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Comment by akhayam | Hacker News Reader

I hear the calls for blood here, but will offer a contrarian point of view. The pressures academic researchers have to face today are unparalleled, even in 95% of industry jobs. The pressure to publish continuously, pressure to win grants, pressure to be a great teacher, pressure to be a role model for students and younger faculty, pressure to balance all this with families that really need you too.

So we basically take the brightest minds and have them compete in a gladiatorial rate race. This system is so broken that something fundamental has to change here.

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"When you're in a hole, stop digging". Yes, academia is terribly broken at the moment, the incentives are fucked, and fraud is rampant. But the solution there is not to just look the other way at misdeeds, that just makes the incentives even worse. Highly-visible career executions for misconduct aren't the entire solution, but they are part of the solution.

The guy went on to become Stanford president, it's not the system that broke him, it's that he was a cheater all along and flourished in it.

There are a lot of good honest hard working people losing out, but you won't find them at an administrator luncheon because they are spending 70h in the lab every week on a temp contract.

This person is in trouble for intensifying exactly the issues you're describing:

"The report ... identified a culture where Tessier-Lavigne “tended to reward the ‘winners’ (that is, postdocs who could generate favorable results) and marginalize or diminish the ‘losers’ (that is, postdocs who were unable or struggled to generate such data).”"

I think GPs point is that there is little here to deter other academics who behave the same way. From my time in academia, there are plenty of professors I knew who behaved this way (not direct falsification, but rewarding the winners).

This is a particularly egregious case of a high profile person. In most other cases, if misconduct is detected, the buck is passed on to the individual researcher/grad student. I personally know a fellow student who falsified data, published papers, and was caught. Only he, not the coauthors, got in trouble.

I agree. I'm a physicist and if everyone I knew who lied in their research got fired, there would be no one left.

What the actual fuck. There should be none of you left if that’s the case.

Not sure why you're surprised, it's basically required at this point. Part of becoming a physicist is learning which 20% of a given paper is a vast overexaggeration of the impact or significance of the results. The exaggeration and deception is required for career progression

Probably because anyone mentioning such a thing is met with outrage at suggestion that “scientists” are anything but humble truth seekers.

Scientists are careerists first. I'm sure you've been told this many times

No the public discourse around this has been, for years at this point, that this isn’t true. Stating anything else gets one labeled as an anti-science conspiracy theorist at best or a fascist at worst. Surely you know this.

I’m from a reasonably poor background so my experience has been almost the opposite, that experts are derided and seen as weirdos who are missing some aspect of reality.

I get that there is a portion of the population for which what you say is true, but I’m sceptical that you aren’t aware of what I’m talking about, but if you’ve genuinely managed to avoid it up until now, then you’re welcome I guess

I didn't read your comment as a defense, only as an explanation. And as an explanation, you're right: The pressure is getting to way too many people. But how can you fix it? I'm afraid good answers need very deep change. Society lets a few 'winners' (whether by cheating, effort, good luck, or anything else) reap too much of our collective rewards.

> But how can you fix it? I'm afraid good answers need very deep change

How the hell do you manage to bring deep change to large entrenched bureaucracies like universities though? Honestly, I’m surprised there wasn’t a crackdown or any supression on the guy who exposed this person.

The guy who exposed this person is the child of two prominent New York Times journalists.

I didn't realize academic research was a mandatory life sentence.

It's interesting to see that software engineering (and IT overall) is not the major quality downgrade introduced by VC-like funding and push for Continuous Development.

If I understand you correctly, you are saying we shouldn't be punishing individuals for a system problem. Is it time to reform the system then?

It was time to reform the system several decades ago. But Americans are terrible at understanding "not every dollar spent on research will have a big outcome", or even understanding how research works in general.

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