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Suggest a title change, since almost none of the comments address the contents of the article. E.g. "Large cash bounties paid for highly-ranked journal article

Suggest a title change, since almost none of the comments address the contents of the article. E.g. "Large cash bounties paid for highly-ranked journal articles in China and other Asian and middle eastern countries". Most comments are answering the question by stating the traditional reward. The article is about how very different rewards are appearing.

joe_the_user 9y ago
Well then let me bite on the question of the problem with such high payouts. "The next question is whether there’s anything wrong with this idea, and if so, what. It makes me uncomfortable, but that’s not the appropriate measure. As long as the journals themselves keep up their editorial standards, the main effect would seem to be that their editorial staffs must get an awful lot of China-derived manuscripts whose authors are hoping to get lucky." Well, I'd offer that this analysis ignores how science has historically worked. Essentially, science has involved something like a "club" of individuals who can be trusted to make a sincere effort to find the true. Certainly, the use of exact instruments and the theoretical reproducibility of experiments were important but also dealing with individuals are reliable, systematic and trustworthy was an important thing. Which is to say that science journals aren't designed to filter out articles which are wholly fraudulent, a tissue of lies cleverly created to mimic an actual scientific breakthrough. With a clever enough person, naturally, there is no way to see fraud from the article, one would have to lab at the laboratory, attempt to reproduce the experiment and so-forth (and reproducibility was the key historically, most experiments weren't actually reproduced and no journal is going to maintain a lab to reproduce submitted articles - except perhaps in CS where a program might submittable). And there you have it. The lab coated scientist is a movie character but be scientist, as least once, was more than to engage in some activities. It was to be part of the "broad march of progress" where the lesser-scientist still helped move things forward by small, honest iterations of basic research (and this "club" arguably was disproportionately and unfairly white, male and first-world but every process has its weaknesses). A move which makes the pursuit of science a purely adversarial affair, by consigning poor performs to absolute poverty and giving fairly vast rewards to good performs is going to break the club everywhere. And the implications of the end of science as an idealist pursuit vary from field to field. Fraud in CS or math might be impossible or might be rendered impossible with suitable measures. But in social sciences or other fields, things could get nasty indeed.
- Retric 9y ago
  In practice math papers are basically arguments for something. It's possible to make a bad faith argument by ignoring that A does not imply B and just hoping nobody notices. You can even structure thing to be intentionally misleading. Honestly, I suspect people fudge thing in math more than you might think.
  - gertef 9y ago
    Peer-review is what caused people to notice.
    - Retric 9y ago
      Sure, but consider you just spent months working on something and your giving up. You can toss that work away or gamble that nobody notices the error. Further, if they catch something then you have not really lost anything at that point anyway.
  - joe_the_user 9y ago
    How reliable math proofs are is pretty tangential to my argument above - I don't actually have any attachment there not being any fudging modern math proofs - notice I said "fraud might be" made impossible in these fields. That said, a tool like coq will deal with any inaccuracies as things good forward. Some portion of math has supposedly been verified with it. But, of course, I haven't run the program, just read about it. So still - no dog in that particular race. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq
- averagewall 9y ago
  What's wrong with poor performance leading to poverty? There seem to be too many scientists, at least publishing too many papers. Wouldn't it be better if a subset of them quit and did more productive work instead. That would also ease the pressure on publication and fraud for the remaining ones. I don't believe there are really hero superstars in science. Sure, there's a gradient of ability, but just because you happened to be the first one to discover something important doesn't mean you'll always be the best at future discoveries. There must be a lot that depends on the environment they work in.

joe_the_user 9y ago

Well then let me bite on the question of the problem with such high payouts. "The next question is whether there’s anything wrong with this idea, and if so, what. It makes me uncomfortable, but that’s not the appropriate measure. As long as the journals themselves keep up their editorial standards, the main effect would seem to be that their editorial staffs must get an awful lot of China-derived manuscripts whose authors are hoping to get lucky." Well, I'd offer that this analysis ignores how science has historically worked. Essentially, science has involved something like a "club" of individuals who can be trusted to make a sincere effort to find the true. Certainly, the use of exact instruments and the theoretical reproducibility of experiments were important but also dealing with individuals are reliable, systematic and trustworthy was an important thing. Which is to say that science journals aren't designed to filter out articles which are wholly fraudulent, a tissue of lies cleverly created to mimic an actual scientific breakthrough. With a clever enough person, naturally, there is no way to see fraud from the article, one would have to lab at the laboratory, attempt to reproduce the experiment and so-forth (and reproducibility was the key historically, most experiments weren't actually reproduced and no journal is going to maintain a lab to reproduce submitted articles - except perhaps in CS where a program might submittable). And there you have it. The lab coated scientist is a movie character but be scientist, as least once, was more than to engage in some activities. It was to be part of the "broad march of progress" where the lesser-scientist still helped move things forward by small, honest iterations of basic research (and this "club" arguably was disproportionately and unfairly white, male and first-world but every process has its weaknesses). A move which makes the pursuit of science a purely adversarial affair, by consigning poor performs to absolute poverty and giving fairly vast rewards to good performs is going to break the club everywhere. And the implications of the end of science as an idealist pursuit vary from field to field. Fraud in CS or math might be impossible or might be rendered impossible with suitable measures. But in social sciences or other fields, things could get nasty indeed.

Retric 9y ago
In practice math papers are basically arguments for something. It's possible to make a bad faith argument by ignoring that A does not imply B and just hoping nobody notices. You can even structure thing to be intentionally misleading. Honestly, I suspect people fudge thing in math more than you might think.
- gertef 9y ago
  Peer-review is what caused people to notice.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Sure, but consider you just spent months working on something and your giving up. You can toss that work away or gamble that nobody notices the error. Further, if they catch something then you have not really lost anything at that point anyway.
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  How reliable math proofs are is pretty tangential to my argument above - I don't actually have any attachment there not being any fudging modern math proofs - notice I said "fraud might be" made impossible in these fields. That said, a tool like coq will deal with any inaccuracies as things good forward. Some portion of math has supposedly been verified with it. But, of course, I haven't run the program, just read about it. So still - no dog in that particular race. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq
averagewall 9y ago
What's wrong with poor performance leading to poverty? There seem to be too many scientists, at least publishing too many papers. Wouldn't it be better if a subset of them quit and did more productive work instead. That would also ease the pressure on publication and fraud for the remaining ones. I don't believe there are really hero superstars in science. Sure, there's a gradient of ability, but just because you happened to be the first one to discover something important doesn't mean you'll always be the best at future discoveries. There must be a lot that depends on the environment they work in.