In Canada the education system was abused as a immigration path, in part because the schools were greedy and corrupt.
Or maybe the corporate owned news doesn't like to publish corporate corruption?
Corporations have an incentive to undercut one another and compete. They'll only band together when something affects them all at the same time, which is basically only economy-wide events.
If your goal is to extract a percentage, find the biggest cashflow to maximize profits.
It has probably been like this for centuries.
The article hints that medical residents are a large source and it could be effects like competition and visas… does that account for the rate of growth?
Are these unscrupulous editors making “payola” or something?
The loftier aims that academia is supposed to enable are crushed by lesser appetites.
Unless there's some way to discriminate between the failed and successful review processes it has failed in its purpose.
The only people who can’t get fired are the few people with tenure. Most people struggle to get that.
Perhaps we just need institutions set up to do replication of papers?
Almost all of the actual lab work requires statistical determination of repeatability & reproducibility to be calculated between different labs, and the summary is included with each document.
I would say there is way less than a kilo without this.
And the amount of supporting raw data on file amounts to kilos which dwarf the pages published. Formally accessible so everything can be thoroughly reviewed at any time in the future, allowing for complete reconsideration if called for.
Scietific instrumentation doesn't stand still.
So it definitely can be done. Even if it's to the extreme not suitable for everybody else.
The less-reproducible documents are there, they did the best they could, but have a smell not shared by the good stuff. You know "exactly" how good or bad the underlying science turned out to be in the real world.
Paradoxically, or intuitively, as the case may be, if you're going to utilize the less-reliable techniques (most likely because they're the best there is), you may need to know how bad they are most of all.
Maybe other publications should raise the bar on statistics as appropriate, I figure zero statistics is about as far as you can get from ASTM "standards".
Some places probably have a lot further to go than others and it would be nice to have a whole lot sweeter smell all around.
People can probably appreciate that lot of the kilos are more figurative than ever, but there's still enough hard copies made to fill big trucks though.
I'm not in academics professionally myself, how universal would you estimate it is among their journals these days to require a statistical study between an adequate number of different labs before final publication?
If they can’t reproduce the original, they should get called out eventually
Why not move back into a cave and stab your own meat with a sharpened stick next.
In many cases, citing articles still go to print media.
Not really, but it does mean you shouldn’t trust individual papers blindly.
Anyone who follows research already knows this. Individual papers appear all the time with remarkable findings which seem revolutionary, but then nobody can replicate or commercialize it.
Some communities eat these isolated results up, like supplement and health podcasters (Rhonda Patrick, Huberman). They should know better than to take some random mouse study at face value, but it’s too good of a story to pass up.
In medicine and the industry, anyone experienced knows not to get excited about singular results unless it’s from a trusted source or until it’s replicated.
In my opinion, the three research frauds of the past 30 years that have had the biggest impact outside of academia are:
1. Andrew Wakefield's autism paper
2. Elgazzar's paper on ivermectin as a treatment for COVID
3. Marc Tessier-Lavigne's Alzheimer's papers
The interesting thing about 1 and 2 is that yes, they reduced public confidence in science, but only because there are large blocks of people who remain convinced that the research wasn't actually fraudulent.
But there are many scientists that love hearing themselves on TV etc. that pull out a paper to shove whatever agenda they have.
First problem: the sort of people who popularized Follow The Science™ actually meant "follow the people who run public sector institutions". Not "follow single studies" or anything that deep. The catchphrase was deployed many times during COVID to browbeat people into obeying people like Anthony Fauci, a man notorious for claiming he literally was science. "Attacks on me are attacks on science", he said. It was pure authoritarianism dressed up as intellectualism, as was so often the case throughout history (see: Lysenko).
Second problem: the heuristic that you should only trust a claim if it appears in several papers will also lead to you trusting many bogus claims. Academics regularly cite work they haven't even read, let alone replicated. It's easy to find invalid citations in the literature. Most of them just take claims on trust or even cite claims clearly advertised as made up fiction (sorry, "modeling assumptions").
Third problem: many results that replicate shouldn't:
https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science...
This in turn allows certain people in institutions to trade legitimacy for agenda pushing, creating the current crisis of institutional trust, which the legitimate "Trust the science" crowd suffers from.
Science itself is all about testable hypotheses and facts. If we can't rely on it, chances are we are doing something wrong and science itself is perfectly fine.
But the findings are often not replicated.
Junk science has been around since, well, even before we coined the word science really. In some ways I think the situation has improved. People seem far more aware of misconduct, and willing to make retractions than they used to.
Even more like undermining trust in journals.
With Science.org doing it to its own self.
Which should be living up to a higher standard than most so they can set an example.
At Science.org I think they have the responsibility to reverse the forces that are trying to build hatred for scientific endeavors across-the-board.
Looks like the haters are most concerned with climate and vaccines, and are perfectly willing to let everything else go down the tubes if that's what it takes to purge every last trace there is concerning progress in those areas past, present, and future.
So when you get the direct opinion of the most hateful where they explain why they don't trust vaccine and climate research, they can often further explain why they don't really trust very many scientists at all, not even NASA, so this is where the most concentrated anti-scientist effort can be found.
The worst of the haters are the ones painting with the broadest brush.
This fraud needs to be exposed, but the way it looks to me it just gives haters another arrow in their quiver.
This article looks very well researched itself and seems like the authors are on the right track and will only gain more expertise on the subject if they try.
What bugs me is that they're painting with as broad a brush as you can get, themselves.
With the resources at their disposal, they should be breaking down in great detail which fields of science are the most effected and least effected by the growing fraud industry. The numbers of scientists in these fields and the locations their research was conducted in, as well as the estimated fraud in each of the fields. We want University and institution affiliations, correlations with educational histories, numbers, why not?
If they try, and stick with it for a number of years, progress in one direction or the other should become measurable for each field.
So the most egregious fraud can be targeted first & strongest.
If there was a time when there was no fraud "industry" at all, I would say that some of most questionable findings were still heavily concentrated on the social sciences, and least of all on the natural sciences.
It would be good to know if this trend still holds based on true statistical data, this could indicate if or when the fraud industries are disproportionally targeting natural science. It would be good to have a sign whether fraud in natural science is on the increase or not independently, whether initiated for the purpose of promoting the lesser scientists or their institutions, or perhaps a source of uncertainty & doubt that can be put on steroids without any intention to promote scientists or their work at all, just the opposite effect could be intended.
You know natural sciences like climate and vaccines are in their cross-hairs so you can expect those to take a big hit without any proven or rumored fraud, but if you're not careful everything else will be equally destroyed even though it was not the primary target of the hate.
One of the worst ways to discredit natural science is to lump it in with social science or anything else.
But I think the worst are the Science Fans who go around saying "Science, bitches!" just because something has a two-column layout and never actually read the shit. Then they go around saying "There is some evidence that" and they've never read the paper.
In fact, there is so much bullshit that you would never accept if you were the one making a decision. It's why so many outsiders frequently make the right decisions on things.
e.g. Bezos closed flights to/from China to/from his offices a month before the pandemic. Bezos isn't a scientist. Trump tried to do the same. Trump isn't a scientist. But what did the scientists say? That it would hinder a coronavirus response: https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/31/as-far-right-calls-for-c...
The "far right" non-experts said one thing while the scientists said another thing and now we know that the "far right" non-experts were right. It's not even because the "far right" has some exclusive access to truth. It's just that there is a certain kind of blind spot imposed upon science by the fact that scientists have certain political persuasions. This causes them to self-censor and blatantly lie so as to preserve those politics.
Even if some racist view were true, you would be hard pressed to find a liberal scientist who would espouse it. Even if some sexist view were true, or xenophobic view were true, or whatever. Which is a dirty stain on science as practiced today.
If a thing is true, it is true.
The idea that science is self-correcting is a nice fiction spread by academics to absolve themselves of the need to reform. "Don't make us change, any problems will go away if you wait because science is naturally self correcting", they say. It's a silly word game. Academia, which is what they mean when they say science, is a human institution whose incentives lead naturally to rewarding bad behavior. Nothing in that system self corrects, corrections must be forced from the outside (or we give up on reform and dissolve the whole thing, a solution now actively being talked about in hardline right-wing forums).
Example: pre-registration does happen sometimes today, and it always happens for corporate clinical trials. It's a good idea that works. In the private case the FDA is the auditor and there's some circumstantial evidence that pre-registration may be the reason why pharma productivity flatlined around ~2000. But in a surprising number of cases in academia a study is pre-registered, the final paper doesn't match the pre-registration and nobody notices. Why? Well, who is responsible for systematically checking these things? It'd have to be auditors, but universities point the finger at journals and journals point the finger back at universities.
Papers calling out problems: it's been done for much longer than I've been alive. Doesn't work. People nod their head and say something should be done, then go right back to the bad old ways.
The only thing that can help is external force. Governments have to either defund academia and let science be done by the private sector, or they have to tie funding to passing rigorous external audits (by private sector actors paid to find fraud, not academics themselves). The latter has been tried a few times, the US ORI is an example of that, but it doesn't work. The ORI was set up on the assumption that academic malpractice is rare so its methods don't scale.
the point is, we're on a dangerous path. if left unchecked, the term scientist will eventually have the same meaning as the word priest.
That is the check you are looking for and indeed how we realized there's some fraud and reproducibility issues, btw. I'll be waiting for the day actual religions gets the same level of scrutiny.
Except if you base things like planes, computers, or medicine on science they provably work.
Obviously it's not perfect and probably never will be as science is a human endeavour and humans are not perfect. But dismissing all of it as "just a religion" fundamentally misunderstands both science and religion.
Alternatively, in times of high wealth inequality are we putting a higher burden on our academics to survive, and forcing them to do more and more, thereby increasing the likelihood they will turn to cheating to survive?
I wonder if there is any empirical analysis of what has historically funded/supported scientific work (private funding vs. academic systems).
I also wonder whether a lone genius in it for the "love of the game" could make much progress in cutting edge science nowadays, given the cost of experiments and the specialization of fields.
Really interesting food for thought.
You could even do it as a complete gentleman without ruffling any feathers at lower cost than most well-paid corporate workers waste, and get more done if you set your mind to it. Sometimes even in your spare time.
So I definitely wouldn't sell the lone genius short.
Could very well be an even better bet.
"In December 2023, a PubPeer user commented on 13 tortured phrases the Problematic Paper Screener had flagged in the article, such as the use of “Parkinson’s illness,” “Parkinson’s infection,” and “Parkinson’s sickness” rather than Parkinson’s disease.
"“These typically result from an attempt to avoid plagiarism detection using a paraphrasing software,” the commenter wrote about the phases. “How come these incorrect wordings survived proofreading by the coauthors, editors, referees, copy editors, and typesetters?”"
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/11/11/all-the-red-flags-sci...
Anyone who is alarmed by this hasn't been paying attention to the perverse incentives scientists have been facing for decades.
The ingress: "Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities..."
The article: nothing
The ingress overreaches, oversimplifies and mixes hypotheses with results. Is this a test?
EDIT: Refers to the paper referenced by the article.
My next manuscript is still going to Plos One ( :(given the reputation) bc it's free to publish. It's such a messed up system that prevents me from even trying to publish in good journals.
It's not peer reviewed in either case.
The problem is what's incentivized to be rewarded with someone else's money.
In my opinion, the ultimate problem in academics (aside from pyramid schemes) are administrations applying a profit model to science, where science is a means to a profit end (for the institution) rather than an end in itself. That is, the problem is in expecting a public service to operate as a private profit enterprise.
Sometimes you pay someone to do something, not to make a profit for you directly.
Replicated studies can likely be replicated under the same conditions.
N=1 means you might be able to believe it, but if the results contradict reality, toss it out.
I no longer feel like I need to 'trust science'. No need to trust. Use it if its useful, don't if its not.
This has eliminated those grandiose happy papers that propose a pretty popular fair world that contradict what we actually see.
I now find that requirement in most AI-related high-tech jobs. Starter salary for these jobs is often $150k+. When someone is willing to pay you $150k+ for having published a paper, fraud definitely makes (financial) sense. Basically, the problem is the demand, and the demand corrupts the metrics (h-index).
I think that having a paper published would become less and less significant in the future. With time, businesses will also move onto other signals of success.
These fraudulent papers are identified like this:
> For instance, of the 79 papers that one editor had handled at PLOS ONE, 49 have been retracted.
That's not what's happen at top conferences.
If we don't admit that there are fundamental problems that affect all of us (academics) and instead pretend it is only the lesser people who f things up, we'll all be screwed sooner or later.
Top AI conferences allow that? That's insane.
Oddly enough, pre-LLMs, I would have said most of these crap paper mill papers didn't really affect the actual fields. Yes, they cited each other but outside the citation ring didn't really alter the field in a knowledge sense. But now.. if these get picked up in Deep Research it's a problem.
Press your face against the glass, and it's much more complicated. The institutions that we have made for funding science don't reliably channel money towards the best ideas. All the experts in the field have figured out how to work the system well enough to build lives for themselves, and this leads to the tautology that "experts" support the status quo. We don't consider someone an expert if they aren't thriving in the current institutions.
Anytime someone mentions new institutions e.g. prediction markets that might better allocate funding, or even enrich the best scientists, there is a visceral backlash.
I'd also suggest that lower scientific funding levels exacerbate the problems with the current system - risky research is less likely to be funded, as are new investigators, etc. Large, established labs are also better able to weather the storm.
Like the vast majority, everyone had to focus more on financial survival than was ever imaginable before, and this permeated the universities also and was never recovered from. This is when the reliance on foreign students began to skyrocket too.
I did this to someone who ripped off my master's thesis, word for word, as a side trek on holiday and it was like steam came out their ears when they realized if they call the campus authorities to escort me out they'd generate an incident report of why I was there.
Edit: This was not in China btw -- ironically despite the stereotypes all the folks I've collaborated with from there have been pretty ethical and hardworking, it's a shame some ruin things for everyone.
I hate to say it, but cutting off the money spigot of government funding for papers seems like a good start.
It feels like our society has been optimized to game a few metrics like this (government wants to raise GDP, CEOs want to increase shareholder value, university deans want to increase funding to write papers), and all of them have toxic second order effects that make society worse.
Funding collapsing is just going to incentivize that. To be as competitive as possible for increasingly scarce resources. You won't be able to run that replication study, or document that code, or let a grad student spend six months chasing down that odd result, because the funding for all that just got cut.
1. apparently-legitimate papers in prestigious journals with fraudulent data. extremely bad.
2. legitimate papers in legitimate journals which, innocently or not, just used bad methods and have wrong conclusions. this is "the replication crisis".
3. totally fake papers in paper mills with no meaningful peer review. it's really easy to spot these, no one is individually getting taken in by the results, but...
3a. sometimes they wind up in a meta-analysis, which is really bad because people might trust the meta analysis.
Problem 1 is morally worst and much more common than one would hope. Outright fabricated data in a Nature or NEJM publication (as has happened) is a disaster.
Problem 2 is amenable to reform for the most part (fields are already doing this).
Problem 3 isn't a problem at all for scientific knowledge per se, although universities and funding bodies might not be pleased their scientists are buying fake papers. You can just ignore the paper mills.
But Problem 3a can actually alter policy, which is pretty serious.
In a recent conversation with the editor-in-chief of a journal I am on the editorial board of, a substantial bulk of the submissions we get are LLM written papers that essentially randomly look for associations in accessible data, which are then sold to faculty (primarily in China).
to the extent they aren't ignored, but seem so plausible that they are taken seriously, eventually people will want to talk to the researchers about their results, invite them to give talks, and so on. at which point it becomes problem 1.
Where a mistake in the Excel spreadsheet was used by many politicians to justify austerity measures to be a #2 or #3a problem (or both)?
[1] https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/collusion-rings-threaten-the-in...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/14/scientist...
Until the "industry" (defined vaguely as scientists, their institutions, universities, funding entities, etc, etc) cleans house and punishes those researchers, we're quickly approaching a time where we'll have to take EVERY study skeptically until it can be replicated.
* Punishment could range from "no, we won't publish your stuff without data+methodology" to ratcheting back funding to "we publicly document your lying/incompetence" (hardest and riskiest) to a variety of other things.
I've always felt like this should be the norm. Why would you trust something before it can be replicated? Even if it's unintentional, people make mistakes.
Unfortunately, we have a media and political structure that uses the most recent study/model/whatever to advocate for, design, and enact policy before that review.
If you are close enough with a scientist, generally they will admit they don’t trust a single study
Some fields also have guardrails, such as the LIGO being two separate detectors a with two independent teams
Why do you think that? If something fails to replicate it, you can investigate the original paper, and then there may be very clear evidence of fraud.
On the other hand, convenient laboratory errors might be hard to tell apart from fabrication (though not always, sometimes people get caught using photoshop), and statistical incompetence might be hard to tell apart from p-hacking. So I agree this is why it's hard to punish fraud.
In my experience, fabricated data is rare. But cherry-picking data and misuse of statistics to prove the desired hypotheses is extremely common in top journals from e.g. the Nature Portfolio journal family. I'd say at least 1/5 of the articles in biology and medicine have serious methodological errors.
IMHO, the main reason are perverse incentives and power imbalance. If you are a student or a postdoc and you get pressure from your supervisor to obtain certain result and you refuse to engage in academic misconduct, you will get pushed out of most projects and this might be the end of your academic career.
In contrast, there are few, if any, consequences for the senior scientists and principal investigators who perpetuate this culture. There's no oversight, no integrity checks, nothing. Universities tend to ignore even clear cases of data fabrication and fraud, where e.g. images derived from experiments are fake. Ultimately, this creates selective pressure for misconduct, as those willing to bend the rules are rewarded.
Unlike a startup or company or some other thing where you vote with dollars on utility, many papers can't be quantitatively evaluated on how much they contribute to science.
Some papers are obvious and groundbreaking, but a lot of research is at such a frontier that literally no one else can evaluate it. You just nod your head and trust it.
That, coupled with the fact that negative results just aren't published, is incredibly inefficient and disheartening.
Well meaning students have little alternative than to publish journal papers showing how their algorithm/method had a 0.001% improvement (measured by questionable metrics) because they are trying to get N publications to graduate.
While discourse about such methods can be beneficial, it also tends to create too much noise that drowns out more meaningful work.
However, another equally damaging form of fraud, cherry-picking data and manipulating statistical inference is common. I think the reason is that it's much simpler to get the results you want this way, and you are much less likely to get caught.
Previously, fake data was common, e.g. in the form of fabricated Western blots, as it has been proven by large-scale image analyses conducted by sleuths. I imagine similar forms of fraud are still frequent in other disciplines or in domains that generate low-throughput data, such as some clinical trials.
Unfortunately, when people do find ways to automatically detect inconsistent numbers in a paper, like SPRITE or GRIM, they find maybe 50% of all checkable papers fail the audit and the authors almost invariably refuse to share their raw data for further checks despite having previously agreed to do so. So it seems likely that fake data is actually not rare at all but very widespread.
Caveat: like I say in every comment on scientific fraud on HN, all this varies dramatically by field. Some fields are much more corrupt than others. That 50% number is from psychology. Computer science isn't that bad relative to others. But for example, in climatology it's taken as axiomatic that it's OK to fabricate data and then present it as "observations". Anyone who tries to call them out on this behavior gets attacked, censored or even sued, yet if you did the exact same thing in physics nobody would hesitate to call it fraud. There isn't even a consistent definition in academia of what data fabrication means.
So no, sadly we don't really know how prevalent data fabrication is. The only way to detect scientific fraud to the level of robustness we'd accept for any other kind of fraud is regular, randomized lab audits with jail time or ruinous damages for perpetrators, backed by rigorous field-independent written standards for what evidence must be provided, all checked by outside organizations. Think financial audits but for scientists.
Obviously not only is academia not doing this, it's culturally nowhere close to considering the possibility of even thinking about starting. Academia has spent so many years engaging in such deep ideological purges that everyone who remains is at minimum sympathetic to ideas like "defund the police". The concept of policing themselves to the level accountancy does will never come up, not even during discussions of reform.
* If there's no clear way to get the raw-data
* If it's unclear how the data was gathered
-> the results are most likely fabricated
Do you have a source about this?
tl;dr where does temperature data come from? Climatologists gather data from various sources and then aggregate them into time series which are then used for later research. Which would be fine, except that along the way they do things that aren't considered legitimate in other fields like:
• reporting "observations" in their "raw data" from weather stations that haven't existed for decades. They are actually software-generated guesses based on other stations that themselves may not exist or be in comparable similar surroundings. This isn't a rare thing, in some countries most of the data is attributed to weather stations that don't physically exist or have moved large distances, yet still show up in databases with readings at their old coordinates.
• adjust their "raw data" in various ways and for various reasons. That is, what gets presented as observational data in climatology - like graphs of temperature - are not actually readings from thermometers, although it's usually presented as if it is. Modern temperature time series have dozens of adjustments including many extremely questionable ones like homogenization (a form of spatial averaging).
• dropping confidence intervals or even reporting temperatures that are simply the max of the CI around the real reading. This is a problem because QA on weather stations is frequently non-existent. In the UK over 80% of weather stations are WMO grade 4 or 5, meaning they are junk tier with uncertainties of 2C and 5C respectively. As claimed warming is 0.1C/decade this sort of data is of no use for detecting it but is used anyway. It's a global problem not UK specific.
• they regularly rewrite temperature time series in ways that invalidate all prior published papers and claims based on that data, but they don't retract any of those papers.
Editing data points, making up readings from non-existent instruments, using garbage-tier instruments, ignoring confidence intervals, playing with the data until it comes good and retroactively deciding your data was wrong but not doing retractions of papers built on it, are all behaviors that would be decried in most other fields.
Until academia can settle on universal standards for what it calls science people's trust in it will continue to fall, because they won't be able to make any assumptions about what kind of methods the word science really means :(
That's a red flag. Reads as evasive to me. Why are you bothered by internet randos disagreeing with you? If you have reputable sources link them instead of wasting time. If the responses are truly ad hominem that should only strengthen your argument in the eyes of any making an attempt to be objective.
I apologize if it seems uncharitable but my default assumption in this sort of scenario is that you've been the subject of well reasoned rebuttals and don't want to confront that reality.
> universal standards for what it calls science
> what kind of methods the word science really means
That's nonsensical. "Science" is a vague, very high level methodology. There's no single correct way to go about things other than to recursively apply evidence driven approaches.
Some fields have broad applicability of course. For example something like the foundations of statistical methods will presumably remain the same no matter what task you apply them to. But what the results of such methods "mean" is going to vary widely.
> "Science" is a vague, very high level methodology. There's no single correct way to go about things
It's really not. But this is the kind of semantic dispute I am warning of. If your response to discovering that academics engage in data fabrication is to say that's ok because science can mean anything, then science doesn't mean anything. And eventually the general public will learn that, and vote to defund it.
> the foundations of statistical methods will presumably remain the same no matter what task you apply them to.
Overfitted models are not only common in many fields but academics often try to justify them as OK to use, so I wouldn't assume statistical methods remain the same no matter what task you apply them to. After all, science is really vague, right? Who is to say what the foundations of statistics are?
I know this because I've been the beneficiary of this system on multiple occasions, and it makes me sick. This is not the kind of world I want to live in.
Peer review should be but sometimes isn’t. It always can be though, unlike conferences
A good time to repost about the famous VIDEA conference:
I don’t dispute that there are probably orders of magnitude more fake papers than fake conference presentations, just that shifting from journal articles to conference talks won’t help at all. If the incentives shift, current paper mills will just shift with the market.
In actual practice what I found was that the principle driver of publishing success has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the work, it has to do with how much your reviewers think that you might some day be in a position to review a paper of theirs. This is the fundamental problem with peer review when: career success is measured by quantity of papers published, the resulting dynamic is governed by game theory, not scientific merit.
how are they?
I have a friend who recently has 'taken an interest in science' and is now passing Youtube videos all of the time that are total crap, but make reference to 'scientific' papers. I 'learned' how earth is already doomed because Betelgeuse went supernova, and that there are deep shafts below the pyramid of Gizeh that only an alien race could have dug. Stuff like that.
Net outcome where it comes to science may be that this helps erode people's trust in science.
Catching fraud further down the chain is easy. Other professions know how to do it. Just adopt the same framework as used in financial controls. External auditors, written standards, randomized spot checks, lots and lots of paperwork to provide audit trails back to real experiments with hard-to-forge evidence. And severe punishments for those found to have engaged in intentional fraud.
You can get a glimpse of that when applying for grants or publishing in more prestigious journals. There are often endless checklists and questions about regulatory and ethical compliance, data availability, reproducibility, and whatever else. And more often than not, many of the questions are category errors or otherwise make no sense in the context of your work. Even the people who are supposed to regulate science lack the ability to do so in a way applicable to the entire breadth of science.
Yes, for sure a lot of controls implemented via audit aren't perfect fits for what is being regulated, that's the nature of trying to fix bad incentives via regulation. It's better to just have aligned incentives to start with, but that can't be done in academia, it's regulation or nothing.
Also, my experience has been that sometimes academics like to claim their field is special and shouldn't be expected to play by the same rules as other fields. But that's often not true. They should in fact be held to the same standards as everyone else is and their justifications for why they're an exception don't hold water.
Science is fundamentally an activity, not a field. You can do scientific research in most fields. Agriculture and software are nice examples, as academic scientists are doing both. And in many cases, the outputs are used by the general public.
Quantitative metrics such as citations, paper counts, and impact factors are mostly used by bureaucrats who don't know what they are doing. Actual evaluations in reputable institutions depend heavily on the subjective judgment of other people in the field.
The role of grants varies a lot between fields and insitutions. In some cases, a professor is expected to become a manager, win grants, and hire other people to do their research. In other cases, grants are nice but optional. Such professors can do research with limited external support, both personally and with students funded from other sources.
Problem is, I could find nothing of it when I googled. O tried to get ahold of the authors and I even wrote to their department. The only Mail back I received concluded that neither would be available any time soon.
So there‘s that. A paper that could be completely made up, with no data to support it. It might as well be make believe. I would lie if I said this didn't make me lose faith in my own work, since it justifiably takes me ages to gather data and write code for my experiments. Great.
Dear Dr. [myname],
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Being a professor/researcher is not lucrative. I get the drive to "get funding" but... my impression was that narcissistic cheaters from undergrad couldn't get industry jobs and doubled down on their unethical behavior at the expense of those of us trying to actually do useful work for civil society.
I might not have had a 4.0 GPA or been the guy always getting into top tier venues, but at least my work was my own work, and it was solid.
there were scientists and engineers everywhere who warned the world.
who didn't listen?
- Split a paper into three
- Waste efforts by running the same research with a slight change
- Plagiarism
- Inter-peer favors (corruption, dishonesty)
Funding/grants, journals, publishers, paper count requirements, are the true source of these behaviors.
This is what markets are when left to develop. Academia made itself game-able. You can't have truth and profits sit in the same room.
Capitalism has made a very nice chair for careerism to sit in.
If it's necessary to do your own peer-reviewing for a publishing house, it could just as well be arxiv.
In my experience good science is much rarer than bad.
Also, politics and hidden hands (eg: third party funding sources) have been shaping science likely since science's inception. It's an open secret that quite often science is not scientific. And that if you are seeing a published paper like this, then critiques have willfully ignored that fact.
I'm sure that this subtly varies from field to field, but I think that one tends to accept and become numb to the dross. Because it is overwhelming. The approach becomes to quietly try to filter for and celebrate better science, and otherwise say nothing. Beyond being overwhelmed, this approach may be necessary for political survival in some fields.
It's actually a fun exercise, IMO. I did it a couple of time for surface temperature claims, which were completely bogus. It took me a couple of days to actually "peer review" the paper though, so it's expensive in time.
Beside "science" is not a thing to trust, it's a process. It's never fully correct by definition.
https://forbetterscience.com/2015/10/28/is-frontiers-a-poten...
It's about a group of journals optimised for sleazy publishing. The author claims he left research due to rampant fraud and went into cartoons and insulting the perpetrators instead.
In 2021 the Wikipedia page on paper mills was created.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Research_paper_mi...
Macchiarini has been at it since, what, 2005?
Basically, one might as well go as far back as WWII and Ghislaine Maxwell's dad:
While it's not my industry, my general understanding this has been more than just isolated covert pockets for some time.
There's simply only one growth market left and that's our imagination.
I became disillusioned when I realized people were publishing the most minute of contributions because they were desperate trying to show something to graduate.
Things stay the same when grants and funding are involved too.
Even in the respected publications, the reviewers are inexperienced students.
Imagine if a Senior Developer had 3 high school Interns as the only reviewers for all merge requests.
Not sure what the solution is, just too many disincentives for quality.
He makes engaging deep-dive documentaries on scientific fraud and scandals. It is absolutely /fascinating/. Videos are anywhere from 30m to 2h long, or broken up into several 1h episodes.
The series he has on cold fusion (not the Adobe programming language, the other cold fusion) is really good! [1].
questinthrow•6mo ago
Eddy_Viscosity2•6mo ago
coderatlarge•6mo ago
Eddy_Viscosity2•6mo ago
odyssey7•6mo ago
coderatlarge•6mo ago
odyssey7•6mo ago
philwelch•6mo ago
coderatlarge•6mo ago
coderatlarge•6mo ago
Al-Khwarizmi•6mo ago
Eddy_Viscosity2•6mo ago
coderatlarge•6mo ago
triceratops•6mo ago
ryandrake•6mo ago
aaronbaugher•6mo ago
77pt77•6mo ago
fuzzfactor•6mo ago
odyssey7•6mo ago
coderatlarge•6mo ago
dagw•6mo ago
NoMoreNicksLeft•6mo ago
Because they aren't intended to be educational. Universities (as they are run today) are primarily grant-revenue capture organizations, secondarily research organizations (at least to the degree necessary that grant money doesn't dry up because of fraudulent spending accusations), and finally after that, a begrudged effort is made at education for optics. If they could ditch the education angle entirely, they'd send the students home tomorrow.
SJC_Hacker•6mo ago
There are pure grad institutions, such as UCSF and Baylor College of Medicine
nradov•6mo ago
dagw•6mo ago
Nothing is stopping you. I've published papers and presented at academic conferences while working in industry. Both in collaboration with academics and without.
coderatlarge•6mo ago
analog31•6mo ago
Disclosure: I was an adjunct for a semester while I was between industry jobs.
hnthrow90348765•6mo ago
ocschwar•6mo ago
butlike•6mo ago
gus_massa•6mo ago
the-mitr•6mo ago
lo_zamoyski•6mo ago
No "system" can ever overcome such problems. Sure, some political orders are better than others in various respects, but nothing will overcome the basic origin of our problems, which is us! The "system" itself is made from the crooked timber of our humanity, and even if some perfect "system" could be made, its perfection could only be actualized by a perfect people.
Hence the need to focus less on systems and more on personal virtue. You want to find your greatest enemy? Look within.
To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”
potato3732842•6mo ago
This gets invoked way too often by bad people defending bad things that they were warned not to do/support at the time but did/supported anyway because there was something in it for them.
lo_zamoyski•6mo ago
Of course, academia could absolutely benefit from certain changes and reforms - I have argued for this myself; education has been derailed by inferior goals - , but the primary place where the work has to happen isn't policy or institutional structure, but ourselves. Indeed, the counterpart to your criticism is that excessive talk of reform is a way of avoiding the difficult and unpleasant work of having to look in the mirror. This does not exclude the need for certain reforms, but unless you get your own house in order first, you will be in poor shape to know what to reform and how.
avoutos•6mo ago
lo_zamoyski•6mo ago
But there is a bootstrapping problem here. The first is that virtue is needed to know what and how to incentivize and disincentivize, and to be able to choose to do it. Corrupt men will tend to create incentives in their own image.
Another problem is that even when incentives are properly aligned, this alone does not guarantee good behavior. Murderers know what awaits them for their crimes. So while incentives are important, a purely game theoretic construction is not enough. It does not do enough to secure rational behavior. So the problem is not merely political, but moral. We each have a personal duty here to demand moral action from ourselves and to grow in virtue.
exceptione•6mo ago
This also applies to society as a whole. The role of the media as the fourth estate in the system is to inform the public when destruction is breaking the rules, to explain how it will bring down the house.
But when in a Res Publica the media susses the common man instead, when the outlets prostitute them to the destructive powers that finally will kill their enablers, all is too late. The common man will have exchanged his virtues for hate towards imaginary enemies. Then it turned out that the rules did not save the public.
gchamonlive•6mo ago
You could argue that the church tried it and we had the inquisition, but I think it's different. We have way more benefit of hindsight and the population is way more educated than it was in the middle ages.
Not advocating for a renaissance of the Christian kingdom, but for embedding care and charity as first class moral values in economics.
Aurornis•6mo ago
This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don’t have capitalism, they’re all getting along, right? Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for mates?
Being competitive is human nature. People will always compete for things, even if you try to artificially remove or forbid financial incentives. There are always more incentives. There will always be social standing to pursue, a coveted position, or the recognition of having accomplished something.
> If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently.
Alternate economic systems that forbid capitalism rely on heavy government enforcement to prevent people from doing capitalistic things: Running unapproved businesses, being entrepreneurial, selling goods and services at market rate.
This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).
code_for_monkey•6mo ago
But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly: will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
Aurornis•6mo ago
And humans do, too. So what’s your point? I’m drawing parallels between animals and humans and you are too! You seem to be supporting my point, not refuting it.
Humans get along and cooperate at scales far beyond anything the animal kingdom can do. Capitalism has driven the advancements that enable it.
> will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
The classic vacuous anti-capitalism rhetoric: Capitalism will destroy the world, but unspecified alternative which doesn’t exist and isn’t described is better. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the non-existent superior non-capitalistic that solves everyone is the bad person, right?
gchamonlive•6mo ago
And this is the classic positivist rethoric that prevents self assertion and self criticism. Every doctrine that can't take criticism and take care of it's flaws while maintaining it's benefits is doomed to fail.
Nobody is saying that you are bad in essence, that is the whole idea. There is no essence. You create the meaning you see in the world.
cyber_kinetist•6mo ago
Although I am a Marxist, I reject the idea that Communism is going to be the "final" form of human society. We may be able to get there someday, but only constant care and effort towards maintaining the system will be able to sustain it, and there is no "deterministic" answer to what the ultimate form of human society is.
code_for_monkey•6mo ago
fuzzfactor•6mo ago
Not my downvote, but . . .
More like so there will be massive corporations to work for instead of the appropriate number of small businesses and farms that could substitute. For instance if things wouldn't have pivoted long ago, including major milestones like the formation of the Federal Reserve system.
Nothing like how it could have been if things would have been allowed to continue as they were progressing, the working citizens would have continued to gain wealth at a faster rate than the government, even more so than many established Wall Street capitalists. Especially the ones who have no talent for creating wealth and instead resort to just moving money around, and they were as powerful as any.
All pressure has been put on to reverse independent prosperity, whatever it takes, whenever the threat to centralized control appears on the horizon.
Those who prefer to centralize their power over you are not the ones wanting you to have an opportunity to start a small business someday. They just haven't completely eliminated that possibility. Yet.
jack_h•6mo ago
> But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly
All economic systems are a set of trade-offs and capitalism in general tends to outperform all other economic systems we know of. That isn't to say it's a perfect system, it isn't, but I've noticed people who profess your opinion implicitly assume the alternative is a utopia that which simply does not exist. We may find a better system in the future but it will still be constrained by the law of supply and demand, resource scarcity, and human nature and hence will have trade-offs.
gchamonlive•6mo ago
Even if this was true, humans aren't subjective to their base instincts and can adapt and reinvent themselves.
> Being competitive is human nature.
I'm not and I'm human.
> People will always compete for things
Sometimes you want something, but you let others have it when they need it more than you. Otherwise if you always compete for things you are just a little kid.
> This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).
This is a misunderstanding of what I said. If you read back I never said competition should be tossed out of the window, it's just that caring for the other as it is right now it's not a core value of the economic system. It's just best effort, if we can say that to the eventually charitable billionaire.
fuzzfactor•6mo ago
We should be able to tell which behaviors are not properly included in the concept of "humanity".
And when we find these behaviors within ourselves, recognize those as a vestige of inhuman nature.
We should be constantly striving not to confuse the unsuitable animalistic stuff as "human nature", otherwise that's the lamest excuse of all and has leveraged more stupidity than probably anything else in history.
I'm with you on competitiveness though, to a degree it's all not purely animalistic, especially not financially ;)
OTOH, the cutthroat stuff can be so inhuman there's not any question, or it wouldn't be called that.
worldsayshi•6mo ago
Transactions need more trivially verifiable metadata. That could solve one of many issues.
77pt77•6mo ago
The world is not what you think it is. Social problems are almost never a result of improper social systems.
The game you are playing by virtue of existing is just shit and no amount of "rules" you build on top of it will ever change that fact.
gchamonlive•6mo ago
If the world is like what you say it is, shouldn't you just drop dead? Thinking like this is like committing philosophical suicide anyways, if you can't imagine a better world that's worth fighting for, even if it's just in a thought experiment.
This learned helplessness is by design, not by nature, so you don't question the status quo and keep working to make the elites richer without realising it's killing the world.
code_for_monkey•6mo ago
Aurornis•6mo ago
There is nothing at odds at all. If you don’t see it, you might have a rather cartoonish, villainy view of a capitalism that gets promulgated by people who refuse to allow anything good or nice to be ascribed to capitalism.
If you can’t understand why capitalists can also like open source, have you considered that maybe it’s your understanding of the system that is flawed, not theirs?
gchamonlive•6mo ago
However that's not even the case because op wasn't criticizing capitalism as whole, just how absurd the ethos in HN is where we seem to defend contradictory values.
code_for_monkey•6mo ago
fuzzfactor•6mo ago
These are not actually essential.
I'm not going to put down a better definition of capitalism, but if you're not handling Other Peoples' Money, and they're not handling yours, you are definitely not a capitalist.
No matter how financially successful you are as an entrepreneur with your own money, even when you out-compete capitalists in a pro-capitalist market.
syncmaster913n•6mo ago
alisonatwork•6mo ago
Netscape feels like a big part of the story - a company staffed with hackers coming out of a public-funded research institute who rewrote a closed-source version of their browser that quickly killed off the predecessor and helped the company to a massive IPO. Then, only when threatened by a more established player, they finally open-sourced it. From the outside that came across more as a Hail Mary than an authentic expression of principles. Around then we also had the Red Hat IPO, the Slashdot/Andover/VA Linux thing etc. It was clear by then that open source had become another gimmick that capitalists could leverage to compound their wealth, rather than a fundamental belief that users of a piece of software should have the right to modify and reconstruct it as they see fit.
Nowadays capitalists love open source because their startups and big tech investments are the users - open source provides free labor whose products these companies can repackage and sell as a platform. Meanwhile a lot of that "free" labor is no longer done by hobbyists or researchers, but by workers at other for-profit companies looking to boost their personal brand or the company's profile, so the whole motivation to contribute has changed too.
eurekin•6mo ago
tjwebbnorfolk•6mo ago
A zero-sum system based around a fixed pool of grants and positions that everyone competes for, and a terminal job ladder position where, once reached by successfully having competed for aforementioned grant $$, I become un-fireable.
I would have to sleep with a gun under my pillow in such a world.
There's already plenty of cheating in business, which is full of positive-sum win-win opportunities. I don't even want to imagine how badly I might behave in academia just in order to survive.
physicsguy•6mo ago
That's not been true in most countries for a long time
FirmwareBurner•6mo ago
storus•6mo ago
aoki•6mo ago
labcomputer•6mo ago
Layoffs aren't a thing in academia. Poor performance in the classroom isn't punishable. Failure to bring in grants isn't punishable. You can't be fired for disagreeing with your boss. You can (in most cases) publicly criticize the administration you work for, and advocate for many (yes, not all) controversial ideas.
physicsguy•6mo ago
aydyn•6mo ago
physicsguy•6mo ago
aydyn•6mo ago
zipy124•6mo ago
physicsguy•5mo ago
jltsiren•6mo ago
In Europe, it's more common that a professor has roughly the same job security as a teenager in their first real job. There are some exceptions due to academic freedom, but they are mostly about the substance of the work rather than the performance in it. And other independent professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, and civil engineers, often have similar exceptions.
MangoToupe•6mo ago
May not "layoffs", but schools lose funding, get shut down, and fail to track sufficient students to justify continuing employment.
tjwebbnorfolk•6mo ago
Look up teachers' and academics' unions (e.g. AAUP), and the contracts they have in place to keep them from being fired.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
physicsguy•6mo ago
Not every country is the US, lots of Hackernews audience isn't in the US
77pt77•6mo ago
Nowhere else do people fight so much and so dirty for so little.
karmakurtisaani•6mo ago
snapcaster•6mo ago
aaronbaugher•6mo ago
NoMoreNicksLeft•6mo ago
pohl•6mo ago
hyperbovine•6mo ago
Fomite•6mo ago
hyperbovine•6mo ago
Fomite•6mo ago
aydyn•6mo ago
Fomite•6mo ago
"You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs" is just untrue - there's always more work than there are people to do it, and I'm pretty sure a number of committees I'm on would be more than a little annoyed if I sent a postdoc.
Is it a job that has some nice properties to it? Yes. But the idea that we have summers "off", or that it's all time to contemplate blue sky research ideas, rather than go to curriculum meetings and work on monthly grant reports is a fantasy.
aydyn•6mo ago
Why? What happens if you as a tenured PI say no?
> "You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs" is just untrue - there's always more work than there are people to do it, and I'm pretty sure a number of committees I'm on would be more than a little annoyed if I sent a postdoc.
No this part is definitely true and I have firsthand experience of it. Your graduate students are paid less than minimum wage and are often immigrants from poorer countries. Often they are even paid zero by the PI. So they can be effectively serfs and beholden to you for literal survival.
Use your imagination. What's to stop you from recruiting a bunch of students and offloading all your grant writing to them, hunger games style?
Look, I know there are idealistic professors who put in the work. If that's you, thank you. But the system incentivizes what is effectively feudalism and the professors who take advantage of that climb faster than you and become program chairs. Acknowledgement of this perverse system is not an attack on you.
Fomite•6mo ago
In the last lets say five years of my career, the range of possible consequences for this range from "Mildly annoying a colleague I like" to "Catastrophic outcomes for a 100+ million dollar research program".
Will I get fired? No. But we can't both argue that academia is incentivized toward grant-getting (which is true) and that pissing off the people who award and administer those grants is consequence free.
It also includes leaving a whole study section in the lurch (I was recruited for specific expertise, the meeting time was published in the Federal register, and then it had to move to an online format, which a 6 AM start for PST folks).
Or collaborators in various foreign countries who need to talk outside regular business hours.
A non-fixed schedule (and I only have one because I rarely teach - the times I do teach my schedule is much more rigid) is like unlimited paid leave. It's very nice, but it also has downsides - you can't reach for business hours. It works for me, but it also makes my GP go a little pale whenever I document my sleep schedule.
Ironically, the only colleague of mine I know who does do a good job with work boundaries does so by assertively working 9 to 5.
> Your graduate students are paid less than minimum wage and are often immigrants from poorer countries.
My unionized graduate students are paid considerably more than minimum wage.
> Use your imagination. What's to stop you from recruiting a bunch of students and offloading all your grant writing to them, hunger games style?
To be blunt? All our graduate students write a mock proposal as part of a professional development course. They are not good at writing proposals.
Beyond that, much of the actual work I do has nothing to do with what graduate students do. I'm not going to have a graduate student review and prepare my department's packets for this year for the Tenure and Promotion Committee. Or have yet another fight with IT. Or figure out how to best represent programs that exist in a multidisciplinary department so they both have a sense of identity but don't undermine a coherent whole (though I will ask their input on that, because it matters to them).
Academia has very real problems, including some of the ones discussed in this article. But Hacker News is very bad at understanding how academia actually works on a pragmatic level, including things like what being a professor is actually like, or how indirect costs work, etc. Even those who have been to graduate school struggle with it - partially because academia is bad at actually teaching to so-called "hidden curriculum" of how being a PI actually works.
aydyn•6mo ago
This is not typical and you know it.
> To be blunt? All our graduate students write a mock proposal as part of a professional development course. They are not good at writing proposals.
That's the thing with hunger games, if they don't get good they don't survive. I've seen it. I know PIs who don't write a single one of their grants.
While maybe you don't abuse grad students and post-docs to do your job its simply not possible to say it doesn't happen unless you are willfully putting on blinders. Frankly, it sounds like you are in full denial of just how bad it can get.
Fomite•6mo ago
You said "your".
But my entire field goes off NIH rates, which while not nearly high enough, are well above minimum wage. That's what I'm objecting to - the broad strokes exaggeration that covers up genuine problems.
> That's the thing with hunger games, if they don't get good they don't survive. I've seen it. I know PIs who don't write a single one of their grants.
Personally, I wouldn't put my name on any graduate student's first grant proposal attempt, because I don't like wasting my time, nor is that what I want them working on.
I am not saying abuse of graduate students and postdocs doesn't occur. I'm acutely aware that it does - and having helped colleagues through a number of crises, I'm very much not in denial about it. But it is also not the norm.
If you want to have an honest discussion about the problems facing graduate students and postdocs in academia, including abusive working conditions, that's one thing. But that's also a massive shift in goalposts from asserting that I get to spend 3-4 months thinking about interesting things all day because "You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs", which is just factually untrue.
hyperbovine•6mo ago
If your job much of a grind as you are making it out to be, why not go make 3-10x in industry? Honest question.
Fomite•6mo ago
My NIH grants have annual reports, as do NSF. CDC and USAID (RIP...) have much more intensive reporting requirements.
Honestly, I love my job, and there are some very nice things about it. It's just not the case that all professors get the summers off, or that if they are working, it's all fun and games and sitting in my office thinking Big Ideas.
hyperbovine•6mo ago
davidgay•6mo ago
coderatlarge•6mo ago
mountainb•6mo ago
By comparison almost all professorships are like becoming the most important hobo on a given street corner.
throw-qqqqq•6mo ago
In all fairness though, it's very difficult to become a judge. At least in my country, you have to have been both a defense lawyer and a prosecutor in order to become a judge. It takes many years of experience that is not easily gained.
wisty•6mo ago
It's kind of like a sport like tennis. If you're in the system, you think that the world number 150 tennis player is amazing, but they barely make enough to afford travel to the matches.
coderatlarge•6mo ago
for example they realize that once they achieve tenure, the amount of work truly required to retain the for-life annuity is risibly low so they can go on to do just about whatever else they want or “consult” for extra dollars as needed.
Fomite•6mo ago
coderatlarge•6mo ago
even when required to teach they simply repeat classes they’ve taught many times before making no effort to optimize for reviews.
i don’t doubt your experience but i wonder how much it has to do with not wanting to endure your colleagues’ and departments’s disapproval vs actual threat to employment.
and fwiw, i’m not saying it has to be this way just that it can be this way due to the structure of the system. similarly there are many corporate situations in which one can scrape by for extended periods of time, but there is rarely a “for life” clause. even so, it hasn’t prevented the university system from helping to catalyze all the amazing discoveries we all benefit from in society every day.
Fomite•6mo ago
But the vast majority of tenured professors I know don't do so, for one of the following reasons:
- I can't get fired, but I also don't need to get paid. My position has a non-trivial soft money component to it, and it's actually low for my field, which ranges from 50% to 100% soft money depending on the institution. A double-digit pay cut is motivation for most people.
- There are still promotions to be had, and those promotions are really the only way to get a raise beyond cost of living increases. At my institution there are two steps beyond Associate Professor with Tenure, and both of them are not obtained by phoning it in.
- Ego. It's hard to understate this one. Most academics are smart, determined people. There are other easier, more lucrative jobs. But there's a sense of purpose and ego that channeled them to the career they're in. Said ego is usually not fed by being in the doldrums. That's not how you get awards and invited to talks, and recruited elsewhere, etc.
Sure, the stick of "You could get fired" isn't there, but there are also ways to make a tenured professor whose coasting's life less pleasant. But even if not, I don't think it's nearly as common as the popular imagination (or this thread) think it is. Most people I know only really take their foot of the gas in the last few years of their careers, often well past retirement age.
coderatlarge•6mo ago
they felt that when they got tenure they “won” and their “ego” was strong enough to allow them to ignore the disapproval of their peers for not doing the conventionally expected things. they felt that they knew better in their hearts what the discipline truly needed and that the rat-race of establishment approval wasn’t it. so they turned inward. which is not necessarily the healthiest path imo.
Fomite•6mo ago
ocschwar•6mo ago
tjwebbnorfolk•6mo ago
In other words, the academics do not grow the pool through their own actions, as in private business. They are forever reliant on the kindness of strangers.
whatshisface•6mo ago
nothercastle•6mo ago
We have acquired a couple such companies and the people that survived that environment are some of the most toxic players you ever meet. They are also really good at the game so they immediately rise to power and begin to devour their next victim.
hnuser123456•6mo ago
77pt77•6mo ago
If there's more than one human, you have politics.
gonzobonzo•6mo ago
beezlebroxxxxxx•6mo ago
One solution, is for an institution to prioritize accessibility (easier to get in) but also prioritize difficulty (actually hard to graduate). This would reorient incentives around challenging education that pushes students to excel rather than coast after striving just to get in. Unfortunately, the priorities are the exact opposite today.
nick486•6mo ago
It just wasn't my thing.
Fomite•6mo ago
- Not all labs run this way. Mine doesn't.
- Very few successful grants, in my experience, are "Give money and we'll find X". Rather, they tend to be "We're reasonably sure X is over here for $reasons, but we'd need money to actually confirm that."
nick486•6mo ago
your summary of a grant request doesn't really sound all that different from mine tbh, just more charitable. Its just that i naively came in with the expectation that it would be something like "we need X$ to explore domain $Y" "sure. here you go", then 2 years later "we found x y and z, see $papers, now we'd like $x2 to explore $y2". and back to square 1/2.
a full broadcast over all available and unavailable channels of "please, master grant officer, just a few coins to explore $X a bit further, we'll very certainly find $Y", i was not ready for.
Im overdoing the tone a bit to highlight that it had to be tuned to the grant officer, way more than it had to be tuned to reality. to promise to find whatever was popular in the field at the time. regardless of the practical facts of the field. because the people evaluating the proposal didnt know shit about the field.
so when you were in the trench every day, it just sounded like absolute parody of what we were actually doing, explained to a kindergartener.
i realize this comes off as a knock on my boss way more than I'd like. i absolutely don't mean to. he did what had to be done, so that his team can keep working, within the system he had to work with to move our field forward. and the money we got was well spent, no doubt here.
but my view was : if I work my ass off for 10 years, I can be this guy. Do I want this? and the answer was a resounding, definitive "hell no".
all the paper publishing shenanigans were just extra irritants that sealed my decision.
Fomite•6mo ago
I will say that "the people evaluating the proposal didnt know shit about the field." isn't true in the U.S. For grants from the NIH, NSF, or CDC, they're almost all peer-reviewed. While some hot topics get a bit of needless shine to them, I've also seen grants ripped apart for "They just tacked LLMs onto this for no reason", etc.
I do definitely get not wanting that. There are people I know and respect immensely as scientists who went "I don't want to be a PI" and that's legit.
I will say, and this is not about your post, that Hacker News both often laments the paucity of staff scientist positions, and also likes to attack the PI who does nothing but write grants, but you can't actually have it both ways. Almost all of my grant writing is driven by keeping my people employed.
77pt77•6mo ago
Changes from field to field but yes, very common.
And many times, like you wrote, they have no idea about what was even done.
Then you have the gigantic collaborations, where everyone gets a citation and it counts as much as a paper with one or two authors.
And of course, everyone will cite it because there's no real alternative.
pixl97•6mo ago
Academia/Science has always been quarrelsome.
gmd63•6mo ago
SecretDreams•6mo ago
moregrist•6mo ago
Even in startups, there’s a tacit understanding that you’re exchanging your time for money and that this exchange has limits. This is simply not true in academics where the need to publish to keep funding (and often your job) is incredibly intense.
SecretDreams•6mo ago
Posted this same comment elsewhere, but seemed equally appropriate as a response to you.
Fomite•6mo ago
SecretDreams•6mo ago
Fomite•6mo ago
at-fates-hands•6mo ago
I opted out when all three of my advisors during my first year of graduate work told to get out and that the whole field of academia was not the romantic vision I had aspired to be. It was quickly becoming toxic. One of my advisors had stopped taking money from universities, and was leaving to go work for a large pharmaceutical company doing research out in Siberian Russia. Another was quietly working on a degree in statistics to go work for the government.
These were people who I admired and fashioned myself after. It's quite a shock when people you respect suddenly warn you academia is not where you want to be. I was lucky, the other two guys I was in grad school with went ahead anyways. Years later, I found out neither lasted more than a few years for exactly what you described and what I was warned of.
neilv•6mo ago
I've also occasionally heard of entire academic departments who should be in jail, for being pieces of crud.
Then there's what I'm guessing is the bulk of academia: care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be.
That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
daymanstep•6mo ago
BrenBarn•6mo ago
timkam•6mo ago
I regularly see both worlds. What I find more troubling in academia is that it is difficult to openly talk about how flawed the system is, that people make mistakes, that papers have mistakes (the own ones as well as others'). We know all software has bugs; but the code that a PhD student hacks together over night is assumed to be flawless (the more senior people rarely even glance at it), otherwise the paper is all wrong, and papers are set in stone... So I genuinely struggle with the lack of a proper failure culture in academia, as it is designed as a system that is fundamentally geared against openly discussing failure.
neilv•6mo ago
One of them, which was surprising to me (which I first heard from a friend in a hard STEM field), was what happens when student A's thesis result is found to be wrong due to flawed experiment... but only after student B is well into their own dissertation building upon A's result. Reportedly, everyone involved (A, B, their PI, the department, the university) has incentive to keep quiet about student A's bad result. B has an academic career to move forward, within funding and timeframes, and everyone else cares about reputation and money. And there is only downside for bystanders to complain, especially if it's other students especially vulnerable to retaliation/disfavor.
Another one I've seen, which is less surprising, is when there seems to be a culture of alliance or truce among faculty. So, if someone is misbehaving, or makes a mistake, it's understood that no one is going to call them out or interfere, and no one wants to even know about it more than they have to. In general, no selfish benefit can come from that, but a whole lot of negative feedback can. Mind your own business, glass houses, etc.
busyant•6mo ago
That's pretty much my experience from 20+ years ago.
One thing that I didn't appreciate when I left the ivory tower was the extent of the replication "crisis."
If other academics can't replicate your work in some esoteric corner of bio research, it's no big deal--some people get burned wasting time, but the research just atrophies in the end.
But in the biotech / pharma industry, we in-licensed a lot of un-replicatable garbage from academia.
And replication was important to us because we actually had to make a drug that was effective (which loosely translates to ... "clinicians must be able to replicate your drug's efficacy.").*
* I'm not sure how true this is anymore, given politicization of regulatory bodies, but it was an eye-opener to me years ago.
nothercastle•6mo ago
busyant•6mo ago
You don't move a drug into clinical trials unless you can replicate the initial studies, which is almost always "drug x cures y in animal z."
They die when they try to determine if "drug x cures y in humans."
jjani•6mo ago
busyant•6mo ago
LOL. That is often the hard part. "We cured your toe fungus. Sorry about the heart attack."
nothercastle•6mo ago
BrenBarn•6mo ago
But there are plenty of disheartening things that don't rise to that level of actual malfeasance. People get so comfortable in their tenured positions that they can lose touch with reality (e.g., the reality of how difficult their grad students' lives are). Even if they don't engage in actual research misconduct, there's a tendency for people to put their thumb on the scale in various ways (often, I think, without being aware of it), many of them connected to a sort of confirmation bias, in terms of who they think is a "good fit" for a job, what kind of work they want to support, etc. In my experience they are at best dismissive and at worst offended by the idea that maybe the current financial/employment model of higher education isn't the best (e.g., that maybe you shouldn't have a two-tiered system of tenure-track and non-ladder faculty with wildly differing payscales, but rather should just have a larger number of people doing varying amounts of teaching and research for varying but roughly comparable levels of pay).
I felt like virtually everyone I met was in some sense committed to the truth, but often they were committed to their own view of the truth, which was usually a defensible and reasonable view but not the only view, and not as clearly distinct from other reasonable views as they felt it was. And they varied considerably in how much they felt it was acceptable or necessary to engage in minor shenanigans in order to keep moving forward (e.g., to what extent they'd compromise their actual beliefs in order to placate journal editors and get something published).
Also, there is often something endearing about how academics can be genuinely emotionally invested, sometimes to the point of rage or ecstasy, in matters so obscure that the average person wouldn't give them a second thought. It's sort of like finding someone who's a fan of some TV show that ran for 12 episodes in 1983 and is adorably gushy about it. Even the people I met who were quite cognizant of making strategic career moves and other such practical stuff still had a lot of this geeky obsession about them.
A lot of this may vary from one field to another. But on the whole there are many worse people in the world than academics.
8bitsrule•6mo ago
(I started to become alert to what that program was really about when I took one of the classes -critical- to my major. It involved a lot of heavy math, and was being taught by a TA with a -very poor- command of the English language. When I complained, my Princeton-grad advisor's reply was 'this course is to separate the men from the boys'. Yeah, thanks pal.
So far as I know, he published very few cited papers.)
TimTheTinker•6mo ago
If: (a) students paid 1/10 of what they pay today[0], (b) all the on-campus expensive perks were ended (new buildings sold, etc.) and the administration headcount dropped to 1 per every 50 students, (c) tuition went directly to professors, research, and basic groundskeeping, (d) some kind of financial arrangement were put in place so universities had skin in the game with regard to the success of their graduates[0]
then I'm positive the academic system would become far more effective at educating students and preparing them for life, and there would be a positive trickle-down effect to scientific research and the politics there.
[0] State-funded secondary education in European countries costs far less than university education in the US. There's a reason for that - unlike students with easy access to debt, the government won't pay such exorbitant fees.
[1] A very rough stab at an idea for making universities have skin in the game: make tuition for degrees conferred refundable by some percentage (50%?) if more than a certain fraction (10%?) of graduates with B- or higher GPA in their majors are collectively unable to find a job in their field within 2 years of graduation. If a university needed to withhold that guarantee for some majors, that would be a very helpful signal for prospective students.
But the point isn't the specifics, it's that just the presence of such a lever (and its absence at some universities or majors) would be a powerful signal to prospective students, better align the university's incentives, and cause a lot of necessary changes.
Fomite•6mo ago
It should also be noted that there are reasons tuition is the way it is. State allocations for higher ed were slashed in 2008, and didn't really get put back even when the economy was doing well. Similarly, federal research dollars (which fund the vast bulk of research, not tuition) has been pretty flat for decades (the amount of a non-modular NIH R01, for example, hasn't changed since the Clinton administration).
Tuition is the only lever left to most institutions.
TimTheTinker•6mo ago
No, cutting costs (especially slashing the administration and facility budget) is another lever that few institutions use. The other really important levers are professor hiring and pay, and admissions standards.
Build a reputation for hiring a great faculty, paying them well, keeping a minimal administration, and cultivating a student body that is hungry to learn, and the right people will come. Everything else is mostly fluff with regard to a quality education.
Fomite•6mo ago
TimTheTinker•6mo ago
In one extreme example, I heard the ratio of student:admin is nearly 1:1. That is bonkers.
And no - administration employees don't need to justify their ongoing employment by constantly publishing new research in academic journals. For them, the gravy just keeps rolling in. Just keep increasing tuition, increasing the endowment fund (often through real estate deals and other hedge fund like activity), increasing donations, increasing their own budget, and threatening to cut research & academic department budgets.
Yes, academic and research departments have often had budget cuts. But expenditures per student are way up to pay academic administration salary.
(If I sound angry, it's because I am. MBA types have caused so much harm to these institutions.)
epolanski•6mo ago
I'll summarize it like this:
- join one of the most prestigious laboratories for my master's thesis in the world
- be assigned work based on a paper published in the same lab by a previous researcher
- can't replicate the results for s*t for months, put in insane overtime hours getting ridiculously good at all the processes, still nothing
- randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by the system in the publication is literally impossible, but by raising the voltage you can easily fake out the amount of electricity generated by the system. Nobody really caught it before because you need some very intimate experience with those systems, and it's just one random (albeit important) point.
- ask why this happens
- she explains that only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid
- she explains that only professors that run labs with a huge number of citations can find good funding
- only good funding can allow you to get the material, equipment and countless number of bodies (phds) to run as many experiments as possible and thus grow your position in the scientific world
Essentially there's way too many incentives to cheat and ignore the cheating for all the people involved.
And due to the fact that as soon as you enter a niche (and literally everything is a niche in science) everybody knows each other toxic things happen all around.
I wanted to be a researcher, but having wasted ultimately 7 months of my life trying to get numbers that were impossible to get, and having understood it was ALL about money (no funds -> no researchers/equipment -> papers -> citations -> funds) and politics I called it quits.
I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.
TheBigSalad•6mo ago
epolanski•6mo ago
I've met countless great scientists in Italy which were ultimately wasted as professors and achieved little as scientists.
I'm not saying that teaching isn't important, but it's a skill completely unrelated to being a good scientist, there's no overlap at all.
mountainb•6mo ago
thaumasiotes•6mo ago
This is just aggravating the problem. Science is mostly fraud because it's mostly done on behalf of a funder who doesn't want it. It's easier to write a paper describing the results you'd like to get than to actually get those results. And the funding agency is indifferent between those two things. So mostly you just get the papers.
epolanski•6mo ago
The current system has essentially no requirement of reproducibility.
Having a paper that only allows reproducible experiments (where there's funding for random labs to reproduce results) may be difficult, or an utopia, or whatever, but not aggravating for sure.
thaumasiotes•6mo ago
(1) This is not a recipe for actually getting any quality.
(2) By virtue of providing the funding, they already are in charge. They're not going to get better results by wishing harder. But they can easily waste more money than they already do.
Your mental model seems to be that the government received a mandate to cause research to happen, and they did that as faithfully as they could, with the only problem being that we forgot to specify that we didn't want fake research. So if we change the mandate to "cause non-fake research", the kind of research we get will change.
But that makes no sense. "Non-fake" was always a requirement. It was an unenforced requirement because it didn't matter to anyone, but you aren't proposing to change that.
fuzzfactor•6mo ago
Check my other comments.
Reproducibility can be a working requirement before publication when the progress is expected to be serious.
At ASTM the publishing company is non-profit and more non-academic industries pay for the (not cheap) publications every year. The employees are well-paid journalists and efficient bureaucrats specializing in continuous quality improvement themselves, highly skilled at organizing the scientists. The scientists are all volunteers.
>indifferent funder in charge of ensuring quality.
Nice not to have. Publication requires complete consensus of the volunteer scientists, and the institution is crafted to progress toward valid consensus.
It's all about quality from day zero.
In more ways than one, more than you can count actually.
So it didn't take 125 years to get that way, it had a better start than most, and has only gotten more strict over the recent decades as computer statistics became mainstream.
Edit: Forgot to mention, there's no eminence. Nobody's name appears at the top of the document, and almost nobody (still living) ever appears within the text.
Further edit: I guess you could say that ASTM is a product of the Industrial Revolution, and there hasn't been an equivalent Academic Revolution yet.
Ashkee•5mo ago
julienb_sea•6mo ago
foxglacier•6mo ago
You can say it's not their fault - they're forced into it because it's the only way to succeed. But it's still their fault. I remember a case of a politician in China being arrested for corruption and he said that the only way to reach his position was with corruption. Yea he was probably right but he was still corrupt.
epolanski•6mo ago
I want to stress out that the lab is great, the people in there are extremely hardworking, Gratzel is a great scientist, but at the end of the day research is what it is and stuff like this can slip under both your lab managers and reviewers. I have never ever seen the slightiest indication that lab staff ever encouraged nor tolerated such stuff, but it's easy for it to happen and there's not enough incentives (nor possibility) to review every single experiment.
But the reproducibility problem does exist and the number of scientists tweaking numbers by tiny percentages here and there to make sure they publish is relevant.
[1] https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lpi/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gr%C3%A4tzel
foxglacier•6mo ago
chrisBob•6mo ago
nothercastle•6mo ago
msteffen•6mo ago
I'm interested in the apparent contradiction between the "tens of thousands of citations" credential for your evidently competent labmate who caught the fraud, and the "only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid" indictment of the evidently mediocre fraudster.
How much of the science that happens do you think is due to people like your labmate, who seems to have earned her citations organically with talent, and how much is due to the fraud? Are most citations still going to talented people?
My parents were both academics who built their careers in the 70s and 80s. I don't know that they had a perspective on fraud per se, but they did say that science used to be totally different—lots of money going into a smaller research community. But because each PI trains many PhDs, the research community has grown unsustainably and now funding is highly competitive. For the system to be sustainable, the vast majority of PhDs need to leave science, and there need to better exits for those people (or else there need to be many fewer PhD candidates and researchers need to stop relying on PhD candidates for labor). I wonder if the fraud is a consequence of this problem.
epolanski•6mo ago
Not every paper out there is fake and Yella Aswani [1], was an excellent PhD in Switzerland before becoming a full time professor in India.
[1] https://scholar.google.pl/citations?user=PHS1UAcAAAAJ&hl=en&...
That being said, some of her colleagues might have felt desperate to publish something meaningful before ending their PhD and cooked the numbers by that 8/10% that makes it impressive. Either that or they took an outlier result that overperformed for some reason (poor instrument calibration e.g.) and never investigated and just published.
In any case, the numbers didn't match up.
alisonatwork•6mo ago
Sometimes I think about tapping out of private industry and getting into academia because in my imagination at least the work would be more pure, but then I think back to the stories my mother told me and realize most likely it isn't.
I agree that the only answer seems to be serious change at the highest levels of government, i.e. revolution. Aside from advocating for that, it seems the best we can do is try exist within these systems and find niches where we can create value for society without feeling too much like our morals are being compromised in the process. It's not easy.
fuzzfactor•6mo ago
How else are you going to pay for lack of breakthroughs?
Some people aren't going to be capable of breakthroughs anyway, lots of them even know it from the beginning, so they naturally or intentionally seek different things using the same institutions and resources that could otherwise yield breakthroughs instead.
Edit: As a footnote suggested by my own question, you pay for lack of breakthroughs by building eminence out of thin air, if it wasn't obvious.
geokon•6mo ago
my gut feeling is that the more famous a group/lab, the more likely there is some funny stuff going on. Smaller groups/labs are less cutthroat. But it also depends on the discipline...
zevon•6mo ago
I'm still mostly in academia but nowadays, I focus on teaching and infrastructure. Especially with teaching, I feel that I can make more of a long-term impact that I ever could as a researcher - not least because I have way more freedom for discussions and interesting projects with students (I still have to deal with way more hostile, petty and sometimes outright dangerous BS than I feel comfortable with - but it's better than in the even-higher-pressure parts of the system).