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Comment by tomlockwood | Hacker News Reader

Remember the Sokal Hoax and Sokal Squared?

Turns out that STEM also has all those problems.

For profit universities pushing academics to "publish or perish" are the real enemies here, for all disciplines.

Publish or perish and other academic pressures are hardly unique to for profit or even non profit universities, even Government institutions have similar incentive models to get tenure or other advancements, it seems pretty universal ?

Do you know of a study or citation about any academic research quality/quantity challenges that are found at a higher rate in for profit / non profit private institutions ?

Tenure = money

I'm pretty sure that this Nobel Prize winner does not work at a for profit university.

Journals are also absolutely involved and incentivised.

For what it's worth, I sort of read that as "universities incentivized to maximize profit or income", not literally formally for-profit universities. Sort of a biting remark about typical university motivations, not literal.

Even if the poster didn't intend it that way, I think it could easily be read that way.

Just because it's non-profit doesn't mean it's not about money.

He works at Johns Hopkins, which is a private university that works closely with a health system called Johns Hopkins and the Johns Hopkins hospital (the medical school). When you say "for profit", be aware that they definitely take money from the government and patients and use it to develop new intellectual property that generates large amounts of money for them (although I guess the "profit" from that doesn't benefit the shareholders).

These "non-profits" have multi-billion dollar budgets and are highly "profitable" depending on how you like to define it. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/opinion/nonprofit-hospita... In these cases, the non-profits are given tax incentives provide a certain amount of community benefit.

This is true but a critical difference is that STEM is a lot more falsifiable.

Postmodern deconstruction lends itself to a million interpretations, but biological testing either works or doesn't, and inconclusive generally means it doesn't.

> Remember the Sokal Hoax and Sokal Squared?

The Sokal Hoax, while famous, is not very notable. They did not even publish in a peer reviewed journal.

Publish or perish is primarily about peer competition and promotion, not pressure from admins.

Teaching is the money maker.

In order to get tenure people need to have published.

because of competition with peers.

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