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Comment by wizzwizz4 | Hacker News Reader

> it's *extremely* common for PIs to pawn review duties off on grad students

Unless the reviews are submitted in the grad students' names, that sounds like academic misconduct. Can you “anonymously” report this without too much backlash? (I assume the answer is no: you clearly know it's wrong, and haven't done anything about it yet.)

> This is the thin veil that everyone hides behind

There are many places in society where we do this. The thin veil of politeness, lies that everyone knows are lies – like asking "How are you?" without actually caring how the other person is, and answering "Quite well, thank you." when you're neither okay nor thankful.

It makes no sense, but people would behave worse without the illusion. I know not whether the benefits of transparency would outweigh that.

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> Can you “anonymously” report this without too much backlash? (I assume the answer is no: you clearly know it's wrong, and haven't done anything about it yet.)

This is so extremely common that I don't believe that there is anything to report. I reviewed dozens of papers under my PI's name throughout my entire PhD. Now that I have completed my degree, I never want to review another paper again.

People that don't know how the sausage is made say the most outlandish things don't they lol.

Thank you to you and mathisfun123 for saving me from doing a PhD.

If it's that dishonest, I don't want anything to do with it.

Thank you both for being honest.

i had a kid (~last week) ask me to edit his PhD proposal (I guess in the EU you have to already have a project in mind?) and I said I would happily edit it for him if he first let me try to convince him not to do a PhD.

my hypothesis on the value of a PhD: if you are the kind of person that can finish an honest PhD i.e., real work that's not necesssarily novel (I don't give a flying fuck about "novelty") but actually requires you to stretch hard to achieve, then you don't need one and it will cost you years of productive/rewarding/lucrative work in industry (and 100% academia is not for you).

i don't know what the "on the otherhand" is though - I really have no idea how anyone comes away from this process thinking "hmm yes I want more of this pile of bs" so I have no idea what kind of psychopaths go into academia (for which the PhD is indeed a prerequisite).

Long ago, I used to think that in a world where I had more money than I could possibly need, getting a PhD and becoming something like a history professor wouldn't be a bad life. Let's just say that I no longer believe that would have been the case.

Some institutions are more corrupt than others. Just because it's normalised, that doesn't mean it's normal. (Discussed https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/5662/84223 https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/65821/84223 https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/142359/84223 )

Consider another unethical practice: sexual harassment, in many industries, was once so extremely common that there was nothing to report. Everyone in a position to do something about it knew it happened, yet it continued. People reported it anyway. Tanked some of the reporters' careers, but the practice is way less accepted now.

You've completed your PhD, so you're at less risk of backlash. Are you yet in a position where you can blow the whistle on what happened to you?

> I assume the answer is no: you clearly know it's wrong, and haven't done anything about it yet.

You expect a first year junior grad student (e.g., me before i was inured to it) to blow the whistle on their senior, well respected, famous, advisor? Is this a joke? You think change like this happens bottoms up from the indentured servant^1 class? lol.

> It makes no sense, but people would behave worse without the illusion.

wut. we've taken a large step off the sane road here. democratic/fair/equitable processes are open. full stop. if you want to debate me on this you're gonna have to whip out a whole lot of philosophy, history, data, etc.

^1 do you know how many phd students in the US are foreign nationals on student visas? if you had to pick between majority and minority which one would you pick? hint: you're wrong it's the other one.

I would expect to be able to raise such concerns myself, and not face much blowback for doing so; however, attitudes towards academic conduct vary around the world. There are even places where you can't report data fabrication without risking your entire academic career.

> democratic/fair/equitable processes are open. full stop.

Secret ballots. Double-blind medical trials. The sealing of juvenile court records.

It's not as clear cut as you make it out to be: what might make sense in one academic field (e.g. applied particle physics) might be total nonsense in another (e.g. partial differential equations).

> Secret ballots. Double-blind medical trials. The sealing of juvenile court records.

in the first and the third you're conflating the processes of the governing body with the experiences of the governed - the governed need to be protected from the governing body, not the other way around - that is the whole point of demanding that the governing body operate in the open. like bro politicians (as politicians) have no right to privacy, but we as individual citizens, governed by them do. how is it possible that i need to explain this to you?

the second isn't a democratic process of any kind.

> It's not as clear cut as you make it out to be: what might make sense in one academic field (e.g. applied particle physics) might be total nonsense in another (e.g. partial differential equations).

oh but it is and you'd have to be as obtuse as my reviewers to argue differently. like bro there isn't a scholar/thinker/activist on this subject anywhere in the world that agrees with you (politicians definitely agreew with you though).

Anonymous reviewers does not necessarily mean anonymous reviews.

> like bro there isn't a scholar/thinker/activist on this subject anywhere in the world that agrees with you

Not a 'bro'; also https://clauswilke.com/blog/2014/10/12/in-defense-of-anonymo... https://doi.org/10.1080/01411920802044438 https://doi.org/10.1038/249601a0 . I pretty much agree exactly with Claus O. Wilke, and haven't read beyond the abstract of the other two, but these were all on the first page of the first web search query I tried.

It's not well-documented, but even OpenReview permits anonymous reviews: see https://docs.openreview.net/reports/conferences/openreview-n...

> After the notification deadline, accepted papers were made public and open for non-anonymous public commenting, along with their anonymous reviews, meta-reviews, and author responses.

Your (incorrect) perception of an overwhelming consensus probably isn't why you hold the position you do. I'd like to hear your actual justification, if you would be happy to share it.

You are blithely jumping back and forth between government and the peer review process/academic process. So let me put it to you like this: please show me a democratic country with an anonymous judiciary. EDIT: actually the US has the FISA courts which are effectively secret courts and those are widely understood to be a great harm and totalitarian (rather than democratic).

> Your (incorrect) perception of an overwhelming consensus probably

Did you know that the word consensus does not include the word unanimous? Just like there is a consensus on climate change despite some exceptional crank scientists there is a consensus on democratic processes being open - again i will emphasize that i never claimed there was consensus about whether peer review should be open but about whether government should be (and my own claims about peer review are informed by that consensus).

> Not a 'bro';

One of my favorite things is when someone is either so pretentious or so clueless as to reject a (gender neutral) colloquialism.

> Did you know that the word consensus does not include the word unanimous?

Yes. Did you remember that you wrote this?

> oh but it is and you'd have to be as obtuse as my reviewers to argue differently. like bro there isn't a scholar/thinker/activist on this subject anywhere in the world that agrees with you (politicians definitely agreew with you though).

If you would like to share the reasons for your opinion about academic peer review, feel free.

> One of my favorite things is when someone is either so pretentious or so clueless as to reject a (gender neutral) colloquialism.

Huh, so it is. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=48576 Mark me down for 'clueless'. I'd seen that with “girlie” and “guy” (perhaps coincidentally, both of which match historical uses of the words), but not “bro”. It's not listed in Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bro#English), but it looks WT:ATTEST-able: do you have a definition that could go there?

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