Comment by bioemerl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bioemerl | Hacker News Reader

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Science as a whole has died a hard death.

All reward and prestige of being a researcher has been lost and the people in the study have a slim chance of being able to work with their degree.

Which I understand is about the opposite of what this article wants, but you shouldn't trust the people who have broken science to fix it. Research itself gets locked behind tightly walled journals and are written with obscure and difficult language laymen can't understand, peer review has become a hoop jumping scam that let's bad research through.

Medical review and other ethics boards are suffocating the ability for researchers to actually do things in a massive overcorrection from the early days of research.

Media is in a continuous game of misrepresentation of everything researchers say and trust in scientific truth had lead to instructional actors getting their fingers in the process and corrupting it to suit their ends.

ARXIV and the likes are the future of science. Where literal discord servers are getting together to publish studies. Yeah. Bunk gets published all the time, but peer review can just happen dynamically through good old regular unchecked skepticism.

I would never in a billion years engage in the academic side of research. If I wanted to be a scientist I'd do it as a hobby, buying the tools to do it in my garage and publishing to open journals where ethics boards and bureaucrats cannot touch me beyond the reach of actual law.

In all hopes, academia will start to crumble and this sort of garage philosophy will grow into a network of people that replaces it with a fresher and more dynamic outlook.

I had a tenured faculty position at an R1 university and left it in part because of a completely dysfunctional institutional environment with no insight. My best friends include full professors at well-known institutions, though, and I've continued to be involved with academics and research.

I'm frankly tired of science being characterized in terms of competitiveness and abuse. That's true, but it's deeper than that. It is now structurally corrupt, in the sense that nominal credit does not reflect actual contributions and results are often questionable or even fraudulent, and the incentives are structured to reward collecting new data that are very predictable rather than new ideas or exploring unknowns.

The characterization of science as just being "stressful" or "competitive", as opposed to being broken and corrupt, does disservice and deflects from real change by implicitly putting the responsibility on those who are affected the most.

It's as if you had a city full of crime, white collar as well as otherwise, and then discussed the problems in terms of victims being anxious, rather than the fact there's no police in the the city and the court system is corrupt.

This echos so much of the world it seems right now.I have seen this in engineering, analytics, and the restaurant industry.

New people and outsiders still have so much hope for what the paths they choose offer them and once they enter and progress are faced with the "city full of crime...(with) no police" and very little recourse. Engineers that are berated and bullied to output test results that conform to desired product specs, management that wants data that conforms to "projected" trends and bully analysts to "massage" the data accordingly, chefs that are told they have to work 12-16hr 5-6 days a week. These are just the examples that I have personal experience with.

It seems that this structural corruption has everything to do with financial rewards and who holds the purse strings. The group/s that dole out the rewards seem to have played their hand miraculously and convinced everyone that this is the only way.

As I write this it reminds me of threads I was reading 10 years ago about surgery and surgeons and what it took to become apart of that field. It was described as being fraught with super high stress, high precision, high physically demands such as super long shifts (24-48hrs) lack of sleep, and a huge drop out rate. So many of the posters from the industry were saying while it was toxic and terrible it produced world class surgeons and that culture of training and gatekeeping was what kept the profession the best in world.

Would you say that possibly the people maintaining the "structurally corrupt" culture are doing it to maintain a perceived superiority and relevance both financially and socially? What about the political winds constantly undermining the output of the profession when it becomes politically expedient to do so? Do you have any ideas on what change would look like? What are some of the solutions that you and your friends have discussed?

I think I developed a similar conclusion that research as a whole is corrupted when there was that CS student that committed suicide due being affected by paper-approval collusion agreements involving nearly all the prominent researchers in the field. Nothing was done about it, even though it directly contributed to someone's death.

I had so much disgust for the field since then.

I wasn't aware of this, do you have a link you could share?

I think it's referring to this case: https://huixiangvoice.medium.com/the-hidden-story-behind-the...

And for outcomes, the paper in question was retracted and the professor involved resigned. However, I haven't seen updates regarding the review ring (where a bunch of peer reviewers collude).

https://retractionwatch.com/2021/03/16/after-grad-student-su...

https://www.wuft.org/news/2021/04/23/university-of-florida-p...

> It is now structurally corrupt, in the sense that nominal credit does not reflect actual contributions and results are often questionable or even fraudulent

This is my experience as well, after working in many different departments. It's really sad. I could hardly summarize it better.

I've heard a lot of complaints from a lot of different people working in lab science (in my case, my interest was in bio & chem) and none of them were about "tightly walled journals" (working academic researchers generally have institutional access, and when the logins are annoying to manage they just sci-hub like everyone else) or IRBs.

Rather, it was very basic stuff, like being told to come in at 5:30AM to feed a cell line only to have the PI show up at 2PM, throw the experiment in the garbage, threaten the student's livelihood, and then demand they stay until 11:30PM redoing the experiment. Over and over again, at random intervals.

I asked around about this stuff because a family member now works in the field and had some startling experiences, only to find that this is apparently almost universal, and that what I'm describing is on the lighter end of it. There are stories about labs at elite universities where the grad students have set up secluded spaces to go hide from their PIs and cry. It's everything you've heard about working as a developer at a video game company, dialed up to 11.

I don't really speak out of concern of the well being of those in research, but for the health of the system as a whole.

The fact it's a monster that eats people alive to me is an evidence that the whole thing needs to be torn down and replaced, which is the best way to erase all these sorts of harms.

But this isn't about today's scientists. I fully expect a collapse of academia to harm anyone currently in it, because the skills you need to succeed will change dramatically

>The fact it's a monster that eats people alive to me is an evidence that the whole thing needs to be torn down and replaced, which is the best way to erase all these sorts of harms.

It is easy to tear down but hard to build.

I get that you are jaded, but tearing down institutional science is just going to harm future scientists by robbing them of opportunity. Yes the system isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean we have to throw it in the trash in its entirety.

What does Opportunity have to do with science?

In this case, it seems like the Opportunity is an opportunity to get trapped in a system that is likely to be both unsatisfactory and unproductive.

My fear is that we've crossed the event horizon and we can't rollback all the alterations that accumulated over the years and gotten academics into a cul-de-sac or box canyon. (Pick your metaphor...) next stop, the singularity, where we will have the opportunity to experience life as a dimensionless point...

>What does Opportunity have to do with science?

Most science requires specialized tools and materials that cannot be obtained outside of an institutional environment. Tearing down the institutions means ceasing basically all non-profit generating "big science" efforts. That robs future scientists of working on the cutting edge.

A garage lab is fun idea, but the reality is infeasible in most circumstances. Even if possible, it will be slap-shod and a gigantic money pit that no granting agency will give a dime to.

>My fear is that we've crossed the event horizon

Hyperbole. Science existed before institutions and will exist after if it all should come tumbling down. There are more scientists than there has ever been, and as a result a lot of "boring" but necessary science is happening, but that doesn't mean there aren't rebels and outlaws in that same system asking interesting questions and overturning ideas.

Very interesting points. Thanks for taking the time to share.

I had a friend who made a big board with switches and knobs on it that changed lights and other stuff. It connected to nothing. But sometimes the professor would come to the lab to "be helpful". So they would point to the board and say turn that switch when I ask. Or rotate that knob or whatever. And the professor would get bored and leave after a while. But I guess he was good at getting money so that's all that matters in some places.

A lot of this seems to be poor leadership ability. Unfortunately, it seems like in the sciences you can get get promoted because you’re really good technically, but these skills don’t mean you can manage a hill of beans. Rather than treating the whole system down, maybe we need to look to promote those who can manage teams rather than just those who are “merely” technically bright.

Hiring boards at major universities know leadership ability is valuable, it's just that there are very few people with the skills, the credible track record, the leadership/teaching ability, and willing to apply, that they have to settle for less. And it so happens that this is where it's easiest to justify settling.

A lot of folks talk about how hard it is to find a tenure track job but it's actually trivial for anyone in the 99th percentile of all 3 categories.

But for anyone with that combination of talents, they can easily make 7 figures in a comfortable job outside of academia so not many of them apply even at the Stanfords and Harvards of the world.

>And it so happens that this is where it's easiest to justify settling.

Why do you think this is so? Is it because technical skills are more easily measurable and thus more defensible than so-called “soft skills”?

I think it goes without saying that most 99 percentilers can get the job of their choosing within that skillset. My question is more about the ranked priorities of the rest of the "middling" candidates. Why is the value system is structured to reward one type of skills when everyone seems to conclude it doesn’t provide good outcomes?

Because leadership skills and teaching ability are much harder to objectively measure on a CV and in a few hours of face-to-face meetings.

Whereas everyone on a hiring committee can tell quite quickly if a prospective applicant is blowing smoke about their technical skills, competence at navigating academia, etc...

This is the same dynamic everywhere when multiple qualities are valued but only some of those qualities are easy to quantify or assess.

I tend to agree. But I do think it’s a solvable problem by valuing, teaching, and prioritizing leadership skills. I think one of the problems in academia is that specialization requires people to forgo learning those traits, and they revert to what they’re comfortable evaluating (because it’s also what they specialize in)

What? Do you understand my previous comment?

I think so. I’m drawing a distinction between the difference being due to an ability to measure and the difference being due to self-selection, predicated on the need to specialize.

If you’re interviewing with a group of mathematicians, there’s a greater likelihood they will consider math skills to be the Ine Important Thing, in part because they’ve had to focus on that so much it becomes disproportionately important in their worldview. It’s a bias due to being overly focused on a specialization.

> I tend to agree. But I do think it’s a solvable problem by valuing, teaching, and prioritizing leadership skills. I think one of the problems in academia is that specialization requires people to forgo learning those traits, and they revert to what they’re comfortable evaluating (because it’s also what they specialize in)

I don't see where you drew the distinction, can you point it out?

How does the possibility of mathematicians being narrow minded in your second paragraph relate to this distinction?

>I don't see where you drew the distinction, can you point it out?

>"I think one of the problems in academia is that specialization requires people to forgo learning those traits, and they revert to what they’re comfortable evaluating (because it’s also what they specialize in)"

There's a distinction in avoiding a measure because it's not quantifiable and just plain not feeling as comfortable in that domain.

>How does the possibility of mathematicians being narrow minded in your second paragraph relate to this distinction?

When you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Humans tend to be cognitively lazy, so they revert to what they know when faced with uncertainty. E.g., a mathematician feels more comfortable measuring math skills, even though a better measure may be a combination of math and leadership skills. So they tend to hire quants with poor management traits. It doesn't mean they couldn't evaluate the soft skills, it means they chose not to.

Using a different analogy, if you asked a sprinter to choose a decathlete, what skills do you think they would more heavily weight in their evaluation? I'm saying it's likely they would more heavily weight the sprinting events because they don't know how to evaluate the other events as well. They specialize in sprinting, after all, and that's what they know and feel comfortable with. The result probably isn't going to select the best overall decathlete, but it doesn't mean the other events couldn't be measured.

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