That guy Felix Heide is a research powerhouse. He and his group published 4 papers in SIGGRAPH 21, 7 papers in CVPR 21 and 6 papers in CVPR 2020, wow.
Don’t mean to pick on you personally, but as the top voted comment it feels like we’re rewarding this harmful perspective on academia. I’d like to say “academia needs to mature” but the problem is actually that it’s gone backwards, and undoing that invasion of management consultant culture and subsequent game playing into a somewhat altruistic and intellectual vocation seems like a very hard problem.
It means they are unquestionably pushing the state of art fowards. Or the system is completely broken.
I see your point though. This is a recurrent discussion.
I think the change of paradigm was positive. Nowadays, papers are published in interactive and incremental way, instead of, doing a parallel with software engineering, with the waterfall methodology.
Publising the research incrementally allows more people to get involved, create more branches, and spot errors earlier.
In sofware developement, the change of the process lead to huge advanvements. I believe this is also true for academia.
I agree with this statement: the system is completely broken.
I've peered inside top level conferences and I can tell you that publishing there does not mean you are pushing the state of the art. Instead you may be: popular, good at playing the political game, lucky (when acceptance rates are low, luck plays a huge part - and why they are low is a story in itself), good at writing marketing copy rather than doing science, engaging in corruption to get your paper accepted, or playing to the gallery in a way that might even harm science.
More widely, if your field is 99% politicians and 1% scientists, then the _scientific_ barrier to entry at an elite conference is not going to be a good endorsement of your work.
For instance, last year there was a whole debacle at one of those top conferences because someone from nvidia, that was in the board of this conference, made (and posted on twitter!) a black list for people who said something that was not alligned with hers ideology. (I wonder what happened after the whole thing went quiet).
Yet, I do still think those conference, and their sponsors, have interest in only selecting the papers based on their content. I don't think you can get them to publish your papers so many time only with influence. Also, things like blind peer review exists to mitigate that (although, it favors writing quality over content).
Also. Politics isn't intrinsically evil. One of the great success of Einstein was spreading his idea. Argbly, others made more important achievement, yet didn't amass the same level of fame as him.
In my experience, people who are good at politics, usually persue others path. Doing so only to get publication is not the most rewarding thing for those kinda of people.
By your own analogy, it would be like saying "someone is a great computer scientist" based on the number of commits they or their colleagues make.
I might even argue that regardless of how the product is or is not improved by the process, the way we attribute credit is worse.
If you move to a collaborative incremental process but still talk in terms of specific individuals as the source, rather than a group, there's a problem.
I'm sorry to inform you that this is untrue. Elite conferences are full of work that is _scientifically_ awful and does not contribute anything to _science_.
Case in point:
https://icfp21.sigplan.org/track/icfp-2021-papers#event-over...
the key is that "elite" in science means "small", amongst other things. Any conference that accepts so many papers that not very attendant can visit every presentation is already not "elite" anymore.
But even within that conference, there are examples of exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not going to personally criticise individuals as it's a widespread and often systemic problem. Peter Thiel has summarised this better than I ever could.
Full meaning significantly most of the work is of no value?
License, registration, and proof of your statement please.
I can't tell you how many papers/patents I wrote only to be listed as the 5th contributor or some such thing.
My guess is each postdoc could produce 1 to 2 papers a year on there own. A PhD student at such a difficult school can probably produce one paper a year once they are in there third year.
14 publications in 2021. Let's guess 6 of which are from postdocs, we'll say 4 of which are from PhD students, leaving us with 4 publications between both professors, or two from each. Of course, this is all very rough estimation.
This model leads to a necessary accrual of credit to more senior researchers because the default assumption is to assume credit of a group to the more senior individual.
The problem is there's no way (or less way) for the less senior individual to establish credit unless they are publishing on their own, which isn't feasible.
In this way, group efforts tend to trickle toward the person in the senior position, and credit accrues to people in management of large groups irrespective of where ideas are coming from or who is doing the work. We say "someone is a great scientist" because they have an administrative position with reference to a large group.
Whoever has the most papers with the largest groups wins.