71–80 of 121 posts
Trendiness trumps all notions of academic rigor, and as long as a field "feels like" it's on the cutting edge it can go pretty far before collapsing in on itself.
This is the funny part. There is little to no power and prestige to be had in the academic system. To a first approximation no one outside academia cares.
I was just working as a staff programmer and taking grad courses with my tuition benefit, and found myself getting caught up in the mentality of needing a PhD to really be successful and valuable. Then got a job in industry making far more money and realized how academia is a small self contained world with status hierarchies irrelevant outside that small world.
Unfortunately, I think this article is not pessimistic enough. If it were true that academic fraud is important for establishing the boundaries of respectable scholarship in a field, then behavioral economics wouldn't exist anymore. And evolutionary psychology would be a fraction of its current size. Trendiness trumps all notions of academic rigor, and as long as a field "feels like" it's on the cutting edge it can g…
Overly pessimistic, and doesn't acknowledge that heads of steam only build behind promising findings, while the deficient (or 'fraudulent') work die on the vine, published or not. In other words the system tends to work. Secondly, there are many ingredients required to successfully publish, communicate science, foster collaboration, etc., beyond technical brilliance. I'm sure we all know many technically brilliant pe…
> Overly pessimistic, and doesn't acknowledge that heads of steam only build behind promising findings, while the deficient (or 'fraudulent') work die on the vine, published or not. This might be true in hard sciences where a "head of steam" can only build based on real, replicatable results But it's very common that public policy is proposed and adopted based on findings from soft sciences like psychology and sociol…
Conversely, computer science/AI doesn't have an equivalent of the rigor that public policy research tends to go through. CS has e.g., benchmark datasets, typical evaluation metrics, but these are more like norms rather than requirements, whereas in public policy, instruments for validations are far more rigorously tested and enforced. Depending on the area.
I agree that outright fraud would be detrimental, but I think OP overblows this issue completely and should apologise to his co-authors.
That being said, the insane emphasis on venue is what's pushing me out of academia. I can't compete with people like this.
I don't have top-tier publications, and I haven't gotten any awards. I've seen people get awards for bullshit and farming prestigous publications. I only have one citation for work that is 100% mine. But every time I read something like this, I feel proud that I don't bullshit, and at least try to do real science. I truly believe in all my work and every sentence I write. That being said, the insane emphasis on venue…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it’s any consolation I split up with an ex partner after she wanted to put me as a co-author on a pseudoscience bullshit paper that she was working on to try and hit her quota. Her entire field, in the social sciences, is inventing a wild idea and using meta analysis to give it credibility. Then flying to conferences and submitting expenses. I contributed nothing other than a statistical framework which was discar…
Luckily this made-up social science trash won't be used as evidence when shaping our policies, so it's pretty harmless! /s
Double-blind review is a mirage that does not hold up. While I was in academia I reviewed a paper that turned out to be a blatant case of plagiarism. It was a clear Level 1 copy according to the IEEE plagiarism levels (Uncredited Verbatim Copy of more than 50% of a single paper). I submitted all of these findings with the original paper and what parts were copied (essentially all of it) as my review. A few days later…
The organisers then made the argument that double blind was working because 50% of papers were not identified correctly! I was amazed that even with strong evidence that double blind was not working, the organisers were still able to convince themselves to continue with business as usual.
> Most researchers are to some extent “career researchers”, motivated by the power and prestige that rewards those who excel in the academic system, rather than idealistic pursuit of scientific truth. This is the funny part. There is little to no power and prestige to be had in the academic system. To a first approximation no one outside academia cares. I was just working as a staff programmer and taking grad courses…
They have power over their students and relative power over other Professors. That's plenty enough incentive for most. There can also be fame and fortune for the most famous among them. See Francesa Gino, Dan Ariely, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't make sense of your first sentence. Can you rephrase it please?
OP's supervisor wrote a paper without any merit. OP then provided a "petty idea" that made the paper "considerable at all". That's how he ended up as co-author.