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Science is extremely important and I really admire scientists and appreciate scientific advancement. With that being said....I just read an article about the f

Science is extremely important and I really admire scientists and appreciate scientific advancement. With that being said....I just read an article about the fake publications being churned out by AI in the thousands and many of the papers published in my own industry (certainly not all, but a LOT) are essentially worthless outside of keeping academics employed. There's also the replication crisis going on. I'm not sure if it's "publish or perish", politics, or professors having to spend all their time dealing with busy work from the bloated administration or what, but it really seems like we're seeing a lot of "research" that looks a lot like padding a resume instead of actually pushing discovery forward. This doesn't excuse harassment, but probably shows why trust in science is at an all-time low.

jltsiren 2y ago
And that lack of trust will likely make science worse. The number one issue in the academia is the lack of (public) funding. There are far more people trying to make a career in academic research than funding to enable that. When there is a lot of competition for scarce resources, people who are good at politics and gaming the metrics have an advantage. And if the resources become even scarcer due to the lack of public trust, the advantage will grow larger.
defrost 2y ago
It's an issue, it's a real issue. That said, the AI generated papers are obvious bullshit and aren't taken seriously by "real" scientists at the cutting edge of various fields, they represent more of an issue in the long tail of the "publishing mills" and the puffed up prestige part of the lesser acedemic life. As an issue it's one that gets push back, recent articles highlight how variou groups have written bullshit detectors for bogo papers and forced the publishing companies to reject those papers and close some of the paper mills. That's a positive. The negative circles back to this posts assertion, that there's a growth in bad mouthing scientists and good science .. and articles | blog posts that have used recent reporting of bogus papers being discovered to justify why they have low trust in science .. and so should you. Ponder that, if it was not for the people in the field complaining about BS papers edging in and working to detect and eradicate them .. nobody would know, not least the trash talking blog authors who don't much read science papers in any case.
- 7thaccount 2y ago
  I appreciate the context, but will add that it doesn't address the replication crisis where huge amounts of papers literally cannot be replicated (likely fraud) and I forget the exact situation, but I think it has happened to prominent cancer researchers and so on. This goes a lot deeper than just AI BS. Someone just posted an article on HN a few months ago about junior researchers being told to move data points to make the results statistically significant.

jltsiren 2y ago

And that lack of trust will likely make science worse. The number one issue in the academia is the lack of (public) funding. There are far more people trying to make a career in academic research than funding to enable that. When there is a lot of competition for scarce resources, people who are good at politics and gaming the metrics have an advantage. And if the resources become even scarcer due to the lack of public trust, the advantage will grow larger.

defrost 2y ago

It's an issue, it's a real issue. That said, the AI generated papers are obvious bullshit and aren't taken seriously by "real" scientists at the cutting edge of various fields, they represent more of an issue in the long tail of the "publishing mills" and the puffed up prestige part of the lesser acedemic life. As an issue it's one that gets push back, recent articles highlight how variou groups have written bullshit detectors for bogo papers and forced the publishing companies to reject those papers and close some of the paper mills. That's a positive. The negative circles back to this posts assertion, that there's a growth in bad mouthing scientists and good science .. and articles | blog posts that have used recent reporting of bogus papers being discovered to justify why they have low trust in science .. and so should you. Ponder that, if it was not for the people in the field complaining about BS papers edging in and working to detect and eradicate them .. nobody would know, not least the trash talking blog authors who don't much read science papers in any case.

7thaccount 2y ago
I appreciate the context, but will add that it doesn't address the replication crisis where huge amounts of papers literally cannot be replicated (likely fraud) and I forget the exact situation, but I think it has happened to prominent cancer researchers and so on. This goes a lot deeper than just AI BS. Someone just posted an article on HN a few months ago about junior researchers being told to move data points to make the results statistically significant.