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Comment by beambot | Hacker News Reader

Sayre's Law: Academic Politics Are So Vicious Because the Stakes Are So Small

Maybe universities, tenure committees, and funding sources should stop measuring academics by vanity metrics such as H-Index and publication counts. And don't get me started on the tendency toward "minimum publishable units."

That said, abusing power as an editor deserves a special place in hell...

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The stakes are pretty large now. You are judged on the number of publications, positions, citations, etc.

It’s not even about philosophical disagreement as much as future career

I've heard that some universities set aside $5-10 million whenever they grant someone tenure. It's a fiscally prudent accounting measure. And it's also a measure of how valuable the contract can be. (Of course one still needs to do some work soooo....)

I wonder if that's the amount to endow a chair or something, because $5m is well within the "never work again" FIRE amount - but perhaps a tenured professor not only has his salary, but that of his assistants, etc.

Corporate KPI-chasing culture ruins everything. “Publish or perish” has hit such an extreme level.

I imagine most academics would gladly not participate in this game if their entire livelihood didn’t depend on it

I think an awful lot of people would rather receive their livelihood without being subject to measurement.

I didn’t say no measurements at all. I was very specific with my language

Institutional design needs legibility to track people's reputation at scale. The problem is that these metrics are often poor substitutes.

The difficulty is that nobody knows how to. My guess is that if you want good signaling, you'll need to find something that is difficult to fake. My guess are evolving benchmarks that measure many things in multiple dimensions, but benchmarks were easily gamed.

You can have it without benchmarks that can be gamed, but then it's basically down to "this feels right" and you have to trust the leadership to not be discriminatory, etc.

Every serious academic knows it is complete crap, the problem is finding a better metric. Although the crappyness competes with "no metric at all" and I think the latter would be superior.

The only advantage the current system has is that it is stupendously simple, so at least it is hard to manipulate.

Goodhart's Law strikes again.

How should they be judged then? Any metric can be gamed. And if it will be kind of qualitative assessment then politics will be 10000x more important. The system is clearly broken but I’m not sure if alternative is not even worse.

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