Comment by spaceseaman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaceseaman | Hacker News Reader

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The casual nature with which you dismiss thousands of people who have devoted their lives to the pursuit of academic knowledge is frustrating and incredibly childish.

Like seriously? Do you think all of us PhDs just sit around and laugh about how dumb the government is while planning how we can make more useless papers? Do you think grad students just train to become better bullshitters? Like what kind of hole do you live in where any of that even appears close to reality.

Seems to me you just tried reading a couple papers, got confused, and decided to justify your own intelligence by claiming their hard work and advancements in the field were pointless.

> but they don't actually need (nor often want) to produce any result

Stop talking out of your rear end. I want to produce a result. My advisor wants to produce a result. We all want to have meaning in our lives.

EDIT: As just a casual example of the importance of academia, look at the Deep Learning boom. First researched around 1960, only now becoming practical and useful. It's almost as if the things academics study need time and a lot of work to actually come to fruition. Research level study is highly expensive for very little real gains. This has always been the case. It takes a long-long time for the investments into research to make sense, but when they do, the advancements are completely game-changing.

I mean you're totally 100% right, but I don't think he wrote that with the intent of harm. I think in his post is a more serious issue. Academic papers are incredibly hard to understand. I received an undergrad degree in CS and spend a lot of time teaching myself theoretical CS. I often struggle to read CS papers, and find it hard to imagine many of them being useful to anyone without a PhD. For instance I was reading a paper on computer vision which used a Bayesian Network to predict a depth map from a regular 2D color image. After spending several weeks, I felt like I understood the article almost well enough to implement it. Thing is, there were some steps in the learning algorithm which relied on a specific kind of optimization (I forget which), but they didn't specify which parameters were used, so it wasn't obvious how to implement it to me. My friend has a PhD in EE (on the theoretical side, his education focused heavily on statistics and optimization) and he only looked at it for 30m-1hr, but he wasn't sure what they meant either.

I can always just fall back to gradient descent instead of the optimization parts of the algorithm I don't understand, but that impacts performance, and I got the feeling I'd spend hours implementing this only to have something which can't perform in real-time so I gave up. It was just a side project. It's frustrating after devoting weeks to this. Reading and attempting to implement a research paper in my own field is incredibly hard.

I feel like if research papers were written in a more accessible, less dry manner and specified details important to implementation, the world could be a better place. If it were easier to implement these things as side projects, you might have people experimenting with these things at home and then starting businesses out of them.

Failure to fully specify the methods is a problem, but it is an institutionally wide issue related to a number of complex issues. In honest open areas, this lack is due to issues with space in journal formats. In other fields, it may be to protect IP...ugh

I suppose I sensed more malice than might have been there, and I agree with you. I also find many papers difficult to read and especially lacking important implementation details.

I've found that many researchers are very open to questions via email, however. Most of the time I'll get a response that can clarify a thing or two.

I personally feel that researchers just need to be better writers though. Most of the time, the writing is just plain bad. Perhaps there needs to be a way to enforce a bare minimum in writing quality. Personally I wouldn't be surprised to see more researchers employ editors for themselves.

> After spending several weeks, I felt like I understood the article almost well enough to implement it.

How long do you think it took the researcher to develop the idea? Probably longer than a few weeks. Even if they could have communicated better, it's still the case that you, a non-expert (my apologies if this is untrue, I am assuming based on the context), can decipher and implement the method in a few weeks!

If I was you, I'd definitely reach out to the author(s). They're usually surprisingly responsive. And they love to hear from people interested in and using their work.

As a PhD student doing computational stuff, I agree with this fully. I'd say that in many, probably majority, of cases it is not possible implement the algorithm based on just the article. Many corner cases needed are omitted from the paper and if a pseudocode is given, it may have huge steps handwaved just giving a line like "optimize this functional".

It's one of the most mindboggling things (the publishing racket is perhaps worse) about academia that CS papers introducing an algorithm aren't required to publish their implementation, even though there necessarily seems to be one doing eg. simulation studies.

I don't really understand the rationale behind omitting the implementation. Maybe people write such crappy code that they're ashamed of publishing it. Or it's the more sinister scenario that the algorithm is actually crappier than the paper claims.

Latter has happened quite a few times in experience. Algorithm performed as designed on the training or example set just to fail terribly on real life data.

Or someone handwaved important things like having an information function be available (impossible, used only in proofs of correctness, way of estimating it is critical).

Or a key assumption on input was just mentioned somewhere in the depths of the paper.

Or a very specific way of measuring the result hides the deficiencies. (Similar to p-hacking or misusing stats in medicine.)

About 50% of the journal articles I read in grad school (engineering) were straight-up BS. Unfortunately, it took me about three years to figure out which 50%.

It's sounds like the paper you struggled with was designed to obfuscate the particular conditions under which its results were produced. This may be beause one of the authors thinks there's money to be made from the secret sauce, or because they're misrepresenting how broadly applicable the result is. Or because they're sloppy. Or all three.

At a certain point, you have to stop blaming yourself for not understanding the literature. Sometimes it wasn't meant to be understood.

I think academic CS papers are hard to understand because computer science is hard. I mean Knuth is an excellent writer and doesn't use a lot of jargon and yet, The Art of Computer Programming is extremely difficult for most people due to the subject matter. This despite much of the subject matter not being at the cutting edge of computer science.

>The casual nature with which you dismiss thousands of people who have devoted their lives to the pursuit of academic knowledge is frustrating and incredibly childish. Like seriously? Do you think all of us PhDs just sit around and laugh about how dumb the government is while planning how we can make more useless papers? Do you think grad students just train to become better bullshitters?

Many people with PhDs and experience of academic publishing and the academic world can attest to exactly that. In fact many had -- some even published studies about it.

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...

And what does the "devoted their lives" has to do with anything? When someone has a PhD all that tells us is that the pursued a career in academics (and sometimes not even than). Nothing about them having noble goals and "devoting their life to the pursuit of knowledge" etc, except in the tautological way that working in research implies it. They might just like the paycheck, the prestige, or whatever else. Heck, they might even have been pushed by their parents. Or they couldn't think they'd make it as entrepreneurs and didn't fancy getting into the enterprise job market.

When doctors are wined and dined by drug companies to promote crap drugs, or are complicit in ordering thousands of needless operations to pad their profits, as they often do, have they not devoted even more years that the average PhD holder? They did, but people can still cheat and take advantage of a system, whether their credentials or position.

Nobody gets a PhD for the damned paycheck, because there basically isn't one.

The ratio of PhDs awarded annually to tenure track positions that opens up suggests that a lot of activity in the sector isn't leading anywhere.

It's almost as if most research doesn't go anywhere.

If I put you in a dark room, and ask you to find a way to light it, how many times will you fail to find the switch? Oh wait, I lied. There's not actually a switch, but there might be a candle in that general direction. Maybe.

That's how little we have to go off of. That's how empty any information on your study is. I don't think people really understand how hard this type of work is.

Research is a purely exploratory and creative work. Like art, science requires time, patience, and many many failures. You don't just get a bunch of eureka-Einsteins that come out of MIT day one knocking down Theorems and discovering new physical laws. That's just not humanly possible and it's ridiculous if you think it'll ever work that way

I am perfectly willing to admit that the vast majority of research and PhD's went nowhere and will continue to go nowhere for a long time. But that doesn't mean they're useless. Research requires exploration. It requires trial and error. It is highly inefficient and does not fit well in a consumerist society like ours, but this is the way that works best for us so far.

If you have some better idea, then why don't you go out and do it? How are you going to get a bunch of incredibly intelligent, creative, and independent people funded and provided for in a society that values immediate results over long term achievements?

I'm not arguing the academia system is perfect. Any one knows it's screwed up beyond belief. But it's not out of malice. We're not purposely trying to make the world worse, or something ridiculous like that. You have many people who care a lot about the science, who need to eat and sleep and need money to do that. Sometimes the money goes to their heads, sometimes their massive egos get the better of them, but do you seriously think we don't care about science? You'd have to be an idiot to do a PhD for the money or the fame. Why do you think we put 7+ years of our lives into stuff like this?

So most PhDs don't actually get tenured positions. What are you actually trying to say? Are you saying there aren't enough tenured positions? Or are you implying that these PhDs don't deserve tenured positions? Do you have any evidence for either of those claims? Because otherwise you're just participating in more armchair speculation.

A PhD is effectively an apprenticeship towards becoming a tenure-track professor. It's not unreasonable to wonder why we are investing so much in training so many people when there is so little demand for that training. The vast majority of PhDs end up in industry doing something barely related, and are no more productive at it than those with only a first degree or even no degree at all.

> A PhD is effectively an apprenticeship towards becoming a tenure-track professor.

No it's not, plenty of people get PhD with the goal of ending as a researcher in the industry.

Or, even, shockingly, because they enjoyed doing research, even if they then don't spend the rest of their life doing research in academia or industry.

I didn't read krick as suggesting that malice was involved. He/she was talking about the kind of work that the institutional structure of science tends to favor.

Perhaps your experience was different from mine. I went to a well known, buy non ivy league school, and grad school for myself and most, not all, of those around me was more about faking it until you made it into industry.

Plenty of junk science, including a thesis I decided not to publish, while my advisor wanted the extra points on his resume. Many PHD students are stuck because they got a hard stem degree (like physics) but realized that job pickings were a little slim without further academic development. Or they are foreigners and cannot stay in the U.S. without studying.

Passion does not always last forever. Especially when you got off-ivy league schools. Didnt you hear stories in school about graduate students who were simply stuck for a decade because of lack of interest from them and/or their advisor? Not totally farfetched.

Yeah...I saw this about an hour ago, and bit my tongue. But it is dismaying that apparently the reverence for science is so high around here that it extends to downvoting criticisms of science as a process and sociological phenomenon to oblivion.

Maybe it will help these poor fellows if I say look, I have a PhD, I work in research, and I agree with everything krick says. Yes, papers are unnecessarily jargonistic and borderline illegible. Yes, there are massive problems with the incentive structure in science. We openly say science is "publish or perish"; how can we not expect that to incentivize lower paper quality, irreproducibility, and status signalling in the form of unnecessary jargon? Even if we assume the noblest of intentions for every single scientist, which is...idealistic.

spaceseaman is equating (IMO unfairly) criticism of the process of science in its current US manifestation with some kind of disrespect towards its obvious beneficial outcomes and motives. The whole thing IS full of inefficiency, and that's not solely because science is hard. Taxpayers have a right to demand that we don't waste their money and perhaps even to present our findings in a way they can understand with a reasonable application of effort (ideally not paywalled as well).

Well, the problem is that people so often go motte-and-bailey on it.

Motte: all the valid critiques of how institutional science works, all of which are well-known.

Bailey: full Paul Ryanism, cut the NSF and NIH to the fucking bone and tell scientists to go get "real jobs" in industry. Subject academics to yet more administration and reporting requirements that further incentivize bad science and just generally make everyone miserable.

We'd all be less tetchy about the motte if it wasn't used as an excuse for the bailey.

Thank you explaining my frustration in such a clear way. My original response was so feral because I interpreted his comment as a criticism of all scientists and a call to change the current University system to something more "libertarian" (because those are arguments I'm frequently exposed to, and the comment I responded to appeared to dog-whistle similar ideas).

I am perfectly happy to admit that institutional science is screwed up - really bad. Scientific texts are often un-readable, and the entire community has major systemic issues. But I react incredibly poorly to the opinion that scientists enjoy this system or even benefit from it. We hate the way academia is structured. It's just that no one can figure out anything better and the benefits for enough people are important enough that swaying them is incredibly difficult.

>We hate the way academia is structured. It's just that no one can figure out anything better and the benefits for enough people are important enough that swaying them is incredibly difficult.

It's also that everyone who wants to do science is held hostage to this system. There is no other institution focused on original research, beyond shipping a product within three to five years.

Academia sucks. There are no full-time research positions for good researchers anymore; grant funding has gotten as selective as the startup lottery. Even the people who "make it" have to work horrendous hours and spend all their time marketing themselves.

Even from the very outset, you're forced to put your heart on the line, declare science your calling and your passion, and then just suck it up when you can't find a tenure-track job.

Some fields don't have an "Exit" option that makes anything better, just a "Voice" option or bust. Besides which, every "Exit" is a betrayal of the social contract, a tiny declaration that society would rather rot and burn than fix problems like mature adults.

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