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Once, at 3Com, Bob Metcalfe introduced a talk by one of his MIT professors with the little joke, "The reason academic politics is so vicious is that nothing's a
by AlbertCory 2y ago
Once, at 3Com, Bob Metcalfe introduced a talk by one of his MIT professors with the little joke, "The reason academic politics is so vicious is that nothing's at stake."
The guy said, "That depends on whether you consider reputation 'nothing.' "
I guess what that shows is, you can always negotiate and compromise over money, but reputation is more of a binary. An academic can fake some work, and as long as he's never called on it, his reputation is set.
So yeah, a little more fear of having one's reputation ruined would go a long way towards fixing science.
- abnry 2y agoI have always said that while professors get paid less money than in industry, they are compensated in reputation to make up for it. Status and reputation are the currency of academia.
- masswerk 2y agoBut this is really a societal/political issue: since we decided that economic capital is king and symbolic capital not that much… (This is really the story of the last four decades or so.)
- AlbertCory 2y agoThere are some people who think everything is "a societal/political issue." But that one-dimensional view is boring. Life is more than politics.
- masswerk 2y agoWell, this is about Pierre Bourdieu, and he had a few things to say about academia, as in Homo Academicus. And I'm not sure what example could illustrate the problem with the lopsided valuation of economic capital and the general devaluation of symbolic capital (as compared to pre-1980s, we have since undergone a social revolution of considerable dimensions, which is also why there isn't an easy fix) better than this one.
- consteval 2y agoSocio-economic issues aren't one-dimensional, in fact they're very complex. Most of our systems and beliefs are socially constructed. Humans are, by our biology, social creatures. Modern humanity more than ever before. If you're not considering the social effects, then IMO you're not addressing anything of value.
- AlbertCory 2y ago... and if ALL you can see is social effects, then you're reducing the rich complexity of human nature to a gray goo.
- NemoNobody 2y agoLife may be more than politics but all of life is inherently political.
- AlbertCory 2y agoNo it isn't. Myopia on your part (and destructive myopia, too).
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago>But this is really a societal/political issue Bang on. Not many people in the academic/technical people realize this, often for their entire lives. In their naive worldview, they cannot even imagine that people can stoop that low. (embarrassingly and shamefully I used to be one of those naive people)
- cscurmudgeon 2y agoThe person who did this fraud decided that symbolic capital > economic capital (by being in academia/govt).
- masswerk 2y agoThe problem being, we have "economized" academia, by things like "publish or perish", a citation pseudo stock market or third party funding, and all incentives are built around this pseudo-economy. Which also imports all the common incentives found in economy…
- mncharity 2y ago> reputation A caveat that "reputation", like competence, is more variagated and localized than is often appreciated. As with someone who is highly competent and well regarded in their own subfield, while simultaneously rather nutter about some nearby subfield where they don't actually work. One can have a reputation like "good, but beware they have a thing for <mechanism X>". Or "ignore their results using <technique> - they see what they want to see". Subtext that gets passed among professors chatting at conferences, and to some extent to their students, but otherwise isn't highly accessible. When people speak of creating research AI's using just papers... that's missing seemingly important backchannels. And corresponding with authors. Attempting research AI as developing-world professionally-isolated professor.