3 ms·

These types of arguments should be made by peer reviewers. Addressing these makes the paper (and research) stronger. Unfortunately, there is a lot of internal

by vilda 11y ago

These types of arguments should be made by peer reviewers. Addressing these makes the paper (and research) stronger. Unfortunately, there is a lot of internal corruption in academia, which makes this feedback ineffective. If you apply for a grant, you already have to outline results of our research. Heather Sarsons, the author, is a doctoral fellow in the "Inequality and Social Policy program". She is paid to find inequality. If she won't find any, she would be unsuccessful. The same holds for colleagues--who actually do peer review. They are on the same ship. It's not a critique of this work, but the overall climate in academia. About 80% of papers in health science was found to be unreproducible. Guess why.

omginternets 11y ago
>It's not a critique of this work, but the overall climate in academia. I think it's both. Contentious though this may be, I think that the reproductibility problems in academia invite us to consider the idea that we may be hiring political activists to do research.
littletimmy 11y ago
To bolster your comment, let me add that Economics as a field is particularly corrupt with regards to how much the reputation of your institution counts for jobs/publications. For example, the leading journal of economics that is "Quarterly Journal of Economics" has 50% of it's articles only from Harvard and MIT. That means 2 schools out of the hundreds who do economics dominate the leading journal. Although Harvard+MIT are good, by no means are they THAT much better over Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton etc. It is obvious that the reviewers are accepting their own people (QJE is a Harvard journal) over other people. The comparable figure for Physics is something like the top 100-odd schools produce the half of the research. That seems like a much fairer distribution. Take the inherent fuzziness of social science research, compound it with prestige gaming, compound with the impossibility of reporting a negative result, and what you get is shoddy research.

by vilda 11y ago

omginternets 11y ago

>It's not a critique of this work, but the overall climate in academia. I think it's both. Contentious though this may be, I think that the reproductibility problems in academia invite us to consider the idea that we may be hiring political activists to do research.

littletimmy 11y ago

To bolster your comment, let me add that Economics as a field is particularly corrupt with regards to how much the reputation of your institution counts for jobs/publications. For example, the leading journal of economics that is "Quarterly Journal of Economics" has 50% of it's articles only from Harvard and MIT. That means 2 schools out of the hundreds who do economics dominate the leading journal. Although Harvard+MIT are good, by no means are they THAT much better over Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton etc. It is obvious that the reviewers are accepting their own people (QJE is a Harvard journal) over other people. The comparable figure for Physics is something like the top 100-odd schools produce the half of the research. That seems like a much fairer distribution. Take the inherent fuzziness of social science research, compound it with prestige gaming, compound with the impossibility of reporting a negative result, and what you get is shoddy research.