[HN Gopher] I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic...
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I wouldn't be productive enough for today's academic system (2013)
Author : NOTHAWKING
Score : 168 points
Date : 2023-09-16 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| nanna wrote:
| Publish quality or academia perishes
| bowsamic wrote:
| This quote was a direct cause of me to decide to abandon my
| physics research job
| oefrha wrote:
| To be perfectly fair, Peter Higgs is quite an outlier, who
| published a grand total of one paper in the 20 years between his
| 1966 paper (continuation of the seminal 1964 papers) and
| retirement in 1986.
|
| https://inspirehep.net/authors/1019617
| mysterypie wrote:
| > retirement in 1986
|
| He retired in 1996.
| mhardcastle wrote:
| Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner had similar sentiments. A very
| interesting interview along these lines:
|
| https://jameswphillips.substack.com/p/s-and-t-a-conversation...
| 3abiton wrote:
| The science crisis keeps on giving.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Peter Higgs: I wouldn 't be productive enough for today's
| academic system (2013)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35303887 - March 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _Peter Higgs: I wouldn 't be productive enough for today's
| academic system (2013)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12717553 - Oct 2016 (141
| comments)
|
| _Peter Higgs: I wouldn 't be productive enough for today's
| academic system_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6864539 -
| Dec 2013 (194 comments)
| j7ake wrote:
| Metrics rarely increase the amount of rate top quality work, but
| history has shown how bad metrics can decimate the top quality
| work produced, eg Expulsion of jewish scientists in Germany
| during the 1930s.
|
| I suspect todays short-term, glamor-based metrics improve the
| median quality of work, but decrease the amount of top quality
| work being produced.
| nanna wrote:
| German Jewish academics were expelled en masse because of
| antisemitic Nazi racial laws... not metrics regarding their
| academic credentials.
| chmaynard wrote:
| This Guardian article appears to be about 10 years old, but still
| relevant of course. A more recent article about Peter Higgs in SA
| also looks interesting:
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-higgs-bos...
| jll29 wrote:
| An average person (whether in academia or industry or in society)
| is one that understands how to survive in the system.
|
| A smart person (whether in academia or industry or in society) is
| one that makes the system work for oneself (= hack it).
|
| However silly academic systems will be designed in the future,
| thankfully there will always people like Wiles or Feynman that go
| for the hard problems no matter what, whilst managing to be at
| least tolerated by "the system".
| marcosdumay wrote:
| To put it bluntly, the system works actively against working on
| hard problems. And very intensely so.
|
| So, you are taking the set of a dozen or half of people good
| and enough on their research line and privileged enough to
| possibly make an important impact, and filtering it by
| requiring that they have that completely unrelated competency
| of hacking a social system so it turns from forbidding their
| work into allowing it.
|
| How selective is that new filter? Because if it's anything like
| 10%, you'll probably end-up with no one at all.
| slavetologic wrote:
| This is also why undergrad education has lost signal, diligent
| but unremarkable people are being selected for. It's a major
| problem in society. Luckily, capitalism punishes misallocation of
| capital fo incompetent people.
|
| The absent minded professor stereotype is dying, but those are
| the exact types that revolutionize fields.
| rscho wrote:
| > Luckily, capitalism punishes misallocation of capital fo
| incompetent people.
|
| This is absolutely not what is happening, but perhaps this was
| irony? We are granting money to very competent people. They are
| true experts in their fields and have studied for years. And
| all this knowledge allows them to expertly optimize their
| trajectory in today's academic system much better than if they
| were simply innovative scientists. People who revolutionize
| science are not only 'competent' or the 'best experts'. First
| and foremost, they're inventive and quite often very lucky.
| Qualities we don't know how to select for.
| Upvoter33 wrote:
| Old academics lamenting the good old days - that never gets old.
| ghaff wrote:
| You could probably add to that quite a few long-term influential
| professors at prestigious institutions who were more
| experimentalists and tinkerers than theoreticians that may well
| not have gotten tenure today.
| asdff wrote:
| A big seminal work from 60 years ago:
|
| Not even a hundred dollars in reagents. Four pages. A hand
| drawn plot and a linear regression. Six references.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Coming up with quality, original contributions in STEM,
| especially theoretical pr pure math/physics is hard. In
| psychology you can always run new experiments, find new case
| studies to look at, etc. It's hard to find new particles or come
| up with a 'new string theory' or a 'new general relativity'.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I have a kind of meta point on this whole discussion.
|
| We like metrics because they are not subjective. We don't like
| metrics because they tend to be insufficiently specified
| optimization problems (I.e. we are looking at 3 variables when we
| really need to look at 1000+). We dance around this with
| "Goodhart's law" type statements, but this is blatantly
| insufficient.
|
| My hypothesis is the brain is obviously working with raw data -
| photons and sound pressure changes fundamentally and is actually
| solving the broader optimization problem- albeit subconsciously
| in the immensely powerful associative cortex. If we were to
| present the same problem to AI, it would end up being similarly
| subjective - influenced by its training and structure.
|
| In summary, human intuition is currently the most powerful
| computational device. It should be objectively trusted over and
| above any gameable metric. Thus only non-gameable metrics should
| be accepted and intense scrutiny should be place on all metrics
| used.
| [deleted]
| kurthr wrote:
| I find it weird that many businesses/organizations/people try
| to come up with one metric to keep things simple (and to be
| easy to optimize), but are then surprised by Goodhart's law.
| It's important to have multiple metrics that measure different
| things (and are orthogonal enough to make it hard to optimize
| them all) and then use judgement to decide when something has
| gone too far on one path. I look at ASICs which might have
| Ops/sec, Power, Cost, TTM (even those could be broken down to
| MACs/FLOPs, maxTemp, Design vs Unit cost, TikTok-cycle vs
| manhours). Perhaps the organization even wants to change
| direction, but the "one" sclerotic metric makes it hard to do
| that.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Two ways I interpret this.
|
| 1. Academia has fallen into a self consuming game where fierce
| individual competition to _appear_ productive means that
| researchers don 't have the space to actually think creatively
| and come up with incredible new insights.
|
| 2. Scientists like Higgs had the privilege of lower hanging fruit
| to harvest in their day, so a career of lesser intensity was
| sufficient for people in his cohort to produce incredible
| contributions. Modern scientists legitimately have to work harder
| to produce less profound results.
|
| Maybe there's something to both lines of thinking.
|
| I'm also reminded of the classic story of the pottery teacher who
| graded one class by final project quality and another by total
| weight produced over the class period, and found that the latter
| group ended up producing higher quality work. Higgs in this
| article seems to be of the persuasion that in his profession, the
| former style produces better results. I think many of us here
| would find that intuitively wrong in general.
| hibikir wrote:
| Doing science and publishing papers is extremely different than
| pottery, and that has nothing to do with a difference in status
| between the two.
|
| When doing any form of art, the most important thing is to
| practice. If you make 20 vases, the 20th is most likely far
| better than the 1st. Same with painting, drawing, other forms
| of sculpture... nothing teaches like practice. There's such
| thing as more complicated pieces that require more work, but
| the majority of actual skill at pottery is practiced the same
| way whether you are aiming for a relatively complex piece, or
| one that is just hard enough it doesn't bore you.
|
| On the other hand, in science, there's no such thing as random
| practice making you better. The more papers you publish, the
| higher percentage of the time is dedicated to the writing bits,
| and getting through the approvals, and doing a million
| submissions, instead of coming up with good hypothesis, and
| finding something to do. Aiming at a hard problem is going to
| lead you to publishing less, not more, so the things you'll
| work on are going to be minor improvements, nothing difficult.
| Therefore, the chances that you'll discover anything major
| definitely decrease the more often you publish.
|
| So if in your intuition you'd be better off focusing on making
| a lot of unimportant papers... why would anyone aim for any
| fundamental problem, which has a higher chance of failure? You
| think the efforts to actually publish and submit, all away from
| the lab aren't mostly wasteful? Because it's really hard for me
| to imagine how publishing more doesn't mean far less time doing
| research.
| ansgri wrote:
| Interesting analogy with pottery. I see that an important
| academic practice that does scale like vases is structuring
| your research in easily publishable way. As a beginner
| (typically a young highly motivated idealistic student -- who
| else would want to go to academia in the first place?), you
| can start with good research idea and important results and
| no understanding of academic world, but struggle to get
| accepted anywhere decent because you didn't follow all
| unwritten rules, and as you get experience, you learn the
| rules of the game and plan your work to contain many low-risk
| "least publishable units" to build your reputation. So yes,
| "a lot of unimportant papers".
|
| Many interesting papers nowadays come from commercial R&D
| departments, like MS Research, because unimportant papers
| probably don't move your main KPIs (which would be "a lot of
| patents" AFAIU), and only interesting results improve the
| image of the company and serve as good marketing material.
| imbnwa wrote:
| >I'm also reminded of the classic story of the pottery teacher
| who graded one class by final project quality and another by
| total weight produced over the class period, and found that the
| latter group ended up producing higher quality work. Higgs in
| this article seems to be of the persuasion that in his
| profession, the former style produces better results. I think
| many of us here would find that intuitively wrong in general.
|
| Wait, how is pottery equivalent to significant expansion of the
| bounds of scientific knowledge? Humans mastered the contours of
| pottery thousands of years before farming was a thing, we have
| no such bearing wrt scientific knowledge.
| theonemind wrote:
| I feel like he's kind of invoking Goodhart's law that when a
| measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
| Academia can only produce what's possible to produce under the
| constraints of meeting certain metrics. If you can't structure
| the work in such a way as to make the right metrics look good
| while doing it, you can't do the work _at all_ , because you
| will be fired, and it doesn't matter how important the work is
| or why you need to do something that doesn't produce the
| desired metric to get it done.
| atrettel wrote:
| Another way to put this is that the incentives in academia
| right now encourage "careerism", for lack of a better term.
| People have to put so much effort into maintaining their
| position that the actually big picture goals like research
| become difficult to do, especially when you have to show
| progress every quarter and funding is only given out in one
| to two year increments. Researchers end up playing it safe,
| because big risky ideas may pay off in five to ten years, but
| that kind of research is hard to fund on a yearly or even
| quarterly basis.
| theptip wrote:
| Yes, definitely a case of Goodhearting. One way of further
| breaking this down is the idea of "slicing the bologna" where
| if you have an idea, you slice it as thin as you can into as
| many papers as possible. This you can cite your own previous
| papers, get more totoal citations & papers, and generally
| game the impact factor.
|
| Additionally the "publish or perish" regime encourages small
| incremental research projects, rather than large expensive
| risky ones that might not produce a paper for many years.
|
| All this against the backdrop that it is getting increasingly
| harder to find new discoveries since the low-hanging fruit is
| mostly harvested.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I completely reject Goodhart's "law". Good metrics are
| proxies for real things that cannot be gamed. If your metric
| does not have this quality, delete it.
| tetris11 wrote:
| I like the sentiment, but I'm legitimately scratching my
| head trying to think of any game-proof metric
| osigurdson wrote:
| Salespeople have fairly ungameable metrics - cash. That
| is the model we should be shooting for.
|
| Consumer facing web products value depends clearly on
| number of users.
|
| If a metric cannot be tied to something material, don't
| start.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| It's never that simple. Salespeople frequently want to do
| things that damage the brand. A lot of companies force
| them to present pitches a certain way to try to prevent
| that.
|
| And you don't want 50 different sales people all trying
| to sell to the same client, undermining each other's
| efforts. That means you need some scheme to assign people
| to opportunities, such as sales territories. They will
| learn to game that system.
| rfrey wrote:
| Sales are absolutely gameable and regularly are. Sales on
| false promises to customers, overpromising feature
| delivery, overstating financial benefits to the customer,
| are so common as to be cliche.
|
| The customers end up being short term relationships, the
| sales provide negative value to the company due to
| reputation loss (not realized for perhaps years), but the
| salesperson collects the commission and is probably
| working somewhere else when the smoke clears.
|
| And I'm not sure if you're claiming "number of users" is
| ungameable. If so, I'd invite you to reconsider that -
| we've just lived through an entire era where companies
| gamed user metrics to harvest sweet, sweet VC dollars.
| Founders game the metrics for VCs, vice presidents game
| the metrics for founders, product managers game the
| metrics for VPs.
| osigurdson wrote:
| If cash is gameable, then play the game. If I hire a
| machine to generate cash and they are consistently able
| to do and grow that it seems that this is a good game to
| play.
|
| You could also reformulate the objective function to NPV.
| rfrey wrote:
| The point is that not all cash is the same, and some
| immediate cash causes medium or long term harm. But if
| cash is your metric, it will be gamed by not
| distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy cash.
|
| So you modify your metric to try to eliminate the harmful
| kind. But now you're in the same race as other metrics.
| osigurdson wrote:
| If NPV isn't sufficient then you are essentially in the
| realm of maximizing happiness as the objective function.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| You've never heard of someone tanking the consumer's
| opinion of a company in exchange for some short term
| profit?
|
| If you make the metric "cash over the past 20 years" that
| would be less able to be gamed, but do you really want to
| wait 2 decades between each performance review for your
| sales team?
|
| There's also the problem of one person gaming the cash
| metric to the detriment of others. Like a used car
| salesman who lets other salesmen "warm up" the customer
| but then swoops in to be the one to actually make the
| sale. Is he really 10x better then the other sales staff
| or is he jut a leech claiming other people's sales effort
| as his own?
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Even in the best case, where you create a flawless metric
| that cannot be gamed, it's typically just one aspect of the
| job.
|
| If people get rated on that metric, they'll maximize it at
| the expense of the things that can't be measured.
|
| But, there are tons of subtle ways to undermine metrics.
| Want to be the top salesperson each month? Give negative
| feedback to candidates for open positions that seem too
| strong.
| contravariant wrote:
| If the low hanging fruit is gone and producing profound results
| requires more effort you'd expect the number of papers to
| _decrease_ , or at least it wouldn't be appropriate to use
| number of papers as a metric because producing good papers
| requires exceedingly large amounts of efforts and possibly
| luck.
| asdff wrote:
| Part of it is also the fields are much larger. Both
| internationally of course, but also on a national level.
| Almost 150 R1 schools in the US now. More grant funded work
| is being done than ever before. More agencies funding
| research both public and private as well. More papers than
| ever submitted to more journals than ever by more people than
| ever, year after year.
| thaw13579 wrote:
| While that seems reasonable, it assumes the amount of impact
| per paper has remained constant, while is practice it has
| greatly declined. These days scientists will literally try to
| identify the set of "least publishable units" in a research
| project to maximize the number of papers (I've attended
| meetings where this is discussed without irony). There is
| also a tendency to publish work that is quite similar to
| previous work with a minor change that is emphasized
| disproportionately to its importance.
| noslenwerdna wrote:
| Not if the scientists involved are p-hacking. Or, less
| harmfully, publishing null results.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| Publishing null results is the opposite of harmful
| piperswe wrote:
| Surely you mean _not_ publishing null results? From what I
| understand, null results are just as scientifically
| important to publish as alternative results, they just
| aren't published as often because they aren't as exciting.
| solveit wrote:
| Yes, I would expect _amount of work_ per paper to stay
| roughly constant in a healthy research community. The whole
| point of writing papers should be to communicate what you did
| and found so that others don 't have to do the same thing,
| and I think the amount of work would be the relevant variable
| that determines the amount of information that has to be
| transferred.
| [deleted]
| complex_pi wrote:
| The current academic system produces (in small quantity of
| course) interesting science by chance and not by design. Local
| funding agencies only reward what's fashionable and are (mostly )
| unable to fund anything new
|
| Pursuing in academia is not smart at the individual lebel, that
| indeed expels a lot of talented individuals.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| That's why I got out during the first year of my PhD.
|
| I had doubts that my field was actually ever going to solve the
| problem it was supposed to, and brought up the issue with one
| of my supervisors.
|
| He took my analysis one step further and explained how the
| (very very slow) progress we appeared to be making was
| basically just sampling bias, but it didn't matter because the
| point of being in the a 3 year PhD program wasn't too discover
| anything but to go through the motions.
|
| Nope!
| barry-cotter wrote:
| If you ever feel like writing up your initial analysis or the
| longer version from your supervisor I'd love to read it and
| I'm sure others would too. Email in profile.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> He has never been tempted to buy a television, but was
| persuaded to watch The Big Bang Theory last year, and said he
| wasn't impressed.
|
| I like that guy.
| tspike wrote:
| Of all the shows to be persuaded to watch..
| sandspar wrote:
| Big Bang Theory is one of those scapegoat shows that smart
| people have a stock "it sucks" opinion about. It's a very good
| light sitcom as far as light sitcoms go and easily holds its
| own with shows like How I Met Your Mother.
| ksd482 wrote:
| I didn't like The Big Bang Theory from any angle whatsoever.
| elashri wrote:
| The title should have (2013). Although the article is becoming
| more in check with reality with passing years.
| asah wrote:
| People have struggled with this for time eternal, and from Google
| 20% time and other "skunkworks" projects, some of the greatest
| discoveries and inventions were made off the books.
|
| One of my favorite (1993):
|
| Wiles, with his from-childhood fascination with Fermat's Last
| Theorem, decided to undertake the challenge of proving the
| conjecture, at least to the extent needed for Frey's curve.[18]:
| 226 He dedicated all of his research time to this problem for
| over six years in near-total secrecy, covering up his efforts by
| releasing prior work in small segments as separate papers and
| confiding only in his wife.[18]: 229-230
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wiles
| artursapek wrote:
| I created and sold a software system to a company and joined
| them. I stayed there for 6 years continuing to work on it and
| building a big team. During this time, I quietly spun off a
| small rogue effort to build a newer client app for the system
| in Rust. This quickly became our most popular product.
|
| The company is now winding down the project overall, but
| decided to keep and adapt this Rust client to its own backends.
| It is the only part which survived and it was the only thing I
| wasn't given orders to build.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Harder questions need to be asked regarding how metrics tie to
| actual objectives. Just because I have a chart trending in the
| right direction is meaningless. "Number of papers published" is
| not a good metric.
|
| We need more trust and fewer metrics / games. The thing I
| really don't want to pay for (as a tax payer) is the
| bureaucracy in the middle of all of this.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| It's a hard problem because there are no good answers.
|
| > We need more trust and fewer metrics / games.
|
| Except, at scale when dealing with a lot of people, there are
| _plenty_ of people who are willing to abuse that trust.
|
| I made this mistake early on in my career as a manager. I
| gave an important piece of work to one of the very senior
| engineers who I managed. Over the course of a month, he
| repeatedly said "trust me" regarding the status of his
| project. When 6 weeks went by and he finally showed it, it
| was in such a state that it was essentially unusable. We
| ended up throwing the whole thing out. Furthermore, he left
| for another job about two months after that, leaving his work
| in a shitty state.
|
| I made plenty of mistakes there, but I also learned a
| valuable lesson, "trust but verify". Until someone shows me
| concrete evidence of what they've done, I really have nothing
| to go by.
|
| To be clear, I'd _love_ to be able to "have more trust and
| fewer metrics". But at the end of the day, it's really hard
| to give people the freedom to, say, hole up for months at a
| time while they say "trust me".
| osigurdson wrote:
| Managers need to have the capacity to understand the work
| being done. Get into (I assume) code, and see what is
| happening. If you can't do this, it is impossible to be an
| effective leader. You can be an effective people manager
| without this capability but you cannot be trusted to ensure
| the work will get done.
| finite_depth wrote:
| [dead]
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Totally agree. To be clear, I am technical, and I
| definitely was able to evaluate the work being done once
| it was delivered. My mistake (among many) was letting the
| work go too long without any visible progress.
|
| That's why I get annoyed when people just lament about
| the problems with things like OKRs and KPIs, while
| totally disregarding the problems these things were
| designed to solve and pretending that if managers just
| had a more "trusting" mindset that a million Higgs and
| Wiles would be free to blossom.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I don't know what to think about a 'senior' engineer that
| doesn't reflexively keep his manager in the loop.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I don't understand the "once it was delivered" aspect.
| Why not ask people to commit whatever they have and then
| you can see if it is going in the right direction (or
| not).
|
| If you can't do this yourself, at some point you need to
| be able to trust (yes trust) someone who can. You could
| not formulate OKRs or KPIs that would have solved this
| problem.
| rfrey wrote:
| That's exactly the "verify" your parent was talking
| about. Unless you happen to have a situation where your
| project includes regular submission of work artifacts --
| which describes a lot of modern software, sure, but is
| far from universal -- monitoring the work regularly is at
| odds with the "trust" you mentioned above. I've often
| seen managers who attempt to monitor like this accused of
| micromanaging.
| [deleted]
| kiba wrote:
| Might be a good idea to bring back the concept of the
| gentleman scientist, who are generally independently wealthy.
| Charles Darwin is one such scientist.
| [deleted]
| linguae wrote:
| As a researcher who is seeking alternatives to the
| pressures of both academic and industrial research, one of
| the things I'm thinking about for my long-term career plan
| is to relocate to an area with a lower cost of living (bye
| Silicon Valley) and make an arrangement where I work part
| time for money (possibilities include being a contractor,
| doing freelance or consulting work, or starting a business
| that doesn't require more than 20 hours per week to
| operate) and spend the other 20 hours a week on research.
| I'd love to be able to do research based on my own
| interests without having to worry about business or career
| concerns. I've come to realize that when one is paid to do
| research, the researcher is suddenly under pressure by the
| person or institution paying the researcher. "He who pays
| the piper calls the tune," after all. But if I make a
| living through non-research tasks, then I'll have research
| freedom.
|
| The tough part is coming up with a business idea that would
| allow this type of lifestyle; that's where I'm currently
| at. If I could make $130,000 per year, heck, even $65,000,
| and live in an inexpensive part of America then I'd be
| fine, but the trick is figuring out how to make that much
| money in only 20 hours instead of 40.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Great, I think it'd be so much better if a qualification
| for scientist was "already rich".
| _dain_ wrote:
| maybe, but it's a hell of a lot easier to get rich when
| you don't spend your 20s on a phd working for peanuts
| yonaguska wrote:
| I find myself doing this for tech debt items far too often.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| You always have to remember to feed the KPIs, otherwise the
| management boogie men will take away your health care.
| anonporridge wrote:
| This is why you FIRE, so management loses their control
| authority and you can actually focus on solving problems
| without their interference.
| atrettel wrote:
| I have heard a similar story about Richard Feynman. If I recall
| correctly, Feynman claimed to have only applied for grants on
| work that he already completed, that way he knows he can
| fulfill what he set out. I am unable to find the source for
| this but I presume it was in his autobiography.
| antognini wrote:
| This is a common trick for theorists. You need to have
| essentially completed the work in order to write a compelling
| grant proposal.
| lisper wrote:
| I did this when I was a researcher even though I was not a
| theorist (I was working in mobile robots). I always worked
| a year ahead, and write a proposal for what I had done the
| year before. I acquired a reputation as someone who always
| delivered. Then one year I had a proposal rejected on the
| grounds that what I was proposing was impossible to achieve
| within the budget and time frame I was proposing. That's
| when I quit.
| genericone wrote:
| They wanted you to ask for more time and money? What kind
| of grift were they actually running?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| People evaluate the proposals expecting them to be
| estimations. And when somebody estimate some work taking
| too little time or money, people often don't trust that
| estimate.
|
| This is all completely normal and reasonable. Except for
| the part where you are expected to estimate results of
| scientific research.
| mcmoor wrote:
| Yeah too good to be true things are red flag for fraud or
| pipe dream
| ok_dad wrote:
| I hope you quit, took 6 months off, then came back with
| the previously finished work and told them, "You were
| right! It only took six months and zero grant money; I
| did this while traveling in Japan." That might have blown
| their little bureaucrat minds.
| lisper wrote:
| The problem is that the reviews were anonymous (which was
| supposed to make the process less political). My direct
| managers knew what I was doing.
| dekhn wrote:
| it's not uncommon for labs to ahve a grad student working on
| a skunkworks project funded by a previous, unrelated grant.
| They generate initial data, which is shown in the grant
| application. But often the grad student is still working in
| parallel with the extremely long grant cycle to get more
| publishable results and can sometimes even get to a full
| paper before being funded.
|
| I think of it like speculative execution and pipelining.
| YakBizzarro wrote:
| That's the sad reality of most grants today
| jzb wrote:
| Should add that this was from 2013. Not that I expect his views
| have changed about the system, but it also says he's never made a
| mobile phone call, browsed the web, or sent an email. That was
| unusual in 2013, but I wonder if it's still true 10 years later?
|
| He also talks about "the lunatic right of the Conservative party"
| trying to withdraw from Europe with reference to a referendum on
| Scottish independence. Would be curious his views today...
| throwaway4220 wrote:
| Academia, you dug this hole for yourself. Way too many faculty
| care about number of publications in Nature or Science and
| scientific merit takes a back seat.
| borroka wrote:
| It should be noted that the scientists themselves, and
| particularly the top scientists, since the others are not as
| easily heard or listened to, have largely contributed to the
| development of this particular academic system in which the
| quality of one's work and academic decisions (recruitment,
| tenure, salary) are evaluated primarily, but not exclusively, by:
|
| total number of publications, citations, grants obtained and
| their monetary values, number of students, impact factor of the
| journals in which the research was published, h-index, gender,
| sexual orientation, ethnicity, and public visibility.
|
| Did I miss anything?
|
| For once, neither politicians nor administrators were responsible
| for a system of "perverse incentives," since these gray figures
| are not involved in either hiring or tenure decisions.
|
| Case in point: one of the leading scientists in a field in which
| I dabble, and former chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy,
| routinely had his name on dozens of articles each year. Given the
| volume of his other academic commitments, at most he would be
| able to take a look at those papers, certainly he was not able to
| contribute meaningfully to (any of) them. So why does a top
| scientist, at the end of his career, whose place in the pecking
| order is established, still feel this need to have his name on
| papers to which he has contributed nothing, instead of taking a
| different path, in which he demonstrates, with facts, that
| unattainable "productivity" is not what scientists should aspire
| to?
|
| Someone might say, "Well, maybe it's not him, but his students or
| collaborators who want his name, so they can say they published a
| paper with an important scientist." And why would they want to
| say that? To impress other scientists, the ones who will give
| them professorships, appointments, fellowships, etc.
|
| A world I am lucky to have left behind.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I think this is a misrepresentation of reality. Generally there
| has been strong pressure from government (and the public) on
| "justifying" their spending through measurable outcomes.
| Throughout the 90s there were numerous media campaigns about
| "useless" research and we can still see the same sentiments
| even here on HN.
|
| Yes academics (well typically more the lab leaders etc), we're
| involved in some of the system that we see now, but it was in
| reaction to the pressure from politics and society. What do you
| expect people to do when the places that fund them start to
| demand measurable outcomes for something that is inherently
| difficult to measure. You come up with some (often arbitrary)
| metrics. That whole dynamic then just became an anweful
| feedback process.
| borroka wrote:
| I strongly disagree.
|
| The public (let's say 75% of the educational attainment
| level, excluding PhDs, so non-academic people who are
| educated enough) knows nothing about research, how research
| is conducted, what a paper is, how a paper is published. Zero
| clues. You can imagine what the bottom 75% think. Researchers
| are considered by the public to be little to no more than
| glorified teachers. It is like saying that bigger and better
| weapons are invented and built to justify the Defense budget
| to the public, where for the public a bomb is a bomb is a
| bomb.
|
| How do I know?
|
| (1) I was an academic and I often had low-level conversations
| about my research, in my home country, in the U.S., in
| Europe, South America, everywhere. Not a single interlocutor
| outside of academia knew what is the typical process to
| follow to have some research results published in a
| scientific journal, or whether a publication in a certain
| journal can be indicative of more or less cited/quality
| research.
|
| (2) I read comments here and there on newspapers, forums,
| social media, etc. Letters to the editor of your local
| newspaper are considered to be equivalent to a publication in
| Cell.
|
| (3) Ask, for fun, like I used to do, your regular guy if (a)
| an electron is bigger than an atom, (b) how many people live
| on earth.
|
| Re: research is useless. Most academic science is useless,
| and the uselessness of 95 percent of research is somehow
| considered inevitable by the "scientific community." But in
| that 95 percent there is a portion of research that is
| speculative and ultimately turns out to be useless, which is
| a good thing to have, and a portion of research (the
| majority) that serves only to pay the salaries of the
| researchers involved, is clear to everyone and their cousin
| that it will go nowhere, and is published in journals that no
| one, and rightly so, will ever read.
| majormajor wrote:
| I think this in near-inevitable in any org or federation of
| orgs of people with more than a few hundred people involved
| (wild-ass-guess, substitute your own).
|
| Once you have too much scale for a few people to truly know
| what's going on, all that's left to keep people working on the
| right incentives is trust, and inevitably you'll have some bad
| actors at some point, and after that you put in _some_ metrics
| and then it gets worse cause even good actors pursuing those
| metrics may have gone off the rails.
|
| The only places I've seen avoid it moderately successfully have
| had exceptional people managers, like 1-in-100/1000 level, to
| minimize the appeal of playing the game instead of doing the
| work.
| borroka wrote:
| Every system that was later changed for something better was,
| at one time, considered inevitable, natural, ineluctable.
| [deleted]
| ta988 wrote:
| The system and its participants has optimized for mediocre
| scientists that can game the system and publish the same slightly
| modified work many times.
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