[agarsev]

disclaimer: I'm a university professor, though in a european country and not in health-rrlated area

The article is excessively negative in tone, and very dramatic and aggressive. I have found many people adjacent to academia, drop outs, or even some inside, very disenchanted and angry at how it works. And it's true, the sets of incentives, structures and political organisation in academia don't relate at all to academic excellence, and are something we have to "suffer". I wish we could come up with a better set of incentives, but it's very hard to do in a mostly vocational and passion-based activity. So what people have come up is structure the incentives along the chores (eg teaching) and easily measurable results (eg publications). And whenever you come up with an incentive structure, some people will game it. And the current state of publication stress (publish or perish) is extreme and counterproductive. But please note that these measurement requirements and incentives are imposed from outside academia. Of course, I'm not saying leave us to our devices, academia is nepotistic and political enough. But the system sure could use some overhaul. Suggestions welcome.

On the other hand, this "fraud" is incentive fraud, but not "truth" fraud. The way science Truth works is by accumulation of imperfect, even erroneous results, leading to an ever more refined understanding of the world. Scientists don't just blindly trust others, even if they cite each other (nowadays, citations are a political and incentive-gaming tool more than actual references). So these massive scale frauds don't bother us so much because they don't make understanding necessarily go backwards. Of course the payer feels it's a waste of money, but in academia we see money as support for research, which is mostly failed anyways because you only make discoveries by failing and failing again.

And progress in knowledge is nowadays still going on, even in the medical fields. And academia still works, much as healthcare and compulsory education, becausemany people feel a calling to do these professions properly, even if it doesn't seem so from outside. So let's be optimistic, even while trying to come up with improvements to the current model.

PS: So sorry for the wall of text

[derbOac]

Also a professor (of two varieties at different times).

I have mixed feelings about this article. I agree with the sense of ignored crisis it points to, but also think it doesn't understand the problems with the solutions it recommends, or maybe misunderstands the sources of the problems, like you're saying.

Academics is different from finance maybe in that outside of outright fraud, things are murky. What one person considers "unscientific" another might consider perfectly reasonable or even rigorous, and vice versa. I've seen debates like this, where the two sides both consider the other unscientific and theoretically and methodologically unrigorous. I don't see the outright fraud as the core of the problems either, it's an extreme version of something that exists because of rotten incentive structures. Getting rid of it is akin to replacing the roof on a house that has rotten foundations: important, but not solving the problem.

The problems in academics can't be easily reduced to one thing. There's lots of extremely competent people working under a broken model of reality, one that assumes that such competence is rare rather than common, that progress is due to single individuals rather than collaborative groups, administrations looking for money from research rather than money for research, fame rather than truth, and so forth and so on. Then there's the other side of the coin, employers using degrees to avoid competent training and hiring, reducing people to specific degrees etc.

Increasingly I see the problems with academics as pervasive to society (at least US society), something deeper, just incentivized and maybe manifest more clearly because it's so broken when applied to academics. I don't think it's a coincidence that health care and academics have both seen huge inflation in the last several decades, for example, and are both huge sources of controversy in US society. I think the average people working in those fields are doing so in good faith, but I also think there's systemic pressures that create huge problems and bad actors in both, and there's enormous reluctance in both to change things because of power structures and poor understandings from the rest of society about what's going on.

[armitron]

I'm afraid it's not simply a matter of wasted money but one of profound institutional rot that drives away large numbers of the best and brightest. The article outlines this by focusing on the proto-scientist archetype and the spiritual, uncompromising pursuit of Truth. Today's academic culture is for the most part completely antithetical to a person possessing these attributes.

That some can endure the suffering and keep working in this sort of environment does not reflect well on today's institutions and doesn't inspire much optimism for the future of academia.

[jltsiren]

It's not the academic culture in my experience. It's the most competitive subset of the academia. Things tend to be worse if there is top-anything involved, if the field of study is supposed to be important, or if the field receives a lot of funding. These factors all attract the kind of people who respond strongly to incentives and often try to game the system.

I have two home communities in the academia. One is string algorithms, compressed data structures, and things like that. It's a small community where people enjoy what they are doing and have somehow found a way to make a living out of it. The groups tend to be small, the atmosphere is friendly and honest, and the results rarely appear in top conferences.

Then there is a subset of bioinformatics and genomics, which often uses results from the other community. This is supposed to be important, so there are a lot of big well-funded labs from top universities involved. Stuff sometimes gets published in prestige journals, administrators from funding agencies (particularly NIH) are trying to direct the research, and even the Big Tech is trying to grab their share of something. I haven't seen fraud, but everything is so serious and competitive and there is a constant pressure to get things done before someone else manages to publish something similar.

I don't know how things are further downstream, and I'm not interested in finding out.

[thatcat]

academia was meant to protect researchers from profit incentives that bias their work in private companies, if you replace those with other corrupt incentives then what's the point? you could just do that shoddy, useless research in industry and not publish it.