18 ms·

The 'attention economy' corrupts science

323 points by respinal 4y ago

alexfromapex 4y ago
The "economy" corrupts science too.
- Ztynovovk 4y ago
xhkkffbf 4y ago
Well, yes, but what else can we do? Certainly we shouldn't give out Nobel prizes on the number of like buttons clicked on TikTok, but at some point the most influential science is the science that influences the most people. Sure, it's possible that someone has written a great paper that will be super influential in three or four hundred years, but we have no way to measure or accurately predict that. So we're stuck with the citation counts and the votes for best paper at the conferences. It's all we've got.
gerikson 4y ago
Absolute tautology corrupts absolutely.
- swayvil 4y ago
  That's just the eddys in the attention-flow talking.
swayvil 4y ago
It suggests that science is an artifact of attention. That bears study. Maybe get a nice paper out of it.
- axiom92 4y ago
  Don't forget to tweet about it with paper alert emojis! (U+1F6A8)
- adamrezich 4y ago
  if a scientist writes a paper in a forest and nobody's around to retweet the headline, does it even exist at all?
syncerr 4y ago
Attention is not the problem; it's the lack of accountability. Social platforms care about engagement, not quality of content (there's virtually no mechanism to incentivize content meets any standard of quality other than what can be measured in the moment).
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Quality is subjective, but there’s no accountability about harmful or illegal content either, so platforms don’t only promote “general purpose” spam, but actively harmful content that intentionally seeds outrage or encourages violence as that generally leads to more engagement.
  - syncerr 4y ago
    Absolutely, it should include a range of indicators like spam, scams, known-falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims.
  - o_1 4y ago
    Quality is subjective? Is it information or a product? Or is all information now a product?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
nramanand 4y ago
Isn't this also related to how the vaccines-cause-autism conversation started? The study involved only had a handful of subjects (a few of which were very unqualified), and then a big important journal (The Lancet IIRC) picked it up for the novelty. The article mentions attention economy as in media, TikTok, etc playing a role before "community assessment." But it's not like scientists don't also gravitate towards the new shiny thing in their own ways.
- syncerr 4y ago
  Yeah. Andrew Wakefield was stripped of his medical license in 2010 for publishing fraudulent research and it was later discovered that he was paid to discredit the MMR vaccine.[0] And yet, ~10% of Americas still believe the study. [1] [0] https://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-summary.htm https://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-summary.htm [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/276929/fewer-continue-vaccines-important.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/276929/fewer-continue-vaccines-...
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    I’m frankly shocked it’s only 10%
    - mannykannot 4y ago
      In the linked study, 10% said they believed vaccines caused autism, and while they were not asked if they accepted Wakefield’s claims, presumably just about all who do were in that group. 45% said they were unsure whether vaccines caused autism, leaving open the important question of which way they would go when faced with a choice.
    - mannykannot 4y ago
      In the linked study, 10% said they believed vaccines caused autism, and while they were not asked whether they accepted Wakefield’s claims, presumably just about all who did were included within that group. 45% said they were unsure, leaving open the important question of which way they would go when faced with a choice.
turlockmike 4y ago
This boils down to a fundamental question. Why do we spend any time doing science to begin with? Historically scientists were drawn to the field in order to improve human understanding of our reality. These individuals often died quite poor and unknown, but advanced us forward. Now popular science is the goal and getting huge money grants. The goal is no longer the pursuit of knowledge, it's a money game. Like journalism. The only useful science done at the moment is at tech companies who will use it to build better products.
- woah 4y ago
  Pretty sure the money a scientist can personally earn with grants is far less than they can at a tech company.
  - Fomite 4y ago
    This is absolutely true. I could leave for industry tomorrow and likely double my salary. The money I've personally earned from grants is... $0. And I've been very successful in getting grants. I only got a job offer at one university where the PI of a grant directly got a monetary benefit from it, and while it was nice, it was never going to be more than "That's a nice little bonus" money. If you want to make money as a scientist in academia, consulting or a startup is where it's at.
- theptip 4y ago
  > The goal is no longer the pursuit of knowledge, it's a money game. I don't know about that. All the PhDs I know are dirt-poor (or were until they left science to get tech jobs), and are in the game because they are passionate about science and the project of advancing human knowledge. It's true that your ability to get a tenure-track position is very dependent on your ability to successfully obtain grant money, but most of the scientists I know view that as a necessary evil, not the game in itself. > The only useful science done at the moment is at tech companies who will use it to build better products. This is trivially demonstrably false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope for the first example that came to mind from recent news.
Fomite 4y ago
"The attention a scientist’s work gains from the public now plays into its perceived value. Scientists list media exposure counts on résumés, and many PhD theses now include the number of times a candidate’s work has appeared in the popular science press. Science has succumbed to the attention economy." Sitting on a tenure and promotion committee at an R1 university, this type of stuff is just as likely to torpedo you as it is to boost you.
- abrax3141 4y ago
  I agree. I’ve almost never seen this, and I read a lot of scientific vitae. (The one time I did see it it was because a major documentary by a major scientific org had been made from the results.) I think they mostly made this observation up. (There’s no citation.) Calls the whole thing into question, which sounded pretty simplistic to begin with.
  - Fomite 4y ago
    There are only two places I call it out in my CV: 1) A pandemic-related paper, where press coverage was a big deal, because it was meant to influence policy decisions on a very short time frame. 2) One paper where we are in the 99th percentile for media and social media mentions for a very good journal, and we call that out specifically. But as a general rule? You're far more likely to trigger "Is that what you're spending your time on?" and "No serious about scholarship" than you are to find someone impressed with your altmetric score. Indeed, I'm worried about several of my colleagues who are learning hard in that direction (being the Social Media Editor of a journal, etc.)
- seydor 4y ago
  The question is when? Surely , with passage of time, it s more likely scams will be revealed. But if the professor has already retired, the damage and lost effort is irreversible.
version_five 4y ago
I agree with some of the problems listed (over-hyping minor results) though personally I think the link to attention economy feels a bit contrived. There are much greater forces leading to these problems - notably the emphasis on metrics for science work (as mentioned) and politicization. This didn't convince me the attention economy lens adds anything
sinenomine 4y ago
Why go to such a long tangent, when you could make a solid case about the legacy grant distribution system[1] corrupting science for decades? It is as close to funding and career success as it gets. https://newscience.org/nih/ https://newscience.org/nih/
hashtag-til 4y ago
The article is very insightful and explains a lot why do you get a growing number of useless inflated headlines arxiv papers trying to gather views from twitter or linkedin.
wanderingmind 4y ago
" Scientists list media exposure counts on résumés, and many PhD theses now include the number of times a candidate’s work has appeared in the popular science press." This is a mandatory requirement to a EB1A green card. Maybe the government can do something from its side to reduce the fluff.
- adharmad 4y ago
  The problem is, any system that replaces it, and has some measurable/countable metric, can effectively be gamed in the same manner.
kossTKR 4y ago
Having multiple family members working actively as scientists and academics i've been pretty blackpilled about what "science" actually is for the most part. Off course there's heaps of interesting papers and progress out there but at least 90% of money and time seems to be spent on politics, careerism and working actively for some disproportionally funded but "profitable" niche. It's get ahead in the game, "earn money for investors" or further some industry astroturfed cause. Also a lot of PhD's use them to grift like cheap salesmen these days unfortunately. Probably has something to do with the corporate incentive structures that have emerged.
- dendrite9 4y ago
  I'm curious if you think there is more of this in science than in other places. Or is it that we want to think of science and academia as better than/more idealistic? This comment is similar to comments I've heard about nonprofits, govt work, and a quite a few large businesses. For a long time I thought nonprofits were generally good, in college I learned more about what nonprofit means and how that kneejerk reaction of mine could provide cover for a huge range of behaviors. "money and time seems to be spent on politics, careerism and working actively for some disproportionally funded but "profitable" niche"
  - kossTKR 4y ago
    Good question. No, i don't think it's much different in other sectors. And the comparison to NGO's is a good one because the same realisation can be made about big parts of that world - ie. lots of them exist to further geopolitical or corporate ends, niches, or keep higher middle class do gooders busy instead of focusing on political or systemic issues. (i have lots of respect for a lot of people in that world still). I guess that leads me to the actual problem; their images as somehow pure or isolated from the rest of societal power dynamics. Everywhere it's about resources, realpolitiks and (media) power, but the internet is filled with people blindly believing in "science", "ngo"'s or people with diplomas for that sake.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    > I'm curious if you think there is more of this in science than in other places. Or is it that we want to think of science and academia as better than/more idealistic? As it is, Science has developed a rather substantial reputation (lots of marketing during the COVID phenomenon), and has a large and hyper-confident fan base spreading The Good Word on social media. I often wonder why Science seems unable / uninterested in addressing this non-ideal state of affairs, considering it's substantial intellectual power (a fact I am regularly educated on by my superiors).
jostmey 4y ago
Having spent over 10 years in a university and been a professor, the problem isn’t attention seeking behavior but a lack of accountability. For example, you can literally make up any data you want in a grant proposal and so long as it sounds right no one can or will double check it. The foundation of academia is rotting, but maybe it’s always been like this
- anonporridge 4y ago
  > but maybe it’s always been like this The older I get, the more I believe this is the truth. For most institutions we've been taught to hold in high regard.
  - marcus_holmes 4y ago
    This. I'm actually optimistic (I know, Unpopular Opinion) about the future for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is the increased transparency that we now have on our institutions. It used to be that the media controlled how much of what went on that we saw, and the media was part of an establishment that valued the status quo and "stability" so didn't report on some things. Now, the blinders are off and we're seeing what was always there. For Science, this means that the institutions that were set up by a bunch of rich men who could afford to spend their time satisfying their curiosity, are now visibly falling apart. Because we can see this, we can change it to something better. The pressure to kill off the journal system is growing. The various crises that the article mentions, etc. This is all good, in the long term.
    - anonporridge 4y ago
      I strongly agree. But I'm also increasingly worried that we're not very far from losing this. It already seems like social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit are increasingly controlled by US propaganda and corporate interests. It's hard to know how far gone what we think is true freedom of speech and democratization of voice already is.
  - derbOac 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> "Science and scientists are part of society. Neither sit on a lofty perch that makes them impervious to societal shifts." Ironically, this is not the general public's perception. Even more ironic is the fact that celebrity "scientists" like Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson are fond of pushing the "science is better than the rest of us" narrative.
O__________O 4y ago
At the point more than 50% of results are not reproduced and/or reproducible — is science really science?
AlbertCory 4y ago
The attention economy corrupts everything it touches: not just science, but journalism, politics, and even childhood. Being famous used to be rather difficult. Of course there were exceptions (writing To Kill a Mockingbird, being the guy who dove into the river to save a drowning child, for example), but for the most part, you were going to live your life known only to the few hundred or thousand people you met personally. Even though you could pick up a phone and dial anyone in the world who owned a phone, you wouldn't, and if you did, they'd hang up on you. Now you can force your idiotic, or great ideas onto the screens of millions of people you'll never meet. Is that a good or a bad thing? It's certainly bad in some ways, and this is one of them.
- nopenopenopeno 4y ago
  >Now you can force your idiotic, or great ideas onto the screens of millions of people you'll never meet. No you can’t. Attention is scarce. That’s why it’s called “attention economy”. In fact, it was far easier to force idiotic ideas onto the screens of millions of people before the internet came along. That’s what TV commercials were.
  - NL807 4y ago
    I think you're thinking about corporate/org-scale attention seeking. Putting things into historical context, getting attention today is certainly easier for a random individual. In fact anyone could directly compete with large organisations and even surpass them in some cases. You can set up a youtube account then do episodic dumb shit, and i can guarantee you'll get thousands of not millions of views eventually. You simply couldn't do that 30 years ago.
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      Exactly. And it is, indeed, still hard to become famous, but not as hard as 30 years ago.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > That’s why it’s called “attention economy”. Those are your words. How many people do you think have already read them? How many more do you think will have read them after 10, 20, or 50 years? If you'd said the same thing before we were using computers to communicate with each other, who would you have said it to? How many people would have heard it? How long would those words have been discoverable? What chance you would you have had to have your words reach millions of people? Forget about you, what chance would I and everyone else have? Speaking as someone who wasn't born after the internet it's much easier now than it was when I was a child for my words to reach a massive number of people, and every child alive today has a better chance than I did at their age. Attention is scarce, when you've got near instant communication over a global network of billions of people you only need a tiny fraction of them to be looking your way and you've got your ideas onto the screens of millions of people
karaterobot 4y ago
> Revenue from subscriptions and from authors, who pay to be published, are no longer the only profit sources. It's not obvious to me what this means. What are the other profit sources for scientific journals, and why do they depend on things like social media virality?
timcavel 4y ago
hoosieree 4y ago
Prove how much you agree with this by not discussing it on hacker news.
thghtihadanacct 4y ago
in all fairness, where is columbia now?
jscipione 4y ago
I disagree with the premise of the article, interconnectedness is a great benefit to science. Yes there are inequities, but that also means more collaboration, and more scrutiny. Science is deeply corrupt but for other reasons such as a lot of money in certain areas of interest, pressure from governments and ivory tower mentality.
nstart 4y ago
While this article feels true, I wish it provided more of its own researched evidence to prove the point. I went through several links and possibly the most relevant ones are "Why are medical journals full of fashionable nonsense?"[1] and the book "Science Fictions"[2]. Most of the other links talk about other tangentially related topics. The subheading "How the attention economy corrupts science" which should contain the meat actually has little to no research of its own that can convince me of the title (unless I'm willing to read the book "Science Fictions"). I read the article "Why are medical journals full of fashionable nonsense?" and found it to have a similar vibe although it had more concrete evidence. Still, the need for more than a few examples is something I feel is fair to call for. Basically, I don't find it to fully support this original article about "attention economy" corrupting science. Overall, I think this is quite an ironic state. The article seems to hold on to what feels like an idea that is socially popular, something we all suspect, and it presents it as true with evidence that is either vague or indirect (look, this book exists on the topic, therefore it is true). The article fails to clearly draw the differences between "working hard to get attention to one's science" vs "the act of getting attention is corrupting science". I'm overall unconvinced that this article really does anything much to support its premise. [1] - https://bigthink.com/health/medical-journals-fashionable-nonsense/ https://bigthink.com/health/medical-journals-fashionable-non... [2] - https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250222688/sciencefictions https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250222688/sciencefictions
- csomar 4y ago
  The article being mediocre-ly researched (and click-baity) is the ultimate evidence of what it is trying to prove.
javajosh 4y ago
The problem with science is that there are too few discoveries for too many scientists. This caused the reproducibility crisis. This caused grad student overwork and abuse. It also means working scientists have had to turn to the "attention economy" to save themselves. We forget that this notion that anyone could (and everyone should) be a scientist is really new and (ironically) quite untested idea. Well, this error mode is called a "glut" and it sucks for everyone involved. Maybe science is better off being either a hobby for rich weirdos (and/or the savants that they patronize) or a game that big business keeps paying to play to secure that all-important new intellectual property. Whoever decided you could make a science factory that produces discoveries was an idiot, and now we have proof.
jongjong 4y ago
It's nice that this has finally come to the public's awareness. For a few years, I was afraid that the attention economy would be an 'invisible hand' which would have a significant impact on everything but which nobody would notice. People used to be uncomfortable discussing 'attention' or 'the media' - I suspect because it was too abstract or not relevant enough to them - Now that many people are struggling to get any attention for their work, attention and the media seem more relevant. When someone publishes the best work of their career and it receives less recognition than their early work, it sometimes makes them wonder what has changed.
Animats 4y ago
Yes. The "prestigious journals" aren't helping. Nature used to mostly cover biology, and had reviewers who understood that. Now, "Nature" is a brand covering a wide range of topics, badly. Then there are university PR departments, who hype every little lab result into a world-changing breakthrough. This is particularly bad in energy-related areas. (I want some publication to reprint, each month, battery PR from 1, 5, and 10 years ago.)
- enviclash 4y ago
  Not even Nature dares launching a journal about economics.
Gatsky 4y ago
Sometimes I am left to wonder about the widespread criticism of science. Slow progress, broken publishing and career progression, terrible working conditions, prestige farming, poor mental health and exploitation of students, fake data, statistical warcrimes, bullying, sexism, racism, elitism, harrassment... The question is, does any of this matter on a historical scale? Is Science doomed to fail? In 200 years, our descendants will probably look back at us with the same mix of condescension and slightly horrified fascination with which we view our 19th century counterparts. Our stupid scientific publishing system will be viewed similarly to the plumbing in London in the 1850s. The chimney sweep and the graduate student suffer similar plights. It is terrible, immoral, we should do better, but then this is always the case. On one level, our future descendants should be grateful - we eradicated small pox (that alone would be enough really, an unprecedented gift to all future humanity, a boundless alleviation of suffering), discovered antibiotics, greatly improved child mortality, invented quantum mechanics and relativity, drastically increased our computational capacity, left the planet for the first time, and connected almost everyone in the world. All of this under conditions considerably less ideal than they are today, despite still being far from desirable. Maybe that's all that matters? Science being Science will sort itself out most likely. We should mainly try to reduce the human suffering involved, and allow greater diveristy in how and where research is done.
- n4r9 4y ago
  My main concern is that perhaps there is an "attention threshold" on fundamental breakthrough results in physics and mathematics, and that we're diminishing the chances of ever getting such results again because theorists don't have enough attention to spare. If you spend all day writing grant proposals and trivial papers (just for the sake of publishing), then go home and veg out on Netflix and Twitter, when are you supposed to have that quality "sitting and thinking" time?
  - karencarits 4y ago
    That the society is moving away from the concept of calling or vocation is also a problem. As a scientist (or physician or nurse or whatever) you are no longer rewarded for devoting your life to such things. You will not be supported (maybe even shamed for your enthusiasm or for failing in the reas of life that you are sacrifying), noone will watch your back, the administration will blame you for what they can, and you will not be paid overtime of course
shswkna 4y ago
We have changed the environment that we live in. And in doing so, we created our own Achille’s heel. Possibly the future (or non-future) of civilisation will be the outcome of a natural selection of the fittest, of the culture that deals with this in the best way.
enviclash 4y ago
Science was already a badly governed and "corrupted" arena. This just adds more trash to disentangle/deal with.
theblabblah 4y ago
I find these arguments kinda funny. Women have known for a long time that attention is a huge catalyst to driving their partners along their lines of perception. Their partners have been freely giving attention to women all their lives. Most of them didn't realize it is a problem then. It is highly unlikely that they will realize it's a problem now. After all we give it freely, nobody has a gun to your head to pay attention to your girlfriend all day or watch shitty content.
seydor 4y ago
So what can we do? As always , nothing, let's throw our hands up in the air and pretend 'it is what it is'. meanwhile, celebrity scientists keep using funds to enrich themselves
- abnercoimbre 4y ago
  The author recommends greater consumer awareness, and to vote with our clicks (identify the better content and only reward those.)
  - seydor 4y ago
    The problem is integral to science and scientists, i dont think the audience is to blame
iciac 4y ago
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” - Herbert Simon
c7b 4y ago
> Twenty-five years ago, it was projected that, in an ever-more interconnected world, money would no longer be the prime currency, attention would be. While it does make for a good opening line, using a single prediction from 25 years ago that arguably worked out to some extent (probably not everyone prefers likes over cash), without giving any context on how many similar predictions were made in the same context, just feels a bit odd.
- teamonkey 4y ago
  Money is still the prime currency. Attention is just a proxy for it. The problem is that, now more than there ever has been, there is a direct link between attention and money - in particular advertising - on a scale that is measured down to micro-engagements. To maximise profit you need to do whatever you can do legally to get your ad revenue (or whatever). Calling it the "attention economy" gives the impression that the problem is the consumer demanding an endless sea of changing content, whereas actually there's a profit motive to generate a lot of content in the cheapest possible way, to push it on people as much as possible, and the quality of that content only matters if you care about retention.
hrdwdmrbl 4y ago
Should we instead call it the "status economy"?
rooundio 4y ago
Reminds me of this Science article in 2017: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6354/880.2#1504269787069 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6354/880.2#1504269... on why scientists need social media influencers …
mkl 4y ago
> “get your science the attention it deserves.” (On Google, that search term garners nearly 500 million hits.) So 500 million pages have one or more words similar to those. That's pretty flimsy evidence. Putting quotes around it I get 5 results (not 5 million, 5), one of which is this article. I don't doubt the overall conclusions of the article, but I do wonder how well supported some of it is.
viridian 4y ago
What most people fail to realize is that fundamentally, most principle investigators, the people who actually run the research world, are primarily fundraisers. Their day-to-day job is a mix of grant and proposal writing, relationship building/organizational meetings, and checking in on their postdocs, candidates, and lab techs. Your main goal, as a PI, is to keep your lab running, and thus research flowing, by any means possible. For some PIs, this means milking every drop of available talent and time out of your doctoral candidates, and is the most common cause of the horror stories you hear about people leaving academia. On the other end of the extreme, they can embed themselves so deeply in fundraising with private or public capital that their lab staff don't see them for more than 15-30 minutes a week, because they are essentially living their lives hopping from sales meeting to sales meeting. This wouldn't be a problem if the job of the PI was explicitly meant to be that of a salesman, but the actual role of a PI is to define the research being done. They draft the hypotheses, the expected impact, etc, because that is their intended role, but in reality these will always be constructed in a way that makes it easier for the PI to solicit funding. It's impossible for the attention economy to not play into the research funding loop then, because every set of eyeballs is another potential revenue source for future research, or a tool to justify growing the footprint of your lab. I wouldn't go so far as to call the superstructure corrupting of science though, not in those words. I'd say it forces science to be mission focused, where the mission is a subtle negotiation between the people funding the research and the people performing it, and often times the person with the capital lands much closer to their ideal.
- derbOac 4y ago
  Just speaking from personal experience, what you describe gets murky really fast in a couple of ways. The model you're describing implicitly is this idealistic "executive-mentor" model of the PI, who has the ideas and the postdocs or doctoral students are just implementing it. Basically scientist wants to produce, so needs help and outsources the work to others. In my experience, though, this is not at all what happens many times. Ideas come from those doctoral students or postdocs or whowever, the PI takes them, and then they get credit for those ideas. I've seen PIs who really don't fundamentally understand the research areas, who kind of are just "black holes" for credit of the ideas and work of others around them, and then because they're more senior, they end up getting the credit. Sometimes this process seems intentional, in that the PI cultivates a false impression of what's going on, and sometimes it just happens because of the nature of the attention economy. So although the "executive-mentor" model is a good one, what's closer to reality in many cases (although not all) is more of a "public liason-mascot" system, or some kind of hybrid. Because of this mismatch between reality and the assumed schema, the attention economy then incentivizes abuse and corruption. This isn't even getting into issues about how chasing grants as a fundamental scientific endeavor distorts what is researched. Even if you have a pure leader-mentor PI who is just trying to get their own independent ideas researched with funding, you then have to ask "what is rewarded? Is it what's good rigorous science, or what is popular?" The problem I think is that what garners attention is not what is rigorous or innovative. Sometimes those things overlap, and maybe they're correlated, but they're not the same. Maybe this isn't unique to science, but it doesn't make it ok, and it seems like changing it to prevent these problems is necessary.
mbrodersen 4y ago
I for one am super happy that I now have access to world class talks, documentaries, and instructional videos on YouTube. Don’t complain about bad content. Instead choose to only watch the quality stuff.

323 points by respinal 4y ago

alexfromapex 4y ago

The "economy" corrupts science too.

Ztynovovk 4y ago

xhkkffbf 4y ago

Well, yes, but what else can we do? Certainly we shouldn't give out Nobel prizes on the number of like buttons clicked on TikTok, but at some point the most influential science is the science that influences the most people. Sure, it's possible that someone has written a great paper that will be super influential in three or four hundred years, but we have no way to measure or accurately predict that. So we're stuck with the citation counts and the votes for best paper at the conferences. It's all we've got.

gerikson 4y ago

Absolute tautology corrupts absolutely.

swayvil 4y ago
That's just the eddys in the attention-flow talking.

swayvil 4y ago

It suggests that science is an artifact of attention. That bears study. Maybe get a nice paper out of it.

axiom92 4y ago
Don't forget to tweet about it with paper alert emojis! (U+1F6A8)
adamrezich 4y ago
if a scientist writes a paper in a forest and nobody's around to retweet the headline, does it even exist at all?

syncerr 4y ago

Attention is not the problem; it's the lack of accountability. Social platforms care about engagement, not quality of content (there's virtually no mechanism to incentivize content meets any standard of quality other than what can be measured in the moment).

Nextgrid 4y ago
Quality is subjective, but there’s no accountability about harmful or illegal content either, so platforms don’t only promote “general purpose” spam, but actively harmful content that intentionally seeds outrage or encourages violence as that generally leads to more engagement.
- syncerr 4y ago
  Absolutely, it should include a range of indicators like spam, scams, known-falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims.
- o_1 4y ago
  Quality is subjective? Is it information or a product? Or is all information now a product?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

nramanand 4y ago

Isn't this also related to how the vaccines-cause-autism conversation started? The study involved only had a handful of subjects (a few of which were very unqualified), and then a big important journal (The Lancet IIRC) picked it up for the novelty. The article mentions attention economy as in media, TikTok, etc playing a role before "community assessment." But it's not like scientists don't also gravitate towards the new shiny thing in their own ways.

syncerr 4y ago
Yeah. Andrew Wakefield was stripped of his medical license in 2010 for publishing fraudulent research and it was later discovered that he was paid to discredit the MMR vaccine.[0] And yet, ~10% of Americas still believe the study. [1] [0] https://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-summary.htm https://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-summary.htm [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/276929/fewer-continue-vaccines-important.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/276929/fewer-continue-vaccines-...
- the_only_law 4y ago
  I’m frankly shocked it’s only 10%
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    In the linked study, 10% said they believed vaccines caused autism, and while they were not asked if they accepted Wakefield’s claims, presumably just about all who do were in that group. 45% said they were unsure whether vaccines caused autism, leaving open the important question of which way they would go when faced with a choice.
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    In the linked study, 10% said they believed vaccines caused autism, and while they were not asked whether they accepted Wakefield’s claims, presumably just about all who did were included within that group. 45% said they were unsure, leaving open the important question of which way they would go when faced with a choice.

turlockmike 4y ago

This boils down to a fundamental question. Why do we spend any time doing science to begin with? Historically scientists were drawn to the field in order to improve human understanding of our reality. These individuals often died quite poor and unknown, but advanced us forward. Now popular science is the goal and getting huge money grants. The goal is no longer the pursuit of knowledge, it's a money game. Like journalism. The only useful science done at the moment is at tech companies who will use it to build better products.

woah 4y ago
Pretty sure the money a scientist can personally earn with grants is far less than they can at a tech company.
- Fomite 4y ago
  This is absolutely true. I could leave for industry tomorrow and likely double my salary. The money I've personally earned from grants is... $0. And I've been very successful in getting grants. I only got a job offer at one university where the PI of a grant directly got a monetary benefit from it, and while it was nice, it was never going to be more than "That's a nice little bonus" money. If you want to make money as a scientist in academia, consulting or a startup is where it's at.
theptip 4y ago
> The goal is no longer the pursuit of knowledge, it's a money game. I don't know about that. All the PhDs I know are dirt-poor (or were until they left science to get tech jobs), and are in the game because they are passionate about science and the project of advancing human knowledge. It's true that your ability to get a tenure-track position is very dependent on your ability to successfully obtain grant money, but most of the scientists I know view that as a necessary evil, not the game in itself. > The only useful science done at the moment is at tech companies who will use it to build better products. This is trivially demonstrably false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope for the first example that came to mind from recent news.

Fomite 4y ago

"The attention a scientist’s work gains from the public now plays into its perceived value. Scientists list media exposure counts on résumés, and many PhD theses now include the number of times a candidate’s work has appeared in the popular science press. Science has succumbed to the attention economy." Sitting on a tenure and promotion committee at an R1 university, this type of stuff is just as likely to torpedo you as it is to boost you.

abrax3141 4y ago
I agree. I’ve almost never seen this, and I read a lot of scientific vitae. (The one time I did see it it was because a major documentary by a major scientific org had been made from the results.) I think they mostly made this observation up. (There’s no citation.) Calls the whole thing into question, which sounded pretty simplistic to begin with.
- Fomite 4y ago
  There are only two places I call it out in my CV: 1) A pandemic-related paper, where press coverage was a big deal, because it was meant to influence policy decisions on a very short time frame. 2) One paper where we are in the 99th percentile for media and social media mentions for a very good journal, and we call that out specifically. But as a general rule? You're far more likely to trigger "Is that what you're spending your time on?" and "No serious about scholarship" than you are to find someone impressed with your altmetric score. Indeed, I'm worried about several of my colleagues who are learning hard in that direction (being the Social Media Editor of a journal, etc.)
seydor 4y ago
The question is when? Surely , with passage of time, it s more likely scams will be revealed. But if the professor has already retired, the damage and lost effort is irreversible.

version_five 4y ago

I agree with some of the problems listed (over-hyping minor results) though personally I think the link to attention economy feels a bit contrived. There are much greater forces leading to these problems - notably the emphasis on metrics for science work (as mentioned) and politicization. This didn't convince me the attention economy lens adds anything

sinenomine 4y ago

Why go to such a long tangent, when you could make a solid case about the legacy grant distribution system[1] corrupting science for decades? It is as close to funding and career success as it gets. https://newscience.org/nih/ https://newscience.org/nih/

hashtag-til 4y ago

The article is very insightful and explains a lot why do you get a growing number of useless inflated headlines arxiv papers trying to gather views from twitter or linkedin.

wanderingmind 4y ago

" Scientists list media exposure counts on résumés, and many PhD theses now include the number of times a candidate’s work has appeared in the popular science press." This is a mandatory requirement to a EB1A green card. Maybe the government can do something from its side to reduce the fluff.

adharmad 4y ago
The problem is, any system that replaces it, and has some measurable/countable metric, can effectively be gamed in the same manner.

kossTKR 4y ago

Having multiple family members working actively as scientists and academics i've been pretty blackpilled about what "science" actually is for the most part. Off course there's heaps of interesting papers and progress out there but at least 90% of money and time seems to be spent on politics, careerism and working actively for some disproportionally funded but "profitable" niche. It's get ahead in the game, "earn money for investors" or further some industry astroturfed cause. Also a lot of PhD's use them to grift like cheap salesmen these days unfortunately. Probably has something to do with the corporate incentive structures that have emerged.

dendrite9 4y ago
I'm curious if you think there is more of this in science than in other places. Or is it that we want to think of science and academia as better than/more idealistic? This comment is similar to comments I've heard about nonprofits, govt work, and a quite a few large businesses. For a long time I thought nonprofits were generally good, in college I learned more about what nonprofit means and how that kneejerk reaction of mine could provide cover for a huge range of behaviors. "money and time seems to be spent on politics, careerism and working actively for some disproportionally funded but "profitable" niche"
- kossTKR 4y ago
  Good question. No, i don't think it's much different in other sectors. And the comparison to NGO's is a good one because the same realisation can be made about big parts of that world - ie. lots of them exist to further geopolitical or corporate ends, niches, or keep higher middle class do gooders busy instead of focusing on political or systemic issues. (i have lots of respect for a lot of people in that world still). I guess that leads me to the actual problem; their images as somehow pure or isolated from the rest of societal power dynamics. Everywhere it's about resources, realpolitiks and (media) power, but the internet is filled with people blindly believing in "science", "ngo"'s or people with diplomas for that sake.
- mistermann 4y ago
  > I'm curious if you think there is more of this in science than in other places. Or is it that we want to think of science and academia as better than/more idealistic? As it is, Science has developed a rather substantial reputation (lots of marketing during the COVID phenomenon), and has a large and hyper-confident fan base spreading The Good Word on social media. I often wonder why Science seems unable / uninterested in addressing this non-ideal state of affairs, considering it's substantial intellectual power (a fact I am regularly educated on by my superiors).

jostmey 4y ago

Having spent over 10 years in a university and been a professor, the problem isn’t attention seeking behavior but a lack of accountability. For example, you can literally make up any data you want in a grant proposal and so long as it sounds right no one can or will double check it. The foundation of academia is rotting, but maybe it’s always been like this

anonporridge 4y ago
> but maybe it’s always been like this The older I get, the more I believe this is the truth. For most institutions we've been taught to hold in high regard.
- marcus_holmes 4y ago
  This. I'm actually optimistic (I know, Unpopular Opinion) about the future for a bunch of reasons, but one of them is the increased transparency that we now have on our institutions. It used to be that the media controlled how much of what went on that we saw, and the media was part of an establishment that valued the status quo and "stability" so didn't report on some things. Now, the blinders are off and we're seeing what was always there. For Science, this means that the institutions that were set up by a bunch of rich men who could afford to spend their time satisfying their curiosity, are now visibly falling apart. Because we can see this, we can change it to something better. The pressure to kill off the journal system is growing. The various crises that the article mentions, etc. This is all good, in the long term.
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    I strongly agree. But I'm also increasingly worried that we're not very far from losing this. It already seems like social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit are increasingly controlled by US propaganda and corporate interests. It's hard to know how far gone what we think is true freedom of speech and democratization of voice already is.
- derbOac 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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chiefalchemist 4y ago

> "Science and scientists are part of society. Neither sit on a lofty perch that makes them impervious to societal shifts." Ironically, this is not the general public's perception. Even more ironic is the fact that celebrity "scientists" like Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson are fond of pushing the "science is better than the rest of us" narrative.

O__________O 4y ago

At the point more than 50% of results are not reproduced and/or reproducible — is science really science?

AlbertCory 4y ago

The attention economy corrupts everything it touches: not just science, but journalism, politics, and even childhood. Being famous used to be rather difficult. Of course there were exceptions (writing To Kill a Mockingbird, being the guy who dove into the river to save a drowning child, for example), but for the most part, you were going to live your life known only to the few hundred or thousand people you met personally. Even though you could pick up a phone and dial anyone in the world who owned a phone, you wouldn't, and if you did, they'd hang up on you. Now you can force your idiotic, or great ideas onto the screens of millions of people you'll never meet. Is that a good or a bad thing? It's certainly bad in some ways, and this is one of them.

nopenopenopeno 4y ago
>Now you can force your idiotic, or great ideas onto the screens of millions of people you'll never meet. No you can’t. Attention is scarce. That’s why it’s called “attention economy”. In fact, it was far easier to force idiotic ideas onto the screens of millions of people before the internet came along. That’s what TV commercials were.
- NL807 4y ago
  I think you're thinking about corporate/org-scale attention seeking. Putting things into historical context, getting attention today is certainly easier for a random individual. In fact anyone could directly compete with large organisations and even surpass them in some cases. You can set up a youtube account then do episodic dumb shit, and i can guarantee you'll get thousands of not millions of views eventually. You simply couldn't do that 30 years ago.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Exactly. And it is, indeed, still hard to become famous, but not as hard as 30 years ago.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > That’s why it’s called “attention economy”. Those are your words. How many people do you think have already read them? How many more do you think will have read them after 10, 20, or 50 years? If you'd said the same thing before we were using computers to communicate with each other, who would you have said it to? How many people would have heard it? How long would those words have been discoverable? What chance you would you have had to have your words reach millions of people? Forget about you, what chance would I and everyone else have? Speaking as someone who wasn't born after the internet it's much easier now than it was when I was a child for my words to reach a massive number of people, and every child alive today has a better chance than I did at their age. Attention is scarce, when you've got near instant communication over a global network of billions of people you only need a tiny fraction of them to be looking your way and you've got your ideas onto the screens of millions of people

karaterobot 4y ago

> Revenue from subscriptions and from authors, who pay to be published, are no longer the only profit sources. It's not obvious to me what this means. What are the other profit sources for scientific journals, and why do they depend on things like social media virality?

timcavel 4y ago

hoosieree 4y ago

Prove how much you agree with this by not discussing it on hacker news.

thghtihadanacct 4y ago

in all fairness, where is columbia now?

jscipione 4y ago

I disagree with the premise of the article, interconnectedness is a great benefit to science. Yes there are inequities, but that also means more collaboration, and more scrutiny. Science is deeply corrupt but for other reasons such as a lot of money in certain areas of interest, pressure from governments and ivory tower mentality.

nstart 4y ago

While this article feels true, I wish it provided more of its own researched evidence to prove the point. I went through several links and possibly the most relevant ones are "Why are medical journals full of fashionable nonsense?"[1] and the book "Science Fictions"[2]. Most of the other links talk about other tangentially related topics. The subheading "How the attention economy corrupts science" which should contain the meat actually has little to no research of its own that can convince me of the title (unless I'm willing to read the book "Science Fictions"). I read the article "Why are medical journals full of fashionable nonsense?" and found it to have a similar vibe although it had more concrete evidence. Still, the need for more than a few examples is something I feel is fair to call for. Basically, I don't find it to fully support this original article about "attention economy" corrupting science. Overall, I think this is quite an ironic state. The article seems to hold on to what feels like an idea that is socially popular, something we all suspect, and it presents it as true with evidence that is either vague or indirect (look, this book exists on the topic, therefore it is true). The article fails to clearly draw the differences between "working hard to get attention to one's science" vs "the act of getting attention is corrupting science". I'm overall unconvinced that this article really does anything much to support its premise. [1] - https://bigthink.com/health/medical-journals-fashionable-nonsense/ https://bigthink.com/health/medical-journals-fashionable-non... [2] - https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250222688/sciencefictions https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250222688/sciencefictions

csomar 4y ago
The article being mediocre-ly researched (and click-baity) is the ultimate evidence of what it is trying to prove.

javajosh 4y ago

The problem with science is that there are too few discoveries for too many scientists. This caused the reproducibility crisis. This caused grad student overwork and abuse. It also means working scientists have had to turn to the "attention economy" to save themselves. We forget that this notion that anyone could (and everyone should) be a scientist is really new and (ironically) quite untested idea. Well, this error mode is called a "glut" and it sucks for everyone involved. Maybe science is better off being either a hobby for rich weirdos (and/or the savants that they patronize) or a game that big business keeps paying to play to secure that all-important new intellectual property. Whoever decided you could make a science factory that produces discoveries was an idiot, and now we have proof.

jongjong 4y ago

It's nice that this has finally come to the public's awareness. For a few years, I was afraid that the attention economy would be an 'invisible hand' which would have a significant impact on everything but which nobody would notice. People used to be uncomfortable discussing 'attention' or 'the media' - I suspect because it was too abstract or not relevant enough to them - Now that many people are struggling to get any attention for their work, attention and the media seem more relevant. When someone publishes the best work of their career and it receives less recognition than their early work, it sometimes makes them wonder what has changed.

Animats 4y ago

Yes. The "prestigious journals" aren't helping. Nature used to mostly cover biology, and had reviewers who understood that. Now, "Nature" is a brand covering a wide range of topics, badly. Then there are university PR departments, who hype every little lab result into a world-changing breakthrough. This is particularly bad in energy-related areas. (I want some publication to reprint, each month, battery PR from 1, 5, and 10 years ago.)

enviclash 4y ago
Not even Nature dares launching a journal about economics.

Gatsky 4y ago

Sometimes I am left to wonder about the widespread criticism of science. Slow progress, broken publishing and career progression, terrible working conditions, prestige farming, poor mental health and exploitation of students, fake data, statistical warcrimes, bullying, sexism, racism, elitism, harrassment... The question is, does any of this matter on a historical scale? Is Science doomed to fail? In 200 years, our descendants will probably look back at us with the same mix of condescension and slightly horrified fascination with which we view our 19th century counterparts. Our stupid scientific publishing system will be viewed similarly to the plumbing in London in the 1850s. The chimney sweep and the graduate student suffer similar plights. It is terrible, immoral, we should do better, but then this is always the case. On one level, our future descendants should be grateful - we eradicated small pox (that alone would be enough really, an unprecedented gift to all future humanity, a boundless alleviation of suffering), discovered antibiotics, greatly improved child mortality, invented quantum mechanics and relativity, drastically increased our computational capacity, left the planet for the first time, and connected almost everyone in the world. All of this under conditions considerably less ideal than they are today, despite still being far from desirable. Maybe that's all that matters? Science being Science will sort itself out most likely. We should mainly try to reduce the human suffering involved, and allow greater diveristy in how and where research is done.

n4r9 4y ago
My main concern is that perhaps there is an "attention threshold" on fundamental breakthrough results in physics and mathematics, and that we're diminishing the chances of ever getting such results again because theorists don't have enough attention to spare. If you spend all day writing grant proposals and trivial papers (just for the sake of publishing), then go home and veg out on Netflix and Twitter, when are you supposed to have that quality "sitting and thinking" time?
- karencarits 4y ago
  That the society is moving away from the concept of calling or vocation is also a problem. As a scientist (or physician or nurse or whatever) you are no longer rewarded for devoting your life to such things. You will not be supported (maybe even shamed for your enthusiasm or for failing in the reas of life that you are sacrifying), noone will watch your back, the administration will blame you for what they can, and you will not be paid overtime of course

shswkna 4y ago

We have changed the environment that we live in. And in doing so, we created our own Achille’s heel. Possibly the future (or non-future) of civilisation will be the outcome of a natural selection of the fittest, of the culture that deals with this in the best way.

enviclash 4y ago

Science was already a badly governed and "corrupted" arena. This just adds more trash to disentangle/deal with.

theblabblah 4y ago

I find these arguments kinda funny. Women have known for a long time that attention is a huge catalyst to driving their partners along their lines of perception. Their partners have been freely giving attention to women all their lives. Most of them didn't realize it is a problem then. It is highly unlikely that they will realize it's a problem now. After all we give it freely, nobody has a gun to your head to pay attention to your girlfriend all day or watch shitty content.

seydor 4y ago

So what can we do? As always , nothing, let's throw our hands up in the air and pretend 'it is what it is'. meanwhile, celebrity scientists keep using funds to enrich themselves

abnercoimbre 4y ago
The author recommends greater consumer awareness, and to vote with our clicks (identify the better content and only reward those.)
- seydor 4y ago
  The problem is integral to science and scientists, i dont think the audience is to blame

iciac 4y ago

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” - Herbert Simon

c7b 4y ago

> Twenty-five years ago, it was projected that, in an ever-more interconnected world, money would no longer be the prime currency, attention would be. While it does make for a good opening line, using a single prediction from 25 years ago that arguably worked out to some extent (probably not everyone prefers likes over cash), without giving any context on how many similar predictions were made in the same context, just feels a bit odd.

teamonkey 4y ago
Money is still the prime currency. Attention is just a proxy for it. The problem is that, now more than there ever has been, there is a direct link between attention and money - in particular advertising - on a scale that is measured down to micro-engagements. To maximise profit you need to do whatever you can do legally to get your ad revenue (or whatever). Calling it the "attention economy" gives the impression that the problem is the consumer demanding an endless sea of changing content, whereas actually there's a profit motive to generate a lot of content in the cheapest possible way, to push it on people as much as possible, and the quality of that content only matters if you care about retention.

hrdwdmrbl 4y ago

Should we instead call it the "status economy"?

rooundio 4y ago

Reminds me of this Science article in 2017: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6354/880.2#1504269787069 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6354/880.2#1504269... on why scientists need social media influencers …

mkl 4y ago

> “get your science the attention it deserves.” (On Google, that search term garners nearly 500 million hits.) So 500 million pages have one or more words similar to those. That's pretty flimsy evidence. Putting quotes around it I get 5 results (not 5 million, 5), one of which is this article. I don't doubt the overall conclusions of the article, but I do wonder how well supported some of it is.

viridian 4y ago

What most people fail to realize is that fundamentally, most principle investigators, the people who actually run the research world, are primarily fundraisers. Their day-to-day job is a mix of grant and proposal writing, relationship building/organizational meetings, and checking in on their postdocs, candidates, and lab techs. Your main goal, as a PI, is to keep your lab running, and thus research flowing, by any means possible. For some PIs, this means milking every drop of available talent and time out of your doctoral candidates, and is the most common cause of the horror stories you hear about people leaving academia. On the other end of the extreme, they can embed themselves so deeply in fundraising with private or public capital that their lab staff don't see them for more than 15-30 minutes a week, because they are essentially living their lives hopping from sales meeting to sales meeting. This wouldn't be a problem if the job of the PI was explicitly meant to be that of a salesman, but the actual role of a PI is to define the research being done. They draft the hypotheses, the expected impact, etc, because that is their intended role, but in reality these will always be constructed in a way that makes it easier for the PI to solicit funding. It's impossible for the attention economy to not play into the research funding loop then, because every set of eyeballs is another potential revenue source for future research, or a tool to justify growing the footprint of your lab. I wouldn't go so far as to call the superstructure corrupting of science though, not in those words. I'd say it forces science to be mission focused, where the mission is a subtle negotiation between the people funding the research and the people performing it, and often times the person with the capital lands much closer to their ideal.

derbOac 4y ago
Just speaking from personal experience, what you describe gets murky really fast in a couple of ways. The model you're describing implicitly is this idealistic "executive-mentor" model of the PI, who has the ideas and the postdocs or doctoral students are just implementing it. Basically scientist wants to produce, so needs help and outsources the work to others. In my experience, though, this is not at all what happens many times. Ideas come from those doctoral students or postdocs or whowever, the PI takes them, and then they get credit for those ideas. I've seen PIs who really don't fundamentally understand the research areas, who kind of are just "black holes" for credit of the ideas and work of others around them, and then because they're more senior, they end up getting the credit. Sometimes this process seems intentional, in that the PI cultivates a false impression of what's going on, and sometimes it just happens because of the nature of the attention economy. So although the "executive-mentor" model is a good one, what's closer to reality in many cases (although not all) is more of a "public liason-mascot" system, or some kind of hybrid. Because of this mismatch between reality and the assumed schema, the attention economy then incentivizes abuse and corruption. This isn't even getting into issues about how chasing grants as a fundamental scientific endeavor distorts what is researched. Even if you have a pure leader-mentor PI who is just trying to get their own independent ideas researched with funding, you then have to ask "what is rewarded? Is it what's good rigorous science, or what is popular?" The problem I think is that what garners attention is not what is rigorous or innovative. Sometimes those things overlap, and maybe they're correlated, but they're not the same. Maybe this isn't unique to science, but it doesn't make it ok, and it seems like changing it to prevent these problems is necessary.

mbrodersen 4y ago

I for one am super happy that I now have access to world class talks, documentaries, and instructional videos on YouTube. Don’t complain about bad content. Instead choose to only watch the quality stuff.