8 ms·

Is this really an American thing? At least in academia, American universities (and Western universities in general) have had a good track record overall with a

Is this really an American thing? At least in academia, American universities (and Western universities in general) have had a good track record overall with academic integrity, and it has set them apart. This seems to have degraded recently, perhaps because of the increasing pressure of the “publish or perish” system (or dozens of other potential causes). We do celebrate people who excel academically seemingly effortlessly. But we don’t celebrate bullshit artists so much in school. In business, and particularly tech, it’s another story.

908B64B197 5y ago
> At least in academia, American universities (and Western universities in general) have had a good track record overall with academic integrity, and it has set them apart. The difference is that these collusion rings or bogus studies are discussed and exposed publicly. It's not the case in Asia.
munk-a 5y ago
I don't think it's nearly as prevalent in Academia. I agree that that sort of deception is quickly punished in Academia if it's discovered and publicized, but I think it still is viewed positively in private contexts. I think it's more of a cultural issue in general. You can read a bunch of articles on Bernie Madoff, Martin Shkreli and Billy McFarland that romanticize the cunning with which these folks exploited others. Most pieces on them will present an overall negative tone but often feature some pretty glowing admiration of them. Let's also not forget that tax evasion by Trump was praised repeatedly as him beating the system - that's a pretty common view point, more common (especially when it comes to taxes) than the view that those individuals are failing to pay their fair share from what I've observed at least. Trumps a complicated example due to all the political baggage around him so maybe just look at companies like Apple, Google and Facebook - they regularly offshore large portions of their profits and I really doubt the people working to those ends feel any shame, instead it's likely a "beating the system" motivation.
jampekka 5y ago
Are you in academia? I am and the state of the publishing is quite horrific. I simply don't read any papers at least in my field unless I'm specifically interested in some detail during my research, or am handed something specifically by a colleague or sometimes if asked specifically to do a peer-review. This is a bit of a public secret, but quite widely researchers don't really trust articles anymore, if they ever did. Maybe some plot or dataset may give some insight and maybe some discussion has worthy information to ponder on. But mostly they're just some ads to put in a yet another funding application. Most articles are just churned out to get some lines to CV or to look good in some metric. Publish or perish has turned into full-on bullshit or perish. The whole peer-review system (which is just around 50 years old anyway) is on the verge of just grinding to a halt due to the stupendous volume of hastily hacked together manuscripts. I think many are still sort of hoping that this will somehow sort itself out. But the collapse of the quality after the explosion of electronic journals, consolidation of publishing houses and overall structure that doesn't really care at all about what is actually in the papers doesn't give much realistic hope. It should be noted that there's sort of a "parallel reality" in academia behind the publication show. The ethos for academic integrity is still quite strong, teaching tends to be valued by the community (but not by the system) and face-to-face discussions can be of very high quality. But the signal-to-noise is so low in publishing that it's not really worth following. We really need to get some new arrangement so that we don't drown in all this bullshit. Word-of-mouth, open data repos, conferences and just blogging and pushing stuff to git repos probably is most that's needed. The publishing structure is becoming just plain unnecessary bureaucracy.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Is scale part of the issue? A lot of academic/publishing culture and norms were established when it was considerably smaller.. number of people, not just number of papers. SEO is a kind of explicit analogy. Google pagerank was modelled on academic publishing, and it worked until it went live. From that point, links started to decrease as a quality signal.. spam. Publish or perish is a similar sort of dynamic. Honestly, I think most legible systems for determining merit have these sort of issues. If advancement, accolade, grants or somesuch are determined by a formal system, whatever that system used as a signal or metric becomes corrupted. Hence why Word-to-mouth, open data repos, conferences and just blogging and pushing stuff to git repos does work. It's informal.
indymike 5y ago
American here. We actually hate this shit.
pdonis 5y ago
> we don’t celebrate bullshit artists so much in school. This was not my experience of school in the US. Just as one example, two words: Cliff's Notes.

908B64B197 5y ago

> At least in academia, American universities (and Western universities in general) have had a good track record overall with academic integrity, and it has set them apart. The difference is that these collusion rings or bogus studies are discussed and exposed publicly. It's not the case in Asia.

munk-a 5y ago

I don't think it's nearly as prevalent in Academia. I agree that that sort of deception is quickly punished in Academia if it's discovered and publicized, but I think it still is viewed positively in private contexts. I think it's more of a cultural issue in general. You can read a bunch of articles on Bernie Madoff, Martin Shkreli and Billy McFarland that romanticize the cunning with which these folks exploited others. Most pieces on them will present an overall negative tone but often feature some pretty glowing admiration of them. Let's also not forget that tax evasion by Trump was praised repeatedly as him beating the system - that's a pretty common view point, more common (especially when it comes to taxes) than the view that those individuals are failing to pay their fair share from what I've observed at least. Trumps a complicated example due to all the political baggage around him so maybe just look at companies like Apple, Google and Facebook - they regularly offshore large portions of their profits and I really doubt the people working to those ends feel any shame, instead it's likely a "beating the system" motivation.

jampekka 5y ago

Are you in academia? I am and the state of the publishing is quite horrific. I simply don't read any papers at least in my field unless I'm specifically interested in some detail during my research, or am handed something specifically by a colleague or sometimes if asked specifically to do a peer-review. This is a bit of a public secret, but quite widely researchers don't really trust articles anymore, if they ever did. Maybe some plot or dataset may give some insight and maybe some discussion has worthy information to ponder on. But mostly they're just some ads to put in a yet another funding application. Most articles are just churned out to get some lines to CV or to look good in some metric. Publish or perish has turned into full-on bullshit or perish. The whole peer-review system (which is just around 50 years old anyway) is on the verge of just grinding to a halt due to the stupendous volume of hastily hacked together manuscripts. I think many are still sort of hoping that this will somehow sort itself out. But the collapse of the quality after the explosion of electronic journals, consolidation of publishing houses and overall structure that doesn't really care at all about what is actually in the papers doesn't give much realistic hope. It should be noted that there's sort of a "parallel reality" in academia behind the publication show. The ethos for academic integrity is still quite strong, teaching tends to be valued by the community (but not by the system) and face-to-face discussions can be of very high quality. But the signal-to-noise is so low in publishing that it's not really worth following. We really need to get some new arrangement so that we don't drown in all this bullshit. Word-of-mouth, open data repos, conferences and just blogging and pushing stuff to git repos probably is most that's needed. The publishing structure is becoming just plain unnecessary bureaucracy.

dalbasal 5y ago
Is scale part of the issue? A lot of academic/publishing culture and norms were established when it was considerably smaller.. number of people, not just number of papers. SEO is a kind of explicit analogy. Google pagerank was modelled on academic publishing, and it worked until it went live. From that point, links started to decrease as a quality signal.. spam. Publish or perish is a similar sort of dynamic. Honestly, I think most legible systems for determining merit have these sort of issues. If advancement, accolade, grants or somesuch are determined by a formal system, whatever that system used as a signal or metric becomes corrupted. Hence why Word-to-mouth, open data repos, conferences and just blogging and pushing stuff to git repos does work. It's informal.

indymike 5y ago

American here. We actually hate this shit.

pdonis 5y ago

> we don’t celebrate bullshit artists so much in school. This was not my experience of school in the US. Just as one example, two words: Cliff's Notes.