12 ms·

I was with you until the end. Can you provide an example of an academic sabotaging useful production in order to prove his or her value?

RyanZAG 13y ago
That happens less in academics - I was thinking more of administrative areas in corporations. For example, there are no shortages of stories of administrators in procurement adding in additional required paperwork when more efficient computerized systems make their stamp on documents less required. Actually, this has happened in academics in a way too - consider the requirement of ever lengthening literature reviews in PHD theses. These have come about because of the ease of access to academic documents through digitized journals making libraries and supervisors less valuable. The answer is to increase their value by increasing the amount of work required so that they will still be necessary to wade through it. I'm not sure how much this is sabotage and not just the result of electronic journals making this easier though, which is why the example in the paragraph above is far more relevant.
- impendia 13y ago
  I am a math professor. This phenomenon of lengthening literature reviews doesn't exist in math, nor indeed have I ever seen mathematicians assign pointless busywork to sabotage others, or to inflate our own importance, or for any other reason. Indeed, we hate extraneous paperwork: http://www.mathjobs.org/jobs http://www.mathjobs.org/jobs and are trying to change the library system: http://thecostofknowledge.com/ http://thecostofknowledge.com/ Now the intrinsic value of research math as a whole may be debated, especially that of the bottom 90% of researchers (and I would not say I'm in the top 10%). But I have really not observed math professors to be guilty of what you claim. Quite frankly, math itself is hard enough; there's no point in setting additional hoops for students to jump through. It would just make us look foolish, and waste our own time (in addition to that of others). I can't speak for other disciplines.
  - bennyg 13y ago
    Well, pointless busywork was a staple of my high school and under days of math. Once I got to college, I had a professor for Calculus I that said our grade was the four tests + the final or just the final - whichever grade was higher. Having taken Cal in high school, I just showed up for the final and got a B+ (I reversed the damn derivatives of ln/e). That was the best math class I never took. To be fair, my discipline wasn't anything scientific so needing math wasn't in my college curriculum (switched from business to psychology then to art and advertising). I took another class, Discrete Math, from the same teacher my senior year as an elective and absolutely loved it. I never skipped a day. He was a great teacher, and the way his class was set up for grading and not really giving a shit about homework was perfect. If I were to ever teach math later, his format would be how I would do it.
    - ramchip 13y ago
      I think you're interpreting "math professor" as "school teacher", while others are talking about the tenured kind of professors. "Students" here are researchers, who do work potentially ostensibly for society, not just homework for their own education.
    - jdpage 13y ago
      "Math professor" probably means at the college or university level -- high school math is widely regarded as complete and utter BS. I've taken... a rather significant pile of maths classes at this point (I'm majoring in it), and I've never felt like any of the college-level maths classes assigned busywork. I may not have liked the size of the workload (oh god, real analysis), but I've never felt it was unreasonable.
- roel_v 13y ago
  " consider the requirement of ever lengthening literature reviews in PHD theses. These have come about because of the ease of access to academic documents through digitized journals making libraries and supervisors less valuable." I'm not sure I understand your conspiracy theory mumbo jumbo correctly, but I cannot help but take from this that you are saying that because finding literature has become faster due to electronic access to papers, the added value of the Phd supervisor has gone down. If this is so, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, a position for which I find additional evidence in your use of 'PHD' with all capitals which nobody in academia would do. Look, if you have something valuable to add to the discussion, please do; but if you're just going to make things up to fit your ideological predispositions, stay on Reddit.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - jclos 13y ago
    I agree. If anything, the explosion of digital libraries and thus of available information would tend to make librarians and supervisors with deep domain knowledge even more essential to sort through all the noise.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- Spooky23 13y ago
  I worked at a government agency that circa 2005 was using paper timesheets. The timesheets were required to be printed on a specific shade of blue paper. Hilarity ensued when some admin ordered "air force blue" paper instead of "power blue". The HR director decreed that only "power blue" would be accepted, and all other hues would be rejected. They probably spent 200 hours debating it.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    Ok, I got to ask what exactly was HR's explanation for a particular shade of blue? I've been part of something like this is a weird way. In the summer the humidity got too much for our HP4 printer and it would crinkle 20lb paper and get jammed. We found the 28 or 32 lb paper (long time ago / cannot remember exactly) would not jam and the printer worked fine. So, in the summer, we changed to ordering the thicker paper. The gold paper was cheaper than the white paper at that weight. So, we order gold paper every summer. Long after the building had air conditioning and the old printer was replaced, they still ordered gold paper every summer until the program closed.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  If I had to guess, literature reviews are getting longer because us researchers are quickly going through the lower-hanging fruit and thus reaching discoveries that have more and more "dependencies".
olefoo 13y ago
Derrida. And I'm only sort of being facetious. Sometime in the 1980's the humanities seemed to collectively decide that 'theory' was more important than the ability to think and communicate clearly. To my mind this has always been the point at which Academia as a class abdicated it's responsibilities to society at large in favor of internal power games and obscurantism.
- impendia 13y ago
  Ah, but this trend was fought by another academic. Alan Sokal, NYU physicist, famously completely bullshitted an essay and got it published by Social Text, a leading postmodern sociology journal. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/ http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/ Scroll down to "Transgressing the Boundaries".
singingfish 13y ago
One peer reviewed paper a year. Regardless of quality. Wittgenstein - a philosopher with a major influence on modern life after he died published two short works in a lifetime.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  Don't publish just to publish, only publish what you believe are great papers and don't bother playing the system.
  - singingfish 13y ago
    So I left academia to become a discordian agent for precisely this reason.
ronaldx 13y ago
I assume you are an academic - therefore, I imagine you have heard of cases where a peer reviewer killed an article just because it contradicted the reviewer's own work? Even if an academic is not explicitly sabotaging work, it's clear from the amount of time spent on grant applications and general bureaucracy that their useful production is being sabotaged. To meet bureaucratic standards, researchers are often required to teach and educators are often required to publish... it's not effective production.
- lsh 13y ago
  > I assume you are an academic - therefore, I imagine you have heard of cases where a peer reviewer killed an article just because it contradicted the reviewer's own work? Thats why you have the reviewers declare no conflict of interest, have more than one peer reviewer and an editor who makes the final decision and assigns further peer reviewers if necessary. I agree with your last two points.
  - ronaldx 13y ago
    > have more than one peer reviewer and an editor who makes the final decision and assigns further peer reviewers if necessary. QED.
ZeroGravitas 13y ago
The continued existence of lecturing, 4 decades or more after it's been shown to be a poor use of time? An article I recently read (written only 30 years ago) attributed a lot of this to the academic's ego enjoying the feel of being an expert, when a printed sheet of paper, written by someone else would have a bigger impact on the students attending the lecture.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  Depends on level. I teach basic maths to adults and teenagers (the latter tend to be the ones at the back of the class in compulsory education). One of my big projects in the first part of the year (before the exams loom over the horizon) is to encourage students to read the textbook themselves. In the rare classes where this becomes accepted, I can use the lessons more like seminars and get the students moved up the problem solving ladder. Given that we have had reliable maths textbooks since around 1215, and printed ones since roughly 1580, the difficulty of achieving this always surprises me.
  - nbouscal 13y ago
    1215? What's wrong with Euclid?
    - keithpeter 13y ago
      Well, ok, I was thinking of arithmetic and algorithmic methods in number. I'll let you have Euclid, although it would be heavy going now to use that as a textbook...
      - nbouscal 13y ago
        It's only been about a century since it was fair to assume that every educated person had read it. I think the fact that we wouldn't be able to use it as a textbook in schools today is a really bad sign.
        13y ago

RyanZAG 13y ago

That happens less in academics - I was thinking more of administrative areas in corporations. For example, there are no shortages of stories of administrators in procurement adding in additional required paperwork when more efficient computerized systems make their stamp on documents less required. Actually, this has happened in academics in a way too - consider the requirement of ever lengthening literature reviews in PHD theses. These have come about because of the ease of access to academic documents through digitized journals making libraries and supervisors less valuable. The answer is to increase their value by increasing the amount of work required so that they will still be necessary to wade through it. I'm not sure how much this is sabotage and not just the result of electronic journals making this easier though, which is why the example in the paragraph above is far more relevant.

impendia 13y ago
I am a math professor. This phenomenon of lengthening literature reviews doesn't exist in math, nor indeed have I ever seen mathematicians assign pointless busywork to sabotage others, or to inflate our own importance, or for any other reason. Indeed, we hate extraneous paperwork: http://www.mathjobs.org/jobs http://www.mathjobs.org/jobs and are trying to change the library system: http://thecostofknowledge.com/ http://thecostofknowledge.com/ Now the intrinsic value of research math as a whole may be debated, especially that of the bottom 90% of researchers (and I would not say I'm in the top 10%). But I have really not observed math professors to be guilty of what you claim. Quite frankly, math itself is hard enough; there's no point in setting additional hoops for students to jump through. It would just make us look foolish, and waste our own time (in addition to that of others). I can't speak for other disciplines.
- bennyg 13y ago
  Well, pointless busywork was a staple of my high school and under days of math. Once I got to college, I had a professor for Calculus I that said our grade was the four tests + the final or just the final - whichever grade was higher. Having taken Cal in high school, I just showed up for the final and got a B+ (I reversed the damn derivatives of ln/e). That was the best math class I never took. To be fair, my discipline wasn't anything scientific so needing math wasn't in my college curriculum (switched from business to psychology then to art and advertising). I took another class, Discrete Math, from the same teacher my senior year as an elective and absolutely loved it. I never skipped a day. He was a great teacher, and the way his class was set up for grading and not really giving a shit about homework was perfect. If I were to ever teach math later, his format would be how I would do it.
  - ramchip 13y ago
    I think you're interpreting "math professor" as "school teacher", while others are talking about the tenured kind of professors. "Students" here are researchers, who do work potentially ostensibly for society, not just homework for their own education.
  - jdpage 13y ago
    "Math professor" probably means at the college or university level -- high school math is widely regarded as complete and utter BS. I've taken... a rather significant pile of maths classes at this point (I'm majoring in it), and I've never felt like any of the college-level maths classes assigned busywork. I may not have liked the size of the workload (oh god, real analysis), but I've never felt it was unreasonable.
roel_v 13y ago
" consider the requirement of ever lengthening literature reviews in PHD theses. These have come about because of the ease of access to academic documents through digitized journals making libraries and supervisors less valuable." I'm not sure I understand your conspiracy theory mumbo jumbo correctly, but I cannot help but take from this that you are saying that because finding literature has become faster due to electronic access to papers, the added value of the Phd supervisor has gone down. If this is so, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, a position for which I find additional evidence in your use of 'PHD' with all capitals which nobody in academia would do. Look, if you have something valuable to add to the discussion, please do; but if you're just going to make things up to fit your ideological predispositions, stay on Reddit.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jclos 13y ago
  I agree. If anything, the explosion of digital libraries and thus of available information would tend to make librarians and supervisors with deep domain knowledge even more essential to sort through all the noise.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
Spooky23 13y ago
I worked at a government agency that circa 2005 was using paper timesheets. The timesheets were required to be printed on a specific shade of blue paper. Hilarity ensued when some admin ordered "air force blue" paper instead of "power blue". The HR director decreed that only "power blue" would be accepted, and all other hues would be rejected. They probably spent 200 hours debating it.
- protomyth 13y ago
  Ok, I got to ask what exactly was HR's explanation for a particular shade of blue? I've been part of something like this is a weird way. In the summer the humidity got too much for our HP4 printer and it would crinkle 20lb paper and get jammed. We found the 28 or 32 lb paper (long time ago / cannot remember exactly) would not jam and the printer worked fine. So, in the summer, we changed to ordering the thicker paper. The gold paper was cheaper than the white paper at that weight. So, we order gold paper every summer. Long after the building had air conditioning and the old printer was replaced, they still ordered gold paper every summer until the program closed.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
If I had to guess, literature reviews are getting longer because us researchers are quickly going through the lower-hanging fruit and thus reaching discoveries that have more and more "dependencies".

olefoo 13y ago

Derrida. And I'm only sort of being facetious. Sometime in the 1980's the humanities seemed to collectively decide that 'theory' was more important than the ability to think and communicate clearly. To my mind this has always been the point at which Academia as a class abdicated it's responsibilities to society at large in favor of internal power games and obscurantism.

impendia 13y ago
Ah, but this trend was fought by another academic. Alan Sokal, NYU physicist, famously completely bullshitted an essay and got it published by Social Text, a leading postmodern sociology journal. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/ http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/ Scroll down to "Transgressing the Boundaries".

singingfish 13y ago

One peer reviewed paper a year. Regardless of quality. Wittgenstein - a philosopher with a major influence on modern life after he died published two short works in a lifetime.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
Don't publish just to publish, only publish what you believe are great papers and don't bother playing the system.
- singingfish 13y ago
  So I left academia to become a discordian agent for precisely this reason.

ronaldx 13y ago

I assume you are an academic - therefore, I imagine you have heard of cases where a peer reviewer killed an article just because it contradicted the reviewer's own work? Even if an academic is not explicitly sabotaging work, it's clear from the amount of time spent on grant applications and general bureaucracy that their useful production is being sabotaged. To meet bureaucratic standards, researchers are often required to teach and educators are often required to publish... it's not effective production.

lsh 13y ago
> I assume you are an academic - therefore, I imagine you have heard of cases where a peer reviewer killed an article just because it contradicted the reviewer's own work? Thats why you have the reviewers declare no conflict of interest, have more than one peer reviewer and an editor who makes the final decision and assigns further peer reviewers if necessary. I agree with your last two points.
- ronaldx 13y ago
  > have more than one peer reviewer and an editor who makes the final decision and assigns further peer reviewers if necessary. QED.

ZeroGravitas 13y ago

The continued existence of lecturing, 4 decades or more after it's been shown to be a poor use of time? An article I recently read (written only 30 years ago) attributed a lot of this to the academic's ego enjoying the feel of being an expert, when a printed sheet of paper, written by someone else would have a bigger impact on the students attending the lecture.

keithpeter 13y ago
Depends on level. I teach basic maths to adults and teenagers (the latter tend to be the ones at the back of the class in compulsory education). One of my big projects in the first part of the year (before the exams loom over the horizon) is to encourage students to read the textbook themselves. In the rare classes where this becomes accepted, I can use the lessons more like seminars and get the students moved up the problem solving ladder. Given that we have had reliable maths textbooks since around 1215, and printed ones since roughly 1580, the difficulty of achieving this always surprises me.
- nbouscal 13y ago
  1215? What's wrong with Euclid?
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    Well, ok, I was thinking of arithmetic and algorithmic methods in number. I'll let you have Euclid, although it would be heavy going now to use that as a textbook...
    - nbouscal 13y ago
      It's only been about a century since it was fair to assume that every educated person had read it. I think the fact that we wouldn't be able to use it as a textbook in schools today is a really bad sign.
      - 13y ago