4 ms·

I agree with the fundamental problem, but I don't really follow the analysis. I thought this would be more about the zillions of paper-mill journal articles use

by kurthr 3y ago

I agree with the fundamental problem, but I don't really follow the analysis. I thought this would be more about the zillions of paper-mill journal articles used by "academics" to advance their careers. I don't really agree that it's all that much harder to search on most deep academic (eg beyond undergraduate) topics. You used to have to request or go into stacks to find physical journals, and even now most interesting research have search terms and topics that nobody would choose to search optimize for. You don't use Google to find academic research most of the time. Where I do disagree is that there aren't enough qualified people to hold positions (at least in the US/Europe) for academic research in the sciences. In fact much of the garbage is from people smart enough to competitively optimize their career at the expense of research and other researchers. That goes on to the departments that in turn optimize for # papers and $ grants for tenure decisions. The shame of Ranga Dias is on the department that ignored evidence of fraud as much as on him. The same for Tessier-Lavigne and the other scandals around Alzheimer's research. There was too much focused money and people in academia for the fame and power rather than research.

swatcoder 3y ago
Yeah, their analysis is skewed because their own "research" is speculative punditry about everyday topics -- a journalist dressed in academic robes -- which puts them in a different position than scientisists/specialists or the casual public. Their frustration overlaps with a lot of other people's but isn't quite the same.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  not even academic or journalistic "research"; they're a think tankie: https://www.bismarckanalysis.com/#/ https://www.bismarckanalysis.com/#/ (I wonder if there's a jealousy problem here: academics and journalists are both trained in wading through lots of Sturgeon's law to find the good stuff, but think tank analysts are competing with each other to carry out the DDoSing?)
derbOac 3y ago
I think the author is correctly describing a phenomenon at some level and the DDOS analogy isn't such a bad one. But I think they're kind of misidentifying the nature of the cause at some level. In some ways it's a bit worse than what they're outlining because at least in my opinion it's more systemic. That is, the problem isn't so much that there's a small number of "real geniuses" getting drowned out by a bunch of noise, it's that there are actually a large number of geniuses who are incentivised by their P&T committee, or college, or grants program officer, or advisor, or whoever, to create the sea that everyone is drowning in. Even when people want to do the right thing, they might not be able to. It doesn't end with tenure either, I can vouch for that. The late Peter Higgs is kind of a good example in this regard. In a lot of ways he was one of those classical physicists from past era, and even he pointed out that he wouldn't have a professor position today, and that people were wanting to get rid of him. Where the DDOS analogy kind of falls flat is that DDOSes don't generally have echoing effects that result in positive (or negative, depending on how you look at it) feedback loops. I guess I saw the author as pointing to a real problem but being a little off about the cause, or at least not recognizing the complexity of the causes as they really exist and focusing on only one small part of it. I think that you're spot on in a lot of ways, that some of the biggest problems are from people who are smart, but then also motivated by the wrong things, and so leverage the whole system to those aims and then rely on survivorship bias to justify the whole thing.

by kurthr 3y ago

swatcoder 3y ago

Yeah, their analysis is skewed because their own "research" is speculative punditry about everyday topics -- a journalist dressed in academic robes -- which puts them in a different position than scientisists/specialists or the casual public. Their frustration overlaps with a lot of other people's but isn't quite the same.

082349872349872 3y ago
not even academic or journalistic "research"; they're a think tankie: https://www.bismarckanalysis.com/#/ https://www.bismarckanalysis.com/#/ (I wonder if there's a jealousy problem here: academics and journalists are both trained in wading through lots of Sturgeon's law to find the good stuff, but think tank analysts are competing with each other to carry out the DDoSing?)

derbOac 3y ago

I think the author is correctly describing a phenomenon at some level and the DDOS analogy isn't such a bad one. But I think they're kind of misidentifying the nature of the cause at some level. In some ways it's a bit worse than what they're outlining because at least in my opinion it's more systemic. That is, the problem isn't so much that there's a small number of "real geniuses" getting drowned out by a bunch of noise, it's that there are actually a large number of geniuses who are incentivised by their P&T committee, or college, or grants program officer, or advisor, or whoever, to create the sea that everyone is drowning in. Even when people want to do the right thing, they might not be able to. It doesn't end with tenure either, I can vouch for that. The late Peter Higgs is kind of a good example in this regard. In a lot of ways he was one of those classical physicists from past era, and even he pointed out that he wouldn't have a professor position today, and that people were wanting to get rid of him. Where the DDOS analogy kind of falls flat is that DDOSes don't generally have echoing effects that result in positive (or negative, depending on how you look at it) feedback loops. I guess I saw the author as pointing to a real problem but being a little off about the cause, or at least not recognizing the complexity of the causes as they really exist and focusing on only one small part of it. I think that you're spot on in a lot of ways, that some of the biggest problems are from people who are smart, but then also motivated by the wrong things, and so leverage the whole system to those aims and then rely on survivorship bias to justify the whole thing.