Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I agree that the general public has basically no idea how the academic world operates and surely their trust in it would decrease if they knew. There are many sketchy practices and a lot is based on an "honor" system, which often devolves to back scratching. Lots of inflated claims for sexy publicity, mass produced PhDs etc.

People imagine science as this serious rigorous thing where everything is objective and unbiased careful "monks" investigate all the details with scrutiny. When actually it's often like a bazaar. You have to sway the reviewer with overinflated claims and "sell yourself" in a way that fully contradicts the scientific virtue of self-skepticism (finding reasons why you're wrong, not right). There's also a lot of who knows/likes who and subjective human factors. These are all obvious for people after a few months or 1-2 years as a researcher, but science has a very different image for laypeople who mostly know about it from school, mostly results that were produced in a different era. The number of scientists has exploded recently, there are tons and tons of papers written and they are all supposed to be some novel discovery and this great leap forward, which is clearly unrealistic at this scale. At the same time thorough analysis and skeptical papers are "boo"-ed down, seen as confrontational and are undervalued compared to sexy new claims.

Many institutions have become paper mills. Raw metrics like paper counts and citation counts have replaced careful consideration in many evaluations, it's basically an industrial scale mechanized process. Feels like a house of cards that can not be kept up indefinitely. The reputation of science will be hurt for sure as the public starts to find out more.

This is an unnerving yet very accurate description of the current state of academia. I would nuance it by saying that some fields are more "competitive" (i.e. crooked) than others and there is, in general, a lot of respect for work done by others (sometimes expressed through mild jealousy).

I share your conclusion but hope that science itself prevails, that this state we're in now is part of the "self-cleansing" property of science and that specific scientists will be held accountable instead of the concept of science. But I can only hope for now.

On the other hand, to list some random newish things:

* Genome sequencing.

* New malaria drugs.

* Graphene.

* Better batteries.

* Deep learning.

* fMRI.

* CRISPR.

From the outside, the public doesn't care about the trials and tribulations of PhDs. Or irrelevant puffed up papers. Or the organisational politics of research.

That's true, there is a lot of good work out there of course.

And I'd say the system is still of concern for the public. Few readers of pop science articles recognize when they are essentially reading a pr marketing piece, and not something like a consensus textbook-like description of consolidated knowledge. The authors have special interests and biases beyond uncovering the truth, such as pressure for publication counts, tenure possibilities, filling your CV, all sorts of political considerations, flag planting, etc.

Another thing is how these discoveries are made. I think people imagine it as if researchers research and ponder about things, then when they find something, they write it up to share it with the world and contribute their new found interesting knowledge. I know someone who did that in his PhD, he quit after several years without any paper submissions. When asked, he said he hasn't found anything yet worth publishing. In most places, people decide in advance that they're going to have a paper this year for this journal/conference and then they plan a solid way there. You decide what result would be sexy (keeping some secondary plans in place) and then do the whole thing. Several times things will not go as you expect, but the paper must be written. Then you rewrite history and come up with ridiculous "storylines" to make it seem like all your hypotheses naturally flow from prior work and everything fits in this nice story. Then you torture the data until it sings because there must be a paper. You look for the smallest indication of something interesting, inflate it to sound like a breakthrough, speculate about far reaching conclusions etc. And then if your university has a good pr department, journalists will eat it all up and you'll be out in the media, impacting normal people's understanding as well.

(I realize I may be a bit too cynical here, and I exaggerate somewhat to get the message through.)

I get that, and you may not be wrong. It's that you may be right about the wrong thing. All this stuff matters a lot if you're pursuing a career in academia. But from the outside it just means the machine of science is a bit less efficient than it could be.

Also I put it to you that serious researchers are rarely misled by low quality, vacuous papers. That kind of work will be ignored by history.

So I agree that what you're pointing out is something of a problem, but may not constitute a cataclysm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com