The Academic Great Gatsby Curve | Hacker News Reader

The Academic Great Gatsby Curve

arxiv.org

25 pointsPaulHoule19 comments

I suspect a lot of that now is because of niche capture as a winning academic career strategy.

If you're working in a specialist area, any kind of blind review is bogus because the primary handful of people publishing in that niche know each other and what they're working on. They are usually aligned into one or more shared-stance cabals lead by the first person or handful of people to establish themselves in that particular niche, and filled out largely by their current and former students and collaborators. Those groups are then the established experts in the area and review, consciously or not, to ensure that they and theirs get published and anything that challenges their stance/narrative/methods/choke-hold doesn't.

I think everyone who has spent much time in academia has a few pieces of "un-publishable work" tucked away, not because it was bad work, but because it would be inconvenient for someone with clout in the area and is thus not worth the hassle.

The second last sentence is "This result makes it clear that academic impact — as quantified by citations — is to some extent inherited." Two things come to mind.

1. Figure 2, which supports the conclusion, does not seem all that "clear" to me. The r (0.61) is pretty low, and the rightmost point might be leveraging the fit.

2. Why would it be a surprise that citation impact is inherited? Research groups with high citation rates tend to draw attention from ambitious students who hope to learn how to do highly citable research.

Not that any of this matters all that much in the end, since citations can (and are) "gamed" by many people. Plus, citation rates very a lot between disciplines, and disciplines within disciplines. But bean counters like to count beans, and citations are easy beans to count.

That one about disciplines seems like it needs to be controlled.

If it wasn't for the very harsh filters of postdocs and tenure I'd say that five years wasn't enough time to really evaluate somebody. In the first five years of an academic career you might still be collaborating with your advisor or working with people who are somewhat connected.

The trouble is that if you don't "make it" rather quickly you'll get filtered out and never get your second wind.

Interesting work. One aspect that doesn't seem to be discussed is that the formation of mentor-mentee pairs is not random. On average, in the realm of physics and astrophysics that I'm familiar with, it's more challenging to secure a position with a high-impact scientist than with one of lower impact.

The relevant bit:

“this study demonstrates that an academic Great Gatsby Curve exists as well, in the form of a positive correlation between academic impact inequality and the persistence of impact across academic generations. We also provide a detailed breakdown of academic persistence, showing that the correlation between the impact of mentors and that of their mentees has increased over time, indicating an overall decrease in academic intergenerational mobility”

I think I am missing the metaphor. Gatsby made his money as a bootlegger, and presented himself as a cultured guy. Yet he owned a library of unopened books. And so do many academics make their careers fronting, or using faked or fraudulent data?

Gatsby died in the end and the Old Money moved on quickly?

You should have beautiful shirts to be a good academic?

The Wikipedia page has a quote about brainstorming name ideas that has this snippet, "...I wrote down the Great Gatsby curve because of Gatsby’s trouble trying to jump social classes in spite of his money."

> academic impact inequality

I'm not following: what's the problem with that?

Everywhere you look, in nature and in society, you will find inequality, and some people always present it as a moral wrong.

> Everywhere you look, in nature and in society, you will find inequality, and some people always present it as a moral wrong.

Everywhere you look, in nature and society, you will find violence, and some people always present it as a moral wrong.

Just because something is natural, normal, or always present doesn't mean that thing is good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

Violence in itself is not morally wrong or right, what a bizarre statement.

It seems to me that one of the primary purposes of society it to mitigate the inequality found in nature. That is to say: A system where the strong and/or lucky thrive and the weak and/or unlucky suffer doesn't need society, it's what happens by default. People band together into a society in order to thrive collectively despite their various weaknesses.

No, that's only your opinion. Millenia of scholarship about societal origins have never said that.

Not really, it's basically what Hobbes argues in Leviathan.

What are you basing your assertion upon?

No, he doesn't. That's your gloss on Hobbes. He didn't mean "inequality" in the modern liberal sense that you are using it. You cannot import modern "thinking" (if that's the word for it) back to the 18th Century.

I suppose you're going to seize on the word "inequality" here:

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldhistory2/ch...

we live in the age where victimhood (the umbrella over inequality) is harvested for social capital. The data doesn't matter anymore, it's just who can make their cause du-jour into the biggest tragedy. This is why it will never stop, they will never be satisfied, only move on to some other tragedy after they use their harvested capital for political gain.

Summary: https://pdf2gpt.com/?summary=a60cdd709ca243599185af0f8513e33...

Academic speak has always been bad, and judging from this article it is only getting worse. Tone it down. I shouldn't need a Rosetta Stone to decipher your paper.

Also, the levels of abstractions, built upon abstractions, and wrapped in other abstractions is also getting silly; Gatsby Curve, Gini, citations and publication database...

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