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Nautilus has an interesting rundown on how scientific fraud happens and what could possibly be done to correct it written in comic book form. It's a fun little read and oh so true.
The book that it is based on, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, is worth reading as well.
Stuart Ritchie is a Lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King's College London. His new book, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, explains the ideas in this comic, by Zach Weinersmith, in more detail, telling shocking stories of scientific error and misconduct. It also proposes an abundance of ideas for how to rescue science from its current malaise.
How many Soylentils here are in academia? Have you felt the pressure of "publish or perish"?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by lizardloop on Saturday August 01 2020, @08:22AM (11 children)
My own experience of this was pitching some software to an academic. A friend of mine works as a researcher and was complaining some years ago that a lot of her job could be automated which would free her up to do more "science" (whatever that is). I visited her place of work and after some investigation agreed that for a modest amount of development work there would be some long term productivity gains. Mainly on processing her data.
I put together a pitch for her boss which explained how much more productive his staff would be with some simple software tools and how little they would cost him. I got almost no interest whatsoever from him. I would go so far as to say he might have been actively hostile to the idea. I apologised to my friend who was going to have to continue with her drudge work unaided and moved on to other projects.
Some months later I was talking to an older friend who used to work in academia and he explained to me why her boss was so hostile. It seems the higher up you go in academia the more your prestige, value and career is measured on is how many people work for you and how much budget you get. So a software tool that would be reduce the number of people needed and reduce the amount of money spent is actually a complete negative for an experienced academic. It doesn't flatter their ego and make them appear more important. My friend went on to tell me about a guy he used to work with who would manipulate vulnerable students in to working on completely useless projects. But projects that were carefully chosen to make his own area of research seem far more important than it really was and help him get speaking gigs at conferences.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Opportunist on Saturday August 01 2020, @10:14AM (2 children)
To be fair, that's not the hallmark of academia, that's a general trait you'll also find in the commercial economy. Middle manager attach their self worth to the amount of people they get to boss around, leading to turf wars between them trying to pull departments under their rule whether that makes sense or not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2020, @02:13PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @02:35PM
But they do lose their healthcare. Keep jumping thru them hoops.
(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Saturday August 01 2020, @02:53PM (6 children)
From your example I would say it sounds plausible. After all her boss doesn't care since he isn't doing any data-work/wrangling anymore, that is all done by the underlings. So however long it takes, how mundane and repetitive it is is of no importance to him. In some cases they probably believe that it's the way it should be, they had to do it eons ago and now the next generations should do it to so that they can some day in the future make their underlings do it for them. It's the circle of academic life.
Working in academia, mainly in research only, I can tell you that having lots of underlings is probably a prestige matter but it's probably also very field or subject dependent. Some fields just lend themselves to having more research- and lab-assistants and phd-students then others so it's not something that goes everywhere. There might also be big country/university differences, where I am now most professors (etc) don't have more then one phd-student each (most dont even have one, but to become a professor you more or less must have had phd-students under you) and assistants are usually shared between multiple projects and groups or only employed for limited time periods. Financing is an issue, so if you can pull multi-million-$ grants then sure you can splurge on having your own academic-posse. But it's unlikely that the university will pay you to have them around just so you'll feel important.
That said I'm not sure there is a difference here between academia and the private sector. All management or bosses are always judged on their underlings, having more is better or more prestigious etc.
But the overall name of the game is to publish papers, lots of them, and get them cited by others. Both are important criteria for your promotion up the academic ladder. So having a lot of assistants and researchers is an easy way to accomplish this, they can attach their names to your work and you can attach yours to their work. Another option is to get into weird little sub-field and start pushing out multiple papers per year on more or less the same topic -- you just update or try and apply different perspectives and such. It's a great way to get your own citation numbers up as you can then cite all your previous papers -- citation inflation.
It's all quite fucked up and far from how people outside academia believe it works, but the day of you being able to sit in your ivory tower and publish like a paper every five years or so are gone, for most people. Now it is almost like a paper-factory and publish or perish is a real thing. If you don't publish you better be one hell of a teacher that the students love, or you better be getting multi-million-$ grants all the time otherwise you are eventually going to get axed and tenure, which is over all getting more and more rare, is not in your career path.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @03:50AM (5 children)
My secret is that I love teaching the classes they hate and none of my colleagues are qualified to judge the quality of my published work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @04:50AM (4 children)
(Pssst noone cares)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @07:55AM (3 children)
You cared enough to reply.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @02:36PM (2 children)
(Only to tell you the painfully obvious)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02 2020, @08:19PM (1 child)
Doesn't change the fact that you cared enough. Twice now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2020, @01:12AM
(OK you win - tell us about why you like teaching again)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2020, @06:50PM
Just another +1 for the same thing.
Assistant, associate and full profs with up to a dozen PhD students. They don't have clue what the students are doing, nor care. Just write papers. It's a good way to sabotage a department whlle appearing Very Busy on the surface. The prof is not on top of the field because he's overloaded himself with babysitting ill-thought out projects come up with by untrained foreign students.
Incidentally, PhD students are a self-selected bunch with emotional imbalances that lead them to stake their entire worth on their mentor's opinion of them. It's fucked up. The mentor is fucked up too. Abused became abuser... cycle continues, the usual story.
Anyway, there are several innovative paths to upping the publication count. This is the one I am seeing a lot of lately - probably due to China funding so many spies... oops, grad students at US universities.