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There's another solution: give up on academia. The model of academia works well when some part of society is willing to fund researchers spending time on open-

by geofft 5y ago

There's another solution: give up on academia. The model of academia works well when some part of society is willing to fund researchers spending time on open-ended basic research, even if it produces no results. Saying "Don't engage in unethical behavior" is well and good, but if the incentives are towards unethical behavior, you shouldn't expect very much. Academic funding and employment is very closely linked to the number of published papers. The article says that a grad student who publishes three papers a year is a professor's dream - but on reflection, it should be clear that this is not because three papers a year is necessarily good science, it's just a good metric. The professor's lab looks good for publishing so much, the professor can ask for more funding from grant agencies, and the student is likely to get a good faculty job which reflects well on the professor. So it's extraordinarily difficult to stay in the field, have a well-funded lab, hire enough grad students, and get tenure if you're optimizing for the quality of your science over the number of publications. The "publish or perish" culture (literally, in at least one case, it seems) isn't driven by the practitioners; it's driven by the requirements of getting grants and getting academic jobs in an increasingly competitive market. Now in some fields you do need the facilities from a university to do your research, but for CS in general - and especially for AI - you'll be just fine in industry. All you need is a pile of cloud VMs, and industry can get you that. Perhaps you also need interesting data and real-world problems; industry can get you that too. Society today underfunds academia and overfunds industry. You, the individual researcher, are not going to be able to fix this. Go where the incentives are better aligned for you. (And if you're a Ph.D. student who sees no future in your life after being complicit in fraud, please, please reach out to industry. Your prior publications are nowhere near as high-stakes as in an academic job; you can contact the journal, get it retracted, drop out of the program, and have a great life ahead of you. What saddens me is that the student who allegedly took his own life was probably so deeply surrounded by academia that he didn't know there's a world who won't judge him for having one fewer paper on his CV and will even look on him positively for reporting fraud and getting his advisor into career trouble.) --- That said, my argument is undermined a bit because the papers OP denounces have coauthors in industry. So I don't have an answer for why those coauthors went along with it.

bonoboTP 5y ago
Depends on what industry you're talking about. Those that publish are working according to the same practices. Google, Facebook et al. need to pass peer review too and they care about papers as a dick measuring contest.
Delk 5y ago
> What saddens me is that the student who allegedly took his own life was probably so deeply surrounded by academia that he didn't know there's a world who won't judge him for having one fewer paper on his CV and will even look on him positively for reporting fraud and getting his advisor into career trouble. Could be that, or could just be that the student couldn't imagine himself not doing academic research despite knowing of the rest of the world. It's sad nevertheless, of course, and I'm not trying to say you're wrong in any way. It's just that people's motives and the reasons they feel trapped can be difficult to guess.
cycomanic 5y ago
I find it quite ironic that every time some unethical academic behaviour is published on HN, there's several posts about "move to industry this never happens here". I mean this is HN, a significant portion of the industry is working on optimizing for clicks and keeping people engaged (addicted?) to some platform or the other. Let's not even talk about the blatantly unethical (and often times illegal) things that happen in the startup world to increase evaluations, secure funding etc. Now academia has lots of issues, but to say industry is better... It's sort of like telling an amateur athlete who is upset by some competitors using caffeine (or amphetamines) to instead to professional sport, because they are more ethical. The stakes (and money) are much higher so people are more willing to cheat to gain an edge.
- geofft 5y ago
  Sure, but as an individual researcher, the integrity of your scientific work is not compromised by the unethical goals of your employer or the unethical ways in which it raises funding. That's what I'm claiming. It's rather different from amateur vs. professional athletics, where both have the same goal of "run as fast as possible but within some nebulous concept of natural human ability": the goals are different between academia and industry. Or put another way: Of the many deep moral questions raised by the Manhattan Project, not a single one was "Did they commit academic fraud and claim that an atomic bomb was scientifically possible when it wasn't?" They were employed to actually get the job done, not to act as if a job were getting done. And at the end of the day, funding for university AI labs is largely driven by the existence of those same unethical industry goals - governments fund the work because it's good for the economy, students pay to take AI classes in their undergraduate degrees because it's an investment in their future careers, the industry donates everything from fellowships to entire buildings to academia, etc. I don't think you can cleanly wash your hands of industry's ethical concerns by staying in academia but working on the problems that industry finds interesting. If your goal is employment without any ethical concerns, you're going to have a very hard time. (In the case of this particular post, the co-authorship of papers with industry makes it clear that the research directly benefits industry.)

by geofft 5y ago

bonoboTP 5y ago

Depends on what industry you're talking about. Those that publish are working according to the same practices. Google, Facebook et al. need to pass peer review too and they care about papers as a dick measuring contest.

Delk 5y ago

> What saddens me is that the student who allegedly took his own life was probably so deeply surrounded by academia that he didn't know there's a world who won't judge him for having one fewer paper on his CV and will even look on him positively for reporting fraud and getting his advisor into career trouble. Could be that, or could just be that the student couldn't imagine himself not doing academic research despite knowing of the rest of the world. It's sad nevertheless, of course, and I'm not trying to say you're wrong in any way. It's just that people's motives and the reasons they feel trapped can be difficult to guess.

cycomanic 5y ago

I find it quite ironic that every time some unethical academic behaviour is published on HN, there's several posts about "move to industry this never happens here". I mean this is HN, a significant portion of the industry is working on optimizing for clicks and keeping people engaged (addicted?) to some platform or the other. Let's not even talk about the blatantly unethical (and often times illegal) things that happen in the startup world to increase evaluations, secure funding etc. Now academia has lots of issues, but to say industry is better... It's sort of like telling an amateur athlete who is upset by some competitors using caffeine (or amphetamines) to instead to professional sport, because they are more ethical. The stakes (and money) are much higher so people are more willing to cheat to gain an edge.

geofft 5y ago
Sure, but as an individual researcher, the integrity of your scientific work is not compromised by the unethical goals of your employer or the unethical ways in which it raises funding. That's what I'm claiming. It's rather different from amateur vs. professional athletics, where both have the same goal of "run as fast as possible but within some nebulous concept of natural human ability": the goals are different between academia and industry. Or put another way: Of the many deep moral questions raised by the Manhattan Project, not a single one was "Did they commit academic fraud and claim that an atomic bomb was scientifically possible when it wasn't?" They were employed to actually get the job done, not to act as if a job were getting done. And at the end of the day, funding for university AI labs is largely driven by the existence of those same unethical industry goals - governments fund the work because it's good for the economy, students pay to take AI classes in their undergraduate degrees because it's an investment in their future careers, the industry donates everything from fellowships to entire buildings to academia, etc. I don't think you can cleanly wash your hands of industry's ethical concerns by staying in academia but working on the problems that industry finds interesting. If your goal is employment without any ethical concerns, you're going to have a very hard time. (In the case of this particular post, the co-authorship of papers with industry makes it clear that the research directly benefits industry.)