28 ms·

Wow, the amount of depravity in some academic circles is astonishing. The article links [1] the case of a PhD student at the University of Florida who was forc

by berndi 5y ago

Wow, the amount of depravity in some academic circles is astonishing. The article links [1] the case of a PhD student at the University of Florida who was forced to participate in such a publication collusion ring and was pressured to commit scientific fraud by fabricating results and submitting them to a conference [2], being threatened with physical harm should he decide to go public. This student saw no way out and decided to kill himself. Just a few days after the suicide, the department thought it would be appropriate for the student's own lab to have a "fun" excursion and to document it on Instagram [3]. I'm lost for words. [1] https://medium.com/@tnvijayk/potential-organized-fraud-in-acm-ieee-computer-architecture-conferences-ccd61169370d https://medium.com/@tnvijayk/potential-organized-fraud-in-ac... [2] https://huixiangvoice.medium.com/the-hidden-story-behind-the-suicide-phd-candidate-huixiang-chen-236cd39f79d3 https://huixiangvoice.medium.com/the-hidden-story-behind-the... [3] https://www.instagram.com/p/Bz1EExLhdYD/ https://www.instagram.com/p/Bz1EExLhdYD/

jollybean 5y ago
Imagine if this happened in private enterprise, like at Google. The press would be all over it 24/7.
- totalZero 5y ago
  Yes, I agree. It seems to me that academia feels external to the power structure, so it rarely gets the same kind of attention as industry because it doesn't stir up resentment.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    They are part of the power structure, they're just 'protected'. Most publications don't want to be seen as promoting a narrative that goes 'against science' even though of course it's not. There's no room for nuance in populism.
    - 3grdlurker 5y ago
      Protected, or just less noticed.
      - salawat 5y ago
        It's more the fact that academia is granted a greater degree of leniency because it is fundamentally something that is societally required for innovations to take place. Genuine ingenuity requires room to flourish, so in the West at least, the theory is you leave tge Boffins alone to do their wizardry. The part I don't understand is how extorting the students to fund bloated Administrative processes, sport teams, stadiums, and executive staff ever became a thing, nevermind the incestuous relationship with academic publishing. Almost all great work I've seen came not out of gnashing of teeth and publish or perish, but out of a labor of love or an odd obsession with truly understanding something until you could practically get it across to a 5th grader. "I can explain how, don't ask me why too many times, still figuring that part out."
        unishark 5y ago
        The faculty have very little say in most of those aspects of universities you're complaining about. The media is just a crazy sideshow that cherry picks a tiny subset of stories to run or people to destroy when it fits the right narratives. When it comes to real scrutiny, I'd say faculty are under vastly more than people in industry. Though yes, google as an entire entity will analyzed more than some random professor. But the rank-and-file professor is also probably in far more constant danger of being ruined than almost any individual in a comparable role in industry. Also more than most businesses that no one cares about.
        jollybean 5y ago
        Academia is not protected because of some intellectual notion of 'innovation' so much as they are on the right side of the bias presented in most publications. Most writers and commentators I think have venerable views of academia and probably err towards supporting that narrative publicly. While it's true that Profs may be under excessive scrutiny in some ways, which frankly might make them skittish - they are obviously not under 'the most important' kind of scrutiny which relates to the material legitimacy of their work in terms of 1) reproducability 2) fudging results and borrowing ideas and 3) misappropriation of credit 'up the chain of power' and 'from other peers'. Hence this article, and some other issues of legitimacy within academia. I think almost everything boils down to the fact that the low-hanging fruit have been had in science, and though there are 20x more scientists alive now than just a few generations ago, in many ways we're getting diminishing marginal returns - and even worse - it's incredibly hard to know which teams to back, and which not to. In the fog of war for funding, it leaves more room for back-stabbing than in most other places, even in the corporate world where at least there is some degree of job security.
- coldtea 5y ago
  Or rather you'd never had known about it. Much worse things have happened in private companies, only a few of which ever make it out in the press.
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    Of course a lot of abuse happens in private enterprise. But typically, senior management is much much more proactive about it than department chairs and provosts. There's very few Fortune 500 companies where you could publicly get away with the kind of abuse that's just part and parcel of being a grad student or post doc at a major research university. It might still happen either because it's well concealed. Or it might happen at smaller or poorly managed companies. But at the typical functional, large corporation, egregious abuse of your subordinates essentially guarantees that you'll be terminated if/when it's brought to senior management's attention. Academia is different because tenured professors are given far more independence and autonomy. By contrast middle managers are tightly monitored and controlled by their own line managers. The typical large corporation strives very hard to promulgate a homogenous corporate culture across the org. Whereas academia as a system encourages professors to be fiercely independent maverick. That has both pros and cons, but one of the major cons is that it tolerates a lot more abuse and dysfunctional management towards the non-tenured subordinates.
    - Beldin 5y ago
      Your rosy picture of industry is surprising to me. It could be right, and the few takes I've heard (eg. recently, google's AI ethics mess) being only one side or exceptions that prove the rule. But I have currently no reason to expect better from industry, and will want some proof before putting it on a pedestal.
      - ErikVandeWater 5y ago
        Abuse happens to people who don't have other options. If you abuse someone who has a white collar job, they generally leave quickly. If you abuse a poor grad student who has to complete research to pay back his loans which cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, he will generally put up with it.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  You mean the number of suicides at foxconn? The forced labour that is likely contributing to many of the large mobile phone company bottomlines. The blatant benchmark fraud that happens all the time by all the large GPU and CPU manufacturers, I could go on. But I don't see the press all over this 24/7 t all, maybe some small niche outlets sometimes. In comparison the scrutiny that the academic world is under (if we relate to the affected people and effects) is much, much larger
  - jollybean 5y ago
    Your example proves my point: Foxconn is 1/2 a world away, and news from that part of the world never penetrates pop culture. That we have heard about it, implies a degree of scrutiny. When Google fires an AI researcher in a sensitive position, it's an international event. If Exxon executives committed suicide in the face of some kind of forced fraud/corruption, it would be a national story.
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    > You mean the number of suicides at foxconn? There are fewer suicides at FoxConn than would be expected given the age profile and number of their employees. If you employ hundreds of thousands of people some of them will kill themselves for reasons entirely unrelated from work. If they live in work dormitories they’ll do it at work.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
berndi 5y ago
How is it possible that professors with impeccable academic credentials get fired for jokes nearly instantly [1], yet this student's professor was allowed to carry on until he resigned two years later [2]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Tim_Hunt_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Tim_Hunt_contro... [2] https://eu.gainesville.com/story/news/education/campus/2021/04/26/uf-professor-tao-li-retires-amid-investigation-grad-students-death/7382132002/ https://eu.gainesville.com/story/news/education/campus/2021/...
- rscho 5y ago
  Well... non-PC jokes are a liability risk for the institution at large. Dead students are not. We have an identical phenomenon in hospitals: there are huge campaigns against sexism and the like, while there are multiple young professionals committing suicide from burn-out every year and noone does as much as bat an eyelash. Contrary to victims of discrimination, dead people can't easily organize into coordinated legal action.
  - berndi 5y ago
    You would think that allegedly driving a PoC student to suicide would count for something in the PC twitter sphere…
    - the_lonely_road 5y ago
      Are Asians PoC? I thought they were not and that was literally the only reason the oft repeated phrase “black and other PoC” didn’t literally translate into “not white”.
      - berndi 5y ago
        Wikipedia says they are. However, the Supreme Twitter Council of Wokeness may have ruled otherwise at some point.
      - hackflip 5y ago
        Only when it is politically convenient
guavaNinja 5y ago
Could someone please screenshot the Instagram post and re-upload it somewhere else for those of us who don't have an account. Thanks.
- aembleton 5y ago
  https://imgur.com/a/tJfeQjg https://imgur.com/a/tJfeQjg
wpietri 5y ago
I definitely wonder if industry is any better here. At least in academia, the papers are public, so there's an opportunity for scrutiny. But I've heard tell of "AI" boondoggles in both large companies and small. E.g., the large corporate "AI" efforts burning millions without making any real improvements. And I wonder how many startups out there have standards that are in effect lower than academia, but instead of writing papers they are shipping products than harm people's lives when they go wrong.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  As a previous Data 'Scientist' I can tell you that it absolutely is. Garbage in garbage out is the norm, the models are long established, but they can't mine gold from dirt. But nobody except the engineers seem to understand this. I'm so glad I left to become a regular software engineer. My code does not depend on a blackbox that is fed with crap, and can be reliably tested.
- jerzyt 5y ago
  It is rampant in consulting business. At least in an internal project it's possible to pull the plug when the results are not promising. In a consulting engagement, when the results are garbage, there's no revenue and no potential for an upsell. In effect the pressure to "find" significant results is enormous.
pvaldes 5y ago
He can't blame other that himself for commiting suicide. We should stop worshiping this kind of people. He has the option to join another team. One of the thousands of scientific teams not directed by a psycho and working on millions of interesting problems waiting to be solved. To leave and do other things was also an option. You can have a really fulfilling and happy live without being a scientist (Is more probable in fact). People with suicidal tendences had deep inner problems that didn't started necessarily in the university. Some are attention suckers, manipulative professionals that need to assume the protagonic role, idiots that decide to jump by a window to avoid facing their first real conflict in their lives. They dream about to punish papa, mama, the evil teacher and the cruel world that apparently owed them a career in science. They smile with the idea of everybody attending their funeral in a rainy day with sad faces in dread. The main motivation behind most (true) suicidal people is collective punishment. Some people can choose to feel miserable for the rest of their lives when this happens. Other will be wiser, break the endless stream of bullshit and refuse the role of punished. Both groups will eventually keep with their lives instead to feel guilty and miserable for an unexpected act that was beyond their acts or wishes.
- kbelder 5y ago
  I partly agree, at the risk of sounding too callous. One of the reasons that reading about this suicide (and so many others) is painful, is because with our outside perspective we can see that he could have moved past it. He could have changed some aspects of his life, and very possibly had a happy future. He succumbed to short-time thinking. But... that doesn't mean that the conditions that led him to suicide aren't worth examining and correcting. Even if he didn't kill himself, they would still be causing misery and undermining scientific progress.

by berndi 5y ago

jollybean 5y ago

Imagine if this happened in private enterprise, like at Google. The press would be all over it 24/7.

totalZero 5y ago
Yes, I agree. It seems to me that academia feels external to the power structure, so it rarely gets the same kind of attention as industry because it doesn't stir up resentment.
- jollybean 5y ago
  They are part of the power structure, they're just 'protected'. Most publications don't want to be seen as promoting a narrative that goes 'against science' even though of course it's not. There's no room for nuance in populism.
  - 3grdlurker 5y ago
    Protected, or just less noticed.
    - salawat 5y ago
      It's more the fact that academia is granted a greater degree of leniency because it is fundamentally something that is societally required for innovations to take place. Genuine ingenuity requires room to flourish, so in the West at least, the theory is you leave tge Boffins alone to do their wizardry. The part I don't understand is how extorting the students to fund bloated Administrative processes, sport teams, stadiums, and executive staff ever became a thing, nevermind the incestuous relationship with academic publishing. Almost all great work I've seen came not out of gnashing of teeth and publish or perish, but out of a labor of love or an odd obsession with truly understanding something until you could practically get it across to a 5th grader. "I can explain how, don't ask me why too many times, still figuring that part out."
      - unishark 5y ago
        The faculty have very little say in most of those aspects of universities you're complaining about. The media is just a crazy sideshow that cherry picks a tiny subset of stories to run or people to destroy when it fits the right narratives. When it comes to real scrutiny, I'd say faculty are under vastly more than people in industry. Though yes, google as an entire entity will analyzed more than some random professor. But the rank-and-file professor is also probably in far more constant danger of being ruined than almost any individual in a comparable role in industry. Also more than most businesses that no one cares about.
        jollybean 5y ago
        Academia is not protected because of some intellectual notion of 'innovation' so much as they are on the right side of the bias presented in most publications. Most writers and commentators I think have venerable views of academia and probably err towards supporting that narrative publicly. While it's true that Profs may be under excessive scrutiny in some ways, which frankly might make them skittish - they are obviously not under 'the most important' kind of scrutiny which relates to the material legitimacy of their work in terms of 1) reproducability 2) fudging results and borrowing ideas and 3) misappropriation of credit 'up the chain of power' and 'from other peers'. Hence this article, and some other issues of legitimacy within academia. I think almost everything boils down to the fact that the low-hanging fruit have been had in science, and though there are 20x more scientists alive now than just a few generations ago, in many ways we're getting diminishing marginal returns - and even worse - it's incredibly hard to know which teams to back, and which not to. In the fog of war for funding, it leaves more room for back-stabbing than in most other places, even in the corporate world where at least there is some degree of job security.
coldtea 5y ago
Or rather you'd never had known about it. Much worse things have happened in private companies, only a few of which ever make it out in the press.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  Of course a lot of abuse happens in private enterprise. But typically, senior management is much much more proactive about it than department chairs and provosts. There's very few Fortune 500 companies where you could publicly get away with the kind of abuse that's just part and parcel of being a grad student or post doc at a major research university. It might still happen either because it's well concealed. Or it might happen at smaller or poorly managed companies. But at the typical functional, large corporation, egregious abuse of your subordinates essentially guarantees that you'll be terminated if/when it's brought to senior management's attention. Academia is different because tenured professors are given far more independence and autonomy. By contrast middle managers are tightly monitored and controlled by their own line managers. The typical large corporation strives very hard to promulgate a homogenous corporate culture across the org. Whereas academia as a system encourages professors to be fiercely independent maverick. That has both pros and cons, but one of the major cons is that it tolerates a lot more abuse and dysfunctional management towards the non-tenured subordinates.
  - Beldin 5y ago
    Your rosy picture of industry is surprising to me. It could be right, and the few takes I've heard (eg. recently, google's AI ethics mess) being only one side or exceptions that prove the rule. But I have currently no reason to expect better from industry, and will want some proof before putting it on a pedestal.
    - ErikVandeWater 5y ago
      Abuse happens to people who don't have other options. If you abuse someone who has a white collar job, they generally leave quickly. If you abuse a poor grad student who has to complete research to pay back his loans which cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, he will generally put up with it.
cycomanic 5y ago
You mean the number of suicides at foxconn? The forced labour that is likely contributing to many of the large mobile phone company bottomlines. The blatant benchmark fraud that happens all the time by all the large GPU and CPU manufacturers, I could go on. But I don't see the press all over this 24/7 t all, maybe some small niche outlets sometimes. In comparison the scrutiny that the academic world is under (if we relate to the affected people and effects) is much, much larger
- jollybean 5y ago
  Your example proves my point: Foxconn is 1/2 a world away, and news from that part of the world never penetrates pop culture. That we have heard about it, implies a degree of scrutiny. When Google fires an AI researcher in a sensitive position, it's an international event. If Exxon executives committed suicide in the face of some kind of forced fraud/corruption, it would be a national story.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  > You mean the number of suicides at foxconn? There are fewer suicides at FoxConn than would be expected given the age profile and number of their employees. If you employ hundreds of thousands of people some of them will kill themselves for reasons entirely unrelated from work. If they live in work dormitories they’ll do it at work.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

berndi 5y ago

How is it possible that professors with impeccable academic credentials get fired for jokes nearly instantly [1], yet this student's professor was allowed to carry on until he resigned two years later [2]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Tim_Hunt_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Tim_Hunt_contro... [2] https://eu.gainesville.com/story/news/education/campus/2021/04/26/uf-professor-tao-li-retires-amid-investigation-grad-students-death/7382132002/ https://eu.gainesville.com/story/news/education/campus/2021/...

rscho 5y ago
Well... non-PC jokes are a liability risk for the institution at large. Dead students are not. We have an identical phenomenon in hospitals: there are huge campaigns against sexism and the like, while there are multiple young professionals committing suicide from burn-out every year and noone does as much as bat an eyelash. Contrary to victims of discrimination, dead people can't easily organize into coordinated legal action.
- berndi 5y ago
  You would think that allegedly driving a PoC student to suicide would count for something in the PC twitter sphere…
  - the_lonely_road 5y ago
    Are Asians PoC? I thought they were not and that was literally the only reason the oft repeated phrase “black and other PoC” didn’t literally translate into “not white”.
    - berndi 5y ago
      Wikipedia says they are. However, the Supreme Twitter Council of Wokeness may have ruled otherwise at some point.
    - hackflip 5y ago
      Only when it is politically convenient

guavaNinja 5y ago

Could someone please screenshot the Instagram post and re-upload it somewhere else for those of us who don't have an account. Thanks.

aembleton 5y ago
https://imgur.com/a/tJfeQjg https://imgur.com/a/tJfeQjg

wpietri 5y ago

I definitely wonder if industry is any better here. At least in academia, the papers are public, so there's an opportunity for scrutiny. But I've heard tell of "AI" boondoggles in both large companies and small. E.g., the large corporate "AI" efforts burning millions without making any real improvements. And I wonder how many startups out there have standards that are in effect lower than academia, but instead of writing papers they are shipping products than harm people's lives when they go wrong.

Aperocky 5y ago
As a previous Data 'Scientist' I can tell you that it absolutely is. Garbage in garbage out is the norm, the models are long established, but they can't mine gold from dirt. But nobody except the engineers seem to understand this. I'm so glad I left to become a regular software engineer. My code does not depend on a blackbox that is fed with crap, and can be reliably tested.
jerzyt 5y ago
It is rampant in consulting business. At least in an internal project it's possible to pull the plug when the results are not promising. In a consulting engagement, when the results are garbage, there's no revenue and no potential for an upsell. In effect the pressure to "find" significant results is enormous.

pvaldes 5y ago

He can't blame other that himself for commiting suicide. We should stop worshiping this kind of people. He has the option to join another team. One of the thousands of scientific teams not directed by a psycho and working on millions of interesting problems waiting to be solved. To leave and do other things was also an option. You can have a really fulfilling and happy live without being a scientist (Is more probable in fact). People with suicidal tendences had deep inner problems that didn't started necessarily in the university. Some are attention suckers, manipulative professionals that need to assume the protagonic role, idiots that decide to jump by a window to avoid facing their first real conflict in their lives. They dream about to punish papa, mama, the evil teacher and the cruel world that apparently owed them a career in science. They smile with the idea of everybody attending their funeral in a rainy day with sad faces in dread. The main motivation behind most (true) suicidal people is collective punishment. Some people can choose to feel miserable for the rest of their lives when this happens. Other will be wiser, break the endless stream of bullshit and refuse the role of punished. Both groups will eventually keep with their lives instead to feel guilty and miserable for an unexpected act that was beyond their acts or wishes.

kbelder 5y ago
I partly agree, at the risk of sounding too callous. One of the reasons that reading about this suicide (and so many others) is painful, is because with our outside perspective we can see that he could have moved past it. He could have changed some aspects of his life, and very possibly had a happy future. He succumbed to short-time thinking. But... that doesn't mean that the conditions that led him to suicide aren't worth examining and correcting. Even if he didn't kill himself, they would still be causing misery and undermining scientific progress.