4 ms·

I hear this sentiment a lot. There was a time when academia was intensely driven by culture. People did stuff because they cared about the community surviving.

I hear this sentiment a lot. There was a time when academia was intensely driven by culture. People did stuff because they cared about the community surviving. It is, in fact, possible to choose the "cooperate" triangle of the prisoner's dilemma, but it takes a lot of work, and is vulnerable to being wrecked by people who don't care / believe in the goals.

matthewdgreen 3y ago
If you keep increasing publication requirements in a Red Queen’s race, you both increase the amount of peer-review required and also reduce the time that qualified scientists have to do it. No matter how much people want to build a functioning system, they only have so many hours in the day.
- rhelz 3y ago
  A valid concern, but what is driving this red-queen race is that you are competing with people who cheat. If you’ve got one really solid paper published, but your competitor fraudulently published 10, it’s real tempting to fraud a few papers yourself. But they multiply fraudulent papers because they can get away with it, and they can get away with it because nobody is really reviewing or replicating those results. I propose a fix: if a paper wouldn’t get published unless somebody has replicated the results—-there would be a lot less papers published, and the the expectation of how many papers a prof should publish a year would fall to reasonable levels. It’s the fraud which is killing us. Get rid of the fraud and a lot of the other problems with academia would start resolving themselves.
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    The idea that fraud is rampant and driving the explosion in publication rates is deeply tempting to folks who don’t work directly in a scientific field. But it’s a misconception that’s largely driven by non-scientific media and bloggers. In practice literal fraud does exist, but it’s relatively rare in most scientific fields. The explosion in publication rates is largely caused by a combination of (1) more people entering the field, and (2) “paper slicing” where people submit smaller contributions as part of each paper, in order to maximize publication metrics. As far as “no publication without replicating the results”. Think for a second about how that will work. How is anyone going to replicate a result if it’s not published? This is literally the reason that scientific publication exists in the first place: to provide a channel by which new results can be conveyed to other scientists so that they can learn from, and in some cases, replicate those results. So clearly you don’t want to prevent publication of non-replicated results, you just want to prevent people from getting some kind of academic brownie-point credit for those publications. Perhaps that’s workable, I don’t know. But you need to be a lot more knowledgeable and curious about the scientific publication system in order to have any hope of improving it. Taken literally, your “no publication without replication” proposal would inhibit scientific replication entirely.
    - rhelz 3y ago
      > “paper slicing” I'm glad we agree that paper slicing is also plaguing academia. When I was a grad student, it bugged me to no end that those guys at Stanford were out-publishing me--because they got enough results for 1.5 papers, and then made (3 choose 2) papers out of them. And yeah, if you think I wasn't tempted to follow suit, think again. I eventually left academia because I didn't want to cheat, or compete with cheaters, when we were being graded on the curve of "publish or perish". > fraud is rampant and driving the explosion in publication rates is deeply tempting to folks who don’t work directly in a scientific field. So, you are an assistant prof who was passed over for tenure, or you didn't get that Harvard appointment--it went to Francesca Gino, whose vita looks sooooo much better than yours, because she's doing TED talks to promote her book called "Why It Pays To Break The Rules In Work And Life". She's making $1 million a year consulting, while you are trying to get funding for your research, which isn't as flashy but at least is real science... ... if you are graded on the curve, how will you look against someone who cheated? It's the prisoner's dilemma. > How is anyone going to replicate a result if it’s not published? In my proposal, it works the same that way can they review a paper if it's not published. You write up a paper, detailing the claims you are making and the experiments and methods you used to justify your claims, and you submit it for publication. Then, 3 or 4 anonymous reviewers decide whether it's promising enough to go to the next step: hire another research group to replicate the results. If the results replicate, then and only then are they published. Yes, it's more expensive, so to finance it I propose that when the grant is being written, the principle investigators should also estimate what it would cost to hire reviewers and to fund experiments at another lab to confirm the results. When the grant is approved, that money is put in escrow until the research is done and submitted for publication, and disbursed to the reviewers and replicators to compensate them for pausing their own research and evaluating someone else's. If it replicates, it's published. If it doesn't replicate, you don't get to write up books on how to cheat your way to the top while you are cheating your way to the top. > This is literally the reason that scientific publication exists ... 100% agree, its great to share new results and all---but if a "result" doesn't replicate, its not a result. What, exactly, are Gino's peers supposed to learn from her fraudulent papers? If I'm trying to decide what to research, how do I know which lines are actually promising or not? Do I just go with researchers at a name-brand university (like Gino at Harvard?) These days papers can be written by machine as fast a a machine gun fires bullets. There's got to be some way of separating the signs from the noise. > brownie-point credit for publications... Publication is very important; one of my professors explained it this way: if you don't publish your results--i.e. you don't convince your peers that what you did is worthy of publishing--its like you didn't do anything at all. Then whole idea of research is to contribute to the edifice of science, and publishing is the vehicle by which that contribution is made. It's how you deliver the contribution to everybody else. And peer-review is how it is determined whether you actually made a contribution. So the solution can't be to just stop caring about how many papers are published. > Taken literally, your “no publication without replication” proposal would inhibit scientific replication entirely. I hope my explanation above addresses this concern....

matthewdgreen 3y ago

If you keep increasing publication requirements in a Red Queen’s race, you both increase the amount of peer-review required and also reduce the time that qualified scientists have to do it. No matter how much people want to build a functioning system, they only have so many hours in the day.

rhelz 3y ago
A valid concern, but what is driving this red-queen race is that you are competing with people who cheat. If you’ve got one really solid paper published, but your competitor fraudulently published 10, it’s real tempting to fraud a few papers yourself. But they multiply fraudulent papers because they can get away with it, and they can get away with it because nobody is really reviewing or replicating those results. I propose a fix: if a paper wouldn’t get published unless somebody has replicated the results—-there would be a lot less papers published, and the the expectation of how many papers a prof should publish a year would fall to reasonable levels. It’s the fraud which is killing us. Get rid of the fraud and a lot of the other problems with academia would start resolving themselves.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  The idea that fraud is rampant and driving the explosion in publication rates is deeply tempting to folks who don’t work directly in a scientific field. But it’s a misconception that’s largely driven by non-scientific media and bloggers. In practice literal fraud does exist, but it’s relatively rare in most scientific fields. The explosion in publication rates is largely caused by a combination of (1) more people entering the field, and (2) “paper slicing” where people submit smaller contributions as part of each paper, in order to maximize publication metrics. As far as “no publication without replicating the results”. Think for a second about how that will work. How is anyone going to replicate a result if it’s not published? This is literally the reason that scientific publication exists in the first place: to provide a channel by which new results can be conveyed to other scientists so that they can learn from, and in some cases, replicate those results. So clearly you don’t want to prevent publication of non-replicated results, you just want to prevent people from getting some kind of academic brownie-point credit for those publications. Perhaps that’s workable, I don’t know. But you need to be a lot more knowledgeable and curious about the scientific publication system in order to have any hope of improving it. Taken literally, your “no publication without replication” proposal would inhibit scientific replication entirely.
  - rhelz 3y ago
    > “paper slicing” I'm glad we agree that paper slicing is also plaguing academia. When I was a grad student, it bugged me to no end that those guys at Stanford were out-publishing me--because they got enough results for 1.5 papers, and then made (3 choose 2) papers out of them. And yeah, if you think I wasn't tempted to follow suit, think again. I eventually left academia because I didn't want to cheat, or compete with cheaters, when we were being graded on the curve of "publish or perish". > fraud is rampant and driving the explosion in publication rates is deeply tempting to folks who don’t work directly in a scientific field. So, you are an assistant prof who was passed over for tenure, or you didn't get that Harvard appointment--it went to Francesca Gino, whose vita looks sooooo much better than yours, because she's doing TED talks to promote her book called "Why It Pays To Break The Rules In Work And Life". She's making $1 million a year consulting, while you are trying to get funding for your research, which isn't as flashy but at least is real science... ... if you are graded on the curve, how will you look against someone who cheated? It's the prisoner's dilemma. > How is anyone going to replicate a result if it’s not published? In my proposal, it works the same that way can they review a paper if it's not published. You write up a paper, detailing the claims you are making and the experiments and methods you used to justify your claims, and you submit it for publication. Then, 3 or 4 anonymous reviewers decide whether it's promising enough to go to the next step: hire another research group to replicate the results. If the results replicate, then and only then are they published. Yes, it's more expensive, so to finance it I propose that when the grant is being written, the principle investigators should also estimate what it would cost to hire reviewers and to fund experiments at another lab to confirm the results. When the grant is approved, that money is put in escrow until the research is done and submitted for publication, and disbursed to the reviewers and replicators to compensate them for pausing their own research and evaluating someone else's. If it replicates, it's published. If it doesn't replicate, you don't get to write up books on how to cheat your way to the top while you are cheating your way to the top. > This is literally the reason that scientific publication exists ... 100% agree, its great to share new results and all---but if a "result" doesn't replicate, its not a result. What, exactly, are Gino's peers supposed to learn from her fraudulent papers? If I'm trying to decide what to research, how do I know which lines are actually promising or not? Do I just go with researchers at a name-brand university (like Gino at Harvard?) These days papers can be written by machine as fast a a machine gun fires bullets. There's got to be some way of separating the signs from the noise. > brownie-point credit for publications... Publication is very important; one of my professors explained it this way: if you don't publish your results--i.e. you don't convince your peers that what you did is worthy of publishing--its like you didn't do anything at all. Then whole idea of research is to contribute to the edifice of science, and publishing is the vehicle by which that contribution is made. It's how you deliver the contribution to everybody else. And peer-review is how it is determined whether you actually made a contribution. So the solution can't be to just stop caring about how many papers are published. > Taken literally, your “no publication without replication” proposal would inhibit scientific replication entirely. I hope my explanation above addresses this concern....