Comment by StandardFuture | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StandardFuture | Hacker News Reader

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> I think it's probably harder for outsiders to understand the nuance.

No, it's simple. It's called game theory. So, who benefits from the publish or perish system that drives this profoundly fraudulent behavior and outcomes in science?

You are avoiding the "who" question. Why not maybe, perhaps, identify the who and get them removed from their position?

It may or may not even be a fellow scientist.

> lack of publications

uh huh, science is not and never was a stationary process.

It's absolutely disgusting that modern academia is filled with so many cowards and buffoons that the state of modern science has reached such a low.

> Even switching to industry isn't so easy without publications

Well, this is stupid. The only thing useful to corporations is your training and not your novelty.

Any novelty is a cherry on top, cream-of-the-crop pick and has nothing to do with being "hirable". But, that is also just an unchangeable aspect of our competitive reality and is thus entirely irrelevant to this discussion.

I disagree that this is for the lizardmen, the leftists, the woke or whoever. No, it's us all. We need publications because otherwise research is hard to evaluate for outsiders. If it's evaluated by peers, it's politics again.

There's a generic problem in academia and there is a specific one in the explosively growing and lucrative ones like AI. We can't think clearly if we blur all sorts of complaints against academia into a generic complaint against elites or something. Publish or perish also comes from the desire to measure, quantify things objectively etc. It's a generic trend in the management community. It's easier to hide behind mechanistic procedures, we live the age of the bureaucrat and not of the strong leader, for various historic reasons. Of the doctrine of equality, not of Great Men theories. But it all leads too far.

I recommend the SSC articles on Moloch for thinking deeper about this.

Why do parents chase extracurriculars and test drilling for their kid? Because it's competitive. With lower stakes, backwater academia can have lower pressure amd perhaps more attention and care.

We cannot abstract away the human. This is not a mere technical problem of a problem of morals in a few individuals. Read some novels, drama etc. We in the technical fields would benefit a lot from learning more from the humanities, literature, even classics from Antiquity. Man has not changed, our nature is still rich and complex and the same lesson that power corrupts.

Re training: outside the US, PhD programs have no explicit training. Training stops at the master level. From day one you just work on methods in the hope to publish the results. Advisors usually don't have a lot of time for each individual PhD student. Maybe let's call it experience, not training.

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