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Well, I had a great time in my Ph.D program. My advisor was the very model of caring about students and integrity. I did good research which I was proud of (but
by wegs 6y ago
Well, I had a great time in my Ph.D program. My advisor was the very model of caring about students and integrity. I did good research which I was proud of (but which had very little impact since at the time I didn't know how to sell / position it well) I see the upsides of a functioning academia.
My cynicism doesn't come from a lack of understanding of the academy or the good parts of the academy. To the contrary; it's based on:
1) Seeing the upper levels of the academy (which are often incredibly corrupt, although this is well-hidden from students).
2) Seeing enough cases handled to know that cover-ups are much more common than resolutions.
3) Seeing many students get abused, and seeing the impact fake research has on the real world.
The lack of transparency makes academia look bad for perfectly good reason: there are huge amounts of money flowing into pockets corruptly at elite schools, entire academic careers build on academic fraud (which is /not/ the same as legal fraud), and there's enough rot in the system that it's hard to reform. The higher you go, the more rot there is.
Appearances to the contrary, students are university customers, and faculty are employees. The power legally rests with the administration and the board. The rot persists since the people benefiting set the rules. If I'm the president of a school, and a reform would put me in jail, or even make me lose my million dollar salary, why would I listen to student protests? Faculty protests carry a little more weight, but not enough, and enough faculty are corrupt themselves that you can't build a united front for reform.
Regarding peer review, the system is entirely bankrupt. There are no incentives to do a good job. Anecdotally, most reviewers skim papers; no one reads them, and certainly no one checks the math or replicates the results. Less anecdotally, when people have looked at data, it's no different from a die roll (NIPS did a proper evaluation of peer review).
Regarding grad student stipends, the basic deal is good on paper: freedom to pursue intellectual interests, quality mentorship, and a quality education with basic living expenses covered (on the taxpayer dollar). This seems like exactly the right thing. It breaks when universities break their side of the bargain, with the taxpayer dollars and charitable donations go to faculty clubs, yachts, and vacation homes, internal power dynamics forcing graduate students to be treated as cheap labor rather than as students, and competition forcing widespread academic fraud.
- SoylentOrange 6y agoOne of my friends leads artifact evaluation for USENIX Sec. It's an emerging but I think valuable addition to the peer-review process in CS. There's been a growing movement, which I very much like, for improved reproducibility. Here's an example from NeurIPS: https://towardsdatascience.com/reproducible-machine-learning-cf1841606805 https://towardsdatascience.com/reproducible-machine-learning... ^ As you know, many areas of science have a reproducibility crisis including psychology and medicine. I hope this will go a long way towards addressing some weaknesses in peer review in CS. For myself, I try to be thorough when refereeing papers. Anecdotally I know some more busy academics farm out their reviews to their grad students. I had a largely positive experience in grad school also thanks to my excellent advisor. Although I can say that my ~$25k/yr stipend made it difficult to live on without the additional scholarship money that I earned, and even then... I agree with you that there absolutely needs to be more transparency in many aspects including complaints about advisors, and investigations into dishonest publishing behaviour like in this case.
- wegs 6y agoI think we're long past that point. We need to realign incentive structures and see wholesale change. You'll never see quality peer reviews on an honor system, with no incentives to do quality. The basic concept is broken. It's much better to let people publish as they do research, and have post-hoc reviews, revisions, and discussions. And for transparency, I'm not going to trust any research out of MIT research until MIT openly gets rid of NDAs and non-disparage agreements. Just no. Yuck. And that includes the chains of corporate walls MIT has built up to hide stuff. I won't trust MIT research until I can file a public records request, and get records. I should be able to discover conflicts-of-interest, financial arrangements, and all the other messes MIT gets itself into. I won't trust MIT research until faculty meetings are subject to open meeting laws, and the public can sit in on them and understand how decisions get made. I won't trust MIT research until data, source code, and papers are out in the sun for public review by anyone. I won't trust MIT research until I see bad actors getting disciplined and these things publicly discussed. Until then, unless I know something at MIT isn't corrupt, I'll just assume it might be. I won't trust Stanford either. Too much stuff is simply fabricated to tell a good story. Heck, I won't trust a lot of the elite academy, since I assume it's just as bad. Things get a little bit better one tier down, but the rot is starting to seep in. MIT CSAIL just shut down its main mailing list -- thousands of people -- since people started discussing institutional corruption. Footnote: I had no problem living on my similar stipend. I paid for one bedroom in a four-bedroom apartment, ate cheap food, and didn't spend much otherwise. My university