[HN Gopher] ReceptioGate and the (Absolute) State of Academia
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ReceptioGate and the (Absolute) State of Academia
Author : nkurz
Score : 45 points
Date : 2023-04-22 14:57 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thecritic.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (thecritic.co.uk)
| martopix wrote:
| The conclusions are something that is well clear to anybody that
| is familiar with the environment of scientific research. The kind
| of metrics used to judge research are greatly damaging.
|
| I mostly disagree with the distinction made between scientific
| research and research in the humanities - "Unlike scientists,
| humanities scholars generally need time, rather than large
| amounts of money, to do their work." - while _some_ scientific
| projects also require expensive equipment, the problem of
| publication pressure and therefore lack of time to do proper work
| is identical in the sciences.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The converse is also true. Humanities would _love_ to do large,
| expensive projects, but the funding for that simply doesn 't
| exist and so the proposals are never written. People aren't
| running entire research programs on the rounding errors in
| science budgets by choice.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > If you've ever wondered why academics seem mostly to talk to
| other academics, here's one reason: many of us are (implicitly)
| penalised for spending time talking to the public, even as
| "public outreach" continues to be a buzzword in university
| management circles.
|
| So some of the administrative bloat people complain about is
| because professors don't have time to do other jobs.
|
| It's news to me that entire research institutes get fabricated.
| still_grokking wrote:
| Interestingly enough the disputed institute is still online and
| posts things like this:
|
| https://www.receptio.eu/kidd
|
| I guess this case would need proper investigation form proper
| authorities to arrive at a final judgment what's going on there.
| What we have here are just two parties claiming stuff.
|
| Even I lean to the side of believing in this "ReceptioGate" I
| would not judge only on the ground of reading through two random
| web pages and some tweets.
| jldugger wrote:
| previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34123302
| joko42 wrote:
| Wrong link.
| nkurz wrote:
| I think this is the right link. It's the initial story from
| the point of view of the person whose work was plagiarized.
| The evidence of plagiarism provided there eventually led to
| the story that I submitted.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I like the "blast my critics with bots" approach, even when
| you've been caught red-handed. Into every generation, a Bernie
| Shifman must fall.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| All the concerns are valid, of course, but there's one important
| caveat to cheating in academia:
|
| Your career is a path dependency, and by cheating now, you may be
| brought down at any point in the future. In other words, cheaters
| need to make sure that their misconduct is detection-proof for a
| long time. That's not trivial. And once your career is tarnished,
| it's not easy to remain in academia, so your whole life concept
| is sabotaged.
|
| Of course, some big players managed to weather scandals, but they
| arguably still took a serious hit to their credibility. For
| example, TED-famous psychologist Dan Ariely, who was the co-
| author of a paper with spectacularly forged data [1], and had to
| do an embarrassing public apology.
|
| [1]
| https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/08/19/a-scandal-...
| epups wrote:
| As someone with an academic background, I would say it is very
| easy to forge results without anyone knowing it, at least in
| the biomedical field. The cases being caught are usually lazy
| like literally copying and pasting bands, if even a mediocre
| attempt to cheat was made it would have been undetectable. In
| many cases the professors involved in outright fraud don't even
| lose their career.
| jfoutz wrote:
| I grinned when I saw "biomedical". For some reason my mind
| always connects to grand old Gregor Mendel, and the Mendel
| Fisher controversy. I thought you might be subtly trolling,
| in a really clever way. I believe your comment was made in
| earnest.
|
| Trusting results it tough, and only tougher with scale.
| Regardless, brilliant comment even if the link was
| unintentional.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Of course it's a dire problem which is not nearly taken
| serious enough. Interestingly enough, some fields seem to
| have some intrinsic motivation to replicate, e.g. biology
| [1]. I hope we can create similar incentives for all sorts of
| science.
|
| (caveat emptor: I don't know anything about biology)
|
| [1]
| https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/03/04/biology-
| as...
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