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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

> Universities and academic societies faking statistics, rewarding plagiarism and other scientific misconduct, restricting data, and otherwise mucking up the process of scholarly inquiry . . . that barely registers on the scale of institutionalized evil.

I'd lump it in the same category as the other things mentioned earlier: being hypocrites.

Like religion preaching one thing, practicing another. Or politicians being for the people, yet willing to enact policies or stir up wars resulting in the death of their people.

Academia is supposed to be about learning, knowledge, and growth, but locking down research and not calling out cheating and plagiarism speaks to the same rot; many at the top are just as selfish and negligent as the worst politicians and religious leaders.

But they sit at the top of their ivory towers and since we assign sacrosanct status to academic institutions (at least for the most part), they are never accountable.

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Attribution of systematic failures to individuals typically overlooks the power of incentives.

Academics need funding, funding allows them to keep going. Institutions that academics work for have bloated overheads typically going to admins who are tiered in such a way that there is just a single admin at every level.

As the overheads go up, the pressure to publish and win awards does too. Most awards for public research say you can take up to 7% of the award as unobligated funds. The result is that institutions want higher operating costs, to push the bottom line and increase their 7% share.

(The point i am making is that the overall context looks more like a snake eating its own tail than evil-empire ivory tower dwellers)

So then using this logic, as long as an organization doesn’t claim to have any ethical standards then there’s no need to hold them accountable to any ethical standard?

That's the point of having laws. They're held accountable to the law.

Laws =/= ethics

The point of having laws is to resolve the problem: not everyone in society has ethics, let alone the same ethics, or ethics that are compatible with each other.

> The point of having laws is to resolve the problem

This statement is normative and has no relation to how laws are actually created.

Can you name a framework of laws that was implemented by a sovereign, explicitly developed to resolve the problem of heterogeneous goal vectors for a defined political population?

I’m unaware of one.

All foundational “constitutions” I’m aware of were written - not as treaties that were negotiated as partners during peace that have explicit and well defined ethical principles that need to be accommodated for - rather each side claim discrete and finite sovereignty and only at the point that one group shows overwhelming violent dominance is imminent do groups grudgingly carve out their own territory.

So no, there is no coherent process for lawmaking that does anything other than encode the desires of the dominant political arm into the structures of its own making.

I encourage you to read Murray Rothbard's Anatomy of the State.

https://cdn.mises.org/Anatomy%20of%20the%20State_3.pdf

Wasn't this the whole point of the Bill of Rights? Without it, some states wouldn't have ratified the Constitution. This was a concession (a weakening of federal power) made for a non-dominant political arm that nevertheless needed to be brought into the fold. That seems to me like it was "explicitly developed to resolve the problem of heterogenous goal vectors for a defined political population."

More broadly, "resolve etc." in the above quote sounds like a mathy expansion of "compromise", which happens in almost every legislative body every day. Although maybe that's done implicitly and not explicitly.

In any case your framing is off point AND uneccesarily caustic. This is a business. They are worried about their revenue. They make a specious argument in an effort to save that revenue. I've never seen this so called Ivory Tower of academia, but that is besides the point.

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