Comment by butILoveLife | Hacker News Reader

Comment by butILoveLife | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>The first thing an academic does is check where a paper is published, before even reading it. It's a crutch.

This is actually what ruined my respect for Academia.

My Science PhD buddy looked at the journal title and the claim, then said: "Its true!"

I look at him with horror. Who cares about the journal, I want to know data and methodology.

I've basically never forgiven Academia since this. I see even Ivys put out bad research and journals will publish bad research (Replication crisis and the ivy fake psychology studies)

For outsiders, there is a prestige to being a PhD or working as a professor. Now that I'm mid career and lived through the previous events I mentioned + seeing who stuck with academia... These are your C grade performers. They didnt get hired by industry, so they stayed in school. They are so protective of their artificial rank because they cannot compete in Industry. Its like being the cool person on the tennis team. They are locally cool, but not globally cool.

> This is actually what ruined my respect for Academia.

Spoken like someone who never went through grad school at a competitive R1 program

It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics. It's about the same for professors too.

We already paid our dues by helping peer review (for free) a half dozen papers for each one we submitted. Why should we be expected to review random papers on arxiv too...?

I went to an R1 university. Most students did not have a 60-80 hour grind. If they did, it was because of an overbearing advisor. Years later, those students are not ahead of those who had a more relaxed advisor.

And chances are: Those overbearing advisors are very invested in the current system.

it varies enormously by field.

in CS you will have intense grind weeks around conference deadlines and a more manageable but challenging pace of life otherwise.

in wet lab science you live by the schedule set by your experiments, which often involves intense hours.

>Why should we be expected to review random papers on arxiv too...?

The GP is not saying to review each paper you read or cite. They're complaining that a colleague accepted a claim after just reading the title and where the paper was published. Between that and doing a full review there's surely a world of options.

The problem is not that he was not willing to review it. It was that he was willing to conclude it was true. If he had said "that is interesting" or "that is plausible" or whatever, that is fine. It is concluding it is true that is the problem.

I don’t think folks in academia have come to terms with how much the above attitude has completely and nearly entirely undermined the credibility of the entire scientific and academic community in the eyes of the general public.

You don’t need a degree to understand how much utter junk science is being published by those who think they are superior to you. Just read a few actual papers end to end and look at the data vs conclusions and it becomes totally obvious very rapidly that you cannot “trust the science” since it’s rarely actual science being done any longer.

The academic community has utterly failed at understanding they needed to cull this behavior early and mercilessly. They did not, and it will be generations at best to rebuild the trust they once had. If they ever figure out they need to.

Things are going to get much worse before they get better. You can’t take any published paper at face value any longer without going direct to primary sources and bouncing it off an expert in the space you still trust to give you the actual truth.

I fear you are right here, and that the problem is far more dire than much of academia realizes. I know enough highly intelligent people (some even with family / spouses in academia, surprisingly) that are otherwise very e.g. left / liberal / progressive and open, that are still basically saying academia needs to be gutted / burned down.

I've no idea what the actual stats are on faith in academia overall today, but I don't think it is looking good.

On the whole you should rarely read papers, you want to read a whole literature in an area. Academics embedded in the field can do this easily. Academics outside of an area know to do this, and to bounce things off an expert to make sure you have the context and aren't over-indexing on a flashy result. Everybody learns the painful lesson in grad school to not just read a paper and believe everything will work as it says.

Somehow the general public and policymakers got the idea that if a paper gets published in any non-fake journal, this is an official endorsement that it's 100% correct, everything in it can be read in isolation, and it's safe to use all claims in the paper to direct policy immediately.

I think academia is partially to blame for encouraging people to believe this rather than insisting on explaining the nuances of how to interpret published research. On the other hand, nobody wants to hear a message that things are nuanced, and they will have to do costly hard work to get at the truth.

I think a world where "you can take any published paper at face value...without going direct to primary sources and bouncing it off an expert in the space" would be great, but it never existed, and it's just fundamentally impossible.

I wouldn't be surprised if the parent's complaint about his academic buddy who didn't read the paper's methods yet declared their findings as true, had misunderstood why his friend did so... which could have well been due to their additional knowledge about similar past findings/studies.

Go read /r/LawyerTalk and enjoy the horror of the dawning realization that this is a lot of professionals. I think it's an issue that stems from getting too deep into the minutiae of the technical and cultural matters of one's field; you become a really good scientist, or lawyer, or SWE (by the standards of scientists and lawyers and SWEs), and end up coming to conclusions that everyone outside the bubble looks at and says, "That's absolutely asinine." Well, laymen just don't understand the details, you know? (Even though the whole point of these professions is to provide services to laymen, fix problems laymen come to them with, and guide laymen to make practical and logical decisions when a $500/hr appointment isn't called for.)

These people take themselves too seriously, and other people only take them seriously when there are material ramifications for not doing so. Otherwise, they're viewed as pompous busy-bodies and don't do themselves any favors by playing to the role.

>It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics.

You know what else works really hard? A washing machine. Hard work alone doesnt create value. I could give you a spoon and tell you to dig a hole, or I can teach you how to use a Digger.

Some things are hard because you overcomplicate them. Some things are hard by their very nature.

Unless you are a Claude Shannon type, adding fundamental new knowledge to humanity's corpus is generally actually hard - at least in science & engineering. If you feel differently, I look forward to reading your groundbreaking papers!

Weirdly, I do have my contributions to science. I run a pretty popular blog, 250k-1M users per year.

Academia will refer to my stuff. Various levels of the US government use my data.

To be honest, I think I got lucky + I was a (hardcore) Stoic for a decade + my hobby was scientific.

> You know what else works really hard? A washing machine. Hard work alone doesnt create value.

My washing machine creates a lot of value for me. The time it saves me is incredibly valuable.

Most machines that work really hard are valuable because they free up time.

This wasn’t the clever burn you thought it was.

Its a line from National Lampoon's Xmas Vacation.

Value is what you're willing to pay for something.

Laundromats aren't particularly profitable businesses.

Laundromats are the best business there is and are extremely profitable and seldom to never go out of business - you should look this up, it is fairly fascinating.

The laundromats around here closed down years ago. Not a characteristic of extremely profitable businesses.

There are a couple of strip malls nearby that have vacant rentables, vacant for years and years. Nobody has thought to put an extremely profitable laundromat in any of them.

This is anecdotal - look this up outside of your strip malls. It has the some of the lowest failure rates of just about any business and 20-35% ROI

I've heard that laundromats are used for money laundering. This may explain their profitability, but it's a front, not a business.

Complete hogwash of a comment, based almost entirely on your limited experiences, to denigrate academic scientists.

If you even knew these people, you'd know that most that remain in academia never considered industry in the first place. These people were not rejected by industry. In fact, it is the other way around. *They rejected industry*. They did so, despite knowing they'd make more money, but chose to remain in academia because they wanted to spend their life pursuing research topics that interested them with independence. Sometimes they feel the fool when money is tight and the hours are relentlessly long, but never have I seen it happen because they were rejected by industry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com