21–25 of 25 posts
This is all well and good but the author seems to still naively assume best and honest intentions. Sadly all kinds of people have all sorts of motivations for writing papers.
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Why is my impression of academics drifting from an image of intellectual curiosity, deep thinking, and excellent communication; to a scene from a bad movie where I'm supposed to like the car salesman. Maybe it's good I didn't go back to grad school... P.S. this article appeared in Nature, so I guess I should take it with the required amount of salt.
Because all the good ones are flocking away to industry or other less ego-intensive careers. In my field it is gross, and if you are not talking on twitter you are not "active". And you have the same kind of citation rings you could (and still see) in papers but now with retweets... It is all about making it look-like science. We are really deep into the cargo cult... And at many levels, the grants, the papers, the p…
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That's not my experience at all. To be fair, I've never solved the Riemann Hypothesis, but in my experience it is possible to find professional academic mathematicians who were willing to meet me (as an outsider) to discuss their work and my ideas in a serious way. Obviously, you have to bear in mind that high-profile mathematicians do get contacted by cranks and they have to weigh up what's worth spending their time…
I have mixed experience publishing in math and statistics. I've had some of the best and worst experiences there compared to more applied fields. There's just been much more variability. The comments and feedback, handled by the right editor, have been some of the most thoughtful, logical, and rigorous I've had of all my papers. The sort that, even when I disagree, think are very good questions to ask of the submissi…
Furthermore, I could believe that the above issues and, as you also mention, reproducibility, are worse in pure mathematics or theoretical CS than in other fields because so little is at stake. Which is not to say I think most maths papers are false, but just that they're not all _entirely_ true either. Their audience is so small and the readers/reviewers "know what they mean" anyway, most of the time. And others are just false and no-one noticed because they couldn't be bothered to check the details, because the result was inconsequential to their own work and the author was a nice enough chap...
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Because all the good ones are flocking away to industry or other less ego-intensive careers. In my field it is gross, and if you are not talking on twitter you are not "active". And you have the same kind of citation rings you could (and still see) in papers but now with retweets... It is all about making it look-like science. We are really deep into the cargo cult... And at many levels, the grants, the papers, the p…
Do academics really take Twitter that seriously? Can’t tell if this is a hot take or the culture eating itself.
> Their discussions are largely of limitations, catalogues of failure. Their conclusions can be brutal. pov: me writing my first published paper and being honest about the shortcomings and then having my advisor tell me that i should sell my results more enthusiastically.
I was described as "too scholarly" by my PhD advisor when writing up my first couple of papers. I'm in industry now. People doing a PhD/post-doc need to understand that there is no escape from "sales". Lots of academically leaning people, including myself, set out with a goal of avoiding becoming a seller and wanting to work in a space where data does the persuading rather than smooth talk. Unfortunately no such plac…