7 ms·

She is doing peer review. There is nothing new about this. The publish or perish culture is new and it's eating away the foundation that our civilization is bui

She is doing peer review. There is nothing new about this. The publish or perish culture is new and it's eating away the foundation that our civilization is built on. If you can't trust science to be accurate you can't trust engineering to work. If you can't trust engineering to work planes fall out of the sky, ships sink and buildings collapse. After that you're back to the 17th century. We should have a lot less science done better. The current number of people being graduated as scientists is completely unsustainable. The number should be cut down by 10 to 100 times for the current funding.

eecc 7y ago
I was agreeing 100% to this post until I hit the last two sentences. WTF, are you out of your mind? Are you suggesting we should allow less people to graduate in order to fix the problem? Sorry for the ad-hominem but this it absolute folly. If there’s too much competition for funding the solution is not to further limit access to scientific profession but to increase funding for Chrissake! The mere fact that there’s so many graduates is literally living proof that there’s an enormous, yet wasted potential for scientific research and discovery. Get your logic in order please.
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  I see so many people follow the academia career trail not because they have a longing to do research, but because they have no idea what else to do with their lives and their professors think it's a good idea. Maybe culling the herd a bit would improve its quality. Maybe being forced out of the profession for misconduct would help prevent it. Maybe the bar needs to be raised a bit for entry so there's less competition and less pressure to cheat.
- kennek 7y ago
  I don't want to speak for the OP, but maybe they meant we should be OK with failing people. At least in the US, if you show up to class, attempt to do the homework, and take the exams you are pretty much guaranteed to get your degree. I see this in graduate programs as well (although not the top programs like CMU or Standford). I even saw it when my wife went through med school - many of her peers partied, did horribly, even got caught cheating, but because they were spending 250k on that education no one ever failed out. I think we should set standards and not be afraid to uphold them. This will probably result in fewer scientists, but maybe it will become clear where we are failing them earlier in their education and allow us to improve that process.
  - Ancalagon 7y ago
    Actually I would argue this is also a thing in top programs (maybe moreso than lower ones) due to grade inflation to improve the perception of those schools.
- munin 7y ago
  How do you decide which scientists to pay? Pay them all? Then everyone becomes a “scientist” but does no work and draws a free paycheck. Pay the ones that produce good work? What is good work? Right now, that is decided by number of papers. That metric is gamed to death, that is what publish or perish culture did. Choose any other metric, it will be gamed too. What if the PhD meant something such that having it was enough? That was all you needed, then you would just get paid to do science. Such a gatekeepeing would require graduating a lot fewer PhDs. How to do that is open: admit fewer? Or psd fewer? If the latter, maybe master out a lot more? Anyone that makes it through gets a guaranteed paycheck, but almost no one makes it through. Where you are mistaken is that there are a large number of graduates because there is a large demand for research. There isn’t. A given professor needs N papers to get tenure. Say that N = c*k for c researchers and k papers. N is so large that c must be >2, so for the professor to get tenure, they need assistants. Where do they come from? Graduate students. What do those students do when they graduate? The professor doesn’t care because they have tenure now. Research funding has been decreasing over time, which means N increases, which, counter-intuitively, means c increases, which starts a negative feedback loop because the amount of researchers competing for funding increases while the amount of funding available decreases, still further increasing the number of graduate students needed. That explains what you see.
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  >WTF, are you out of your mind? I was doing a PhD in high energy experimental physics until I finally notice that the majority of my peers were not doing science, they were padding a resume. Today we could stop doing high energy physics, both theory and experiments, for 50 years and we would not actually retard the progress of the field. We lack the engineering to build experiments better than the ones we have for any sane price and we are sitting around counting angels on pins. The brainpower that we are wasting on un-rigorous mathematics could be much better spent in any number of fields. I dare you to read 100 papers in any field that you are familiar with and tell me that 95 of the papers aren't there just because someone needed to publish something. I've talked to people in astronomy, genetics, mechanical engineering and computer science and they all say the same thing. We don't need more science, we need better science. The simplest way to do that is to do less of it. We won't even be hurting progress because you will be able to trust it, unlike today where if you try and synthesize an experiment from three papers you're pretty much guaranteed it won't work because the papers are either fraudulent, p-hacked, flat out wrong or not even wrong.
  - pauljurczak 7y ago
    > We don't need more science, we need better science. Exactly. We have to increase signal to noise ratio. I'm trying to stay current with progress in Computer Vision and the amount of junk being published is overwhelming. I'm pretty sure it's the same in many other disciplines.
    - pacman128 7y ago
      Ex-prof here. The whole publish or perish mentality is a big problem. How many good papers can a researcher produce a year? Way less than they are expected to in the academic world.
  - eecc 7y ago
    I suspect it’s more to do with the publish or perish and funding dearth combination. Departments need a blockbuster discoveries just to stay open, it’s obvious where the incentive goes. Also, none of the underlings will ever think of questioning - let alone reviewing - the results. Their career, their debt repayment plans, their income would be railroaded the moment they stop to think at what they’re doing. In this Mad Max scenario who’s going to make science and who’s just coasting in survival mode?
- pauljurczak 7y ago
  > The mere fact that there’s so many graduates is literally living proof that there’s an enormous, yet wasted potential for scientific research and discovery. I don't see a proof in this statement - all I see is a belief. Many people believe that a sheer number of people engaged in professional science and requisite "publish or perish" job description is the cause of decreasing quality of scientific publications. Increasing the fraction of population with PhD have to run into Bell Curve limitations at some point.
- dexen 7y ago
  >Are you suggesting we should allow less people to graduate in order to fix the problem? Yes of course. As per "The Mythical Man-Month"[1] adding more people to a project doesn't speed id up - quite the opposite, slows it down. Right now we have huge overhead in training and communication. Low s/n ratio follows. You can fix that gatekeeping science a bit better - pick more talented, better educated, harder working candidates, and train & finance & supply them better. -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
  - buzzkillington 7y ago
    >Right now we have huge overhead in training and communication. Low s/n ratio follows. You can fix that gatekeeping science a bit better - pick more talented, better educated, harder working candidates, and train & finance & supply them better. None of that. A lottery of everyone who can pass a minimum literacy exam in their field. Looking at the luminaries of any field to a very good approximation none of them are "more talented, better educated, harder working candidates", in fact being lazy, combative and self taught is usually a better predictor for ground breaking discoveries. The people who you would pick are already the ones in academia and they are the ones who created the replication crisis.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  It brings to mind one larger trend I noticed with many smaller "fringe" groups but by no means limited to them - a fallacy that just because they personally cannot understand something it must be an unsustainable house of cards. It is understandable why their heuristics could make them think that even in the absence of any egocentric self justification. It need not be the Gold Standard people, or those who believe in a pending vague apocalypse or collapse. Some insist that fuel injection systems with computer control are "less reliable" in spite of needing less maintenance and fewer replacements than older fuel dispersal systems. It resembles a "monkeysphere" sort of concept like a stereotypical communist refusing to see that the disappearance of every banker would cause real and major damage or an ideological counterpart objectivist not seeing that a complete disappearance of bueracrats would also cause real and major damage. This isn't to say that current systems don't have deadweight, dysfunctions, and things which could be redone way better without the weight of inertia, legacy, and vested interests. The current cure may in fact be worse than the disease but that the cognitive "here be dragons" interferes with understanding a whole system and its alternatives.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
raxxorrax 7y ago
I disagree, the numbers of scientists isn't the problem. The more the merrier. There is certainly enough work to be done. We just shouldn't expect every scientist to publish papers and use that as basis to determine their success and qualification. If you optimize on that metric, you would write on the same topics as your peers to generate the needed recitations that allegedly proove your ablility. You cannot industrialize science where at the end is a number that determines scientific advancement. Is is bad enough that research and economic interest are intertwined, it just plainly shouldn't be the case. But we should look for workable compromises.

eecc 7y ago

I was agreeing 100% to this post until I hit the last two sentences. WTF, are you out of your mind? Are you suggesting we should allow less people to graduate in order to fix the problem? Sorry for the ad-hominem but this it absolute folly. If there’s too much competition for funding the solution is not to further limit access to scientific profession but to increase funding for Chrissake! The mere fact that there’s so many graduates is literally living proof that there’s an enormous, yet wasted potential for scientific research and discovery. Get your logic in order please.

marcus_holmes 7y ago
I see so many people follow the academia career trail not because they have a longing to do research, but because they have no idea what else to do with their lives and their professors think it's a good idea. Maybe culling the herd a bit would improve its quality. Maybe being forced out of the profession for misconduct would help prevent it. Maybe the bar needs to be raised a bit for entry so there's less competition and less pressure to cheat.
kennek 7y ago
I don't want to speak for the OP, but maybe they meant we should be OK with failing people. At least in the US, if you show up to class, attempt to do the homework, and take the exams you are pretty much guaranteed to get your degree. I see this in graduate programs as well (although not the top programs like CMU or Standford). I even saw it when my wife went through med school - many of her peers partied, did horribly, even got caught cheating, but because they were spending 250k on that education no one ever failed out. I think we should set standards and not be afraid to uphold them. This will probably result in fewer scientists, but maybe it will become clear where we are failing them earlier in their education and allow us to improve that process.
- Ancalagon 7y ago
  Actually I would argue this is also a thing in top programs (maybe moreso than lower ones) due to grade inflation to improve the perception of those schools.
munin 7y ago
How do you decide which scientists to pay? Pay them all? Then everyone becomes a “scientist” but does no work and draws a free paycheck. Pay the ones that produce good work? What is good work? Right now, that is decided by number of papers. That metric is gamed to death, that is what publish or perish culture did. Choose any other metric, it will be gamed too. What if the PhD meant something such that having it was enough? That was all you needed, then you would just get paid to do science. Such a gatekeepeing would require graduating a lot fewer PhDs. How to do that is open: admit fewer? Or psd fewer? If the latter, maybe master out a lot more? Anyone that makes it through gets a guaranteed paycheck, but almost no one makes it through. Where you are mistaken is that there are a large number of graduates because there is a large demand for research. There isn’t. A given professor needs N papers to get tenure. Say that N = c*k for c researchers and k papers. N is so large that c must be >2, so for the professor to get tenure, they need assistants. Where do they come from? Graduate students. What do those students do when they graduate? The professor doesn’t care because they have tenure now. Research funding has been decreasing over time, which means N increases, which, counter-intuitively, means c increases, which starts a negative feedback loop because the amount of researchers competing for funding increases while the amount of funding available decreases, still further increasing the number of graduate students needed. That explains what you see.
buzzkillington 7y ago
>WTF, are you out of your mind? I was doing a PhD in high energy experimental physics until I finally notice that the majority of my peers were not doing science, they were padding a resume. Today we could stop doing high energy physics, both theory and experiments, for 50 years and we would not actually retard the progress of the field. We lack the engineering to build experiments better than the ones we have for any sane price and we are sitting around counting angels on pins. The brainpower that we are wasting on un-rigorous mathematics could be much better spent in any number of fields. I dare you to read 100 papers in any field that you are familiar with and tell me that 95 of the papers aren't there just because someone needed to publish something. I've talked to people in astronomy, genetics, mechanical engineering and computer science and they all say the same thing. We don't need more science, we need better science. The simplest way to do that is to do less of it. We won't even be hurting progress because you will be able to trust it, unlike today where if you try and synthesize an experiment from three papers you're pretty much guaranteed it won't work because the papers are either fraudulent, p-hacked, flat out wrong or not even wrong.
- pauljurczak 7y ago
  > We don't need more science, we need better science. Exactly. We have to increase signal to noise ratio. I'm trying to stay current with progress in Computer Vision and the amount of junk being published is overwhelming. I'm pretty sure it's the same in many other disciplines.
  - pacman128 7y ago
    Ex-prof here. The whole publish or perish mentality is a big problem. How many good papers can a researcher produce a year? Way less than they are expected to in the academic world.
- eecc 7y ago
  I suspect it’s more to do with the publish or perish and funding dearth combination. Departments need a blockbuster discoveries just to stay open, it’s obvious where the incentive goes. Also, none of the underlings will ever think of questioning - let alone reviewing - the results. Their career, their debt repayment plans, their income would be railroaded the moment they stop to think at what they’re doing. In this Mad Max scenario who’s going to make science and who’s just coasting in survival mode?
pauljurczak 7y ago
> The mere fact that there’s so many graduates is literally living proof that there’s an enormous, yet wasted potential for scientific research and discovery. I don't see a proof in this statement - all I see is a belief. Many people believe that a sheer number of people engaged in professional science and requisite "publish or perish" job description is the cause of decreasing quality of scientific publications. Increasing the fraction of population with PhD have to run into Bell Curve limitations at some point.
dexen 7y ago
>Are you suggesting we should allow less people to graduate in order to fix the problem? Yes of course. As per "The Mythical Man-Month"[1] adding more people to a project doesn't speed id up - quite the opposite, slows it down. Right now we have huge overhead in training and communication. Low s/n ratio follows. You can fix that gatekeeping science a bit better - pick more talented, better educated, harder working candidates, and train & finance & supply them better. -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  >Right now we have huge overhead in training and communication. Low s/n ratio follows. You can fix that gatekeeping science a bit better - pick more talented, better educated, harder working candidates, and train & finance & supply them better. None of that. A lottery of everyone who can pass a minimum literacy exam in their field. Looking at the luminaries of any field to a very good approximation none of them are "more talented, better educated, harder working candidates", in fact being lazy, combative and self taught is usually a better predictor for ground breaking discoveries. The people who you would pick are already the ones in academia and they are the ones who created the replication crisis.
Nasrudith 7y ago
It brings to mind one larger trend I noticed with many smaller "fringe" groups but by no means limited to them - a fallacy that just because they personally cannot understand something it must be an unsustainable house of cards. It is understandable why their heuristics could make them think that even in the absence of any egocentric self justification. It need not be the Gold Standard people, or those who believe in a pending vague apocalypse or collapse. Some insist that fuel injection systems with computer control are "less reliable" in spite of needing less maintenance and fewer replacements than older fuel dispersal systems. It resembles a "monkeysphere" sort of concept like a stereotypical communist refusing to see that the disappearance of every banker would cause real and major damage or an ideological counterpart objectivist not seeing that a complete disappearance of bueracrats would also cause real and major damage. This isn't to say that current systems don't have deadweight, dysfunctions, and things which could be redone way better without the weight of inertia, legacy, and vested interests. The current cure may in fact be worse than the disease but that the cognitive "here be dragons" interferes with understanding a whole system and its alternatives.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

raxxorrax 7y ago

I disagree, the numbers of scientists isn't the problem. The more the merrier. There is certainly enough work to be done. We just shouldn't expect every scientist to publish papers and use that as basis to determine their success and qualification. If you optimize on that metric, you would write on the same topics as your peers to generate the needed recitations that allegedly proove your ablility. You cannot industrialize science where at the end is a number that determines scientific advancement. Is is bad enough that research and economic interest are intertwined, it just plainly shouldn't be the case. But we should look for workable compromises.