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Comment by fallon54 | Hacker News Reader

AKA why you probably don't want to be in academia

I think most of the things in life come with a lot of struggle, strange things, things that should be different and so on.

Making a startup? Go and check how hard and crazy that is. Make a family? Similar convoluted process with ups and downs.

What I think is wrong is that people have a very "idealized" image of a scientist scribbling on a board and equation and getting some prize (or defeating the aliens). These images are good for kids but after high-school I think people should give it a thought and say "ok, things are not exactly how I imagined in life, lets try to understand more what I like and want". You know the same process that makes people realize there is no Santa Claus.

Yep... Everyone in academia complains about publishing papers, about the high prices of publishing, about "publish or perish", and then when they come high enough in "academia", require the same pain from the newcomers. It's like a closed circle of people both requiring papers for maintaining and advancing your carreer and at the same time complaining about those papers (and the publishing process), and not even thinking about some kind of "change".

I've giving "Accept - Minor Revisions" to every paper I've peer reviewed since getting my PhD other than two that were outright plagiarism. Figure it's important to the morale of grad students to get some positive validation and the vast majority of published research is garbage anyways so I don't feel particularly inclined to defend the trash heap as an unpaid reviewer. In practice, I find that I've tipped the scales in favor of a lot of borderline papers over the years and am quite happy about that.

This is only true to some extent, having myself been on a fair number of hiring committees.

While the institution and national agencies measure impact in terms of number of "level 1/level 2" papers, colleagues don't care at all about this value. What's important is number of single-author papers, number of papers without their advisor, number of different small group collaborations, and most of all, having papers accepted in the top venues.

A person with 50 shit papers will not even be considered for the job.

Sure, but the same group of people that complains about (the publishing of) papers, is then in a position to change that, but doesn't. All those people that went through this process and complained, then (well.. a few years later) sit in univeristy comitees that decide what the hiring (and scoring) rules are, what are the requirements fo TAs, for professors and tenures, etc., and decide, that the "pain of publishing" is an ok thing to subject new generations to.

edit: i'm from slovenia, univeristies here are "autonomous" (not a direct part of the government.. except for being government funded), and they decide all the internal rules themselves.

The problem is that academia is otherwise a pretty cushy job. It attracts a lot of people who want the prestige and like to talk, but don’t actually want to do any work.

Peer review and the paper chase are the least bad solution that we’ve come up with to address this.

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