281–290 of 319 posts
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Why weren't you?
Much of academia seems to have become an outwardly transparent no hold barred status battleground. So this just seems to exactly align with my expected outcome given that assumption. I'm not saying there aren't people in academia who aren't driven by doing good research but I certainly don't see that as the driving force in the US academia.
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You trust science because it has the highest probability of being accurate. What's the alternative? Most people aren't capable of analysis scietific research to see if it's correct. What makes something political? If new research shows that X product is dangerous and republicans, who that company donates to, come out and disagree with the research they just made it political. Now, someone like you, can just say "This…
Jesus Christ, the point of science is to REMOVE trust - not be the least worst option. Science that cannot exist without trust is faith.
When I was an undergrad in college, I helped design a study on the role of gender perception in expertise. We had a piece of text that the subjects (undergrads) would read and rate the expertise of. We had the same text but we randomized whether the name would be a commonly male name, a commonly female name, or initials. We also randomized if they'd watch a clip of men's sports beforehand (men's basketball), women's…
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Whoever told you that about your cites is probably right -- you shouldn't cite yourself while calling out that you are citing yourself. You should cite yourself the same you that site any other work. The second part is probably unavoidable. If you're working on something super specialized when all your reviewers are the six other people who work on it then sure, it'll be unblinded. Not much we can do there sadly.
This happens in larger fields too. For example in AI, which is a large research field, you can be blind-reviewing a paper, but it uses a proprietary google dataset, so you know where it comes from. Blind review is not the answer, I fear.
Regarding papers that cite proprietary datasets that no one can access, in fields like AI where it is perfectly possible to release datasets (if there's a specific reason it's a different issue), as far as I'm concerned they should be outright rejected due to lack of reproducibility and inability of the reviewers to check the correctness of the claims. Although I know this is a minority viewpoint and it won't happen.
I'm not sure what we're supposed to find astonishing about academics (like most of humanity) being vulnerable to reputation biases in their reasoning. As in, that would be the null hypothesis. It would be astonishing if most academics overcame it. EDIT: apparently, the size of the effect (factor of six more likely to be accepted if it came from a Nobel Prizewinner) is larger than anticipated.
Are people in general bias based on reputation?
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I disagree, the style to write as a "neutral" observer (often writing in passive voice) is frowned upon nowadays for good reason. Part of that is also that the information if the authors wrote a citation or not can be important to a reviewer. For example it is unfortunately quite common that authors publish results in a salami tactic to maximize the number of publications. There can be a significant difference in imp…
> the style to write as a "neutral" observer (often writing in passive voice) is frowned upon nowadays for good reason. Could you be more specific about who's frowning upon it? Because I've never heard this before in my field (Comp. Ling., where double blind is the rule) and would like to look more into it.
The reasoning is that the work was "subjective", i.e. carried out by you. By using "detached third person language" you are trying to give a false impression of objectivity. This is similar to management/PR double speak like "we are forced to raise our prices", "we are unable to compensate you"... (I don't assign malice in the case of scientists though).
Duh
As a former researcher with multiple high-impact publications I can 100% confirm it: - when I was a researcher in Italy for an unknown lab, all of our articles were generally very scrutinized and went through years of reviews before publication - when I worked in Michal Graetzel[1]'s laboratory things get published much more easily on more higher impact journals with less scrutiny. Not only most of the publications d…
I don't understand this. Don't you have blind peer review? In my discipline, most journals even have double blind peer review. I thought that's the standard.
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Podcasts, concerts and books are something we review subjectively. Scientific articles one would expect would be reviewed objectively.
The data is objective but the quality of the research is subjective. For example if my sample size was 150 for some study that's subjective whether it was sufficient of size
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Do you have any evidence of this?
HN isn't a journal and so academic sources of evidence really are overkill. However, I'll throw you a bone. Go to your favorite major journal and start looking at the "conflicts of interest" and "grants" section. Once you take money from someone (except for NIST, in my experience) you're basically beholden to try your hardest to get the results they're looking for. Some scientists are moral enough to still return bad…
Most declare no conflicts of interest. One author of one paper seems to have started a company based on similar technology: potentially a bias, but also potentially putting one's money where their mouth is. One other author lists some consulting work for a few companies.
As for grants, I doubt people are bending their results to appease the NSF or NIH. There's certainly groupthink in what gets funded. We're still throwing money down the ABeta-for-Alzhemier's hole, for example. That eventually shapes what topics get published, but maybe not the specific results. The recent Abeta articles are pretty negative, for example.