[HN Gopher] A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture
___________________________________________________________________
A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture
Author : brzozowski
Score : 421 points
Date : 2021-02-21 07:45 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (huixiangvoice.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (huixiangvoice.medium.com)
| Athas wrote:
| This is such a sad story. Nothing can bring back the dead, but we
| can try to prevent a repeat of the events, and ensure that their
| death was not in vain. It is heartening to see that ACM took the
| investigation seriously, and actually did discover and condemn
| serious academic fraud. However, while I can _guess_ who is has
| been banned from submitting to ACM conferences for the next 15
| years, apparently it is ACMs policy not to announce publicly!
| Just look at the report[0], it 's completely anonymous. Am I
| mistaken? What is the justification for this? At a practical
| level, how am I as a co-chair of an ACM event supposed to enforce
| a ban if I don't know who is banned?
|
| [0]: https://www.sigarch.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/JIC-
| Publi...
| ithinkurwrong wrote:
| It is really heartbreaking. I hope all PhD students can find
| their dream professors who can help their careers.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Meanwhile, I'd guess this will be branded a "bad apple", but of
| course the worst apple in the bunch is more of a sign of issues
| in the whole farm/system.
|
| Of course colleges are overloaded with managerial vampires that
| are supposed to be overseeing this better than the old days where
| there wasn't as much tuition/loan money flowing through the
| system.
|
| Higher ed administration is broken, financing is broken, research
| is broken, phd programs are broken, adjunct professorship is
| broken, there is corruption everywhere.
|
| Edit: and I totally forgot... college sports.
| tobmlt wrote:
| I want to express sympathies in a particular way:
|
| When I had a job I didn't want, in a city i didn't want, no kids,
| no wife, and prospects abounding, it was easy to speak truth to
| power. I did it, and I was right technically, businesswise, and
| morally. What a win...(?)
|
| Now, I have my dream job, my dream location, my own damn house,
| and my family. -Whole thing feels like a dream I might wake up
| from if I am not careful... and I feel totally weighed down when
| it comes to speaking up in a way I would have never countenanced
| a few years ago.
|
| All that to say, this poor kid... I can only imagine the
| incentive structures that led him to choose this route, but I
| know academia being f'ed is a big part of it, and it ticks me
| off.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| _" It is difficult to get a man to understand something when
| his salary depends on his not understanding it."_ -- Upton
| Sinclair
| gher-shyu3i wrote:
| > and I feel totally weighed down when it comes to speaking up
| in a way I would have never countenanced a few years ago.
|
| The prevalent "cancel culture" today makes this even more
| difficult. If you don't go by the groupthink, you lose your
| livelihood and can't support your family anymore.
| atoav wrote:
| Totally understandably so. However I think that it is also a
| matter of perception: If we view it as a matter of living the
| dream while some intrusion might endanger that dream, surely
| minimizing the damage done to the dream is a logical
| consequence. But what if the intrusion stops making your job a
| dream job?
|
| I was in a similar situation where a superior demanded that I
| breach the trust our users had in the privacy of our service.
| This would not only have been illegal, but there was no way to
| make use of that data without revealing that we broke that
| trust. Additionally it made no sense, because the info my
| superior hoped to gain through this wouldn't have been readable
| from the data anyways.
|
| My superior was a typical authotarian male: Saying no to him is
| something he took very personal. This was my dream job, but
| breaking privacy rules goes against anything I stand for (which
| no longer would make it my dream job), so I did what needed to
| be done and stood up. I explained carefully what he needs to
| know before making that decision and why I wouldn't do it that
| way, all the time making sure there is a way out for him where
| he can keep his face.
|
| Guess what, I didn't need to breach that trust and the superior
| ultimately was thankful that I stopped him from running into
| this. But it left a very bitter taste in my mouth that the guy
| even considered this as a possibility.
| rlonn wrote:
| In my experience, people who try to intimidate others into
| unethical acts are pretty much rotten at the core. They
| either lack morals, or empathy, or both. Chances are your
| superior did some damage control when expressing gratitude
| towards you later on.
| darkerside wrote:
| It sounds like he didn't understand what he was asking for
| and was thankful for you informing him. Seems like a
| reasonable case, although maybe there's something about the
| initial demand that made it more of an intimidation tactic?
| [deleted]
| feralimal wrote:
| "I was right technically, businesswise, and morally."
|
| ... and in third place, morality. And now lost in the distance.
|
| I'm not a Christian, but this is worth considering by everyone:
|
| "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but
| loses his soul? Or what will a man give as an exchange for his
| soul?"
| techbio wrote:
| If you interpret a grammar (in this case, a list of
| dimensions for evaluating one's choices) in the terms of
| another grammar (in your interpretation, the ranking order of
| horse race or other competition) you impose a structure on
| the conclusion and what logically follows, that is orthogonal
| or irrelevant to the original statement.
|
| There is no reason I see that placing morals last in that
| list places it below the technical or business dimensions,
| and assuming good intentions would seem to require that they
| were ordered that way because morality is in fact the bottom
| line or last word, rather than tacked on as some also ran, in
| itself requiring technical and business success to be
| actualized, while in fact standing as the higher goal.
|
| The most charitably I can view your response is that you
| discount technique and business due to some prevalence of
| corruption in them but do not likewise discount moralism.
|
| What shall it profit a man to lose the whole world?
| Immorality itself often follows failures to thrive, ie
| cheating to get an edge in one way or another.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > I'm not a Christian, but this is worth considering by
| everyone:
|
| >"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world,
| but loses his soul? Or what will a man give as an exchange
| for his soul?"
|
| This would only affect people who assume "they" have an
| immortal component, i.e. a soul.
| novia wrote:
| You can look at it metaphorically. Whatever that thing is
| that people are talking about when they say, "have a
| heart!!", that's the soul. It's supposed to be your
| innermost self. If your innermost self becomes unethical or
| immoral as a habit, that's, "losing your soul."
| M277 wrote:
| Even if you don't subscribe to that belief, you still have
| something to lose -- conscience.
|
| Conscience doesn't really die overnight (and this is from
| my experience of living in a corrupt society), it's a
| death-by-a-thousand-cuts situation. The beginning is "Come
| on, everyone is doing it" and you can guess the end.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Conscience doesn 't really die overnight_
|
| Well, some are ruthless and competitive without coscience
| even as kids, and continue so...
| M277 wrote:
| Yes, but do they really start out like that, or is it a
| gradual descent? There's usually a catalyst that starts
| it in kids. Parents demanding success at all cost /
| rampant cheating around them (or just being surrounded by
| ruthless kids) / a very competitive rat race that turns
| out to be pretty dirty / the parents themselves are
| without conscience / etc.
| Thiez wrote:
| I think children tend to be pretty cruel when given the
| chance, many of whom grow up to be decent people. While
| there are certainly bad people out there who were already
| rotten as children, I don't subscribe to the theory that
| people are born perfect and then somehow experience moral
| decay as they grow older.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _" For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole
| world, but loses his soul?_
|
| It will profit them, well, the whole world. Duh!
|
| (Yeah, I know what the Christian sentiment means. But it
| requires the belief, if not in soul, in some trancedental
| good, for people to care about "loss of soul" over "gaining
| the world". Which, alas, we don't have as much...)
| bobthechef wrote:
| Losing your soul to acquire something less valuable defeats
| the point of acquiring the inferior good in the first
| place. Every sin, every immoral act, is such an act of
| self-betrayal and spiritual self-mutilation. It is an act
| that is so profoundly nonsensical, stupid, and absurd that
| it boggles the mind. But given what we might call the human
| condition, the moral life is made difficult, especially
| because we have a tendency to rebel against the truth and
| because we are cowards. But it is the only road to true
| happiness.
|
| So here's your city of gold and your garden of delights,
| but only if you desecrate and destroy yourself, cripple
| your mind, poison your heart, and blind yourself first. Oh,
| and here's the cherry on top: when you lay in your self-
| made gutter, let all these riches taste to you like ash.
| Clubber wrote:
| >But it requires the belief, if not in soul, in some
| trancedental good
|
| The soul is your conscience, you're comfortability with
| yourself. The judge is your peers, family and ultimately
| yourself.
| coldtea wrote:
| Well, the soul (as in "ultimately yourself") might not
| give a fuck about morality and goodness, and judge you on
| failing or not to get what you want. What then?
|
| As for family and friends, people find that those like
| you just fine if:
|
| (a) you can fake being good succesfully (while still
| being bad and doing bad things for your benefit - common
| with politicians, CEO doing "charity" with corruption and
| cruelty on the side, etc.)
|
| (b) you win material wealth and so they depend on kissing
| your ass
|
| (c) they are actually treated well and kindly by you
| (while you're still fine to fuck over everybody else for
| profit - king of like in mob - their families don't
| dislike them because they're mobs)
| sojournerc wrote:
| There's a secular interpretation too.
|
| What good is all the money in the world if you don't
| respect/ recognize yourself after you get it.
| coldtea wrote:
| Well, there's the even more secural interpretation "who
| said I don't respect/recognize myself? Those 'morals' are
| just ideals and don't exist, meanwhile I have the world".
| loveistheanswer wrote:
| That would be a great rationalization for a narcissist to
| use while wreaking havok on other people's lives with no
| remorse.
| AwaAwa wrote:
| I think that was the point of the 'more' secular
| interpretation?
| greenonions wrote:
| That's not an interpretation, that's just pointing out
| that people who do not have a strong conception of
| themselves or have self-imposed limits on their behavior
| according to their moral system have no reason not to
| blindly pursue enhancing their material wealth.
| 8note wrote:
| They don't have a reason _to_ pursue that material wealth
| either
| coldtea wrote:
| How so? Material wealth gives all kinds of tangible
| benefits as control, pleasure, influence, access, etc --
| even better health and surely better healthcare.
|
| Whereas, what does being moral/good give (to the
| invididual practicing it, not to the community) except a
| feel-good feeling (and that only on those who care for
| it)?
|
| (I'm in favor of being moral, just point their point of
| view).
| sojournerc wrote:
| I tend to think of morality as an emergent property of
| successful social structures.
|
| It's a necessary common value system that underlies
| peaceful cooperation. In this sense it's an evolutionary
| advantage to treat each other morally and have a shared
| ethic. That includes not exploiting others for personal
| gain.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| It sounds like you haven't heard of that experiment on
| rats.
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QsMJQSFj7WfoTMNgW/the-
| traged...
| moksly wrote:
| There is an old punk saying. The guilty don't feel guilty,
| they learn not to.
| xenihn wrote:
| >Now, I have my dream job, my dream location, my own damn
| house, and my family. -Whole thing feels like a dream I might
| wake up from if I am not careful... and I feel totally weighed
| down when it comes to speaking up in a way I would have never
| countenanced a few years ago.
|
| I'm not at this point yet, but reading this makes me wonder why
| any employer would ever prefer younger employees with nothing
| tying them down, for any reasons other than the fact that we
| cost less. Sure, you'll save money on salary, but odds are that
| we're going to move on within a year or two if you're not a
| top-paying company. Even then, there's no guarantee.
|
| Meanwhile, someone who has dependents and a mortgage has more
| to lose and less leverage.
| AnHonestComment wrote:
| It's a trade off:
|
| Younger workers have less to lose, so tend to leave more --
| but they're also less experienced and tend to have lower
| expectations for the workplace.
|
| Older workers are less likely to leave because it's
| disruptive, but they're also more experienced at the
| political side of life -- and tend to insist on things like
| reasonable hours, professional management, etc.
|
| My personal stance is that trying to exploit your workers is
| a losing game -- but from the employers who act that way...
|
| There's some who prefer the lower expectations (eg, Amazon)
| and some who prefer the more stable crew (eg, ATT).
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > My personal stance is that trying to exploit your workers
| is a losing game
|
| Maybe in highly paid and creative fields, but for the vast
| majority of business around the world, I observe exploiting
| the power imbalance between employer and employee to be
| very beneficial for the employer.
| AnHonestComment wrote:
| How so?
|
| My experience is that you get small gains (eg, 10-100M)
| but you see an uptick in similarly sized faults (eg, tax
| audits or plane defects) and then go negative on the
| occasional preventable disaster (eg, 737 MAX). Edit: this
| is different than being beneficial for some employee at
| the employer -- ie, it probably improves some VPs bonus
| even though it's negative for the company, overall.
|
| Then you have the various examples that succeeded by
| treating workers well -- Ford, Avis, Boeing, etc.
|
| I'm curious how you're comparing companies to reach that
| conclusion.
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| HN is filled with ultra talented devs getting offers.
|
| It's not that easy to find a new job for 90% of the
| population.
| tobmlt wrote:
| Oh yes, some (many?) employers do prefer those with more to
| loose.
|
| Immigration rules tie right into this as well (of course).
| nitrogen wrote:
| _Oh yes, some (many?) employers do prefer those with more
| to loose._
|
| Years ago I actually had a hiring manager tell me "all of
| our guys have families" and later "we're really looking for
| people who want that _stability_ ". Direct discrimination
| against single people. Fortunately I did not get that job,
| and ended up much better off elsewhere.
| timwaagh wrote:
| Having to pay less is pretty major if you are the one doing
| the paying.
| xenihn wrote:
| Sure, but is it cheaper in the long run when you account
| for attrition, hiring costs (recruiters, engineer hours
| spent interviewing), and ramp-up? Let's go ahead and assume
| that things like code quality and technical debt aren't
| factors here, and that the replacements for regrettable
| attrition would receive (and accept) offers with comparable
| TC.
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| You don't bother thinking about that. Over time you have
| a large enough sample size for attrition rate and you
| hire based off that. it doesn't matter if a few leave, a
| few will always leave.
| xenihn wrote:
| Why not think about it?
| sva_ wrote:
| > makes me wonder why any employer would ever prefer younger
| employees with nothing tying them down
|
| Probably a lot of reasons, but a major one may be that young
| people with no family of their own got all day, every day, to
| think about work-related problems - especially so, if they
| derive a lot of meaning from their work, as many people do.
| It's probably also a lot easier to boss them around,
| especially if said people crave acknowledgement from some
| authority figure.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| I'm convinced that it's because younger people are easier to
| control and less likely to speak up about messed up stuff. So
| while it would be in the company's best interest to hire more
| experienced developers, it's in the interest of individual
| managers to prefer younger folks.
| xenihn wrote:
| This makes sense. I didn't think about it specifically from
| a manager's POV, since I'd like to think they're more
| likely to act in the company's best interests when it's a
| tiny/small eng org.
| phabora wrote:
| I don't understand what kind of sympathy this is supposed to
| express. Presumably the "kid" was really desperate and didn't
| know what else to do. Even if someone from successful picket
| lane might know better.
|
| Sometimes it's better to say nothing.
| shrimpx wrote:
| Tragically, a non-trivial number of Ph.D. students commit
| suicide. It's natural to gradually put all your eggs in the
| imagined Ph.D. outcome (e.g., an idealized notion of a
| professorship) with increasing depth as the years wear on.
| After multiple years and a huge emotional and intellectual
| commitment, if you start to see the cracks in the structure,
| and you cannot reconcile the newly perceived reality with your
| model and goal, it can be absolutely devastating.
| jessaustin wrote:
| An experience I had as an undergrad of walking around a not-
| yet-bleached spot on the sidewalk in front of Pierce played
| some role in my not going to grad school.
| sn41 wrote:
| I agree, mate. I've decided to stop brooding over things less.
| I do still sniff the toxic sludge at my workplace, but turn
| away by thinking about technical and intense.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > I know academia being f'ed is a big part of it
|
| I'm sorry, but I have to strongly disagree with the way you've
| ended your comment. This lets the people responsible off the
| hook. The guilty party is an individual (and perhaps several
| individuals). Academia, peer review, conferences, and
| organizations didn't cause this. The professor was responsible.
| He wasn't just a cog in the system.
| sn41 wrote:
| The incentive structures in academia make it easier to opt to
| cheat. A furious mediocrity is considered more desirable than
| thoughtful work : Thoughtful work is not "high impact", high
| "h-index" or whatever, but stuff that makes you enlightened,
| and makes you smile and go "oh yeah! now I see it".
|
| But academic administrators do not understand that, because
| they have never had that experience, and have no idea why
| some professors go very quiet when an obscure faculty member
| speaks up to make a point in a quiet voice - that is because
| that quiet person has earned genuine respect from the other
| faculty present.
|
| Quality is rare, quality has pauses and takes breathers.
| rmk wrote:
| The whole point of the blog post is that the University
| Department is supporting the (allegedly guilty) Professor to
| the hilt.
|
| There are countless such scandals, including an epidemic of
| Title IX sexual assault "investigations", where universities
| are repeatedly shown to be supporting the wrongdoer.
|
| Academia is definitely f'ed up. In this case, the family of
| the person who committed suicide don't have any recourse:
| it's up to the university department to give a semblance of
| justice, which they have apparently failed to do.
| woofie11 wrote:
| I went to MIT. MIT has procedures involving NDAs and non-
| disparage agreements to cover up academic fraud. Academic
| fraud widespread, at least in the departments I worked with,
| and the Institute can apply *a lot* of pressure to get people
| to shut up. Except for anonymous web forums, I did.
|
| I'm sorry, but this isn't letting the individuals off the
| hook, any more than accusing the KKK of being racist isn't
| letting a particular KKK member off the hook, or a mafia of
| engaging in extortion letting any particular member off-the-
| hook.
|
| There are no effective, enforceable structures for stopping
| academic fraud. Most people who've engaged in it did not
| become _persona non grata_ , let alone been fired; most
| continue to hold tenured academic jobs. Worst-case outcomes
| are a multiyear slap-on-the-wrist of some kind. That,
| combined with intense competition, led some people to cheat.
| Eventually, when it turned out to work okay, it became a
| culture of cheating.
|
| Yes, the individuals involved should be punished, but much
| more important are:
|
| 1) Procedures for getting crooks out of the academy
|
| 2) Reducing competition, so there aren't the intense
| incentives to cheat
|
| 3) Implementing transparency. Why do universities get to use
| taxpayer dollars (grant / tuition overhead) and charitable
| contributions to cover up this stuff? Governance should be
| transparent and open. Data should be transparent and open
| whenever possible. NDAs and non-disparage agreements should
| be off-bounds.
|
| 4) Big money should be out. Yes, I know how much the typical
| professor gets paid, but the million-dollar salaries for
| presidents, Nobel laureates, and similar high-ranked
| positions distort things.
|
| 5) Related to the prior, conflict-of-interest provisions
| should be just a couple orders of magnitude more enforceable.
| The industry<->academia and especially startup<->academia
| pipelines help ground things and prevent things from getting
| detached, but if you're doing research to start a startup to
| make a few million dollars, that tends to apply extreme
| pressure to bake data.
|
| 6) Hiring and promotion structures shouldn't be so impact-
| focused. The easiest way to have impact is to tell
| politically-popular lies. P-hunt for data that shows liberals
| are smarter than conservatives, atheists are more open-minded
| than evangelicals, racism is wholesale, wokeness is the way
| to solve it, and so on. On this list, the really most harmful
| is when you reach correct conclusions from false data (much
| more so, even, than false conclusions from false data).
|
| ... and so on. This should happen wholesale, across academia,
| to be eligible for federal grants or tuition subsidies.
| bobthechef wrote:
| Any worldly institution that operates this way will
| implode. Establishment academia has lost a great deal of
| clout, deservedly so. It's going to collapse sooner or
| later because people aren't intoxicated by the mirage of
| establishment academia like they used to be. Eventually,
| new schools and institutions will emerge that will better
| conform with human nature and human needs that will replace
| these obsolete and failed institutions of today. The
| example of the Benedictines is probably especially
| meaningful. When the Roman Empire fell, it was the
| Benedictines that preserved what they could and around
| which new communities formed that hunkered down for the
| long winter. European civilization then sprang from these
| Benedictine communities. And frankly, not just academia is
| collapsing, though academic rot is often one canary in a
| coal mine for other manifestations of cultural and social
| rot and itself a symptom of rot higher up the chain.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Maybe it will happen but it will likely take a couple
| human lifetimes to get there
| woofie11 wrote:
| Yeah. It ain't happening. I thought Harvard would take
| some flack when people noticed 43 percent of white
| students admitted are legacy, athletes, or related to
| donors or staff. That blew over in a week. Varsity Blues
| did nothing either.
|
| Liberals will have faith in elite schools. Conservatives
| will have faith in churches. Liberals will distrust
| religious organizations, and conservatives will distrust
| the academy. We're polarized enough that scandals
| probably won't change that.
|
| MIT had a huge Epstein cover-up. They did an
| investigation, threw everyone who came forward under a
| bus, and did nothing to faculty who partied with ladies
| on Epstein's island. If you'd like references:
|
| * MIT's factfinding report mentions no faculty visits to
| the island
|
| * Epstein's web page has a ton of photos of himself with
| top MIT faculty on the island. Those are the tip of an
| iceberg -- he didn't bother posting photos with lower-
| tier faculty, many of whom partied there too.
|
| * News reports indicate Epstein coerced one of the girls
| to offer herself to Minsky.
|
| By all accounts, Minsky declined and behaved with all
| propriety (he was there with his wife), but he was far
| from the only one on the island, and at least rumors
| suggest others weren't as proper. Are rumors true? That's
| kind of the point of a fact-finding report.
|
| This became super-visible within some MIT communities,
| and I kinda expected MIT to implode. It didn't even merit
| a news story. MIT just shut down internal mailing lists
| where this was being discussed.
|
| Even if a scandal did do something, the endowments are
| now astronomical. A mere scandal won't shut anything
| down.
|
| I believe the only way to do this is to place
| restrictions on government funding. Institutions which
| use NDAs, non-disparage agreements, don't respond to
| FOIA-style requests, don't publish in the open, don't
| share research data when reasonable (e.g. except for
| PII), and otherwise shouldn't receive federal funds,
| shouldn't receive foundation funds, and shouldn't receive
| alumni donations.
|
| That's hard, but I'm not sure if impossible. Elite
| schools have a lot of power in government, but things are
| over-the-top enough that if this isn't brought under
| control, this isn't getting kept bottled up forever.
| Brands will suffer.
| temp8964 wrote:
| That guy sent internal email to his students in Chinese. This
| is crazy.
| sampo wrote:
| In a way, you have respect the integrity of the PhD student. But
| also, publishing a fraudulent conference paper in this field
| (neural networks), the real damage to anything is minimal.
|
| Nobody expects a random paper in this field to be particularly
| true or useful. A lot of papers are trivial applications of old
| ideas, obfuscated behind complicated word soup. Or false good
| results due to buggy code, which you can never check because they
| don't publish the source code. Or useless or irreproducible due
| to many other reasons. The field produces also good results, but
| you need to follow bigger trends, as individual publications are
| mostly just noise.
| charliebrownau wrote:
| If your actually willing to research differences in RACE
|
| Check out RACE REALISM
|
| Goverment, Authorians, mainstream have lied on purpose about
|
| Race
|
| Race Differences
|
| IQ differences
|
| Ethnic Nationalism
| Vaslo wrote:
| I'm shocked at how little I can find about this. Maybe I'm naive
| but I thought there would be more coverage on what's going on.
| Sadly it's just this blogger, the school doesn't seem to be
| commenting. What could take so long?
| coldtea wrote:
| Don't let the Chinese name of the professor fool you. This
| happens all the time with Americans, Europeans, Chinese, Indian,
| etc professors and "peer" reviews.
|
| It's just that usually there's no conscience to take it bad from
| the student, on the contrary, it's the thrill of being published
| that prevails.
| csfighers_0 wrote:
| Why did the University of Florida tolerant this and kind of keep
| protecting that professor?
| Vaslo wrote:
| Because his papers get them tons of grant money.
| DSingularity wrote:
| Same reason the conference allowed the professor to present the
| paper even though the first author committed suicide over it
| and left a suicide letter which blamed the misconduct and the
| professor --- nobody in academia gives a shit. Don't mistake
| the penalty for integrity. These are the same guys that abuse
| vulnerable students to fuel their ego-trip (which they call
| careers).
| airhead969 wrote:
| PhDComics needs a special dystopian subsidiary just for these
| sort of departments. Like a Charlie Hebdo.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| It's a sad story. The action of the student is difficult to
| understand in my opinion, and may have been the consequence of
| some other underlying issue. However, even if he suffered from of
| mental issues, the fact that he didn't get support speaks very
| badly for the university and the supervisor.
|
| The lack of reaction from the university is also hard to justify.
| Even if one doesn't want to jump to conclusions about the
| professor, some temporary measure should have been taken, at
| least to reassure the family that due investigations were being
| done.
| timwaagh wrote:
| I just want to note that nothing caused suicide other than his
| decision to kill himself. I don't condone suicide as a method of
| protest. The damage to the family and the person are too severe.
| He talked about another world in his letter. That doesn't happen
| and I hope he meant that metaphorically, because otherwise he
| really did not know what he was doing. I wish media stopped
| reporting on suicides except in statistics. Not that I'm saying
| academic fraud is okay, it's not, it's evil and I would hope they
| get jail. But the media should not put suicide on a pedestal.
| Vhano wrote:
| yea I hope he reads this
| mbar84 wrote:
| If you see Moloch, don't let it eat you, run!
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Really interesting story. This guy is a true hero, attacking
| corruption in a sad but powerful way.
|
| > "I hope this will make a change in this world. I hope you can
| keep simple and stay honest in this society. I will bless you in
| another world."
| kvathupo wrote:
| I think the proof is in the mentioned 15 year ban that ACM
| handed down [1]
|
| [1] - https://twitter.com/sigarch/status/1358873198222311427
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Wow, okay edited my comment.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| I never understand why phd students who are going through mental
| torture don't just quit their phd program. I mean ... noone can
| force you to finish a shi*y phd right? Why not just drop out and
| pursue sth that actually fulfills you? With your Masters degree /
| diploma in your pocket and the vast theoretical knowledge you
| have all doors standjng eide open for you, don't you?
| izgzhen wrote:
| Similar to the reason why someone is married the wrong one but
| just can't get himself/herself to divorce. Certain types of
| people tend to be very averse of sunk cost even if they are
| well-aware that they will lose more if keep going. This is very
| unfortunate though.
|
| I found that academically excellent people are especially easy
| to get in this type of trap -- maybe because that "never give
| up" and "overcome the difficulties" rather than giving up is
| engrained by the process.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| It's tough to make the jump. Part of the trouble is that pure
| science and research _is what interests and fulfills you_ -- in
| principle. It just doesn't pay enough, and only a tiny fraction
| of researchers see real success. To make the jump into
| industry, you have to admit to yourself that a) the academic
| life isn't what you hoped for and never will be; and b) you,
| personally, will never make the kind of scientific breakthrough
| you still dream about.
|
| For all that you may be able to go from a tiny salary to a six-
| figure salary, you still need to admit failure at some level,
| and that's hard.
| tlringer wrote:
| This student was an international student. If he quit, he would
| have lost his visa and had to leave the country.
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| As someone who quit a graduate program:
|
| - it looks really really really bad on your CV to not finish a
| graduate degree. I dropped out for health reasons with an A+
| GPA and still have to delicately explain what happened to
| interviewers. It looks worse than just having a masters degree.
|
| - "just one more year of misery and then your career prospects
| will increase dramatically" is a very powerful argument and not
| just a sunk-cost fallacy.
|
| - young people in PhD programs tend to have a lot of identity
| and psychological investment in getting their PhD and working
| as a researcher. For most PhD students, the occupation that
| most fulfills them is their research. It strikes me as very
| strange that you think PhD students have some secret marketable
| passion that they would pursue but instead they somehow got
| stuck in graduate school. Speaking for myself: a PhD program
| was the only feasible part for me to do something fulfilling.
| My current work as a software developer is tedious and boring
| by comparison and, frankly, not at all what I wanted to do with
| my life.
|
| - PhD students rarely have any savings and their meager
| stipends are the only income they have. So "pursue [something]
| that actually fulfills you" is most likely impossible, since
| that 'something' is probably not a routine office/engineering
| job.
| k33n wrote:
| > it looks really really really bad on your CV to not finish
| a graduate degree.
|
| That's something people who have no real world experience
| say. For one thing, nobody is forcing you to put any
| information on your CV. Lastly, only the lowest of the low
| judge such things so harshly that they won't even interview
| you.
| nharada wrote:
| This is one of those things that's hard to see until you're
| out though. Combined with the fact that inside academia
| there definitely is a bias against those who don't finish
| the program ("they couldn't hack it") this perspective is
| relatively rare for those who are in it, especially those
| without prior industry experience.
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| I am kind of frustrated that I am reporting my real-world
| experience after having been "out" of academia for 10
| years and yet you and another person are assuming that I
| don't have any real world experience and am just lacking
| perspective! Please read the comment! And that "bias" you
| mention 100% exists outside of academia.
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| > That's something people who have no real world experience
| say.
|
| I was speaking to my real-world experience!
| xfer wrote:
| > For one thing, nobody is forcing you to put any
| information on your CV.
|
| And put what for the career gap? It's easier to just put
| the truth than to make something up for the gap years.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| In computer science, though, I have several "ABD" (all but
| dissertation) acquaintances that have had fine and lucrative
| industrial careers. I don't see it as such a black mark.
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| My point was that PhD dropouts can land on their feet but
| it's not a question of "following their passions and do
| something that makes you happy." It's really a question of
| "give up your passions and do something pragmatic."
|
| My career in software is also "fine" and even somewhat
| "lucrative" given that I don't work at for-profit
| companies. But it's not how I pictured my life going and it
| was a difficult adjustment.
| logicchains wrote:
| "If you see one cockroach in your house, there are probably many
| more". It's great that this fraud was finally exposed, but sad
| that there are probably many more similar instances going on
| unnoticed.
| tester756 wrote:
| unfortunely world is full of shitty papers
| sieste wrote:
| It's rather sad that you can guess from the title that this is
| probably about academia. I have to say though that I can't
| confirm any of this for my institutions, professors, and fields
| of research. I've always worked with honest and caring
| professors, who cared more about correctness of results than
| headlines and fame.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I was not so sure, reading the title. At first I was thinking
| about whether it might be about the Internet or perhaps even
| society in general.
| jzer0cool wrote:
| The story is sad.
|
| In both academia and corporate I've known many who find it
| difficult to stand up for themselves. It is already a difficult
| and yet courageous act to express a different view to your
| professor, boss, employer, etc. Things are never the same if
| speaking out. There are those who simply just do what is told.
| Simply Leave. Or fall through a deep hole when there is imbalance
| when taking on an action that is against what you stand up for.
| rawland wrote:
| My condolences to the family & friends.
|
| Having read this article it made me sad. On a good note, ACM
| seems to have reacted in a proper way. Glad to see this. This
| student must have been very very alone and suffered immensely to
| take this decision. Sadly, I have witnessed this exact same thing
| at a very well known university in Germany. With great effort
| this was kept away from the public and blamed on the PhD student
| himself ('This guy had _other_ problems'). Even though he left a
| letter, which was also very explicit about his situation. This
| left me thinking, how often this actually happens but receives no
| publicity...
|
| I believe most people, who enter the world of academe have good
| principles and ideals. In German pedagogy this is called
| "Humboldtsches Bildungsideal" which translates unfortunately into
| this [1]. Humboldt's model was very much based on many ideas of
| the enlightenment, esp. concerning one's pursuit of intellectual
| growth for its own sake and the world citizen.
|
| Unfortunately the economic grip on the world of academe in many
| fields gets stronger and at one point in time ones sees these
| ideals destroyed.
|
| It's best witnessed with what happened to the internet. Wonder
| how many can remember how it 'felt' in the beginning after CERN
| opened it to the world... and now, look at it.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...
| pbzcnepu wrote:
| ISCA is a particularly horrible "top" conference. We've been
| trying to reproduce some papers with questionable methodology
| from ISCA'20 (including using "1 cycle access L1 cache" in
| simulations, something that's not really possible on modern
| CPUs).
|
| Of 5 paper groups contacted, 4 have not responded despite
| repeated requests, even when VPs of research at the university
| contacted.
|
| One group eventually replied, said that they were "too busy" to
| release their simulator changes, and then also saying they
| weren't going to because they were worried about it being
| classified as a munitions export.
| pbzcnepu wrote:
| also, at ISCA'19, over half the papers were PC papers, meaning
| they were papers where one of the authors was on the committee
| that picked which papers get in. It's probably why the highers
| ups have been so reluctant to change the culture at the
| conference because it would so negatively effect all the
| higher-ups' publication counts
| ccs42762 wrote:
| This is really shocking and heart breaking. Really angry that
| University of Florida did nothing and the professor is still in
| the position and giving speech.
| airhead969 wrote:
| University of Florida is a sheepskin factory. It's all about
| the Benjamins and politics. That they don't care shouldn't be a
| surprise to anyone.
| lixtra wrote:
| From the suicide note:
|
| > Considering that this will have an impact on my career in the
| future and my reputation in the area of Computer Architecture, my
| future life will be worse than death and I will be totally in a
| dilemma.
|
| Maybe we also need to change academic culture to allow people to
| confess academic fraud, receive punishment and than be _forgiven_
| and _continue_ academic careers.
|
| Currently once you started, there is no exit and fraudsters are
| incentivized to continue to sustain their building of lies.
|
| With financial debt we allow people to go bankrupt and be reborn
| free (after some time and a honest effort; not including American
| student debt).
|
| Why not with your past academic fraud?
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I'm reminded of this recent comment on the consequences of
| zero-tolerance policies in the military.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506316
| boublepop wrote:
| > Maybe we also need to change academic culture to allow people
| to confess academic fraud, receive punishment and than be
| forgiven and continue academic careers.
|
| Are you suggesting we forgive the professor who's pressure and
| influence seems to have cause the phd students suicide?
|
| If anything I think we need to stand firm on the harsh one
| direction only nature of academic misconduct, and simply
| provide better training and whistleblower options for students.
| There should never be any doubt in a students or professors
| mind that academic misconduct when discovered will be an end to
| their academic carrier.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| > There should never be any doubt in a students or professors
| mind that academic misconduct when discovered will be an end
| to their academic carrier.
|
| This is a big part of the reason for the suicide. Reread the
| quote with this in mind
| murphyslab wrote:
| Forgiveness definitely should have its place, particularly for
| minor offenses, however the consequences are often multifaceted
| and tangled. For example, as research often uses public
| (government) funds, there are sometimes _criminal_ consequences
| attached. [0][1]
|
| A secondary issue is trying to determine what penalty is fair
| and trying to determine whether an error was intentional or
| unintentional. The boundaries are admitted by most to be fuzzy.
| Moreover there is a desire to exact punishment:
|
| > A recent survey of roughly 1,800 people in the United States
| found that 90 percent of those who responded believe that
| fabricating data is morally repugnant. Preferred punishments
| include being blacklisted from university positions and being
| banned from government funding for future research, but don't
| end there.
|
| > "Most respondents who support criminalization prefer a
| sentence of incarceration, rather than a fine and/or
| probation," according to the researchers, Justin Pickett and
| Sean Patrick Roche, both of the University at Albany. "The
| results indicate that slightly over half of all Americans would
| prefer both to criminalize data fraud and to sentence
| fraudsters to a period of incarceration." [2]
|
| ... and then there's China, where the penalties sought seem
| even higher. [1][3] However, given the investment in most
| researchers and their specialized skills, it seems a huge waste
| to lock up that person in a way that prevents society from
| benefitting.
|
| Finally, you have the problem of coordinating the action. With
| criminal behaviour, society coordinates action (for the most
| part) in order to achieve reasonable justice: Otherwise every
| person willing to act independently (as a vigilante) to extract
| an additional pound of flesh. We would need everyone to agree,
| otherwise you have situations where there is no punishment
| because someone breaks an embargo or you have too much
| punishment because multiple agents inflict punishment
| separately.
|
| Your typical person breaking the law is stuck within one
| country. It's a bit more complicated for researchers, since
| most are highly mobile. A PhD in a STEM topic means visas are
| almost automatically granted, so it's relatively easy to get a
| position in a different country.
|
| (It would be really interesting to see a follow-up on all of
| the researchers featured in [1], since that was written back in
| 2007.)
|
| [0]
| http://navier.engr.colostate.edu/CH693/prot/Nature_445_244_2...
| [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1747016119898400
| [2] https://www.statnews.com/2016/08/04/fraud-science-jail-
| time/ [3] https://www.statnews.com/2017/06/23/china-death-
| penalty-rese...
| pm90 wrote:
| I don't think that's a good idea.
|
| The analogy with financial debt is misleading: people go
| bankrupt even if they don't do anything "wrong", things don't
| pan out, or disasters hit. For people that do commit financial
| crimes, they are prosecuted and face criminal punishment and
| often lose their ability to continue to be involved in finance.
|
| Academia doesn't have that kind of strict laws, likely because
| academic fraud doesn't affect the general population and is
| limited in the damage it can do, or hasn't received similar
| attention as financial fraud. So making it even more tempting
| to commit academic fraud isn't something I would recommend.
|
| The really straightforward solution here seems to be to make
| these institutions recognize the professors (even the
| prestigious ones) are human and can commit fraud, and thus to
| create ways for students to give feedback on such kinds of
| frauds to the institution, based on which the institution must
| take action.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| > For people that do commit financial crimes, they are
| prosecuted and face criminal punishment and often lose their
| ability to continue to be involved in finance.
|
| Wealthy white-collar criminals often only face minor fines
| and are able to keep operating. The industry perception of
| people who get caught (who are known to still be only a small
| percentage of those who commit them) is almost universally
| "they were stupid enough to get caught."
|
| I wonder whether this is yet another tendril of the student
| loan debt bubble and the privatization of a public good
| (education) contributing to deep, structural rot in American
| society. Most of the quality academic talent gets picked off
| into the industry, where there are real opportunity costs for
| mis-execution, and a much more healthy and liquid market for
| labor supply and demand. Does that mean that maybe the only
| plausible end-state for academia is a market for lemons?
| pm90 wrote:
| The low rate of prosecution doesn't mean that the laws are
| useless. It has coerced the financial industry into
| behaving in more pro-public ways than it would have without
| them. In this case it would likely ensure that academic
| frauds are not engaged in lightly.
|
| I don't think Research fraud specifically has much
| connection to student loan debts. Most PhD students are
| fully funded by their programs. Most of them are
| international students anyway and would likely not have
| access to the sweetest US based loans.
| tticvs wrote:
| This is similar to the advantage to amnesty for corrupt
| dictators proposed by Mesquita & White in The Dictators
| Handbook.
|
| Basically giving authoritarian regimes an alternative to
| fighting to the death might increase overall utility.
| zaik wrote:
| I think the authors are Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and Alastair
| Smith.
| chii wrote:
| but it also gives the moral hazard of someone wanting to
| start such a regime, because they know they can profit/garner
| personal wealth during their reign, then beg for amnesty
| after a while (when it looks like their grip on power is
| lowered), and possibly, hiding their wealth gained away
| somewhere secret.
|
| Where as, in a world where such amnesty doesn't exist, they
| may have to face the possibility of being executed when they
| lose power (which, if history is to be believed, they
| eventually do). Therefore, some who are more cowards but
| cunning won't want to be a dictator, and thus, you end up
| with a more democratic system.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| There must always be punishment. The comments above are too
| summarized to get into it, but when that kind of amnesty
| happens, it is never complete.
|
| But if the punishment is so crass that the people prefer to
| lose their lives instead, that's a clear signal that your
| society has a problem, and your new regime isn't all that
| good either.
| tlringer wrote:
| Students under abusive advisors like this should not be
| punished and in fact are currently not punished. The
| power structures are too fundamental.
|
| The problem is that if you cross your advisor, good luck
| getting a job later.
| buildbot wrote:
| Definitely going to personally make sure to never use University
| of Florida based research again, it's shocking that the prof is
| still there.
| fireattack wrote:
| Disgusting.
|
| Can you (the family) sue UF/the professor over this? I feel like
| this is the only way now to make them to take the responsibility
| after almost two years of nothingness.
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| The paper is "3D-based video recognition acceleration by
| leveraging temporal locality". Haven't found a copy online. I'd
| expect a paper like that to come with examples and a link to
| Github. Why fake something like that? Either the paper is
| ignored, or someone implements it and finds it doesn't work.
| kvathupo wrote:
| As someone with a little experience in ML research, I feel like
| outside of the top 5-10 conferences, there rarely is a code
| repo [1]. I think an even bigger issue is that even when a repo
| is provided, it's often poorly documented, contains dead links,
| or _hard to reproduce on other machines_ without code-
| wrangling.
|
| Tangentially related, even popular repos can have
| implementations of models that differ from the paper cited. So,
| who knows how far errors can propagate -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| [1] - https://www.guide2research.com/topconf/
| buildbot wrote:
| Somethings that's personally bothered me for a long time is
| that as far as I know, there's now current way to check the
| test accuracy on imagenet, as the test server has been gone
| for awhile. Yet somehow people still report a test
| accuracy...
| izacus wrote:
| I spent a lot of time in my career implementing and comparing
| different algorithms based on published papers. This might
| surprise you but:
|
| - Most of them don't publish any kind of code or only snippets.
|
| - Most of the algorithms are incomplete (think "we add constant
| M here into equation tuned by an expert"). The chosen constants
| aren't documented and they're tweaked before publication to
| maximize results for the given dataset.
|
| - Most results are only good for the chosen dataset and based
| on very fine tuned constants (which is the reason they're not
| published). As soon as you apply them to a slightly different
| dataset they fall apart.
|
| - Even if you get code for a given paper, it's usually a
| disatrous mess of quality and runs only on the given
| researchers computer with given version of Windows and a weird
| patched version of Python they found somewhere in the internet.
|
| There ARE better written papers out there. But most of them are
| just made to publish "something" and get the publishing metrics
| up. That means minimum effort for actual research and maximum
| effort to tweak and tune results to make them look good.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's tragic that academics have no metric for _quality_ in
| published work.
|
| The only metrics are journal status and citation count, which
| is partly why we're in this mess.
|
| There should be some form of public post-review attached to
| all public work, with explicit requirements for rigour and
| reproducibility.
|
| Some domains - like math - do at least attempt this, more or
| less. But CS doesn't seem to.
|
| Aside from motivations - now skewed towards business outcomes
| - the underlying problem is that paper publishing as the gold
| standard for disseminating new research is a 17th century
| process and badly needs an update.
| alfu wrote:
| Here: https://sci-hub.se/10.1145/3307650.3322260
| rosstex wrote:
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3307650.3322260
| black_puppydog wrote:
| > I'd expect a paper like that to come with examples and a link
| to Github
|
| You'd expect that, but you'd probably be surprised in a lot of
| cases. One of the strong reasons why good conferences mandate
| code nowadays. The _quality_ of the code, and whether it
| actually reproduces what you claim, isn 't checked
| systematically though. That's down to the reviewers'
| enthusiasm, and whether they actually have the technical means
| to reproduce. That's not a given for more niche robotics or
| high-profile AI applications where hardware can be an issue.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > Why fake something like that? Either the paper is ignored, or
| someone implements it and finds it doesn't work.
|
| The "formal" academic world does not care one bit about stuff
| working or not. It's all about self-promotion, papers and
| meaningless academic rituals and procedures.
|
| (And it's even worse outside of the US let me put it that way)
| hellojasonjack wrote:
| The university of Florida is really loving toxic professors who
| can produce tons of fake papers to increase UF's ranking.
| andi999 wrote:
| The article is all over the place with a lot of innuendo. I mean
| I do not want to play detective, I want the case served on a
| silver platter
| pbzcnepu wrote:
| for more details than you possibly want go here:
| https://pbzcnepu.net/isca/timeline.html
|
| though it is more about the ACM/IEEE side of things rather than
| what was going on in Florida.
|
| Many researchers seemed to know there was weird stuff going on
| with peer-review at ISCA, but if you asked the researchers
| they'd just shrug and more or less say something to the effect
| of "don't hate the player, hate the game"
| andi999 wrote:
| I read it and the thing doesn't make sense: so the author is
| complaining that the victim knew the names of the reviewers?
| Who cares? What does this have to do with anything? Also
| there seems to be almost no relation to the conference with
| the suicide except for the pressure his supervisor put on
| him.
|
| The other thing from the web page is murky, they basically
| found breached confidential info on the victims laptop. Ok,
| this is more serious, but again, this is seems to me also a
| total sideshow;what am I missing here.
| baybal2 wrote:
| IEEE must purge him.
|
| Such conduct is infectious.
|
| If you don't oppose it, it invites other to both try, and ignore
| it.
| pbzcnepu wrote:
| the IEEE probably won't do anything. We've been trying for 2
| years to even get an e-mail reply from them on the issue, let
| alone say anything useful. See the whole story here:
| https://pbzcnepu.net/isca/timeline.html
| hackerofhacker wrote:
| Sad story. An interesting question is if you were him, what to
| do?
|
| My intuitive thought is simply to quit, and start another
| academic pursuit (assuming you are really interesting in science
| and research); it could be rather hard, but that is life. LIFE
| never goes easy.
| tlringer wrote:
| Things to consider:
|
| 1. When under an abuser, frequently you internalize their
| narrative.
|
| 2. Allegedly the professor threatened to kill him if he "ruined
| his reputation."
|
| 3. If he was an international student (I do not know if he
| was), he could quite literally lose his visa for losing his
| spot in the program.
|
| 4. If your advisor hates you and you haven't managed to safely
| switch advisors, good luck getting a letter for any future
| academic pursuits. (Unless you're willing to speak out about
| what happened, or you have someone willing to write an
| explanatory letter on your behalf.)
|
| 5. When you're being abused and threatened with retaliation for
| speaking out and so on, you aren't thinking rationally. It's
| really traumatic and scary, and sometimes it's hard to imagine
| a path out that is tolerable, and death sounds safer and
| easier.
|
| We in academia need to respond by setting up better systems to
| recognize and safely escape abusive situations without
| permanent harm to one's career and mental or physical
| wellbeing. And also by making those systems known to students
| and very easy to access and use.
| tlringer wrote:
| Seems he indeed was an international student.
| op03 wrote:
| I know someone who knew his prof was doing some weird shit. He
| came up with a story and took the summer off from working in
| the lab, and went and worked for another influential prof.
| Impressed the new folk (worked his ass off cuz he knew he had
| to get out) and it worked. He switched labs by the end of
| summer.
| bezout wrote:
| Agree, I don't think it's worth it to end your life because of
| work. But, obviously, everyone is different. Also, we don't
| know how he felt. He was under a ton of stress, for sure.
| sabujp wrote:
| it's difficult to do unless you put yourself in that person's
| shoes. Basically forced to lie or be disgraced
| ccsjavaccs wrote:
| Huixiang is a true hero. UF s*ks
| greatartiste wrote:
| I do some work in a certain field of digital signal processing.
| From time to time I look at the latest academic papers in that
| field and am always shocked by the poor quality. Probably 90% of
| the papers couldn't be repeated due to a lack of source code ,
| the worse ones just have Simulink 'blocks' to illustrate the
| code. The techniques in this field used by industry for
| commercial products are never mentioned it's as if they exist on
| another planet. I can only presume anyone who knows what they are
| doing in this field works in industry while what remains in
| Universities have to produce a certain number of papers every
| year despite the quality. It really is a waste of everyones time
| and effort.
| alyizzet wrote:
| Indeed, during my undergrad I have seen the exact same
| behaviour with the Electrical Engineering faculty(at one of the
| most prestigious in the EMEA region). Most of the so called
| academical output from my department was hidden source code
| simulink visual spaghettis closed for scrutiny. It seemed to me
| as the profs spun out a web of lies out of EE jargon plus
| matlab blackboxes.
| [deleted]
| adev_ wrote:
| I'm gonna get enemies for that ....
|
| But let's face it: the Academia peer review process is pretty
| rotten.
|
| - Many organisations could not care less about whatever crap you
| publish as long as you publish. And if possible a lot.
|
| - Many journal's reviewers are friend of friends and you can
| often easily guess their names, even in double blinded review.
|
| - Many reviewers care more about you quoting their own paper than
| giving any relevant feedback.
|
| - There is plenty "pay2publish" journals that care about quantity
| not quality that are commonly used by academia to "force"
| validate crappy researches/PHds
|
| - The publishing world is full of oversized-ego individuals that
| will destroy a paper just because it comes from a competing
| lab/department/professor and not because it is scientifically
| irrelevant.
|
| And that is only a little subset of the problems...
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Oh sure, the system is bad; it has perverse incentives and
| insufficient checks. But that doesn't also mean that these
| specific actors aren't more specifically bad in very concrete,
| condemnable ways.
| pca006132 wrote:
| But the problem is, apart from peer review process, what
| measures can be used to ensure the quality of the paper being
| published? And what should be used as the metric for academics?
| izacus wrote:
| > - Many reviewers care more about you quoting their own paper
| than giving any relevant feedback.
|
| My supervisor once told me that I should quote a paper from a
| pair of reviewers (he knew exactly who was reviewing the
| papers) before he'd allow publishing. It was a CS paper and the
| reviewers were in the field of geology.
|
| A few of those fun cases were the reason why I left the
| academia - corporate bs doesn't come close to academic bs.
| ntsplnkv2 wrote:
| Academic BS is just as bad, if not worse. You have far less
| options. It's way easier to just "find another job" than it
| is to "find another phd program" and colleges/professors
| abuse the shit out of it.
| jgeada wrote:
| The reason you know about academic fraud is that lots of the
| process is public and has many unaffiliated people involved
| that are potential leaks. So, sure, fraud happens and clearly
| that's bad. But you do hear about it.
|
| By contrast the same events within corporate culture happen
| behind veils of secrecy and HR departments & heavy hitting
| lawyers to make life hell if you don't toe the line. And the
| cult of personality and oversized egos is very well represented
| in boards and upper management.
| eptcyka wrote:
| I take it you meant to say 'competing lab' instead of
| 'concurrent lab' in your 2nd to last comment.
| adev_ wrote:
| Indeed. Fixed.
| Tistron wrote:
| Curious. In Swedish we say "konkurrerande" for "competing", I
| guess adev speaks a language that does something similar. In
| Danish they say konkurrence for competition.
| eptcyka wrote:
| And in Latvian, probably Slavic labguages too.
| gambiting wrote:
| Konkurencja in Polish, which sounds very very similar to
| concurrence
| lou1306 wrote:
| French and Italian also use similar terms (concurrence,
| concorrenza) for business competition, so it's not a far-
| fetched hypothesis.
| rjsw wrote:
| And for sports competition.
| dehrmann wrote:
| This sounds like something like the tragedy of the commons or
| Gresham's Law for academia. It's in everyone's best interest to
| do take advantage of the system, at least as long as there's
| public support for academia.
|
| I don't see the situation getting much better. Republicans like
| free-market solutions, but not facing market constraints is
| part of the value of academia. Meanwhile, especially with
| consternation around student debt, Democrats will blindly
| support academia, failing to put any pressure on it.
| dash2 wrote:
| My experience is different. Peer review is far from perfect
| but:
|
| * Most of my papers have had thoughtful comments. Typically,
| they improved the paper, sometimes a lot.
|
| * I have very rarely been asked to quote a specific paper from
| a specific author. Of course, pointing out important references
| that the paper has missed is part of peer review, so this would
| not necessarily be evidence of corruption.
|
| * There are loads of crap pay-to-publish predatory journals,
| but publishing in those journals would harm my career, not help
| it. Nobody cares about them.
|
| * I've not experienced people rejecting papers from rival labs
| or departments. I don't say it doesn't happen, but I haven't
| experienced it.
|
| * I myself try hard to give high-quality reviews that explore
| the paper's value in depth.
|
| I am from one particular discipline, country and subfield.
| Others may have very different experiences.
|
| Again, I am not claiming academic peer review and publishing
| doesn't need a lot of improvement. Removing the parasitic
| mainstream publishers like Elsevier and Springer would be a
| great start.
| 8note wrote:
| I find it intriguing that reproducing the experiment isn't a
| part of the review, or visiting the lab to look for potential
| flaws in their set up.
|
| These reviews seem far from what you hear about for
| disproving N rays and the like
| bjornsing wrote:
| So how do you explain the information in the OP?
| dash2 wrote:
| I don't know enough about the specific situation of
| computer science at the University of Florida to add
| anything useful. It sounds like a serious scandal.
| Vhano wrote:
| yes, this is localized and the system is not corrupt as a
| whole.
| woofie11 wrote:
| It varies field-by-field. In my field, peer review is a joke.
| I'm glad it's not a joke in your field yet, but incentive
| structures say it eventually will be. If incentives don't
| change, it's a question of when, not if.
| ketzu wrote:
| I agree with the general point of your comment, but my
| personal experience with the usefulness of reviews is not so
| great.
|
| Nearly all reviews were superficial, not a single review ever
| found any technical flaw, even when some were discovered
| later. The acceptance recommendations seem to be governed by
| the overall impression the reviewer had from the paper and
| not by any factual points they make in the review. This
| manifested in getting 5 reviews at one conference, where all
| reviewers made nearly the same points in their review: all
| about the presentation of the paper. The paper received all
| of the five recommendations: Accept, weak accept, borderline,
| weak reject, reject. (The most critical and useful with a
| small correction of one formula was the "Accept" review.)
|
| Many reviewers also leave the impression they didn't read the
| paper in full or at all, or ran out of time while for the
| review, so looked for a reason to reject the paper and didn't
| look any further.
|
| Note: I am not saying my papers should have been accepted, 2
| had serious issues I glad I discovered later! I also had a
| few very useful reviews to improve the presentation of my
| paper.
| timkam wrote:
| I largely agree with this comment, but this just means the
| underlying issues are more subtle. For example:
|
| * I typically get thoughtful reviews, and in particular
| critical reviews are often thoughtful. Still, I know that
| some people assert influence on the outcome of the reviewing
| process of their own papers. Also, there's a fine line: for
| example, many journals allow you to recommend reviewers for
| your papers. If you're well-connected, you can recommend your
| best friends and your editor friend follows your advice. Is
| this misconduct? I'd say it depends. After some decades in a
| math-heavy community, most people who are experienced and
| competent in the context of a highly specialized sub-field
| will be your "friends".
|
| * Journals that are outright predatory are, of course, a no-
| go. Still, there are edge cases like some MDPI journals;
| sometimes there are special issues from credible, relatively
| junior people in my community. Should we support them or not?
| Also, my funding provider wants me to publish in high-
| profile, "big publisher" journals and pays the open access
| fee; these journals typically rank much higher than
| community-owned/not-for-profit venues. On the long run, it's
| better to fully move to community-owned venues only, but as a
| junior researcher I feel I cannot afford it at the moment.
|
| Personally, for me the problem does not come from outright
| and obvious ethics violations; sure, I know of some
| individuals who I consider somewhat problematic, but I don't
| think these people control the community. For me the problem
| is to navigate all the grey areas, knowing that the system is
| largely ethics-agnostic.
| Gatsky wrote:
| Peer review is an ok idea. Academia is the problem. I saw two
| wasps fighting on the carcass of a dead bird the other day, it
| was a very apt analogy.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > Finally, the paper with academic misconduct got retracted by
| ACM as Huixiang's last wish. The ACM imposed a penalty of a
| 15-year ban on participation in any ACM Conference or Publication
| to the offenders.
|
| Wow. It does sound like the student discovered suicide as one of
| the only known effective methods of triggering accountability for
| research misconduct.
|
| That's awfully depressing.
|
| I can't now find the article I remember reading, perhaps from HN,
| of someone who came across then spent a lot of time
| demonstrating/reporting apparently falsified data to journals, to
| pretty much no consequence. (except teaching the researcher how
| to falsify data better to evade the particular tests the exposer
| used in that case).
| aerovistae wrote:
| The sheer amount of typos here is....challenging. And I'm not one
| to pick on someone who's doing their best to communicate in a
| second language or anything but shoot this really could've used a
| copy editor.
| ylyn wrote:
| Yes, the sheer number of wrongly-used words just makes it
| really hard to read.
| dbos_friends wrote:
| We are really sorry for these mistakes in langauge. Can you
| please send an email to huixiangvoice@gmail.com with details
| of these language mistakes so that we can try to fix it.
| Thanks
| [deleted]
| WWWWH wrote:
| Sincerely, I wouldn't worry about it. This is a powerfully
| written, emotive, bombshell. Anyone who is genuinely
| worrying about apposite word choice and non-native syntax
| is missing the wood for the trees.
| ylyn wrote:
| Of course. It just makes it quite a bit more difficult to
| read; I need to spend some effort trying to figure out
| the exact nuance the author was trying to convey.
| thisrod wrote:
| Doesn't a _15 year_ ban on publishing in ACM journals speak for
| itself, in any language?
| dbos_friends wrote:
| We are really sorry for these mistakes in langauge. Can you
| please send an email to huixiangvoice@gmail.com with details of
| these language mistakes so that we can try to fix it. Thanks
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Non English native here, a few obvious:
|
| Engineering hold an off-site event => held an off-site event
|
| a classmate got suicide => a classmate committed suicide
|
| academic integrating => academic integrity.
|
| with a responsible manner => in a responsible manner.
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| activate the spell-checker.
| dang wrote:
| > I'm not one to pick on someone who's doing their best to
| communicate in a second language or anything
|
| In that case, please don't. It doesn't help to shame people.
| pm90 wrote:
| It's a blog, not the New York Times. I could understand it just
| fine.
| ded_fixer wrote:
| Really a sad story! the attitude of University of Florida made me
| angry!
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| University administrations are all in prairie dog mode. They
| are all run by fat unneeded administrative fat cats, charging
| wayyyyy tooooo much money, are all frightened of a bubble burst
| in higher ed that will cost an unknown number of institutions.
|
| In situations like that, it is ripe for scapegoating a single
| institution that gets in the news for the wrong reasons.
|
| Outside of the cream of the crop, large institutions in higher
| education are also tenuously tied to "reputation".
|
| A couple bad runs, and you go from, say the University of
| Florida's current reputation (which is pretty good as the SEC
| schools go) to, say, the Mississippi schools which are
| basically second-rate Cal State schools academically being
| propped up by football money.
|
| And then you might get dumped from your conference.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| It's bad enough that ethical people find themselves in a
| situation like this. But when suicide is the result, it's tragic.
|
| Finding out you've thrown your lot in with - and been trapped by
| - scumbags that you thought you could trust - must be very
| difficult. But suicide is not a solution ... you lose all. The
| best choice is to _walk away._
|
| Tomorrow will need you.
| tlringer wrote:
| Someone really, really, really needs to get this professor's
| current students to safety immediately. Don't forget that shortly
| before the student's suicide, according to a screenshot of a
| conversation with the student who took his own life (same Medium
| account, earlier article), the professor threatened to kill the
| student if he "ruined his reputation." His students are not safe
| and the focus should be on making sure they are safe.
| tlringer wrote:
| If any one of his current students are reading this, feel free
| to reach out to me (use ringertalia@gmail.com), and I will help
| you find resources that may help you while prioritizing your
| safety. I recommend doing this from a non-university email
| because university emails are not truly private.
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