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I'll give my reading, and a tip to the author. To me, this did not read as a serious proposal to actually commit more fraud. Rather, it was a "modest proposal"
by raphlinus 5y ago
I'll give my reading, and a tip to the author.
To me, this did not read as a serious proposal to actually commit more fraud. Rather, it was a "modest proposal" in the tradition of Swift, in which the actual call to action was for the field to be more critical of papers, especially to be on the lookout for all fraud, both the obvious kind and the more subtle variants, the latter of which also do great damage to the field.
The tip: humor like this is fun and appreciated by people who run in the same circles as the author, but an essay like this will be read by a diverse cross-section of people. Some won't have the cultural references, some won't have English as a first language, etc. Almost always when I've snuck jokes into my writing, I've found it causes confusion.
So I might have written this a slightly different way, something along the lines of: the community is structurally more equipped to deal with blatant than subtle fraud. Ironically, now that we're seeing more egregious examples of fraud, there's a better chance that things will get better; we would have tolerated the subtle types for a long time, as lots of people benefit from the status quo.
If the author were actually legitimately calling for more fraud, then I apologize for misunderstanding.
- dahart 5y agoI assumed it was tongue in cheek, but the end of the article really convinced me that the author is serious about his ‘let it get worse so it can get better proposal’ stance. “Widespread fraud would force us to re-strengthen our community’s academic norms, transforming the way we do research, and improving our collective ability to progress humanity’s knowledge. “So this is a call to action: please commit more academic fraud. [...] “Let’s make explicit academic fraud commonplace enough to cast doubt into the minds of every scientist reading an AI paper. Overall, science will benefit.” Given the number of people in academics and politics and software and just about any field who argue from the ‘let’s burn it down and rebuild it’ position, even if it is satire, it’s basically impossible to tell.
- jacobbuckman 5y agoAuthor here -- it's intended as satire, don't worry, haha. I know that nobody would ever actually do this so I decided to just lean into it. If I had any real power by which to fix things, I would have a much more nuanced take.