4 ms·

Is the author against excellence in general, or is he just against the corrosion of the word excellence by its proliferate use?

by progman 10y ago

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
I think partially the authors are pulling our legs, and partly they're pointing out that academia's current usage of the word "excellence" commits a Fundamental Attribution Error by attributing the desirable qualities of research to an innate individual trait of the researcher rather than to methodological rigor and a good knowledge of math. In human words, much of academia now talks about "excellence" to mean "extremely horribly steep competition for jobs", which amounts to pretending that the Best of the Best of the Best individual academic laborers can and should produce the Best of the Best of the Best research results out of some shining individual genius rather than because they had a good way to check whether theories are right or wrong before they published and their reviewers could also check and other researchers could also replicate the results. In even more human words, "excellence" has become the academic equivalent of "success". It denotes that society's reward mechanisms have rewarded you a lot, without specifying anything at all that you actually needed to do to deserve all that rewarding.
- stevedonovan 10y ago
  Fair enough, although one could argue that there's also a lot of fetishization of that methodology (e.g. this is Science because it _looks_ like Science). I suppose we are after all monkeys and look at both X and Y when evaluating 'X says Y'. As for individual track records, it is true that some researchers are good racehorses and worth betting on. That's the common meaning of excellence.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >As for individual track records, it is true that some researchers are good racehorses and worth betting on. That's the common meaning of excellence. Sure, but the point is that almost all science consists of plowing fields, not racing. If you only hire racehorses, you're leaving the fields unplanted by the workhorses. Aaaaand agricultural metaphors get inaccurate very quickly, but oh well.
    - stevedonovan 10y ago
      Actually that's almost my favourite agricultural metaphor about 'normal' science; it's like subsistence farming and everyone has their little turf to tend.
- gwbas1c 10y ago
  I made it to about page 16. This was where the paper basically pointed out that no one gets published for confirming or denying results of a previous publication. Reproducibility is needed for science.

Is the author against excellence in general, or is he just against the corrosion of the word excellence by its proliferate use?

by progman 10y ago

Is the author against excellence in general, or is he just against the corrosion of the word excellence by its proliferate use?

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

I think partially the authors are pulling our legs, and partly they're pointing out that academia's current usage of the word "excellence" commits a Fundamental Attribution Error by attributing the desirable qualities of research to an innate individual trait of the researcher rather than to methodological rigor and a good knowledge of math. In human words, much of academia now talks about "excellence" to mean "extremely horribly steep competition for jobs", which amounts to pretending that the Best of the Best of the Best individual academic laborers can and should produce the Best of the Best of the Best research results out of some shining individual genius rather than because they had a good way to check whether theories are right or wrong before they published and their reviewers could also check and other researchers could also replicate the results. In even more human words, "excellence" has become the academic equivalent of "success". It denotes that society's reward mechanisms have rewarded you a lot, without specifying anything at all that you actually needed to do to deserve all that rewarding.

stevedonovan 10y ago
Fair enough, although one could argue that there's also a lot of fetishization of that methodology (e.g. this is Science because it _looks_ like Science). I suppose we are after all monkeys and look at both X and Y when evaluating 'X says Y'. As for individual track records, it is true that some researchers are good racehorses and worth betting on. That's the common meaning of excellence.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >As for individual track records, it is true that some researchers are good racehorses and worth betting on. That's the common meaning of excellence. Sure, but the point is that almost all science consists of plowing fields, not racing. If you only hire racehorses, you're leaving the fields unplanted by the workhorses. Aaaaand agricultural metaphors get inaccurate very quickly, but oh well.
  - stevedonovan 10y ago
    Actually that's almost my favourite agricultural metaphor about 'normal' science; it's like subsistence farming and everyone has their little turf to tend.
gwbas1c 10y ago
I made it to about page 16. This was where the paper basically pointed out that no one gets published for confirming or denying results of a previous publication. Reproducibility is needed for science.