3 ms·

Some days ago there was a post here on HN about a post doc who failed to get tenure. And every other comment was like: “What did he expect, he had much less th

Some days ago there was a post here on HN about a post doc who failed to get tenure. And every other comment was like: “What did he expect, he had much less than the usual two papers a year.” So it seems that even here on HN, the mindset of quantity over quality still persists.

thomasz 8y ago
Those were not normative statements.
- konschubert 8y ago
  That's possible of course.
baxtr 8y ago
The problem really is: there is no alternative (which I know of). Having a number of papers in well known journals is everything we have to gauge the quality of people that look for a life time position. It’s sad but true
- pas 8y ago
  No, the number of papers is an okay metric, thr problem is that journals don't like to publish honest negative results
  - Jeff_Brown 8y ago
    There are a few journals that will promise to publish your results based entirely on your pre-registered plan -- e.g. whether or not you find the correlation you were looking for. In the long term, it seems like journals that publish lots of falsified papers should be punished, and journals that don't (e.g. because of a judge-upon-pre-registration policy) should crowd them out.
    - pas 8y ago
      Pre-registration is great, and I think it even helps researchers/scientists/post-docs to submit something (it doesn't have to be perfect, after all, it's just an experiment design, and they don't have to worry about massaging the data to have promising results to report) and then stick to the topic, and then carry out the experiment as well as they can, and gather as much high quality & fidelity data as they can, and do the analysis according to the plan, and then report it. No extra pressure to think about how to frame what you "found". Though this will inevitably lead to the problem that grant boards face, that it'll be a lot harder to differentiate between proposed experiments. And it'll be even harder to do boring stuff. (So if we assume all submitted plans are sound, they have to publish them all. Though then we'll have journals based on how strict they are with experiment design requirements, 1 sigma, 2 sigma, 5 sigma, etc.)
hprotagonist 8y ago
that author’s problem was that they had been a postdoc for 23 years. That duration alone raises fatal red flags.
- konschubert 8y ago
  It's possible you're right, but that's not what people were saying IIRC.
  - throwawaymath 8y ago
    That's exactly what they were saying. Go read the thread again. They were being prescriptive of academic careers, not descriptive of the author's inherent merit as a researcher.
    - hprotagonist 8y ago
      and to recurse a layer, i’m being descriptive of the prescriptivists that i know to exist and i easily believe did that guy in.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
It seemed obvious to me that those comments weren’t extolling any merit of the “two papers per year” heuristic, but instead were just cynically resigned to the fact that that’s just the reality of it (good or bad) and so someone pursuing tenure has to be planning on dealing with being evaluated that way (even if it’s a bad practice generally).
throwawaymath 8y ago
No...that's not what it seems. I remember reading all the comments in that HN thread on Friday. The top comments were dispassionately explaining the reality of academic career trajectories. That's a basic reporting of facts, not a normative claim that quantity is better than quality. They did not themselves say you need to publish more often to be a good professor; rather they discussed the incentives that lead this to be the practical reality of the field.

thomasz 8y ago

Those were not normative statements.

konschubert 8y ago
That's possible of course.

baxtr 8y ago

The problem really is: there is no alternative (which I know of). Having a number of papers in well known journals is everything we have to gauge the quality of people that look for a life time position. It’s sad but true

pas 8y ago
No, the number of papers is an okay metric, thr problem is that journals don't like to publish honest negative results
- Jeff_Brown 8y ago
  There are a few journals that will promise to publish your results based entirely on your pre-registered plan -- e.g. whether or not you find the correlation you were looking for. In the long term, it seems like journals that publish lots of falsified papers should be punished, and journals that don't (e.g. because of a judge-upon-pre-registration policy) should crowd them out.
  - pas 8y ago
    Pre-registration is great, and I think it even helps researchers/scientists/post-docs to submit something (it doesn't have to be perfect, after all, it's just an experiment design, and they don't have to worry about massaging the data to have promising results to report) and then stick to the topic, and then carry out the experiment as well as they can, and gather as much high quality & fidelity data as they can, and do the analysis according to the plan, and then report it. No extra pressure to think about how to frame what you "found". Though this will inevitably lead to the problem that grant boards face, that it'll be a lot harder to differentiate between proposed experiments. And it'll be even harder to do boring stuff. (So if we assume all submitted plans are sound, they have to publish them all. Though then we'll have journals based on how strict they are with experiment design requirements, 1 sigma, 2 sigma, 5 sigma, etc.)

hprotagonist 8y ago

that author’s problem was that they had been a postdoc for 23 years. That duration alone raises fatal red flags.

konschubert 8y ago
It's possible you're right, but that's not what people were saying IIRC.
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  That's exactly what they were saying. Go read the thread again. They were being prescriptive of academic careers, not descriptive of the author's inherent merit as a researcher.
  - hprotagonist 8y ago
    and to recurse a layer, i’m being descriptive of the prescriptivists that i know to exist and i easily believe did that guy in.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

It seemed obvious to me that those comments weren’t extolling any merit of the “two papers per year” heuristic, but instead were just cynically resigned to the fact that that’s just the reality of it (good or bad) and so someone pursuing tenure has to be planning on dealing with being evaluated that way (even if it’s a bad practice generally).

throwawaymath 8y ago

No...that's not what it seems. I remember reading all the comments in that HN thread on Friday. The top comments were dispassionately explaining the reality of academic career trajectories. That's a basic reporting of facts, not a normative claim that quantity is better than quality. They did not themselves say you need to publish more often to be a good professor; rather they discussed the incentives that lead this to be the practical reality of the field.