The DDoS attack of academic bullshit | Hacker News Reader

The DDoS attack of academic bullshit

benlandautaylor.com

I agree with the fundamental problem, but I don't really follow the analysis. I thought this would be more about the zillions of paper-mill journal articles used by "academics" to advance their careers. I don't really agree that it's all that much harder to search on most deep academic (eg beyond undergraduate) topics. You used to have to request or go into stacks to find physical journals, and even now most interesting research have search terms and topics that nobody would choose to search optimize for. You don't use Google to find academic research most of the time.

Where I do disagree is that there aren't enough qualified people to hold positions (at least in the US/Europe) for academic research in the sciences. In fact much of the garbage is from people smart enough to competitively optimize their career at the expense of research and other researchers. That goes on to the departments that in turn optimize for # papers and $ grants for tenure decisions. The shame of Ranga Dias is on the department that ignored evidence of fraud as much as on him. The same for Tessier-Lavigne and the other scandals around Alzheimer's research. There was too much focused money and people in academia for the fame and power rather than research.

Yeah, their analysis is skewed because their own "research" is speculative punditry about everyday topics -- a journalist dressed in academic robes -- which puts them in a different position than scientisists/specialists or the casual public.

Their frustration overlaps with a lot of other people's but isn't quite the same.

not even academic or journalistic "research"; they're a think tankie: https://www.bismarckanalysis.com/#/

(I wonder if there's a jealousy problem here: academics and journalists are both trained in wading through lots of Sturgeon's law to find the good stuff, but think tank analysts are competing with each other to carry out the DDoSing?)

I think the author is correctly describing a phenomenon at some level and the DDOS analogy isn't such a bad one. But I think they're kind of misidentifying the nature of the cause at some level.

In some ways it's a bit worse than what they're outlining because at least in my opinion it's more systemic. That is, the problem isn't so much that there's a small number of "real geniuses" getting drowned out by a bunch of noise, it's that there are actually a large number of geniuses who are incentivised by their P&T committee, or college, or grants program officer, or advisor, or whoever, to create the sea that everyone is drowning in. Even when people want to do the right thing, they might not be able to. It doesn't end with tenure either, I can vouch for that.

The late Peter Higgs is kind of a good example in this regard. In a lot of ways he was one of those classical physicists from past era, and even he pointed out that he wouldn't have a professor position today, and that people were wanting to get rid of him.

Where the DDOS analogy kind of falls flat is that DDOSes don't generally have echoing effects that result in positive (or negative, depending on how you look at it) feedback loops.

I guess I saw the author as pointing to a real problem but being a little off about the cause, or at least not recognizing the complexity of the causes as they really exist and focusing on only one small part of it. I think that you're spot on in a lot of ways, that some of the biggest problems are from people who are smart, but then also motivated by the wrong things, and so leverage the whole system to those aims and then rely on survivorship bias to justify the whole thing.

I don't see justification for these two statements: "A doctorate just means much less, now, than it did. Most of today’s physicists would not measure up to the standards that the field held for itself when that photo was taken in 1927." I.e. sure, the number of awarded PhDs is larger, and therefore the number of Nobel prizes awarded per PhD is lower. Also at least in fundamental physics there was not much progress over last 20-40 years, especially if you compare it with early 20th century when quantum mechanics and general relativity were 'created'. But I don't know what that tells about an average PhD now vs average PhD then or 'standards of the field'.

(Full disclosure, I have a science PhD)

> the number of awarded PhDs is larger, and therefore the number of Nobel prizes awarded per PhD is lower [..] I don't know what that tells about an average PhD vs average PhD then or 'standards of the field'.

I don't think it's about Nobel prizes per PhD, the article mentions neither the word 'Nobel' nor 'prize'.

> "From 1900-1999, the U.S.’s production of academic doctorates increased a hundredfold, while its population increased by 3.5 times—that is, almost thirty times more PhDs per capita"

That's the issue: Why are we dishing out far more PhDs - and I'm guessing also all other types of academic qualification - per capita than we were before?

Hypothesis #1: We're all getting smarter!

Hypothesis #2: The value of the qualification is dropping...

In the immortal words of so many professors: "discuss" ...

> Why are we dishing out far more PhDs - and I'm guessing also all other types of academic qualification - per capita than we were before?

On one hand, the sphere of human knowledge is expanding, so the outermost edges (the surface area, so to speak) are longer, and therefore we need more PhDs who are the people at those outermost edges. It also explains the extreme specialization of those PhDs, whose theses are incomprehensible to normal people.

On the other, there's been a systematic push to put everyone through college, and of course some of those people go on to more advanced degrees. So given the incentives involved it's expected that more people per capita come out with a PhD.

It's a well known saying, but my mandatory HN pedantry must point out that it doesn't work because the surface area grows slower than the volume.

> we need more PhDs who are the people at those outermost edges

<spoiler> Apologies if I'm the bearer of bad news, but most PhDs stop working in science and end up working for corporations.

> there's been a systematic push to put everyone through college

Q: Why is that?

> but most PhDs stop working in science and end up working for corporations.

The bills don't pay themselves, I suppose! Especially if a PhD comes with a hefty loan to pay off.

> Q: Why is that?

I don't know if any single person could fully answer this question (and it certainly won't be me), but my guess is that those well-intentioned folks in power saw that college-educated people earn more money, and applied faulty causation. Put more people through college and they will earn more and make the country wealthier! Put everyone through college and everyone will be better off.

Hypothesis #3: Because of the Internet more democratization of information on what a PhD entails, how to apply, and how to be successful has increased the number of smart people who previously would have been interested but didn’t have enough readily available information to fully pique their interest.

Could explain the shift up since the internet.

Hypothesis #4: The work at Los Alamos to win the war on the back of PhDs popularized the notion that smart people could change the world.

Could explain the strong shift since 1940.

> Because of the Internet more democratization of information on what a PhD entails, how to apply, and how to be successful

I'd love to see a working definition of "successful" as regards to getting a PhD.

I spent the best part of 20 years recovering from getting mine, and I'm not kidding.

Sorry, my implied addition there was “how to be successful at getting accepted to a PhD.” Sounds like you were successful at that, at least!

Disclosure: also have PhD and leading a lab for of PhD students

I think not the PhDs are the problem, but the amount of papers. We just need all the PhD students to produce those papers to keep the industry going (much like a snow ball system). There is no incentive to scale down, so we keep scaling up.

The problem IMHO ist that we have scaled our methods to cope with enormous amount of mostly empirical results. P-value hacking is implicit in this system. IMHO we can throw away two thirds of all published research in many fields because it is not reliably reproducible/generalizable. If we could/would use all those PhD students to put science on better grounds that would be great. However, we expect all those PhDs to produce new results, so we get what we wished for.

> We just need all the PhD students to produce those papers to keep the industry going (much like a snow ball system).

I'm not sure we agree on the definition of "we just need" in that!

> There is no incentive to scale down, so we keep scaling up.

Scaling up waffle just produces more waffle, and no-one actually wants that. We seem unable to agree on how to judge progress in academia, so we end up counting papers. Which means everyone's trying to publish waffle.

Judging progress is easy enough. Trusting the judgment is hard, because the world is small and conflicts of interest are inevitable. People who are established experts on a topic generally know each other. Because taxpayers don't want to fund someone's research just because the applicant's friends say so, they need ways of judging the merits without the actual expertise to do so.

Bearing in mind the relatively large number of people that simply weren't the right demographic or lacked the earlier education or money to pursue a PHd in 1900 irrespective of their aptitude, you'd expect that per capita number to massively increase even before we get into universities' incentives to enroll more students

That of course can lead to both 1 and 2 (why not both, and let's not forget that smart high school kids today know things which the very best of the PhD candidates hadn't done the work of figuring out yet in 1900)

Hypothesis #3: More people for professors to offload work to.

> Hypothesis #2: The value of the qualification is dropping...

This is Goodhart's Law.

When a degree is something you have to love the subject in order to get, having the degree is a strong signal. Once the government starts handing out student loans to the average person so they can get the degree, having the degree can no longer prove you're exceptional.

The average person can't be above average. You can open up a paper mill and give everyone a piece of paper, but all that does is dilute the value of the paper.

Or we’re doing more research. A PhD is not about grading the population on a curve.

We train 3.5 times more PhD's. What we discover isn't more physics, it's that the "Mythical Man Month" is more broadly applicable than it's writer realised.

I think I agree; my take:

The point that the leading group in a field could and indeed did know each other to some extent is somewhat conflated in the piece with that particular group, who represent a very particular set of one-off extreme high achievers.

Self evidently "most physicists" are not going to measure up against a group including 17 Nobel Prize winners.

PhDs serve a different purpose now in society, but are still of value.

This is from a blog I follow.

> University students have average intelligence according to Uttl et al. They suggest the following consequences: First, universities and professors need to realize that students are no longer extraordinary but merely average, and have to adjust curricula and academic standards. Second, employers can no longer rely on applicants with university degrees to be more capable or smarter than those without degrees. Third, students need to realize that acceptance into university is no longer an invitation to join an elite group.

Were university students ever genuinely an elite group? I’d be interested to know if there’s any data to suggest historical university students were somehow more extraordinary.

In 1960, only 41% of the population had graduated from high school. (I presume not 41% of the student-age population, but 41% of the total population.) By 2022, 38% of the population had graduated from college.

Conclusion: A college degree today means roughly what a high school diploma meant in 1960 - except that it takes a lot more time and money to get.

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attai...

Sure, but why would that inherently relate to whether the graduates were smarter? There was less of a need or expectation to get college degrees, so most people didn't. Now there is, and so most people do. It's not necessarily that the smartest 7% were the college graduates.

Scientific literacy is at an all-time low (or rather it's being leveraged at an all -time high), with Reddit and TikTok regurgitating "Study finds .. " articles without linking the study nor doing due diligence on the results. The amount of non-reproducible studies on child development, child attachment are wreaking havoc on well-meaning parents being influenced by group think.

For example, the APA does a pretty good job posting recommendations and citing sources. Those sources often lead back to studies with ~2k data points, often meta-analysis or in a single area, or from a past era that is no longer relevant.

The recommendation that mothers must exclusively breastfeed for at least 6 months is built on many studies that seem rather small or homogenous, and yet this recommendation is treated as if it is a prescription that must be followed. Try bringing up this nuanced argument with an exhausted mother who is "failing" to breastfeed a starving baby.

You can take this problem and multiply it 10x when talking about psychology and child/teen mental health.

> Try bringing up this nuanced argument with an exhausted mother who is "failing" to breastfeed a starving baby.

That would be an emotional problem. 'Do you want your kid to starve or do you want to make sure you follow some scientific paper that may or may not be right?'

Framing is everything. They used emotional manipulation to get people to pay attention to them. It works both ways.

I would be the first to agree that social media platforms are evil, but now I'm curious, didn't a very similar thing happen with the yellow/local press and the local radio ?

Breastfeeding is preferred, and the vast majority of healthy mothers are able to breastfeed. Obviously, get a donor or formula if not possible. I don't need a study to tell me that food > no food.

> Scientific literacy is at an all-time low (or rather it's being leveraged at an all -time high)

I'd say your parenthetical is probably the more appropriate take. That said, in the guise of "scientific literacy", do you have any studies saying as such or is this more a general feeling on your part?

Very clever to write an article that is the very thing that it criticizes, the entryway into a certain "marketing funnel."

What I got out is this: "Good information is scarce and strong research skills are therefore increasingly valuable. Guess what, we (my consulting firm) specialize in giving just the kind of actionable advice you need."

Appropriate for the author's image to be of the ourobouros.

More charitably though, it's fine for the market to offer solutions to this problem, as long as it's not conflated with the space for "serious leisure" that mere curious nerds subsist on in all ages.

Leisure is by definition an end in itself. It just happens that without it people and societies alike cease to function well. What can we do to expand the space for serious but aimless thinking in this age?

Basic income for all postdocs, rentfree lab livng. It’s a serious downvote magnet for caste-system detractors , but consider that such a low funding level plus shame of flunking out straight tenure would be too costly for obligate status seekers. Good way to promote UBI too

It's that broad a problem?

I usually see this in battery papers, where a legit paper on some minor advance in surface chemistry is hyped into a supposed world-changing result. Electrek, or somebody in that space, should publish a "1, 5 and 10 years ago in battery hype" column. We know now that most social science papers do not describe repeatable results. In what other fields is this a problem?

Is't ok if I point out you made a typo.

The hype is part of playing the grant funding game. You need to be dishonest to hoodwink the piggy banks into bankrolling your interest in Alkenes by pretending to care about anti-cancer drugs and green energy.

I don't disagree with the article - enjoyed it. The 5th Solvay is somewhat of an outlier: majority of the folks in the famous photo were Nobel laureates or laureates to be, which must be some sort of record.

Unfortunately, everything is held back by the en(bull)shitification cycle we're in, not just academe. This seems to be an area where LLMs will make a big difference: what we think now is a flood will turn out to be the receding tide before the tsunami.

I wish people had more to say besides what makes them unhappy, followed by 'the good old days' or a remedy that's worse than the disease.

To dress complaining up in historical details and to go on for pages is ironic. Is the author not guilty of the very thing he's complaining about?

This dude's blog is a gold mine. I love the direct language. Thank you for posting this!

Seconded. I'm 64, and today I learnt I had no idea what historians do when I read https://www.benlandautaylor.com/p/how-to-learn-history

I can't find an article from him where I can fault the logic or didn't learn something new. Perhaps some are a bit wordy, by my he does write readable words.

Back to the topic on hand, I googled "How to learn history". Why? Because I now I have a fair idea of what the best introductory page on the subject is. To give Google it's due his post is the 15th result by my count, so it's discoverable if you are persistent. To give this article it's due, the top 14 hits are exactly as he described in this article - little better than SEO horseshit.

It triggered a lightbulb moment for me - a theory on how Google ranks its results. Sites that specialise in serving higher grade horseshit on a wide variety of topics are in a hand curated list, and sites in that list are ranked first.

Why do I think it's hand curated? Two reasons. Google keeps returning the same few sites. It's been puzzling me for a long while why sites Quora and wikiHow appear are at the top, when there invariably are far better resources out there. Reason one is I keep reading every metric Google used to automatically rank sites has been gamed into uselessness, so it has to be hand curated. The second is hand curated means the size must be manageable to a human. Given the shear number of topics (millions if not billions) the only way to keep it manageable is to restrict it to sites that serve a lot of topics. So www.benlandautaylor.com won't be in that list, despite being high quality. It doesn't contain enough topics. No one-horse blog would.

Finally, I've come up with a plausible explanation of why sites that clearly are little better than SEO farms keep being ranked highly, even though many of them (like Quora) are almost always worse than useless. While they are worse than useless, being only a little worse than useless is a high bar on todays internet. That question has been driving me nuts, because I'm positive no search engine likes the situation.

That said it's immediately obvious to me his pages were way better than even the highest grade of horseshit the search engines float to the top. If it's obvious to me, it will be obvious to an suitably trained AI. They are already far smarted than me in their domains. The CPU consumed by feeding a AI the entire internet regularly boggles the mind, but I guess that will change. Maybe there is some hope for internet search after all.

I don't think this is wholly wrong, but there is an alternate explanation for why a small number of physicists advanced the field so much in the early 20th century while a ton of physicists don't advance it today.

All the low hanging fruit has been picked.

All we have left today in fundamental physics is the edges of particle physics and quantum gravity, and the latter has so far proven hard to research without convenient access to a black hole or a particle accelerator the size of the Moon's orbit. Convenient access to a black hole would be so cool we even made a movie about it (Interstellar).

Outside fundamental physics a ton of these new physicists are working on important but niche problems: superconductivity, condensed matter, plasma physics, fusion, all kinds of materials science, etc. A lot of that stuff didn't exist at all back then, or only existed as a theory prediction or a proof of concept.

A similar problem exists in other hard science disciplines. It's just easiest to wrap your head around in physics because the edges of our understanding are more clear.

Soft sciences and humanities are by definition factional and open ended, so in that case more people just means more discourse.

My point is that I think more than one thing is going on, and I don't think you can attribute stagnation to a single cause.

When you make "then and now" comparisons, you have to look at the entire picture of what has changed. Single-cause analysis is almost always wrong.

> When you looked for information about how to tell if your bread is rising correctly, or about South Korean cement manufacturing, or the musical influences on Igor Stravinsky, or whatever weird thing, Google would pull up high-quality reference material, or blogs and BBS arguments among disagreeable weirdos who specialized in the subject and usually knew what they were talking about.

Going to rankly speculate the author added "musical influences on Igor Stravinsky" without doing the work of seeing what gets returned today.

Let's run "musical influences on Stravinsky" in Google:

1. Encyclopedia Britannica entry for Stravinsky. Bog standard

2. A three-year old article on Stravinsky from The Guardian. Not specifically about influences, but it does mention Rimsky-Korsakov as his teacher, so there's that

3. "Stravinsky" article from the World History Encyclopedia. Has a whole section on "Musical Style" which mentions all kinds of influences, including Debussy (who I know he copy-pasted from for the beginning of The Nightingale[1], so that checks out)

4. "Stravinsky" Wikipedia entry. Bog standard

5. 100 years of Stravinsky's influence. Got it backwards, but hey nobody's perfect

6. Some SUNY music 101 "Stravinsky" page which lists a lot of influences, including some more obscure ones Taruskin talked about (probably in his book on Stravinsky)

...

Looks pretty damned good to me.

Moral: don't pad a rule-of-three list with a musical example without first making sure you are correct.

1: Probably also transposed it, I don't have the Nuages score in front of me atm

> Looks pretty damned good to me.

These are the exact results the article is complaining about. Generic pages on major sites, whereas the interesting stuff that doesn't show up is a forum discussion by some weirdos who are experts in the topic.

If all you want is an encyclopedia article then you can skip Google and go straight to the site of the encyclopedia.

> You have to start from the assumption that it’s Out To Get You, because nine times out of ten, it is. Maybe it’s activist bullshit based around tendentiously redefining words, or maybe it’s built on fabricated medical data, or maybe it’s some kind of statistical jiggery-pokery to pull statistical significance out of unreplicable noise

Or maybe its a rant with made up claims that the past was just better™.

Were academic papers in past really better on average, or are you only reading the best ones that survived the past half century.

Is the average PhD really worse today, or are you comparing them to the top minds of the past century.

> A hundred years ago, all the important physicists knew each other and were in constant dialogue

This seems like a particularly egregious claim. It is easier than ever to communicate with almost anyone in the world in close to real time.

Is there really a solid argument to be made that the top physicists collaborated more easily 100 years ago?

Were there any other major world events happening around 1924 that may have influenced a rapid advance in physics and technology? something kind of the opposite of collaboration?

> Were academic papers in past really better on average, or are you only reading the best ones that survived the past half century.

There was both a barrier for entry issue (your paper had to be typed, illustrated, etc.) as well as an "iterated game" issue where the field was small enough that if you got a reputation for junk you would get ignored.

Both of these have collapsed, so I would definitely argue that the papers of the past were better on average.

> There was both a barrier for entry issue (your paper had to be typed, illustrated, etc.)

I don't really understand this.

The barrier to publishing academic work was (and is?) the ability to create a document?

I would argue the barrier was and is, having sufficient background knowledge to produce academic work accepted by your peers.

> the field was small enough that if you got a reputation for junk you would get ignored.

Still largely the case today. It is true that anyone can publish to personal blogs or substack and that the average quality of that largely opinionated content is low.

But academic papers (that matter) are published in very specific venues. Experts in a domain know which venue to look at and publish to. The bar to get work published in those specific venues remains much higher than substack.

Is the bar lower than in the past? Maybe.

Without someone actually looking into it we are just throwing around opinions and gut feelings.

>I tried to explain how it used to be easier to find information from good-faith experts, but I don’t think I really got the point across. Let me try again.

It's shocking to me how quick this changed as well.

>Back in 1999, few people had figured out how to take advantage of search engines that way.

Even basic rules like "mandatoryterm" or -dontshowterm were super powerful but don't even bother with that today. It'll just make your results worse.

>Worse, the weirdo specialists have a harder time finding each other.

The trick now is to use a better search engine. It's rare that I use google for search.

>What I know for sure is that when I read academic work published in 2014, I’m pretty likely roll my eyes and mutter about how no serious person would even bother with this crap and set it aside,

Author doesn't know about the 2005 conflict of interest legislation; infringing on freedom of speech technically but nobody is arguing for anything else. Medicine and social sciences has gone through a massive upheaval over this. You dont hear much about violent video games activists anymore because after the social science had to start declaring their conflict of interest the movement died. Entirely because better science displaced it.

Cholesterol being a bad thing is also a shocking change since 2005. It turns out a great deal of the science that said it was bad was pre-2005 and now since conflict of interests must be declared, dietary cholesterol basically doesnt matter. It turns out the cereal companies published false science to blame cholesterol for what they were causing.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/dietary-cholesterol-doe...

I'll postulate a semi-secret, conspiratorial reason for research: National security!!!

Uh, sure, maybe nearly all the research is junk, but tough to PROVE that it's junk and will forever remain junk. Soooo, instead, suddenly some day some research might be revolutionary, powerful enough to affect national security. E.g., one of those math profs working in number theory or modular forms, what can look like really goofy research, 2000 year old number theory questions, might suddenly break all the encryption!!! Or maybe a physics prof will work out quantum gravity, dark matter, or dark energy with big consequences.

Soooo, each country that can afford it wants to be out at the frontiers either doing that research or at least being able to understand it if some other country does it first. And if not national security, then the national economy.

Soooo, in the committee rooms and offices in Congress, maybe something like "Remember the bomb, the atom BOMB!!! We can't risk falling behind." Or, as J. B. Conant supposedly once said, "... have so many funding sources that they can never all be turned off at the same time". Sooo, have NSF, DARPA, DoE, NRL, .... Right, we can't understand the papers, but the researchers are in an intense competition, trying their best to do good research, to the extent that anyone knows what good research is. And, the profs don't get paid very well -- the research is cheap. Soooo, have grants to MIT, Harvard, Cornell, Cal Tech, etc. Have national labs, LLL, Brookhaven, etc. Pass out the money and relax that we aren't going to be blind sided by Russia, China, ....

"Besides, a fraction of the grants is taken by the colleges as overhead so that we are also supporting higher education!" I suggest that Congress can think that way!

And, in the game between the US and Russia, publishing openly is essentially a saddle point: If we don't publish, then they won't publish and we won't have their results to build on and they might get ahead of us without our knowing it.

What happened to secondary education being first about making well-rounded citizens ? And writing a thesis being about the intellectual challenge of pushing into new territory ? Should only a very very few chosen people be allowed that one ?! What is this elitist bullshit !?!

Forgive my anger, but I was expecting at least some argument against that position, but it has just been... ignored.

Finally, yeah, a ~decade ago things seemed grim on the publishing bullshit side, but now it seems like we are seeing the end of the tunnel, they even give an example towards the end. (Ditto for search engines, I would have agreed merely a year ago, but same thing with the likes of Kagi and the EU finally starting to flex its power against GAFAMs...)

I do agree that bildung should be available to everyone. However, when you're paying $90,000 a year to go to college (not a typo this year at some places) it's only fair to expect some sort of return.

If universities wish to restore the life of the mind, they should make it cheaper to pursue. That's not a jab at the faculty. That's a jab at the administrators.

I was expecting this, and I feel almost sorry for springing this trap, but this is just not a relevant concern for most people involved : while college is certainly a time when money is tight (an important part of the bildung itself I would say), most people concerned do NOT have to pay ridiculous amounts like these (and are often even being paid for attending, if their parents are poor enough) : Ivy League in particular is just a drop in the ocean with regards to the education of first world(ish) citizenry.

"... academic bullshit" is quite broad.

Since my Ph.D. is in applied math and since for a while I was a college prof, I have a view:

A common criterion for publishing research was that the work was "new, correct, and significant".

Then what should be the criterion for a Ph.D. dissertation? Easily and commonly enough, "new, correct, and significant", or "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication".

Rest of the criteria for a Ph.D.? Good background of knowledge in the field, both for research and for teaching. Sooooo, have qualifying exams (QE). The QE I took were not easy. Only about 20% passed. I was the best in the class on 4 of the 5 exams, but what I did for all 4 was due heavily to independent study, 3 before grad school and the 4th in a summer during grad school.

So, in what I saw, a Ph.D. was not easy, and there was no glut of graduates.

By the way, I paid nothing to the university.

Then, due ONLY to help my wife, who suffered terribly for her Ph.D., I took a faculty position. They wanted research, and anything published in any academic journal was sufficient. No need to get financial grants.

My attitude: (1) The research they were asking for, and from the other profs were getting, was junk. (2) I wasn't getting paid enough: Really, brought two cars and left with the same two. Didn't have enough to buy a house and start a family. Net, LOST money. So, I had no respect for that career direction.

It does appear that broadly there has been a big change, at least in US academics: Somehow it is popular to insist that all profs do research -- just teaching is no longer sufficient. Soooo, we get a lot of papers published. Papers? You want papers? Okay, we'll give you papers ....

My summary view: To buy a house, support a family, have a good, secure life, need to look at the US economy, say, more closely than just stay in school, get a Ph.D., accept a position as an assistant prof. E.g., at present the US has a lot of $1 million houses: It appears that few of them were bought just from earnings as an assistant prof, and the people in those houses found some sources of money better than just such a college prof salary.

This rant is not worthy of the front page of HN.

Its all, "Make Science Great Again" "because believe you me, back in the day things were great"; now not so much. Some are good, but its hard to know, cuz but most are lying stupid rats, coming over, looking to bilk you."

Nope. Not buying the outrage.

Yeah, spam is a thing and there's obviously more spammy journals around now.

But when someone starts ranting insisting that standards in papers were universally better across many fields in the middle of last century you wonder about whether he has the breadth and depth of knowledge to make that claim, and and then in the comments someone asks him who the greatest philosopher of this century is and he replies "Eliezer Yudkowsky"!

'Most influential', TFA's actual words, is not 'greatest'. Everyone ends up reading something of Yud's at some point, which is more than can be said of the people who would probably qualify more. That's more or less the entire thesis of TFA.

Fair, 'most influential' isn't necessarily 'greatest', but if he'd wanted to elaborate that Yud was an example of someone who qualified mainly by being visible and prolific and very accessible online when there were far more deserving candidates I'm sure he'd have done so

I disagree with some of the later points the author brings up - the sentiment of "SEO is ruining searching for things" is certainly agreeable, but I find the connection to academia a bit more specious and extreme.

> Today it would be effectively impossible for a physicist to personally know all the other top physicists. In the U.S., the number of physics PhDs awarded per year grew from under 20 in 1900, to nearly 2,000 by 2018. Imagine trying to get all the leading theorists together for a group photo today.

What is the point here? It is a fact that knowledge expands and grows. If you collect all of the "top physicists", by some magical metric, you get physicists from vastly different subfields who probably wouldn't understand each others research. This is a good thing! We understand so much more about physics that you have entire sub-sub-fields warranting the same attention as quantum mechanics did at its beginnings.

> A doctorate just means much less, now, than it did. The fraction of physicists who can generate genuine new knowledge and insight is fairly small. Most of today’s physicists would not measure up to the standards that the field held for itself when that photo was taken in 1927.

This is... frustrating. Of course if you compare to the mythologized greats of physics you won't be as good. That doesn't mean what you are working on isn't new, or interesting, or important. The author seems to want every PhD to discover quantum mechanics. But that's already been done. Also, I would pushback on the author having the ability to judge whether a physicist is able to generate new knowledge.

> The dilution of the top experts doesn’t only mean that it’s harder for you and me and the New York Times to tell the first-rate researchers apart from the sea of mediocrities.

Work from physicists from the early to mid 1900s is of course going to seen to be on average better than the average work in physics today - we aren't going to still be looking at the stuff that was below average/didn't work out! There is an inherent survivorship bias in what ideas survive 100 years, but that doesn't mean that all ideas from that time were of equal importance. Also, if you are looking at the probably greatest period of advancement in physics, as the author seems to be, given their prior focus on physics, of course modern day stuff is going to pale in comparison. But of course if you compare to the 99th percentile everything else seems lesser.

> It’s also harder for those on the cutting edge to find each other.

This is just untrue - the people working in these areas know which journals/conferences are higher quality and which are worse, and are in direct communication with their colleagues. As an outsider attempting to peer in, yes, you won't have this knowledge. But the conclusion from that isn't that the experts also struggle with this, the conclusion is the hidden knowledge should be made more open.

> When an important new theory is published, instead of being circulated and torn apart by the two dozen people whose opinions matter, it’s sent off to some nameless apparatchik for the hollow bureaucratic ritual of peer review, so that the reviewer can demand bogus citations for himself and his friends.

I don't see where the author is going on this - the "circulated and torn apart" step still happens, though perhaps less violently. Academics do not see a peer reviewed article and assume "this is a good article, I will accept it at face value", they read over it, they might discuss it with colleagues, the authors presents at conferences, etc. Peer review is not the end of the process, its just a gatekeep to prevent the lowest quality from making it through. Yes, there are problems with the process, but certainly not enough to warrant the disdain the author shows. Furthermore, preprints are a common feature of some fields. If your theory is truly groundbreaking, post it to the arXiv, and it will eventually make its way around. Perelman's work is only on the arXiv, for instance.

I hope my points make some degree of sense.

We get it. It's been garbage for over 6 years. Possibly edging on a decade. Yes Google is aware and complicit. No they're not going to change it. Why? Because it PRINTS MONEY for them.

Google is trying desperately to lock down Chrome to prevent others from putting in filters to remove the junk. Hence all the new rules on add-ons.

Are there any other search engines that do better on finding this long tail stuff? Using the "musical influences on Stravinsky" search as an example, both Kagi and Marginalia give me mostly encyclopedia pages and generic sites selling me stuff, just like Google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com