8 ms·

Horrible article telling bright eyed prospective grad students to fellate the prestige obsessed academic politics machine rather than actually try to advance sc

Horrible article telling bright eyed prospective grad students to fellate the prestige obsessed academic politics machine rather than actually try to advance science. Remember that Einstein told journal editors to piss off [1] when they tried to get his papers peer reviewed. [1] https://theconversation.com/hate-the-peer-review-process-einstein-did-too-27405 https://theconversation.com/hate-the-peer-review-process-ein...

blitzar 2y ago
If you dont play their game you are not allowed to play at all. Catch 22
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Stockholm syndrome. Only if the game is getting grant money out of that system.
  - maleldil 2y ago
    For PhDs, the game is "finishing the degree".
    - HPsquared 2y ago
      That has always been an arcane ritual. Of course there are silly rules.
jpfr 2y ago
I happen to be an (associate) editor of an academic journal. What the people who critique the publication process are missing: 90% of submissions are crap - unfit for publication. We need some process to gate-keep. a) The venue of publication is a good signal, whether the time to read a paper is well-spent. b) The PhD students learning the craft need objective feedback. The supervising professior/university often has the incentive to "just submit" -- even if they know that a publication does not meet the quality standard. Before peer-review, somebody also needed to make a decision on what to publish. This typically fell to a single individual. The editor or some well-known member of the community who could recommend a paper for publication. On old journal issues they even mention the "recommender". So the question is not whether peer-review is bad, the question is which alternative gate-keeping process would be better. Otherwise we will drown in crap publications (even more) and the PhD students don't get a honest feedback signal upon which they can improve their craft.
- Spacecosmonaut 2y ago
  We are on the cusp of being able to plow through vast quantities of literature and data in an instant using multimodal machine learning models. Journal articles are written for people. The landscape is changing. We are headed toward a future where scientist upload data and thoughts en masse into the cloud to be consumed by interpreter models that in turn feed back into the scientific machine. Data quality and attribution (scientist performance rating) is automatically allocated by models.
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  PNAS still mentions the recommender.
- cherryteastain 2y ago
  As a (former) reviewer at 5 journals, I disagree first and foremost with the notion that > We need some process to gate-keep. Journals, when print was the medium through which academic research was disseminated, had to gatekeep because there were practical considerations regarding how many articles they could put in each issue. With online repositories like arxiv, this is hardly a concern anymore. Someone putting a crap article on arxiv does not hurt anyone else, and I'm saying this as a person who recommended tons of articles to be rejected because they had atrocious grammar/spelling issues. Worst case, it gets 0 attention and is ignored by the research community. Something not being published in a journal/conference proceedings clearly does not prevent it from drawing tons of research attention, as we saw in numerous cases like the Adam optimizer [1]. Which brings us to the second point: what even is the purpose of a journal now? The answer is that the sole function of a journal now is gatekeeping, with the presupposition that, as you observed > The venue of publication is a good signal, whether the time to read a paper is well-spent Except, well, top journals have tons of articles that get 0 citations too. Clearly the filter fails at this purpose as well. So, why gatekeep at all then? Because if we did not have some exclusive prestigious journal, the plebs would not be separated from the esteemed titans of academia with the biggest grants, most prestigious scholarships and diplomas from the most famous universities. The only reason we need to gatekeep today is to feed the academic prestige and politics machine. If you care about the science, upload the goddamn PDF to arxiv , tell your colleagues about your research at a conference and let the scientific community decide on whether your idea is interesting. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6980 https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6980
analog31 2y ago
There's a pragmatic issue involved: A PhD student faces a high risk of getting knocked off of their track and leaving without a degree due to circumstances entirely outside of their control. Delays are super costly, both financially and by adding to the risk. This is a hugely asymmetric burden, and overshadows all other considerations. For this reason, the top three priorities of the PhD student are: 1. Finish 2. Finish 3. Finish
- mrktf 2y ago
  I would extra: avoid any activities which does not add any value to your thesis and obviously weight it against potential conflicts. Having PhD year earlier is better value, than year later with "better experience" (depends on situation, but having written thesis makes things little easier)
  - analog31 2y ago
    Indeed and if you feel that theres more work to be done along the lines of your thesis, funded advisors will often let you stay on for a while as a post doc. This can also help if you end up finishing without a job offer.
asimpletune 2y ago
The post made some points and you’ve said it was wrong to make them. Who am I supposed to believe? I would like to understand more about your position, but you’ve chosen not to actually address any of their points. Sorry, don’t mistake my tone for condescension. I just wanted to explain how this looks to an outside observer.
- cherryteastain 2y ago
  The post is telling young researchers to ignore the main reason they went into research - scientific discovery (what the author calls "Science 1") - and focus on playing the academia prestige pissing contest game ("Science 2") in a cynical career optimization move. Academic politics always existed of course. We should not be under any illusions that the greats of the past just wrote their manuscripts in isolation. However it was not an industrialized machine like it is now, and incentives are misaligned in academia to such a degree that the machination of academic politics killed the reason why academia exists in the first place (scientific discovery). To advance in the academic cursus honorum, one goes to a presitgious undergrad to go to a prestigious grad school, so you can get a prestigious postdoc grant, so you can get a tenured position at a prestigious institution, so you can get a fat and prestigious government grant, which you use to hire bright young students who want to do the same. Note that scientific advancement does not play a role in this cycle, it's actually safer to pursue incremental and irrelevant improvements which you get published through thanks to the connections you made throughout your prestige optimization career. As a result, academia has produced no notable scientific advances in a long time. It has instead evolved into an organism which selects individuals that excel at funneling money into itself under the guise of doing science while not necessarily doing science (though it incidentally occasionally may). The kind of behaviour the author is promoting is telling individual prospective grad students you're small, the academic politics machine is so big, yes we all know it's a farce but you just need to suck it up and play the game. In doing so, the prospective grad students will strengthen the machine that is actually killing the very thing they want to cherish and promote, in the hope that they receive a few scraps in return. (Writing all this as a PhD and former journal reviewer)
  - deleted 2y ago

blitzar 2y ago

If you dont play their game you are not allowed to play at all. Catch 22

HPsquared 2y ago
Stockholm syndrome. Only if the game is getting grant money out of that system.
- maleldil 2y ago
  For PhDs, the game is "finishing the degree".
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    That has always been an arcane ritual. Of course there are silly rules.

jpfr 2y ago

I happen to be an (associate) editor of an academic journal. What the people who critique the publication process are missing: 90% of submissions are crap - unfit for publication. We need some process to gate-keep. a) The venue of publication is a good signal, whether the time to read a paper is well-spent. b) The PhD students learning the craft need objective feedback. The supervising professior/university often has the incentive to "just submit" -- even if they know that a publication does not meet the quality standard. Before peer-review, somebody also needed to make a decision on what to publish. This typically fell to a single individual. The editor or some well-known member of the community who could recommend a paper for publication. On old journal issues they even mention the "recommender". So the question is not whether peer-review is bad, the question is which alternative gate-keeping process would be better. Otherwise we will drown in crap publications (even more) and the PhD students don't get a honest feedback signal upon which they can improve their craft.

Spacecosmonaut 2y ago
We are on the cusp of being able to plow through vast quantities of literature and data in an instant using multimodal machine learning models. Journal articles are written for people. The landscape is changing. We are headed toward a future where scientist upload data and thoughts en masse into the cloud to be consumed by interpreter models that in turn feed back into the scientific machine. Data quality and attribution (scientist performance rating) is automatically allocated by models.
selimthegrim 2y ago
PNAS still mentions the recommender.
cherryteastain 2y ago
As a (former) reviewer at 5 journals, I disagree first and foremost with the notion that > We need some process to gate-keep. Journals, when print was the medium through which academic research was disseminated, had to gatekeep because there were practical considerations regarding how many articles they could put in each issue. With online repositories like arxiv, this is hardly a concern anymore. Someone putting a crap article on arxiv does not hurt anyone else, and I'm saying this as a person who recommended tons of articles to be rejected because they had atrocious grammar/spelling issues. Worst case, it gets 0 attention and is ignored by the research community. Something not being published in a journal/conference proceedings clearly does not prevent it from drawing tons of research attention, as we saw in numerous cases like the Adam optimizer [1]. Which brings us to the second point: what even is the purpose of a journal now? The answer is that the sole function of a journal now is gatekeeping, with the presupposition that, as you observed > The venue of publication is a good signal, whether the time to read a paper is well-spent Except, well, top journals have tons of articles that get 0 citations too. Clearly the filter fails at this purpose as well. So, why gatekeep at all then? Because if we did not have some exclusive prestigious journal, the plebs would not be separated from the esteemed titans of academia with the biggest grants, most prestigious scholarships and diplomas from the most famous universities. The only reason we need to gatekeep today is to feed the academic prestige and politics machine. If you care about the science, upload the goddamn PDF to arxiv , tell your colleagues about your research at a conference and let the scientific community decide on whether your idea is interesting. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6980 https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6980

analog31 2y ago

There's a pragmatic issue involved: A PhD student faces a high risk of getting knocked off of their track and leaving without a degree due to circumstances entirely outside of their control. Delays are super costly, both financially and by adding to the risk. This is a hugely asymmetric burden, and overshadows all other considerations. For this reason, the top three priorities of the PhD student are: 1. Finish 2. Finish 3. Finish

mrktf 2y ago
I would extra: avoid any activities which does not add any value to your thesis and obviously weight it against potential conflicts. Having PhD year earlier is better value, than year later with "better experience" (depends on situation, but having written thesis makes things little easier)
- analog31 2y ago
  Indeed and if you feel that theres more work to be done along the lines of your thesis, funded advisors will often let you stay on for a while as a post doc. This can also help if you end up finishing without a job offer.

asimpletune 2y ago

The post made some points and you’ve said it was wrong to make them. Who am I supposed to believe? I would like to understand more about your position, but you’ve chosen not to actually address any of their points. Sorry, don’t mistake my tone for condescension. I just wanted to explain how this looks to an outside observer.

cherryteastain 2y ago
The post is telling young researchers to ignore the main reason they went into research - scientific discovery (what the author calls "Science 1") - and focus on playing the academia prestige pissing contest game ("Science 2") in a cynical career optimization move. Academic politics always existed of course. We should not be under any illusions that the greats of the past just wrote their manuscripts in isolation. However it was not an industrialized machine like it is now, and incentives are misaligned in academia to such a degree that the machination of academic politics killed the reason why academia exists in the first place (scientific discovery). To advance in the academic cursus honorum, one goes to a presitgious undergrad to go to a prestigious grad school, so you can get a prestigious postdoc grant, so you can get a tenured position at a prestigious institution, so you can get a fat and prestigious government grant, which you use to hire bright young students who want to do the same. Note that scientific advancement does not play a role in this cycle, it's actually safer to pursue incremental and irrelevant improvements which you get published through thanks to the connections you made throughout your prestige optimization career. As a result, academia has produced no notable scientific advances in a long time. It has instead evolved into an organism which selects individuals that excel at funneling money into itself under the guise of doing science while not necessarily doing science (though it incidentally occasionally may). The kind of behaviour the author is promoting is telling individual prospective grad students you're small, the academic politics machine is so big, yes we all know it's a farce but you just need to suck it up and play the game. In doing so, the prospective grad students will strengthen the machine that is actually killing the very thing they want to cherish and promote, in the hope that they receive a few scraps in return. (Writing all this as a PhD and former journal reviewer)
- deleted 2y ago