[questinthrow]

Its odd how I viewed academia as a beautiful place where people were judged by merit not by politics. Then I joined it and realized its even more cutthroat than corporate politics, I guess you cant escape human fallibility no matter the system since all systems are reflections of human nature.

[epolanski]

Former solar researcher here, had the same experience.

I'll summarize it like this:

- join one of the most prestigious laboratories for my master's thesis in the world

- be assigned work based on a paper published in the same lab by a previous researcher

- can't replicate the results for s*t for months, put in insane overtime hours getting ridiculously good at all the processes, still nothing

- randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by the system in the publication is literally impossible, but by raising the voltage you can easily fake out the amount of electricity generated by the system. Nobody really caught it before because you need some very intimate experience with those systems, and it's just one random (albeit important) point.

- ask why this happens

- she explains that only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid

- she explains that only professors that run labs with a huge number of citations can find good funding

- only good funding can allow you to get the material, equipment and countless number of bodies (phds) to run as many experiments as possible and thus grow your position in the scientific world

Essentially there's way too many incentives to cheat and ignore the cheating for all the people involved.

And due to the fact that as soon as you enter a niche (and literally everything is a niche in science) everybody knows each other toxic things happen all around.

I wanted to be a researcher, but having wasted ultimately 7 months of my life trying to get numbers that were impossible to get, and having understood it was ALL about money (no funds -> no researchers/equipment -> papers -> citations -> funds) and politics I called it quits.

I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.

[alisonatwork]

My mother worked in academia on the teaching and administrative side and said it was pretty much the same there too. In her experience even at public universities, it was all about the money. In order for the department or faculty to justify itself, it needs to bring in revenue, and the number one way to do that (along with those research grants) is international students. But the most reliable source of international students who can afford the fees are not necessarily the world's best and brightest, they're the kids of wealthy elites who see education as a business transaction - we pay, you pass our kids. So the syllabus is adjusted to suit, and the teaching methods are adjusted to suit, and in the end everybody suffers because the system becomes structured around keeping the money train coming in. The education still happens, just like the research still happens, but it's happening in a suboptimal fashion, or as a side-effect rather than as the primary focus.

Sometimes I think about tapping out of private industry and getting into academia because in my imagination at least the work would be more pure, but then I think back to the stories my mother told me and realize most likely it isn't.

I agree that the only answer seems to be serious change at the highest levels of government, i.e. revolution. Aside from advocating for that, it seems the best we can do is try exist within these systems and find niches where we can create value for society without feeling too much like our morals are being compromised in the process. It's not easy.

[foxglacier]

Great story and it shows what everybody knows but won't say - normal academics are the frauds. Not just mysterious strangers in foreign countries, paper mills, etc. but normal medium or high status academics in prestigious universities in western countries doing the fraud themselves.

You can say it's not their fault - they're forced into it because it's the only way to succeed. But it's still their fault. I remember a case of a politician in China being arrested for corruption and he said that the only way to reach his position was with corruption. Yea he was probably right but he was still corrupt.

[TheBigSalad]

And this encourages the people with integrity to quit.

[thaumasiotes]

> I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.

This is just aggravating the problem. Science is mostly fraud because it's mostly done on behalf of a funder who doesn't want it. It's easier to write a paper describing the results you'd like to get than to actually get those results. And the funding agency is indifferent between those two things. So mostly you just get the papers.

[fuzzfactor]

Seeking eminence costs more than making breakthroughs.

How else are you going to pay for lack of breakthroughs?

Some people aren't going to be capable of breakthroughs anyway, lots of them even know it from the beginning, so they naturally or intentionally seek different things using the same institutions and resources that could otherwise yield breakthroughs instead.

Edit: As a footnote suggested by my own question, you pay for lack of breakthroughs by building eminence out of thin air, if it wasn't obvious.

[julienb_sea]

This is likely a generalized problem with basic science. In applied science you need to be very careful about fraud because ultimately the application of research findings will end up in customers hands who can and will pursue legal action if the original claims turn out to be false.

[chrisBob]

One thing that helps to counter this somewhat is that if your paper is proven to be wrong, the journal can force a retraction. A retraction isn't exactly career ending, but it is a huge deal and will have an impact on future jobs and funding.

[geokon]

> one of the most prestigious laboratories

my gut feeling is that the more famous a group/lab, the more likely there is some funny stuff going on. Smaller groups/labs are less cutthroat. But it also depends on the discipline...

[msteffen]

> randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by the system in the publication is literally impossible

I'm interested in the apparent contradiction between the "tens of thousands of citations" credential for your evidently competent labmate who caught the fraud, and the "only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid" indictment of the evidently mediocre fraudster.

How much of the science that happens do you think is due to people like your labmate, who seems to have earned her citations organically with talent, and how much is due to the fraud? Are most citations still going to talented people?

My parents were both academics who built their careers in the 70s and 80s. I don't know that they had a perspective on fraud per se, but they did say that science used to be totally different—lots of money going into a smaller research community. But because each PI trains many PhDs, the research community has grown unsustainably and now funding is highly competitive. For the system to be sustainable, the vast majority of PhDs need to leave science, and there need to better exits for those people (or else there need to be many fewer PhD candidates and researchers need to stop relying on PhD candidates for labor). I wonder if the fraud is a consequence of this problem.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

Funny, as someone who works in private sector, I always had the opposite view of academia:

A zero-sum system based around a fixed pool of grants and positions that everyone competes for, and a terminal job ladder position where, once reached by successfully having competed for aforementioned grant $$, I become un-fireable.

I would have to sleep with a gun under my pillow in such a world.

There's already plenty of cheating in business, which is full of positive-sum win-win opportunities. I don't even want to imagine how badly I might behave in academia just in order to survive.

[ocschwar]

From 1945 to about 2000, academia in the western world was slowly growing. That made the pool of positions not-quite-zero-sum, and way too many people went into it expecting a much more genial environment.

[physicsguy]

> I become un-fireable

That's not been true in most countries for a long time

[77pt77]

Academia.

Nowhere else do people fight so much and so dirty for so little.

[neilv]

I viewed academia as altruistic and relatively enlightened. And I've certainly met many who live up to that.

I've also occasionally heard of entire academic departments who should be in jail, for being pieces of crud.

Then there's what I'm guessing is the bulk of academia: care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be.

That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.

[timkam]

> That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.

I regularly see both worlds. What I find more troubling in academia is that it is difficult to openly talk about how flawed the system is, that people make mistakes, that papers have mistakes (the own ones as well as others'). We know all software has bugs; but the code that a PhD student hacks together over night is assumed to be flawless (the more senior people rarely even glance at it), otherwise the paper is all wrong, and papers are set in stone... So I genuinely struggle with the lack of a proper failure culture in academia, as it is designed as a system that is fundamentally geared against openly discussing failure.

[busyant]

> care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be. That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.

That's pretty much my experience from 20+ years ago.

One thing that I didn't appreciate when I left the ivory tower was the extent of the replication "crisis."

If other academics can't replicate your work in some esoteric corner of bio research, it's no big deal--some people get burned wasting time, but the research just atrophies in the end.

But in the biotech / pharma industry, we in-licensed a lot of un-replicatable garbage from academia.

And replication was important to us because we actually had to make a drug that was effective (which loosely translates to ... "clinicians must be able to replicate your drug's efficacy.").*

* I'm not sure how true this is anymore, given politicization of regulatory bodies, but it was an eye-opener to me years ago.

[BrenBarn]

Yeah, I would say that my time in academia disillusioned me somewhat, but not to the level that some people here are expressing. I never got the sense that people were falsifying data, directly (but covertly) backstabbing one another, or anything really awful like that.

But there are plenty of disheartening things that don't rise to that level of actual malfeasance. People get so comfortable in their tenured positions that they can lose touch with reality (e.g., the reality of how difficult their grad students' lives are). Even if they don't engage in actual research misconduct, there's a tendency for people to put their thumb on the scale in various ways (often, I think, without being aware of it), many of them connected to a sort of confirmation bias, in terms of who they think is a "good fit" for a job, what kind of work they want to support, etc. In my experience they are at best dismissive and at worst offended by the idea that maybe the current financial/employment model of higher education isn't the best (e.g., that maybe you shouldn't have a two-tiered system of tenure-track and non-ladder faculty with wildly differing payscales, but rather should just have a larger number of people doing varying amounts of teaching and research for varying but roughly comparable levels of pay).

I felt like virtually everyone I met was in some sense committed to the truth, but often they were committed to their own view of the truth, which was usually a defensible and reasonable view but not the only view, and not as clearly distinct from other reasonable views as they felt it was. And they varied considerably in how much they felt it was acceptable or necessary to engage in minor shenanigans in order to keep moving forward (e.g., to what extent they'd compromise their actual beliefs in order to placate journal editors and get something published).

Also, there is often something endearing about how academics can be genuinely emotionally invested, sometimes to the point of rage or ecstasy, in matters so obscure that the average person wouldn't give them a second thought. It's sort of like finding someone who's a fan of some TV show that ran for 12 episodes in 1983 and is adorably gushy about it. Even the people I met who were quite cognizant of making strategic career moves and other such practical stuff still had a lot of this geeky obsession about them.

A lot of this may vary from one field to another. But on the whole there are many worse people in the world than academics.

[8bitsrule]

As an US undergrad decades ago, at a major (non-elite) research school, I was already discovering these criticisms of the current academic system, in action, way back then. So I don't think we can blame much of any 'fraud' increase going on today on that system. Today, perception of fraud may be on the increase.

(I started to become alert to what that program was really about when I took one of the classes -critical- to my major. It involved a lot of heavy math, and was being taught by a TA with a -very poor- command of the English language. When I complained, my Princeton-grad advisor's reply was 'this course is to separate the men from the boys'. Yeah, thanks pal.

So far as I know, he published very few cited papers.)

[daymanstep]

How is it better than the tech industry?

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

Sayre's Law: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."

[coderatlarge]

as it turns out an annuity for life in the form of a tenured position is not really low stakes…

[butlike]

It's really hard when there's no metrics beyond "perceived intelligence."

[lo_zamoyski]

Academia is a petty place.

No "system" can ever overcome such problems. Sure, some political orders are better than others in various respects, but nothing will overcome the basic origin of our problems, which is us! The "system" itself is made from the crooked timber of our humanity, and even if some perfect "system" could be made, its perfection could only be actualized by a perfect people.

Hence the need to focus less on systems and more on personal virtue. You want to find your greatest enemy? Look within.

To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”

[exceptione]

Your post being down voted is unjust. There is a tendency to expect salvation from the system and the rule, but they only have power if they are kept by and defended by the commons.

This also applies to society as a whole. The role of the media as the fourth estate in the system is to inform the public when destruction is breaking the rules, to explain how it will bring down the house.

But when in a Res Publica the media susses the common man instead, when the outlets prostitute them to the destructive powers that finally will kill their enablers, all is too late. The common man will have exchanged his virtues for hate towards imaginary enemies. Then it turned out that the rules did not save the public.

[potato3732842]

>To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”

This gets invoked way too often by bad people defending bad things that they were warned not to do/support at the time but did/supported anyway because there was something in it for them.

[avoutos]

I think it's more beneficial to think in terms of incentive structures. How we structure societies and industries can incentivize virtue, but it can also disincentivize fradulance and incentivize good clean work more directly.

[at-fates-hands]

I was planning on going into academia in the early aughts and this was also around the time that there was a groundswell to take away tenure from professors. "They" wanted to set out a quota for how many times you needed to have your research published on a yearly basis to show you were still doing your job.

I opted out when all three of my advisors during my first year of graduate work told to get out and that the whole field of academia was not the romantic vision I had aspired to be. It was quickly becoming toxic. One of my advisors had stopped taking money from universities, and was leaving to go work for a large pharmaceutical company doing research out in Siberian Russia. Another was quietly working on a degree in statistics to go work for the government.

These were people who I admired and fashioned myself after. It's quite a shock when people you respect suddenly warn you academia is not where you want to be. I was lucky, the other two guys I was in grad school with went ahead anyways. Years later, I found out neither lasted more than a few years for exactly what you described and what I was warned of.

[gonzobonzo]

One thing that really needs to be unbundled is assessments for credentials, teaching, and research. As it is now you want to be assessed for credentials at a top institution, you have to pay to take classes and learn at that institution. Which often leaves you in a class being "taught" by a researcher who's uninterested in teaching and unresponsive, and who hands off the actual job of teaching to an inexperienced graduate student making minimum wage. And for this privilege, you're charged a massive amount of money.

[beezlebroxxxxxx]

Part of the problem is many academic institutions, even prestigious ones, simply don't prioritize teaching. They don't even really prioritize challenging education. They prioritize prestige and opportunity hoarding. The hardest part about many of these schools is getting in. Once you're in, then grade inflation and the desire for the institution to retain it's prestige brand means the classes aren't particularly hard --- graduating is particularly easy and most students actually barely put in effort. Getting in is the golden ticket more than graduating.

One solution, is for an institution to prioritize accessibility (easier to get in) but also prioritize difficulty (actually hard to graduate). This would reorient incentives around challenging education that pushes students to excel rather than coast after striving just to get in. Unfortunately, the priorities are the exact opposite today.

[nick486]

I had the same view until I went to do a small internship in a research lab. There, I realized that my research group's boss was spending most of his time submitting grant requests, that in my view distilled to 'Give use money and we will find X'. Which was absolutely antithetical to what I thought research was like(wait, aren't we supposed to not know what we will find ?). Then came the publishing part where you get reviews saying your paper isn't good enough because it didn't cite ${completely not relevant to the topic} paper (which sort of narrows down who the "anonymous reviewer" was). Then there's the quasi-feudal approach of putting the lab head in the authors. I mean, come on, I'm not sure the guy even knows the paper exists...

It just wasn't my thing.

[Fomite]

Two notes:

- Not all labs run this way. Mine doesn't.

- Very few successful grants, in my experience, are "Give money and we'll find X". Rather, they tend to be "We're reasonably sure X is over here for $reasons, but we'd need money to actually confirm that."

[77pt77]

> Then there's the quasi-feudal approach of putting the lab head in the authors

Changes from field to field but yes, very common.

And many times, like you wrote, they have no idea about what was even done.

Then you have the gigantic collaborations, where everyone gets a citation and it counts as much as a paper with one or two authors.

And of course, everyone will cite it because there's no real alternative.

[SecretDreams]

Academia these days is a lot like industry, but with worse pay, better schedule, and low consequences/verification if the data that is published is "wrong", intentionally or unintentionally.

[moregrist]

The schedule is not better. My quality of life increased dramatically when I left academia and realized that I had time for things like hobbies.

Even in startups, there’s a tacit understanding that you’re exchanging your time for money and that this exchange has limits. This is simply not true in academics where the need to publish to keep funding (and often your job) is incredibly intense.

[Fomite]

My schedule, while more flexible, is not better than any one of my colleagues who went into industry.

[eurekin]

Same here. I think it's one of those fields that feel polar opposite to, what they advertise to be.

[pixl97]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculu...

Academia/Science has always been quarrelsome.

[77pt77]

> Its odd how I viewed academia as a beautiful place where people were judged by merit not by politics.

If there's more than one human, you have politics.

[gmd63]

Not all humans are practitioners of the terminal gamesmanship that is infecting our economy and government. It's about electing, promoting, and buying from the right people, and having the courage to properly punish those who have betrayed the good faith that powers successful societies.

[the-mitr]

in academia many times it matters whom you know rather than what you know,

[TimTheTinker]

It seems to me that the "elephant in the room" no one has mentioned yet w.r.t. academia is the model of modern academic administration, where universities are run like cruise ships (look at the perks kids are paying for these days!) with hedge funds attached, and have no "skin in the game" with regard to the incredibly high financial risks that students take when they pay for tuition.

If: (a) students paid 1/10 of what they pay today[0], (b) all the on-campus expensive perks were ended (new buildings sold, etc.) and the administration headcount dropped to 1 per every 50 students, (c) tuition went directly to professors, research, and basic groundskeeping, (d) some kind of financial arrangement were put in place so universities had skin in the game with regard to the success of their graduates[0]

then I'm positive the academic system would become far more effective at educating students and preparing them for life, and there would be a positive trickle-down effect to scientific research and the politics there.

[0] State-funded secondary education in European countries costs far less than university education in the US. There's a reason for that - unlike students with easy access to debt, the government won't pay such exorbitant fees.

[1] A very rough stab at an idea for making universities have skin in the game: make tuition for degrees conferred refundable by some percentage (50%?) if more than a certain fraction (10%?) of graduates with B- or higher GPA in their majors are collectively unable to find a job in their field within 2 years of graduation. If a university needed to withhold that guarantee for some majors, that would be a very helpful signal for prospective students.

But the point isn't the specifics, it's that just the presence of such a lever (and its absence at some universities or majors) would be a powerful signal to prospective students, better align the university's incentives, and cause a lot of necessary changes.

[Fomite]

Most universities do not have "hedge fund" class endowments.

It should also be noted that there are reasons tuition is the way it is. State allocations for higher ed were slashed in 2008, and didn't really get put back even when the economy was doing well. Similarly, federal research dollars (which fund the vast bulk of research, not tuition) has been pretty flat for decades (the amount of a non-modular NIH R01, for example, hasn't changed since the Clinton administration).

Tuition is the only lever left to most institutions.

[zevon]

Another ex-researcher here. Similar experience. I went in with hopes of a lot of rationality and intense cooperation between people who would be there mostly for a shared curiosity. Fast forward years and... Good grief - so, so many people publicly being shouted down, shamed, bullied, insulted. So many serious abuses of power - up to sexual and bodily - essentially without consequences for the abusers (often with way more negative consequences for the victims if they complained). So many tears, so many ends to academic careers of people who were really smart and really cared - in quite a few cases accompanied by burn-outs and other long-term health consequences. So much tax money down the drain with questionable accounting up to outright lies. So, so many utterly absurd intrigues and wars between mini-kingdoms based on nothing but the feelings of the biggest, loudest and most vicious narcissists. So many publications of questionable methodology that are sliced as thinly as they possibly can be and are hyper-targeted towards all-important journals or conferences. And so much more soul-destroying nonsense.

I'm still mostly in academia but nowadays, I focus on teaching and infrastructure. Especially with teaching, I feel that I can make more of a long-term impact that I ever could as a researcher - not least because I have way more freedom for discussions and interesting projects with students (I still have to deal with way more hostile, petty and sometimes outright dangerous BS than I feel comfortable with - but it's better than in the even-higher-pressure parts of the system).

[gchamonlive]

I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism. If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently. Because what you see in small, specially poor communities is that trust in each other is strong.

You could argue that the church tried it and we had the inquisition, but I think it's different. We have way more benefit of hindsight and the population is way more educated than it was in the middle ages.

Not advocating for a renaissance of the Christian kingdom, but for embedding care and charity as first class moral values in economics.

[77pt77]

Not only is it human, it's far more general than human.

The world is not what you think it is. Social problems are almost never a result of improper social systems.

The game you are playing by virtue of existing is just shit and no amount of "rules" you build on top of it will ever change that fact.

[worldsayshi]

I think one of the core failures of our current economic religion is that we can rely solely on anonymous transactions. But many transactions fail when everything is black boxes. We can't easily evaluate (1) if the thing we got is of good quality and (2) there wasn't any harmful side effects.

Transactions need more trivially verifiable metadata. That could solve one of many issues.

[Aurornis]

> I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism

This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don’t have capitalism, they’re all getting along, right? Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for mates?

Being competitive is human nature. People will always compete for things, even if you try to artificially remove or forbid financial incentives. There are always more incentives. There will always be social standing to pursue, a coveted position, or the recognition of having accomplished something.

> If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently.

Alternate economic systems that forbid capitalism rely on heavy government enforcement to prevent people from doing capitalistic things: Running unapproved businesses, being entrepreneurial, selling goods and services at market rate.

This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).

[code_for_monkey]

its funny how the tech community is so pro capitalism but also pro open source, which seem completely at odds.