Are you saying doing science is so hard the only way to succeed is to cheat?
This is a slap in the face to scientists doing honest work.
Sure in the short term dishonesty might work for a scientist but long term? Legacy after death? I'm not so sure on that.
Surely the conditions for being a professional academic are much more favorable than times in the past. (By virtue only that University is more accessible to more people today than any other time)
Just because we see flaws today doesn't mean that those flaws can not be 'fixed'. (Nor that we won't discover new flaws and new fixes: engineering is an interative process).
> Surely the conditions for being a professional academic are much more favorable than times in the past. (By virtue only that University is more accessible to more people today than any other time)
If anything this has made things worse in the current system, because it has grown so much more competitive. Competition is good only so far as success in the competition is based on contributing to the overall goal, and academia lacks a good alignment between that and rewards, so the competition has some fairly significant negative effects.
I agree there are likely ways to fix the current system, but it will require a concerted effort from many directions, as the current incentive structure rewards many in the current system for perpetuating it.
God's sake, you need to be able to think better about these kinds of things than this to understand business. It's all human systems—you ask for bad behavior, you get bad behavior, and sitting around tut-tutting over the people doing the bad behavior won't do jack-shit to fix things, no matter how good it feels. It's immature as hell.
Putting down groups of other commenters just makes the thread more dyspeptic, even if you're right.
... however, complaining about it doesn't help, sure, and I'm aware that posting (in basically any capacity...) doesn't improve it, so, shouldn't have posted. I'll leave it be, thanks for the deserved "bop".
I do wish there were a way for HN to get better at this specific thing, as it's always been about the same amount of bad, and avoiding non-tech topics doesn't seem to be something HN's interested in doing ("it's hard to define what that is" well, yes, but other tech-focused forums manage regardless—but they also get less engagement, and that does matter for this site's advertising purposes, I get it).
I think downplaying identity was a good idea to try and I like the ideals of it and appreciate what it's trying to achieve, but I'd say the evidence is firmly favoring the "failed" column for that experiment. We see the same people having the same extensive bad exchanges over and over, and identity helps avoid that with group-education about repeated behaviors by certain posters in certain contexts. Changing course might help with this and some of the other most-acute issues on the site. I expect nothing, just putting it out there. I know, unsolicited opinions are like assholes :-)
Failing that, user-managed blocklists would be a godsend—I know those come with their own problems, but it'd be well worth it on here. Bonus points if you could have separate lists for tech and non-tech posts (I know, tricky, that's why it's bonus points, haha). Some posters exclusively post uninformed flamebait nonsense (within the threshold of "HN Nice" so it keeps happening—not a dig at moderation, that's a Hard Problem in that space) in non-tech threads, but do contribute positively to tech threads. ("so correct them" -> folks do, that's how the threads keep happening, it's like sitting in on a 101 course mostly attended by non-majors who are nonetheless passionate about their uninformed position, and arguing with the professor and won't accept they may be wrong—it's not productive or enlightening) It'd be lovely to never see that again, but get to keep reading the site. Blocklists are the #1-100 features I'd add to the site, if I had a genie that could grant 100 only-HN-feature-related wishes.