[boibombeiro]

The parent post used the number of papers at the top conferences in their respectives fields.

It means they are unquestionably pushing the state of art fowards. Or the system is completely broken.

I see your point though. This is a recurrent discussion.

I think the change of paradigm was positive. Nowadays, papers are published in interactive and incremental way, instead of, doing a parallel with software engineering, with the waterfall methodology.

Publising the research incrementally allows more people to get involved, create more branches, and spot errors earlier.

In sofware developement, the change of the process lead to huge advanvements. I believe this is also true for academia.

[randomsearch]

> It means they are unquestionably pushing the state of art fowards. Or the system is completely broken.

I agree with this statement: the system is completely broken.

I've peered inside top level conferences and I can tell you that publishing there does not mean you are pushing the state of the art. Instead you may be: popular, good at playing the political game, lucky (when acceptance rates are low, luck plays a huge part - and why they are low is a story in itself), good at writing marketing copy rather than doing science, engaging in corruption to get your paper accepted, or playing to the gallery in a way that might even harm science.

More widely, if your field is 99% politicians and 1% scientists, then the _scientific_ barrier to entry at an elite conference is not going to be a good endorsement of your work.

[boibombeiro]

I don't think you are completly wrong.

For instance, last year there was a whole debacle at one of those top conferences because someone from nvidia, that was in the board of this conference, made (and posted on twitter!) a black list for people who said something that was not alligned with hers ideology. (I wonder what happened after the whole thing went quiet).

Yet, I do still think those conference, and their sponsors, have interest in only selecting the papers based on their content. I don't think you can get them to publish your papers so many time only with influence. Also, things like blind peer review exists to mitigate that (although, it favors writing quality over content).

Also. Politics isn't intrinsically evil. One of the great success of Einstein was spreading his idea. Argbly, others made more important achievement, yet didn't amass the same level of fame as him.

In my experience, people who are good at politics, usually persue others path. Doing so only to get publication is not the most rewarding thing for those kinda of people.

[derbOac]

The problem isn't the incremental nature of the papers or the collaboration, it's the equating of scientist quality with numbers of publications (or something like it).

By your own analogy, it would be like saying "someone is a great computer scientist" based on the number of commits they or their colleagues make.

I might even argue that regardless of how the product is or is not improved by the process, the way we attribute credit is worse.

If you move to a collaborative incremental process but still talk in terms of specific individuals as the source, rather than a group, there's a problem.

[op00to]

The comment wasn’t that they had a lot of papers, but they had a lot of papers in influential conferences.