from the most-novel-and-transformative-SN-story dept.
The language used in grant applications is becoming increasingly hyperbolic, a study published last week (August 25) in JAMA Network Open finds. The study found that 130 research-hyping adjectives were used at a 1,378 percent higher frequency on average in funded application abstracts from 2020 than in those from 1985. "The findings in this study should serve to sensitize applicants, reviewers, and funding agencies to the increasing prevalence of subjective, promotional language in funding applications," the authors write.
The team, comprised of two linguists and a biomedical researcher, began by using software to annotate the parts of speech in more than 900,000 abstracts in the National Institutes for Health (NIH) archive of funded projects. They then compared the frequency of adjectives between projects funded in 1985 and those funded in 2020, looking specifically for what they considered hype: "hyperbolic and/or subjective language that may be used to glamorize, promote, or exaggerate aspects of research," according to the paper. While there was no statistically significant difference in the overall prevalence of adjectives between those two years, 1,888 of the descriptors exhibited marked shifts in frequency, 139 of which the researchers deemed to be hype.
Of those 139, 130 were used more often in 2020 than in 1985—including words like "transformative" and "impactful," which increased in frequency by 8,190 percent and 6,465 percent, respectively. The word "sustainable" was more than 25,000 percent more common in the more recent set of abstracts, and some hype adjectives were not seen at all in 1985, such as "renowned," "incredible," "groundbreaking," and "stellar." Meanwhile, the hype adjectives "major," "important," "detailed," and "ultimate" showed some of the largest decreases in frequency.
[...] After all, the words themselves "don't actually really say much," coauthor and linguist Neil Millar of the University of Tsukuba in Japan tells STAT. And other studies have found increases in hype in published research, press releases, and science journalism.
Journal Reference:
Neil Millar; Bojan Batalo; Brian Budgell; Trends in the Use of Promotional Language (Hype) in Abstracts of Successful National Institutes of Health Grant Applications, 1985-2020 [open], JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(8):e2228676. DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.28676
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 08 2022, @03:55PM
The eggheads and geeks talk a lot of shit.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday September 08 2022, @04:03PM (15 children)
...at first they are rude, then they become common parlance and the new buzz words cycle into existence.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 08 2022, @04:37PM (13 children)
Eventually, you don't get people's attention without a whole f^ing pile of $4it heaped on top because otherwise they'll feel that you lack enthusiasm...
I mean, literally, in the stockroom at a grocery I worked at in college, I'd acksk (Freudian slip of the keys, that's how it was pronounced there) another stockman something, anything, in a loud and clear voice, and they wouldn't even react, but if I started out with "F--k Percy" instead of just "Percy" then the same thing I just said, preferably with "f-ing $4hit" sprinkled in every third word or so, Percy (or whichever stockman I was addressing) not only would hear me, but also would usually do whatever I just asked - almost instinctively.
I'm afraid we're to a similar state with grant reviewers. It seems that if you ask for support for "Groundbreaking AI driven, ML enhanced, self-directing object search and tracking technology which promises best in World performance", they'll almost instinctively approve the grant without reading the proposal, particularly if the competition is merely "Investigating the merits of quaternion based optimized differential pattern matching with respect to object search and tracking efficiency."
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aafcac on Thursday September 08 2022, @04:46PM (12 children)
That's probably part of it, but I also think part of it has to do with where the funding is coming from. So much of the funding is coming from a small group of foundations, or the government, and nobody wants to fund things that aren't the most whatever. It's particularly problematic as it can be incredibly hard to get funding for replication studies unless you can convince the funders that there's some reasonable chance of not just setting aside the result, but doing so would be notable.
It's a shame really, because negative results are legitimate results and as long as you're not regularly testing things that turn out to be wrong, it shouldn't be an issue. And in some cases, it's the most efficient way of settling the question.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 08 2022, @05:13PM (11 children)
>it can be incredibly hard to get funding for replication studies
I'm incredibly jazzed about the "no paywalls for federally funded research" progress we made recently. Profiteering off of the results of scientific research is 100% counter to the point of doing the research in the first place.
Next up: somehow turn the tides in favor of replication studies... Maybe recognize the value of replication studies with matching funds for grants? If that doesn't cut it, then maybe a program to recognize the most valuable un-done replication research out there today and put up grant offers to do the work?
I absolutely devastated a PhD employee by pointing out an un-seen optimization in some code he had been working with. It wasn't really even his code, he had translated it and the inefficiency came along for the ride in his translation. We, the review group, broke it gently, non-judgmentally, and clearly pointed out the source of the inefficiency wasn't him, but... he went full meltdown: "I can't take it here anymore, I should be paid more, nobody calls me Doctor, etc. etc." Offers to start calling him Doctor weren't well received, and it's just as well - I needed to lay off one headcount anyway. But, I wonder if that "I am PhD: I am Pherfect Dammit!" mindset gets instilled somehow in the dissertation and defense process, or maybe it comes from teaching obscure subjects that nobody knows as much about as you do...
Anyway, the value of "we got it wrong, we know better now, we're probably still not right, but this new understanding does clearly seem to be better" is definitely missing in practice in our scientific institutions.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 08 2022, @05:54PM (1 child)
Piled Higher and Deeper
(Score: 3, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 08 2022, @08:32PM
Comparative value with a Post Hole Digger depends entirely on where you are and what you need at the time...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RS3 on Thursday September 08 2022, @06:11PM (1 child)
You share some very interesting stuff, thank you.
Sounds like the PhD guy didn't feel enough project ownership. And I don't mean that in an absolute way, but too often I / we feel pressured / rushed on a project, we know we're not doing our best, due to pressure we're missing all kinds of things, and it's frustrating. Of course the frustration causes much "mental noise", and you can guess what that does to accuracy and productivity.
Some years ago at a "systems integrator" (generic term- it was factory automation engineering / programming) I was asked to help with a project. They gave me some code- I don't know who wrote it. The spiel was: it almost works, just please fix it. Well, very long story short, it was some of the worst code I've ever seen. There were loop index counters with long meaningless names, and critically important variables named "i". Ugh. I wasted a good week trying to get it to work. Never understood it.
I ended up writing the project from scratch, and it worked extremely well, but I caught a ton of flack for taking far too long. I went full-on attorney mode (I'm not an attorney, but strongly considered it) with strong help and backing from some very major coworkers. I ripped apart all of the management deficiencies (things that were never done at all) and they just kind of ended the meetings. Idiots. That company was a disaster. Thankfully I and several others got laid off a few months later. A couple of years later company changed name, and a couple of years after that was gone.
Point of all of that is: company was very management-heavy political. Wise coworkers used to tell me to "posture myself". I still don't know what that means, and don't want any part of posturing. I've had other jobs where very high-level very smart very mover-shaker managers saw my abilities and told others to stay out of my way. I'm pretty self-motivated, very technical, can't stand politics. I'm extremely motivated by can-do, optimistic, harmonious teams.
Most important thing: do your best to define projects and work. Scope, resources, and most important: time budget. Don't give me a project, then one week later suddenly attack, complaining about time, progress, etc. In my aforementioned coding example I had great compassion for the project managers in that they had no idea how much would be involved to write the code, and they had already spent much time on the project. But do not ever pile that negativity onto the person who is actually getting the job done.
Six or so months after I was laid off I got a call from a now ex-coworker who just had to complement me on the work and code, how easy it was to read and make a few changes. Awesome call to receive.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 08 2022, @08:28PM
Well, we were all pressured and rushed, and the job was offered at $50K / year, we hired him telling him there are no present plans to open higher paying opportunities but he still made a statement to the effect of "oh, I think you'll see the value..." So, this may have been his self-imposed inflection point - either we "pay him what he's worth" or he's out. As I said, timing was pretty terrible on his part - if he had waited 2-3 months he might have gotten "what he was worth" if he was willing to relocate (only 2/15 relocated when the investment bank money came in and told us to move to Ohio...)
On that time pressure thing, another place I worked took on a "simple" project to fix up some air filter code... literally: a little chip that controls the fan in a HEPA filter unit, how hard could that be? Well, the design spec was 8 pages long, and the chip that was supposed to implement that spec had 2K of program space - but it was CHEAP! Like $0.27 per copy. Of course, for $0.37 per copy they could have gotten the chip with 4K of program space, but Noooooo.... so they're paying us $5K or something to "fix their _simple_ problem" and management tosses it to the fresh hire straight out of school. He struggles for 2 weeks, and then they call me in to see if I can fix it "in a day or so." So... first day we figure out that the stack on this chip is so small that it (silently) overflows with subroutine calls more than 2 levels deep. We restructure the code to be 2 levels deep, and we're out of program space, but... the optimizer recognizes "identical exit paths" and combines them, and we can see the light at the end of the tunnel by the end of day 1. But, management asks at 5pm "Is it working yet?" Of course not, but we know we can get it with one more day. "We've wasted too much money on this already, your time is too valuable, etc. etc." I just ignored them and got together with Jr. Engineer the next morning and we had it fixed before lunch, and management was pissed, but FFS scrum isn't until 9:45, and everybody starts planning where to go to lunch at 11:30, just chill! Yeah, that place's income dried up after the troop drawdown in Afghanistan ~2011 and they eventually went down in flames - not for anything they deserved specifically, but the way they were operating they _did_ deserve something like that to happen.
I used to say "I'm a good leader of a good team," which is another way of saying "I'm a bad manager of the typical crew you encounter in the real world," and as they say in Germany "Ich habe kein Bock auf Dies" - Germans love their animal metaphors and the goat (Bock) is a stand-in for desire or lust... Getting the most out of a bad collection of problematic actors just doesn't appeal to me. I would take "posturing yourself" to mean "look like what they want to see," which is another thing I care very little for. I do take pride in doing good work, but when I look back at most of the work I have done through the years, most of it was rushed and barely functional - hardly exemplary stuff, and that comes down to the environment you work in: if they have the money and the time to invest in doing good work, it pays off in the long run, but so many scrappy little companies know full well that by the time they invest enough in a product to make it "the right way" they are very likely to be out of money before they can start selling the product and the whole exercise was then a waste of time...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Friday September 09 2022, @03:03AM
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday September 09 2022, @12:48PM (5 children)
I have worked in academic and non-academic stuff. PhDs are just the same as everywhere else, mix of a-holes and nice people, competent and less so. You need to be able to write a book on something technical, which puts a sort of minimum layer on stuff, but the bar isn't that high. Most techy people can write a book about their project, and given a project that "no one has done before" (or not in that font at least) it becomes a dissertation.
As with most walks in life, they are pretty much like us, but with different colour skin.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 09 2022, @02:20PM (4 children)
The best description I have heard of the "minimum bar" that PhDs must cross is: "the patience/personality to deal with academic B.S. long enough to get a thesis review committee to sign off."
First semester senior year undergraduate I was well and truly DONE with academic B.S., but three things convinced me to stay on and do my M.S. 1) second semester senior year was 9 credit hours, with 3 credit hours of senior project (I had been taking 17-18 hour loads up until that point), a "full load" in the Master's program was 9 hours, and the B.S. is a lot easier to take when it's only coming at you from two or three sides at a time, instead of five or six. 2) Tuition inversion: for the small consideration of co-teaching a 1 hour lab course (which I totally kicked ass in last semester and was squarely in my area of interest), I went from having to scrounge together $20K/year in financial assistance to pay tuition, tuition was covered by the TA position plus $14K/yr salary - not exactly a king's ransom, but a big step in the right direction. and, the deciding factor: 3) The looming end of the Reagan Star Wars firehose of funding into the tech sector meant that there were major hiring freezes and downsizings already in play in the industry, and even companies not affected by the funding reduction were faced with a surplus of recently laid off experienced engineers, so a freshly minted B.S. in the field was worth, essentially, squat.
2.5 years later, the job market hadn't recovered much, but when the University's idea of a "big raise" for my TA was from $14K to $18K, I decided I'd make a leap of faith into the job market and see what happened... got lucky, found a local company to pay $30K/yr within a couple of weeks (this was a HUGE stroke of luck, the broader market was still oversaturated with layoffs) and well before I would have been halfway through my PhD that was raised to $37K. In computer engineering I had already pigeonholed myself into a fairly small market of potential employers - the money was good, but you usually have to relocate to chase it, a PhD would have magnified that effect many times over - and potentially launched me into the world of post-docs who, 10 years after receiving their M.S. are still using bicycles as primary means of transportation.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday September 09 2022, @04:40PM (3 children)
I don't think you really sample academic life from an undergraduate degree. PhD is totally different. Having said that, post-doc universe is crappy for people who want a career. Years of 3 year contracts on low salary to, if you are lucky, land a permanent job doing crappy admin and teaching.
On the plus side, lots of travel, you get to play with cool toys and the salary is enough if you don't want to drive a sports car. Professorship has status for some. I ride a bike every day by choice - my place of work is a few miles from where I live and there is a bike path through rolling hills pretty much door to door.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 09 2022, @07:59PM (2 children)
Back in 1991 the post-doc compensation was enough, if you didn't want to drive a Miata. I, too, rode a bike instead of my crappy Honda Civic most of the time by choice, but that balance shifted from 80% of time on bike 20% of time in car to 10% of time on bike 90% of time in car when I got a decent car, and a job that paid enough that I could afford to do things when I arrived at places.
PhD is totally different, and I've scratched around on the edges of that world enough to know that, and to know that life is too short for me to mess with that stuff. As you say, if you want any kind of professorship they basically require it in most places I would want to teach - and I completely fail to see the relevance, other than tradition.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday September 10 2022, @04:56AM (1 child)
In CompSci (which I understand is your thing) I guess there is enough industry expertise that PhD is pretty irrelevant. Indeed, one might argue that industry expertise is much more than PhD expertise in some instances. Elsewhere it is less obvious - probably not many folks could teach an undergraduate biology course unless they are really dealing with that sort of thing every day i.e. they are researchers i.e. PhD.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday September 10 2022, @01:57PM
Well, I guess that depends on what kind of quality you are expecting in the course.
Undergrad biology was taught in a giant theater of a lecture hall when I took it, and the prof was pretty good, but that was basically irrelevant - he may as well have been a video recording. Chem 101 was 50% video recordings (in 1985) and the other 50% was grand theater (live burning of benzene, etc.) - but it was still a relative waste of the professors' talents as the course was a heavy weed-out instrument for pre-med. Then there were smaller classes taught "by the book" which also completely failed to utilize any of the professor's knowledge of the material, a first year TA who took the course last semester would have offered more insight and passion for the material. Those were the stand-outs, I would guess that about 40% of my undergrad professors fell in those "useless" categories, and the rest worked their way up to the top of the scale with some of the most excellent being non-PhDs who came in from industry to teach things like Thermodynamics, etc.
My Masters' level Physics/Math - yeah, that probably needed a PhD to do it any justice whatsoever, but Undergrad - I could have taught fully half of my Undergrad classes better than the PhD profs who were doing the teaching - before taking the class myself with just a couple of days' prep time, if I cared enough to do so and was given the opportunity. After having successfully completed the class myself, I probably could have taught 20% of them better than the profs with essentially zero additional prep, just walk in cold and open the book/notes from when I took the class. And tenure? Such an obviously corrupt and even anti-student oriented carrot, it seemed that the best profs never had tenure, and those who had it basically treated teaching with contempt.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Friday September 09 2022, @10:51AM
Well I for one am impressed by this incredibly transformative and groundbreakingly impactful study. However I can't find any mention of whether this stellar result is sustainable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 08 2022, @04:31PM
When will the Science Pope decree that Latin be de emphasized and converted to native vernacular
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday September 08 2022, @07:40PM (3 children)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday September 08 2022, @08:17PM (2 children)
That can't happen. You're requiring administrators to be aware of what the researchers at the edge of the field are doing. You could automatically reject proposals that had certain words in them, though. Or at least ding them points in whatever scoring system you are using.
And, really, there's no particular reason a grant proposal should include the words "transformative" or "impactful". Those aren't quite meaning-free, but are pretty close, and are definitely subjective evaluations when applied to something that isn't in the past.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday September 08 2022, @09:58PM (1 child)
Shouldn't they, at least at a high level, be aware of that in order to judge the application's merit? Otherwise we have a bigger problem here.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday September 09 2022, @04:04PM
Yes, there's a bigger problem. But it's not new, and I don't think there's any solution.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday September 08 2022, @09:37PM (1 child)
Is there a large enough set of examples of hyperbolic grant applications to train an AI to generate new hyperbolic grant applications automatically?
Can I get a grant to study that question?
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 09 2022, @12:25AM
Only if you think your idea would lead to a transformative paradigm shift in the way grant proposals are evaluated.