

He made a terribly misogynistic "joke" and paid the consequences for it.

You'd think someone with a Nobel prize wouldn't be so clueless

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#174

Post by jollybean »

unishark wrote: post #131
salawat wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more the fact that academia is granted a greater degree of leniency because it is fundamentally something that is societally required for innovations to take place. Genuine ingenuity requires room to flourish, so in the West at least, the theory is you leave tge Boffins alone to do their wizardry. The part I don't understand is how extorting the students to fund bloated Administrative processes, sport teams, sta…

The faculty have very little say in most of those aspects of universities you're complaining about. The media is just a crazy sideshow that cherry picks a tiny subset of stories to run or people to destroy when it fits the right narratives. When it comes to real scrutiny, I'd say faculty are under vastly more than people in industry. Though yes, google as an entire entity will analyzed more than some random professor…

Academia is not protected because of some intellectual notion of 'innovation' so much as they are on the right side of the bias presented in most publications. Most writers and commentators I think have venerable views of academia and probably err towards supporting that narrative publicly.

While it's true that Profs may be under excessive scrutiny in some ways, which frankly might make them skittish - they are obviously not under 'the most important' kind of scrutiny which relates to the material legitimacy of their work in terms of 1) reproducability 2) fudging results and borrowing ideas and 3) misappropriation of credit 'up the chain of power' and 'from other peers'.

Hence this article, and some other issues of legitimacy within academia.

I think almost everything boils down to the fact that the low-hanging fruit have been had in science, and though there are 20x more scientists alive now than just a few generations ago, in many ways we're getting diminishing marginal returns - and even worse - it's incredibly hard to know which teams to back, and which not to.

In the fog of war for funding, it leaves more room for back-stabbing than in most other places, even in the corporate world where at least there is some degree of job security.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#175

Post by skystarman »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #125
alisonkisk wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 any of the context here, but it seems to me that what the quote actually says is that the author admits that he is unable to function effectively with female colleagues, that there are other men like him, and that it's a problem that mustn't be allowed to hold women back from doing science.

It's interesting that everyone defending this old coot is just memory-holing the clearly misogynistic comment "if you a criticize a woman in the lab, they cry" and are choosing to only mention the comments that are more easily defensible as a "joke"

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#176

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #66
busterarm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That kind of compute still costs money. You still have to find the funding for it.

Nah, a motivated hacker can use a Colab TPU or GPU for free. It's how I started. There's an ungodly amount of resources available now compared to even 10 years ago, let alone 30. The bottleneck is usually motivation.

Note that all the advances that eventually led to today's successes and applications of deep learning happened 20 or more years ago (e.g. LSTMs was in the '90s, the neocognitron in the '80s and so on).

Then the hardware and the data came online and the field boomed, but no progress has been made in terms of new approaches and the overall state of research has stagnated with the inevitable results discussed in the article above (I can quote at least one Turing Award winner on that if that sounds just like me bloviating). In a sense, because it's now easy enough to get good results by throwing a bunch of data at a large computer, everyone's at it and nobody is looking for a way to obtain good results without a lot of data and a big computer. Which of course is not sustainable, not least because it means only large corporations can obtain state of the art results (and to be honest, I don't think any such have been obtained by "motivated hackers" using colab).

No, my hope is that things will continue as they are now, until academics realise they've been kicked out of the game by the Big Players, and then go look for a way to compete that doesn't require gigantic amounts of compute. After all, academia can still motivate people to do actual research and find actually new things. The same motivation is much harder in industry, that only cares about one thing and only knows how to hand out one kind of reward.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#177

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#178

Post by bumby »

unishark wrote: post #165
bumby wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Publishing the code may not be enough. Part of the problem is that replication of a study isn’t usually rewarded in the academic sphere because of the obsession with novelty within publications. Most researchers want to spend their finite time on something they find interesting and also may help their career. One way may be to create a movement to foster good replication studies that can be published and rewarded.

Novelty is in the job description though. I think the problem, especially in AI/ML is the obsession with "State of the Art" algorithms. This can be gamed by making claims with numerical "experiments". If an idea had to stand on its own, and be interesting even if it may not make a better pattern-recognition product, most of them probably wouldn't make it. Indeed that's essentially the requirements presented by review…

I’m not stating novelty isn’t be part of the aim of research, I just think we need to be aware of the perverse incentives it creates when it becomes the sole underlying criteria by which merit is judged. I think there’s room for expanding the definition of what is good research to include replication of prior art because the field in general will be better off for it. I imagine novel research would still be more prized but it wouldn’t relegate replication to being considered a waste of time.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#180

Post by Veen »

frickinLasers wrote: post #167
h2odragon wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a description of humans being human... Precisely. There's some sort of "if you have authority you must be better than me" feeling and "better than me" admits no flaws or human variety at all , apparently. Some folks want perfect Gods to follow and keep failing to make them from people made of meat.

It is difficult to distinguish genuine romantic feelings between two people, from the case of a superior using their position to get their genitals wet and a subordinate capitulating for fear of losing their job. Since feelings are only a biological impulse, and we humans frequently suppress our impulses in the form of self control, it's much easier to look for that oxytocin fix in a more appropriate arena. The milit…

It's difficult to distinguish genuine romantic feelings from exploitative lust everywhere. It's a constant of human experience and has very little to do with power dynamics.
Post reply on HN