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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

I think around year 4 a manager made the mistake of believing the research and pushing hard on it. This in turn became a tracked goal with a multi-year timeline. The individual left before things could fall on them too heavily.

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how do you work 4 years on a project before having a tracked goal. absurd. sounds like management's fault.

The goals before the 4 years were probably based on results claimed, not making a product. Research management is difficult and efficiently running a lab requires some degree of trust that researchers don't lie.

I think the bigger part of management's fault here is that they should have spent some time on verifying the research before dedicating more resources.

Also setting up mechanisms to verify results and share results. Even a basic mechanism of “check in your code” would have served the purpose of identifying fake work. A code review mechanism can help stop irresponsible work.

“Check in your code” can identify certain kinds of blatant fraud, but it only does so much. For example, you can p-hack by evaluating your result in many different ways and then commit the version that gives the best number. It takes a lot of discipline to prevent this at an organization level. You can even have an emergent group form of this, where people collectively p-hack by individually evaluating their work and randomly finding lottery tickets. I’ve seen this phenomenon extend from research all the way to shipped product changes.

Incidentally that's how the best research with the most impact had been made in the past. Letting brillians minds play around and supporting their tinkering.

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