Discussion
everdrive: >Don’t hate the player, hate the gameI understand this is a cheeky section heading and the author is not really making this point, but this may be one of the dumbest popular phrases out there. You're effectively saying "Don't get upset at me for being an awful person, I probably wouldn't have succeeded if I'd been a good person." "The game," of course, is made up of players and if no one played that way there would be no game.
tjwebbnorfolk: Ok but if you are the first person to decide to be "good" in a rotten game, you aren't going to be held up as some example of virtue. You are just going to lose the game.Of course the thing that makes the game rotten is incentives. The academic profession as a whole has decided to incentivize and reward this behavior.
retsibsi: But if winning the game requires you to do shitty science and defraud the public, why play it at all? There's no desperation justification here, because anyone who can succeed in academia almost certainly has the brains and credentials to get a decent non-academic job.
bpt3: Because it's not a requirement, and most people are not intentionally or accidentally defrauding the government.The issue is that there is no incentive to do the additional work necessary to generate reproducible results because of the pressure to constantly generate sufficiently novel results to publish.If you spend the additional time required to have fully reproducible results and your competition is not, you're probably going to lose the game (where the game is obtaining more funding).Not generating reproducible results doesn't mean you're a fraud, but the absence of a requirement to generate them in order to publish means that it's easier for fraudsters to operate that it would be with that requirement.
BeetleB: This has been the case for decades.At the same time, knowing someone who committed academic fraud during his PhD and was caught, I can say two things:A lot of people do it when they simply don't need to. They're not trying to "survive in academia". They're trying to get to the top. The person in question was smart, bright, and did good research (at least excluding the stuff he made up). He could have gotten an academic position without committing fraud. And he could have had a great industry job without it too.No matter - he simply switched to another top tier university, got his PhD, and is now running a startup. Which comes to the second point: The repercussions are minor even when you do get caught.
if you are already well-established. Publish less, but publish better research. Put time and effort into transparency. Share everything you can share, as openly as you can share it. Use your privileged position to do research in the way you think it ought to be done, even if that’s not the quickest way to achieve academic success.
Al-Khwarizmi: "Especially if you are already well-established. Publish less, but publish better research. Put time and effort into transparency. Share everything you can share, as openly as you can share it. Use your privileged position to do research in the way you think it ought to be done, even if that’s not the quickest way to achieve academic success. (...) Be aware of the implicit signal you might be giving those you supervise when you say things like ‘you need to get a result’ or ‘we need to make this publishable’."While I agree in the abstract, the problem is that when you're well-established, in most areas, your research basically amounts to supervising PhD students and postdocs who are not well-established. And they're struggling to meet the requirements to finish their thesis, get a permanent position, etc. So if you encourage them to do slow science and publish less, there's a high risk that you're basically letting them down. Plus, to do research you're probably using some grant funding and guess what the funding agency expects...Thus, most people never get to a point in their career where they can safely say "let's ignore incentives and just pursue this project slowly and carefully". There might be some exceptions. Probably in math, where research is often individual. And maybe in other areas if you can have a smallish side project with other professors that doesn't require much specific funding. I've done that sometimes, but it's the exception rather than the rule. The truth is that even senior professors seldom have that luxury.
