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Please commit more blatant academic fraud

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Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#231

Post by thomasahle »

Cyril_HN wrote: post #117

In undergrad, my professor explained to me in very candid terms (from the position of being a generous mentor) that the optimal path to success in the Arts and Social Sciences is: 1. Find a niche only a couple of people operate in. 2. Make friends with them at all costs and work in their area. 3. Review each others work, amassing enormous citations in highly respected (albeit sometimes niche) journals.

I wonder if part of the current problem is not that the fields are too big. In a small field where people know each other, reputation becomes more important, and you can't just misrepresent your results, since everyone will read it and know you did it. Meanwhile, in a big field, it is easier to hide in the crowd. Write some papers that get accepted, but not read, and have some friends cite them.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#232

Post by unishark »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #194
skystarman wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Please give some credit to other posters. The way I read this; when he says "you", it's the generic you: he's talking about the "chauvinist monsters" like himself, and it's in the context of three particular ways in which his own failings prevent him working with women. He forms and encourages inappropriate emotional relationships with his female colleagues and it affects his ability to give criticism of their work e…

Yes I imagined his idea of "criticizing" amounted to abusively yelling at people. From what I've seen, the way people win Nobel prizes is by working their lab 24/7 like a slavedriver. I actually have seen psychopathic professors yell at female lab members until they cry. I knew one guy who complained about it. He apparently got much more productivity out of yelling at the guys. Pretty dark humor if it's a joke.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#233

Post by miltondts »

josalhor wrote: post #82
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…

Well, I wonder if this could force people to start publishing their code so others can replicate the results. This would help greatly with the kinds of issues that are being discussed: - It would be much harder to hide makeup results and cherry-picked seeds - Useless research would not be as easy to hide - The real-world impact of the research would be more valued. - Researchers would be forced to recheck their code…

Great news! There are journals that do this! E.g. https://academic.oup.com/gigascience

They require the full means for replication to be open access, and reviewers take this very seriously! They will run your code, open github issues if they detect bugs etc.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#234

Post by magila »

fighterpilot wrote: post #189
DistressedDrone wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the universities wanted the problem fixed it would be fixed. I truly don't believe research universities are focused on producing value (other than to themselves).

Apparently it wasn't always like this, and it used to be common for junior faculty hires to have only 0 or 1 publications coming out of their PhD program. Why did the culture deteriorate so much and become so myopically focused on weakly informative metrics like publication count?

Because government grants demand it. Private patrons can trust their own judgment when deciding who to fund, but when it's taxpayer money being handed out people are understandably going to demand objective metrics to guard against corruption. In academia the objective metrics of choice are publication and citation count, so here we are.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#235

Post by bumby »

rscho wrote: post #200
pasabagi wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess for me the thing that's really crappy about this quote is that it shows his underlying attitude - that women are basically always potential romantic partners. If he was into men, and he said he didn't want men in the lab because he might fall in love with them, you can sort of see how absurd it is, and how unpleasant it is to be the object of romantic fantasy when you're just trying to get on with your job.

> women are basically always potential romantic partners Ok, why would that not be the case? Laws? PC? Age difference? Love/biology doesn't care about social rules, and this has been shown time and again in every possible situation you could think of. > you can sort of see how absurd it is Huh, no I can't. What makes it different when you reverse the situation?

>Ok, why would that not be the case?

Because of professionalism. The root of term used for “professions” like law, medicine, engineering etc. is that one professes to a code of ethics. That code should overrule base desires.

We generally wouldn’t accept a doctor who views and treats patients primarily as an income stream despite greed being a near-universal human drive and we shouldn’t expect a professor to view subordinates as potential romantic partners. Acknowledging the drive exists isn’t a reason to condone it.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#236

Post by OminousWeapons »

ModernMech wrote: post #227

There's a lot of discussion here about changing the incentive structure of academia to prevent this kind of fraud, but based on the discussion I've read so far I don't think a lot of people here understand the exact incentives that are involved, so I'd like to try to explain how academics actually operate. We've all head of "publish or perish", and there is a general understanding that you have to publish papers to g…

I agree with everything you said. At the risk of being pedantic:

> A feedback loop of profits from industry to universities. Right now when technological advancements happen at universities, those flow out to the general public, then to companies, who figure out how to monetize them. The profits generated by that monetization are captured entirely by private corporations, even though the foundational innovations on which they are based are funded by Universities and by extension the public. If some of this profit were diverted back into Universities (maybe through increased corporate taxes), then this would help.

This isn't ENTIRELY true. Universities "own" research IP and they do have tech transfer offices which at least theoretically help them monetize their largest breakthroughs via researcher startups. Many large, well established labs will also perform collaborative industry research, effectively acting as a CRO, which they can charge a lot of money for (and the Universities can subsequently take overhead from). The huge, field leading labs with well known PIs will have multiple R01s and various grants but the vast majority of their funding will come from industry.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#237

Post by eeegnu »

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…

If you keep track of these categories and have amassed a large enough dataset, it sounds like a fun experiment to see if a NN can learn some feature of the papers text to predict if a paper is BS. Some combinations of citations may even be a telling feature.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#238

Post by emn13 »

Veen wrote: post #188
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.

> What's the missing context here? The missing context is that many women he worked with defended him. That he has consistently worked with, hired, supported, and promoted women throughout his career. That he has done far more to benefit women in science and humanity generally than the whining Twitterati who denounced him ever will.

It sometimes surprises me how people don't seem to see that while all of this is part of a healthy (and seemingly normal) societal change, that it's unfortunate that not just are oldfashioned behaviors shunned, but that merely talking about struggles with them is so taboo. Is society really going to adapt better because people lash out so uncompromisingly?

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#239

Post by _dps »

fighterpilot wrote: post #189
DistressedDrone wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the universities wanted the problem fixed it would be fixed. I truly don't believe research universities are focused on producing value (other than to themselves).

Apparently it wasn't always like this, and it used to be common for junior faculty hires to have only 0 or 1 publications coming out of their PhD program. Why did the culture deteriorate so much and become so myopically focused on weakly informative metrics like publication count?

Two likely contributors:

1) due to population effects, academic positions are much more competitive now than they were in say 1970; if you figure that the top 50 research universities are not generally expanding the number of professors, and that new professors generally also come from those top 50 research universities, then on average a top-50-research-university professor will generate one new such professor in a career, despite having 10-100x as many graduate students (this was different in the 70s when the university system was rapidly expanding).

2) the increasing desire for fairness in hiring and promotion (by itself, a good thing) means that you need to be able to resolve hiring and promotion disputes with something both objective and external to the university (in the same way some undergraduate institutions put more admissions weight on external and objective metrics like standardized tests compared to more easily game-able internal metrics like high school class grades)

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#240

Post by rscho »

bumby wrote: post #235
rscho wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> women are basically always potential romantic partners Ok, why would that not be the case? Laws? PC? Age difference? Love/biology doesn't care about social rules, and this has been shown time and again in every possible situation you could think of. > you can sort of see how absurd it is Huh, no I can't. What makes it different when you reverse the situation?

> Ok, why would that not be the case? Because of professionalism. The root of term used for “professions” like law, medicine, engineering etc. is that one professes to a code of ethics. That code should overrule base desires. We generally wouldn’t accept a doctor who views and treats patients primarily as an income stream despite greed being a near-universal human drive and we shouldn’t expect a professor to view sub…

> Acknowledging the drive exists isn’t a reason to condone it.

So, exactly what Hunt said in his speech.

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