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When you want to do a proper work, your grants and papers get rejected because they are not innovatove enough or don't go far enough. So it is not a surprise th

• jerf 5y ago
  Worse yet, it compounds. The people approving grants, seeing all these amazing results promised, will then raise the bar for what kind of results you're promising. Which means the next batch of promises will need to be that much more extreme to get approved. It's a race to the top... or the bottom, depending on your point of view.
• ethanbond 5y ago
  Yep. The incentives in science are all wrong. To maximize your chances of publication (i.e. keeping your job), you have to make the most outlandish claims you can possibly maybe defend. Additionally, the complexity of data/analysis is increasing every day while also the esoteric domain knowledge required to make any progress is deeper and more specialized.
  • BitwiseFool 5y ago
    Not enough people realize that science and academia are just as prone to organizational politics and corruption as everything else. Peer reviewed studies are great, but, just because it was published doesn't mean it represents "The Truth". And sadly, being skeptical of studies makes you appear less credible in arguments.
    • zepto 5y ago
      >being skeptical of studies makes you appear less credible in arguments This is the most screwed up part.
  • diognesofsinope 5y ago
    Not only this, academia is a really cushy job. When I was an economics RA literally half of the econ professors didn't work Fridays and barely worked summers. It was incredible you get paid 150k with that kind of schedule.
    • IX-103 5y ago
      Interesting. In my experience professors might not be on campus teaching one or two days a week or in summer, but that's only because they are working their ass off from home, writing grant proposals, reviewing papers, doing basically anything to get funding, and trying to find time to manage their own research. I used to think it was a great gig too, since most professors had one or more small businesses on the side. Then I realized they have those businesses and consulting companies because that means they can also apply for small business grants (which they use to subcontract the research out to the university) in addition to the normal academic research grants. If you also count teaching, then that means those professors are working three jobs for one salary. I made the decision that I'd rather make 50% more working in industry doing easier (if boring) work.
      • caddemon 5y ago
        I'd guess that's pretty field dependent. What you're saying matches my experience with biology profs - technically once they get tenure they could chill out, but then they wouldn't have any funding for research anymore, so they wouldn't be able to do much of anything in their field. In CS I saw more of a mix though. It's feasible to fund a small research group without busting your ass, and it also seemed to me that putting time into coursework, writing books, etc. was culturally a more acceptable use of time in that department than it was in biology. I knew a few CS PIs that actually purposely scaled back their research once they got tenure because they were more excited about teaching and some of the educational initiatives the school was working on. That's not the norm of course, but I literally can't imagine that ever happening in a bio department lol.
      • diognesofsinope 5y ago
        Agreed, you can definitely work from home, but you're being quite charitable -- 'let's assume their behind closed doors with no accountability and do everything we expect'. This is basically how we ended up in the replication crisis to begin with. There's little to no accountability and people assume they're working hard and being honest. 5% of all degree granting universities are R1 or R2 research universities, e.g. Harvard, Stanford, etc. The vast majority of professors aren't obligated the conduct research or apply for grants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_university https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_university https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-many-universities-are-in-the-us-and-why-that-number-is-changing https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-...
  • giantrobot 5y ago
    > To maximize your chances of publication (i.e. keeping your job), you have to make the most outlandish claims you can possibly maybe defend. This is compounded by publishing negative/null results being disincentivized. Knowing what doesn't work can be as important as knowing what works.
• nextos 5y ago
  You are absolutely right. Furthermore, universities tend to require tons of publications to promote you. Things are spinning out of control. I know a few EU countries where the written norm is to need > 100 publications to qualify for a full professorship, with equally ridiculous requirements for associate and assistant positions. Obviously, this encourages and rewards completely broken practices. Many associate and full professors in my area only care about stamping their names into as many journal articles as humanly possible. Some of them are already beyond 500, with many of these in top tier journals (Nature, Science, Cell, NEJM). Obviously, they hardly ever contribute anything. Their serfs do all the work. Their job is basically to plot in order to stay on top of their neofeudal shire. In addition to this, funding bodies do nothing after fraud has been proven. ERC only terminates grants on rare occasions. https://forbetterscience.com/ https://forbetterscience.com/ discusses many cases of serial fraudsters who keep getting funded despite having retracted 10 or 15 articles in major journals.
  • tasogare 5y ago
    > Many associate and full professors in my area only care about stamping their names into as many journal articles as humanly possible. [...] Obviously, they hardly ever contribute anything. Their serfs do all the work. This describe my lab's head perfectly. At first I found strange he was so angry about a side project paper I wrote alone quickly on my free time and asked to publish at a conference. Then I understood why: in his view, every minute I spend on my projects is one I don't spend on his projects. The guy approved my first journal paper submission, which had his name on it without even reading it. It was obvious by the lack of comments and when he asked a few days later during a lab meeting to change half the content of the paper... I'm not against putting name of people contributing to the research, even slightly and informally, but at this point this is pure leeching and exploitation. Then he wonders why my thesis isn't progressing (hint: because when I chose nothing about the topic, method and experiment setting I'm not really motivated to work on that).
  • derbOac 5y ago
    One of the clearest examples of the publishing problem to me was the shift in meaning of last authors on papers over the course of my career. When I first started, last author meant the person who had contributed the least to the paper (in cases where ordering of effort can actually be determined -- often there's genuinely equal contributions). Often this was the senior faculty member, as they did little but sort of read over a paper or maybe supervise someone independently functioning. Over time though the last author came to mean "the more senior person" and then "the person whose idea it really is". So being last went from this thing that no one wanted, to this thing that people would kind of argue over. In the process the more manipulative cases, people would kind of casually say "oh I can be last author" realizing the gains from that position. It seems when a more junior person is doing all the work and is first author, an unscrupulous senior researcher will claim that "it's the idea that counts"; when that senior researcher is first author, it's "ideas are a dime a dozen, it's getting it done that matters."
• ModernMech 5y ago
  > When you want to do a proper work, your grants and papers get rejected because they are not innovatove enough or don't go far enough. Not being innovative enough isn't the root cause though. The real issue is there isn't enough funding to go around, and so the bar is higher than it needs to be. Available research funding in the US is a paltry sum considering the aggregate ROI of discoveries and technologies that originate in universities. Funding rates can be as low as 10-20%, with thousands of researchers competing for the same grants. They need to all paint a tortured story of how their idea will be the next big invention. The problem with our system is that we put public money into research, which is then commercialized by corporations and sold to consumers, and corporations/universities end up capturing the profits. Those profits are then invested in ways that yield short-term returns instead of being reinvested in research. Some of those profits are supposed to come back to the government and reinvested in research, but more and more corporations (and I consider universities to be a kind of corporation with the way they act like hedge funds that do education as a side hustle) are figuring out how to keep as much of those profits as possible, despite those profits only being made possible in the first place due to publicly funded research. What if we increase funding into research? VCs are willing to pour millions into ridiculous or tenuous ideas because they know a single success will more than make up for the duds. Lower the stakes, make funding more available to researchers, and then maybe we won't need to squeeze every bit of "innovation" out of every research dollar. Make room for research that fails or yields a negative result. This is important work that is valuable and needs to be done, but there's no funding for it. We could double the amount of funding for e.g. the NSF and it would still be a drop in the federal government's proverbial bucket.
  • derbOac 5y ago
    I get the sense from colleagues and visiting different universities that this varies across the US, Canada, the UK, and the EU, but grants are now the bread and butter at most US universities. It's not really enough to publish 100s of articles, or have a high h index, it's to bring in money even if it's not strictly necessary for your research. Part of the reason we have the problem you're mentioning is not that there isn't enough money to go around, it's that universities (at least in the US) now depend on inflated costs to function. The costs of research are kicked down the road to the federal government, and the research itself is seen in terms of profits rather than discovery. So if you have all these universities essentially telling researchers their jobs are on the line if they don't bring in profits, you're going to have everyone scrambling to bring in as much money as they can. It's not just postdocs or untenured research professor lines, it's tenured professors as well, whose income can be brought down below some necessary standard of living, or who can have salaries frozen or resources cut. I was thinking about this the other morning. I had a grant proposal that the program officer was really excited about. This program of research could probably be conducted for almost nothing because it involved archival data analysis. However if you put a dollar amount on the time, it might realistically actually cost around 250k USD, maybe 500k max, pretty generously in terms of staff effort. However, the university managed to inflate the budget ask to around 2 million for the sole purpose of indirect funds. When you have that kind of monetary incentive (carrot or stick), of course you're going to have thousands of persons applying for each opportunity. It's what led to the graduate student ponzi scheme, inflated numbers of surplus graduates, etc and so forth. It all trickles down too, in terms of research claims, p-hacking, etc and so forth. There's a place for profit, but there's also some realms where it does nothing but corrupt.
• heisenbit 5y ago
  The problem is not that people lie on their application but that these people are now being judged by people who lied on their applications some time back. The lying has been institutionalized and leaves little resources for small but meaningful progress.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  I'm sadly amused by all this. The complaint I hear about privately done research is it's all tainted by the profit motive, and so research should be funded by the government, as then it'll be pure and untainted by selfish motives. Of course, government funded motives are just as tainted by selfish motives, if not more. Even worse, the people who make the funding decisions aren't spending their own money, so they have little reason to care. At least with privately funded research, the people providing the money aren't going to fund bullshit fake research. This is why market systems work better than government systems.
  • buitreVirtual 5y ago
    Actually, companies pay universities to conduct fake research that "shows" that their products work.
    • WalterBright 5y ago
      That's a good point. But if the companies are paying for research in how to build better products, they aren't going to pay for bullshit research.
      • mhh__ 5y ago
        It has happened before i.e. Hendrik Schon, however these incidents are more to do with humanity as a species than their employers.
        • WalterBright 5y ago
          Nothing is 100%. I'm talking about incentives here, and people do things almost entirely on selfish impulses. Money is a powerful motivator, and people are strongly motivated to not spend their own money on bullshit. That motivation is absent when government funds things - but other motivations remain.
          • mhh__ 5y ago
• eloff 5y ago
  Peer review is shit. It's elitist, it's actively anti innovation and enforces the status quo. Peer review should happen out in the open and not just be limited to academics.
  • pm_me_your_quan 5y ago
    academics are largely the only people who will be able to understand the work, but sure. The fact that it's not out in the open is somewhat complicated. You're perhaps right that it would lead to better outcomes, but it's also important that researchers feel free to speak openly.
    • eloff 5y ago
      I understand the concern about being free to speak candidly, but I think it's trumped by the need for transparency to ensure that if improper gatekeeping or other unethical behavior is happening, their reputation is also on the line. Basically if you can't say it to your peers in public, don't say it at all. This also fixes the problem of incompetent peer review, because it will be called out as such and the reviewer's reputation will suffer.
      • SantalBlush 5y ago
        Opening peer review to public scrutiny will not make the process any less political--quite the contrary. There must be some way to combat the unethical behavior that does exist in academia, but that isn't it.
        • eloff 5y ago
          I think shining light on unethical behavior does reduce its incidence. Do you have some support for why you think the contrary?
          • SantalBlush 5y ago
            Please don't post opinions without supporting evidence and then ask for supporting evidence when someone disagrees with you. This just shows that you're applying skepticism selectively.
• BurningFrog 5y ago
  I keep getting more convinced that Science needs to be rebooted. How do we start over in some sane way?
  • shadilay 5y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14
  • ta988 5y ago
    You don't if you do that the ones with power will immediately seize even more and remove the last barriers. A bit of why you can't reboot a country, people who abuse the system are the ones that have the money, properties etc. Communists tried to break some of that, but almost if not all of its applications failed because of power abuse.
• pc86 5y ago
  The "way out" is to have severe, lasting professional repercussions for those creating these fraudulent studies. If the most egregious offenders found it hard to get any job at any institution, and those with state licensure oversight (I'm thinking primarily of physicians) lost their license to practice, you would see instances of this dry up almost overnight. This only happens because we allow it to happen.