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A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

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Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#181

Post by andrepd »

jessaustin wrote: post #152
shrimpx wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tragically, a non-trivial number of Ph.D. students commit suicide. It's natural to gradually put all your eggs in the imagined Ph.D. outcome (e.g., an idealized notion of a professorship) with increasing depth as the years wear on. After multiple years and a huge emotional and intellectual commitment, if you start to see the cracks in the structure, and you cannot reconcile the newly perceived reality with your model…

An experience I had as an undergrad of walking around a not-yet-bleached spot on the sidewalk in front of Pierce played some role in my not going to grad school.

Bleached? In what sense?

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#182

Post by coldtea »

sojournerc wrote: post #168
coldtea wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? Material wealth gives all kinds of tangible benefits as control, pleasure, influence, access, etc -- even better health and surely better healthcare. Whereas, what does being moral/good give (to the invididual practicing it, not to the community) except a feel-good feeling (and that only on those who care for it)? (I'm in favor of being moral, just point their point of view).

I tend to think of morality as an emergent property of successful social structures. It's a necessary common value system that underlies peaceful cooperation. In this sense it's an evolutionary advantage to treat each other morally and have a shared ethic. That includes not exploiting others for personal gain.

>It's a necessary common value system that underlies peaceful cooperation. In this sense it's an evolutionary advantage to treat each other morally and have a shared ethic. That includes not exploiting others for personal gain.

It's an evolutionary advantage for a species.

For an individual animal it's an advantage to not follow morality anytime it can get away with it, and thus gain more sexual partners, food, influence in the herd, etc, and from that, more progeny.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#183

Post by webmaven »

andrepd wrote: post #181
jessaustin wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An experience I had as an undergrad of walking around a not-yet-bleached spot on the sidewalk in front of Pierce played some role in my not going to grad school.

Bleached? In what sense?

A concrete surface (such as a sidewalk) needs to be cleaned with a bleaching agent in order to remove bodily fluid stains, which can otherwise persist for years.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#184

Post by webmaven »

M277 wrote: post #99
lotsofpulp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not a Christian, but this is worth considering by everyone: >"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul? Or what will a man give as an exchange for his soul?" This would only affect people who assume “they” have an immortal component, i.e. a soul.

Even if you don't subscribe to that belief, you still have something to lose -- conscience. Conscience doesn't really die overnight (and this is from my experience of living in a corrupt society), it's a death-by-a-thousand-cuts situation. The beginning is "Come on, everyone is doing it" and you can guess the end.

> Even if you don't subscribe to that belief, you still have something to lose -- conscience.

Integrity also works as an asset that can be lost to corruption. And for those that aren't inclined to put much stock in that sort of inner-life intangible, consider reputation as an outward facing stand-in.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#185

Post by Fomite »

sieste wrote: post #34

It's rather sad that you can guess from the title that this is probably about academia. I have to say though that I can't confirm any of this for my institutions, professors, and fields of research. I've always worked with honest and caring professors, who cared more about correctness of results than headlines and fame.

I read the title and assumed it was about a startup.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#186

Post by krageon »

bachmeier wrote: post #72
tobmlt wrote: post #19

I want to express sympathies in a particular way: When I had a job I didn’t want, in a city i didn’t want, no kids, no wife, and prospects abounding, it was easy to speak truth to power. I did it, and I was right technically, businesswise, and morally. What a win...(?) Now, I have my dream job, my dream location, my own damn house, and my family. -Whole thing feels like a dream I might wake up from if I am not carefu…

> I know academia being f’ed is a big part of it I'm sorry, but I have to strongly disagree with the way you've ended your comment. This lets the people responsible off the hook. The guilty party is an individual (and perhaps several individuals). Academia, peer review, conferences, and organizations didn't cause this. The professor was responsible. He wasn't just a cog in the system.

Given that Academia is a toxic cesspit of vipers at every level, I'd hesitate a little more to attribute it to individuals. Something about the environment brings out the worst in people and that's worth scrutinising.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#187

Post by swiley »

8note wrote: post #156
dash2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is different. Peer review is far from perfect but: * Most of my papers have had thoughtful comments. Typically, they improved the paper, sometimes a lot. * I have very rarely been asked to quote a specific paper from a specific author. Of course, pointing out important references that the paper has missed is part of peer review, so this would not necessarily be evidence of corruption. * There are loads…

I find it intriguing that reproducing the experiment isn't a part of the review, or visiting the lab to look for potential flaws in their set up. These reviews seem far from what you hear about for disproving N rays and the like

Do you checkout your co-worker's branches and run the unit tests for every PR they make? In an ideal world that might be nice but in the real world with normal sized projects that's to time consuming so everyone just reasons through patches.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#188

Post by andi999 »

pbzcnepu wrote: post #123

ISCA is a particularly horrible "top" conference. We've been trying to reproduce some papers with questionable methodology from ISCA'20 (including using "1 cycle access L1 cache" in simulations, something that's not really possible on modern CPUs). Of 5 paper groups contacted, 4 have not responded despite repeated requests, even when VPs of research at the university contacted. One group eventually replied, said that…

What I believe one problem with a lot of conference papers is:

- It is very important to go to conferences, to meet your (international) peers, see what is new, what interesting results have been achieved/are work in progress and to forge the next collaboration

So far so good. Now, all academic institution I know of, only allow you (means paying) to attend a conference if you present a paper. I guess this might be universal. So since you want/need to go, a lot of people just write up what the current status about a problem is, and this leads to a lot of half-baked presentations.

(of course fraud is something different)

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#189

Post by andi999 »

woofie11 wrote: post #78
dash2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is different. Peer review is far from perfect but: * Most of my papers have had thoughtful comments. Typically, they improved the paper, sometimes a lot. * I have very rarely been asked to quote a specific paper from a specific author. Of course, pointing out important references that the paper has missed is part of peer review, so this would not necessarily be evidence of corruption. * There are loads…

It varies field-by-field. In my field, peer review is a joke. I'm glad it's not a joke in your field yet, but incentive structures say it eventually will be. If incentives don't change, it's a question of when, not if.

What incentive structures? When I get a paper for review, I do my (time limited) best. Which incentive will change me?

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#190

Post by andi999 »

8note wrote: post #156
dash2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is different. Peer review is far from perfect but: * Most of my papers have had thoughtful comments. Typically, they improved the paper, sometimes a lot. * I have very rarely been asked to quote a specific paper from a specific author. Of course, pointing out important references that the paper has missed is part of peer review, so this would not necessarily be evidence of corruption. * There are loads…

I find it intriguing that reproducing the experiment isn't a part of the review, or visiting the lab to look for potential flaws in their set up. These reviews seem far from what you hear about for disproving N rays and the like

If reproducing were a requirement for reviewing, publication cost might be exorbitant (like when CERN tries to publish a paper you have to rebuild the particle accelerator?)
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