When I had a job I didn’t want, in a city i didn’t want, no kids, no wife, and prospects abounding, it was easy to speak truth to power. I did it, and I was right technically, businesswise, and morally. What a win...(?)
Now, I have my dream job, my dream location, my own damn house, and my family. -Whole thing feels like a dream I might wake up from if I am not careful... and I feel totally weighed down when it comes to speaking up in a way I would have never countenanced a few years ago.
All that to say, this poor kid... I can only imagine the incentive structures that led him to choose this route, but I know academia being f’ed is a big part of it, and it ticks me off.
I was in a similar situation where a superior demanded that I breach the trust our users had in the privacy of our service. This would not only have been illegal, but there was no way to make use of that data without revealing that we broke that trust. Additionally it made no sense, because the info my superior hoped to gain through this wouldn't have been readable from the data anyways.
My superior was a typical authotarian male: Saying no to him is something he took very personal. This was my dream job, but breaking privacy rules goes against anything I stand for (which no longer would make it my dream job), so I did what needed to be done and stood up. I explained carefully what he needs to know before making that decision and why I wouldn't do it that way, all the time making sure there is a way out for him where he can keep his face.
Guess what, I didn't need to breach that trust and the superior ultimately was thankful that I stopped him from running into this. But it left a very bitter taste in my mouth that the guy even considered this as a possibility.
... and in third place, morality. And now lost in the distance.
I'm not a Christian, but this is worth considering by everyone:
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul? Or what will a man give as an exchange for his soul?"
There is no reason I see that placing morals last in that list places it below the technical or business dimensions, and assuming good intentions would seem to require that they were ordered that way because morality is in fact the bottom line or last word, rather than tacked on as some also ran, in itself requiring technical and business success to be actualized, while in fact standing as the higher goal.
The most charitably I can view your response is that you discount technique and business due to some prevalence of corruption in them but do not likewise discount moralism.
What shall it profit a man to lose the whole world? Immorality itself often follows failures to thrive, ie cheating to get an edge in one way or another.
It will profit them, well, the whole world. Duh!
(Yeah, I know what the Christian sentiment means. But it requires the belief, if not in soul, in some trancedental good, for people to care about "loss of soul" over "gaining the world". Which, alas, we don't have as much...)
>"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul? Or what will a man give as an exchange for his soul?"
This would only affect people who assume “they” have an immortal component, i.e. a soul.
The prevalent "cancel culture" today makes this even more difficult. If you don't go by the groupthink, you lose your livelihood and can't support your family anymore.
I'm sorry, but I have to strongly disagree with the way you've ended your comment. This lets the people responsible off the hook. The guilty party is an individual (and perhaps several individuals). Academia, peer review, conferences, and organizations didn't cause this. The professor was responsible. He wasn't just a cog in the system.
But academic administrators do not understand that, because they have never had that experience, and have no idea why some professors go very quiet when an obscure faculty member speaks up to make a point in a quiet voice - that is because that quiet person has earned genuine respect from the other faculty present.
Quality is rare, quality has pauses and takes breathers.
There are countless such scandals, including an epidemic of Title IX sexual assault "investigations", where universities are repeatedly shown to be supporting the wrongdoer.
Academia is definitely f'ed up. In this case, the family of the person who committed suicide don't have any recourse: it's up to the university department to give a semblance of justice, which they have apparently failed to do.
I'm sorry, but this isn't letting the individuals off the hook, any more than accusing the KKK of being racist isn't letting a particular KKK member off the hook, or a mafia of engaging in extortion letting any particular member off-the-hook.
There are no effective, enforceable structures for stopping academic fraud. Most people who've engaged in it did not become persona non grata, let alone been fired; most continue to hold tenured academic jobs. Worst-case outcomes are a multiyear slap-on-the-wrist of some kind. That, combined with intense competition, led some people to cheat. Eventually, when it turned out to work okay, it became a culture of cheating.
Yes, the individuals involved should be punished, but much more important are:
1) Procedures for getting crooks out of the academy
2) Reducing competition, so there aren't the intense incentives to cheat
3) Implementing transparency. Why do universities get to use taxpayer dollars (grant / tuition overhead) and charitable contributions to cover up this stuff? Governance should be transparent and open. Data should be transparent and open whenever possible. NDAs and non-disparage agreements should be off-bounds.
4) Big money should be out. Yes, I know how much the typical professor gets paid, but the million-dollar salaries for presidents, Nobel laureates, and similar high-ranked positions distort things.
5) Related to the prior, conflict-of-interest provisions should be just a couple orders of magnitude more enforceable. The industry<->academia and especially startup<->academia pipelines help ground things and prevent things from getting detached, but if you're doing research to start a startup to make a few million dollars, that tends to apply extreme pressure to bake data.
6) Hiring and promotion structures shouldn't be so impact-focused. The easiest way to have impact is to tell politically-popular lies. P-hunt for data that shows liberals are smarter than conservatives, atheists are more open-minded than evangelicals, racism is wholesale, wokeness is the way to solve it, and so on. On this list, the really most harmful is when you reach correct conclusions from false data (much more so, even, than false conclusions from false data).
... and so on. This should happen wholesale, across academia, to be eligible for federal grants or tuition subsidies.
I'm not at this point yet, but reading this makes me wonder why any employer would ever prefer younger employees with nothing tying them down, for any reasons other than the fact that we cost less. Sure, you'll save money on salary, but odds are that we're going to move on within a year or two if you're not a top-paying company. Even then, there's no guarantee.
Meanwhile, someone who has dependents and a mortgage has more to lose and less leverage.
Probably a lot of reasons, but a major one may be that young people with no family of their own got all day, every day, to think about work-related problems - especially so, if they derive a lot of meaning from their work, as many people do. It's probably also a lot easier to boss them around, especially if said people crave acknowledgement from some authority figure.
Immigration rules tie right into this as well (of course).
It's not that easy to find a new job for 90% of the population.
Younger workers have less to lose, so tend to leave more — but they’re also less experienced and tend to have lower expectations for the workplace.
Older workers are less likely to leave because it’s disruptive, but they’re also more experienced at the political side of life — and tend to insist on things like reasonable hours, professional management, etc.
My personal stance is that trying to exploit your workers is a losing game — but from the employers who act that way...
There’s some who prefer the lower expectations (eg, Amazon) and some who prefer the more stable crew (eg, ATT).
Sometimes it’s better to say nothing.
But let's face it: the Academia peer review process is pretty rotten.
- Many organisations could not care less about whatever crap you publish as long as you publish. And if possible a lot.
- Many journal's reviewers are friend of friends and you can often easily guess their names, even in double blinded review.
- Many reviewers care more about you quoting their own paper than giving any relevant feedback.
- There is plenty "pay2publish" journals that care about quantity not quality that are commonly used by academia to "force" validate crappy researches/PHds
- The publishing world is full of oversized-ego individuals that will destroy a paper just because it comes from a competing lab/department/professor and not because it is scientifically irrelevant.
And that is only a little subset of the problems...
* Most of my papers have had thoughtful comments. Typically, they improved the paper, sometimes a lot.
* I have very rarely been asked to quote a specific paper from a specific author. Of course, pointing out important references that the paper has missed is part of peer review, so this would not necessarily be evidence of corruption.
* There are loads of crap pay-to-publish predatory journals, but publishing in those journals would harm my career, not help it. Nobody cares about them.
* I've not experienced people rejecting papers from rival labs or departments. I don't say it doesn't happen, but I haven't experienced it.
* I myself try hard to give high-quality reviews that explore the paper's value in depth.
I am from one particular discipline, country and subfield. Others may have very different experiences.
Again, I am not claiming academic peer review and publishing doesn't need a lot of improvement. Removing the parasitic mainstream publishers like Elsevier and Springer would be a great start.
Nearly all reviews were superficial, not a single review ever found any technical flaw, even when some were discovered later. The acceptance recommendations seem to be governed by the overall impression the reviewer had from the paper and not by any factual points they make in the review. This manifested in getting 5 reviews at one conference, where all reviewers made nearly the same points in their review: all about the presentation of the paper. The paper received all of the five recommendations: Accept, weak accept, borderline, weak reject, reject. (The most critical and useful with a small correction of one formula was the "Accept" review.)
Many reviewers also leave the impression they didn't read the paper in full or at all, or ran out of time while for the review, so looked for a reason to reject the paper and didn't look any further.
Note: I am not saying my papers should have been accepted, 2 had serious issues I glad I discovered later! I also had a few very useful reviews to improve the presentation of my paper.
* I typically get thoughtful reviews, and in particular critical reviews are often thoughtful. Still, I know that some people assert influence on the outcome of the reviewing process of their own papers. Also, there's a fine line: for example, many journals allow you to recommend reviewers for your papers. If you're well-connected, you can recommend your best friends and your editor friend follows your advice. Is this misconduct? I'd say it depends. After some decades in a math-heavy community, most people who are experienced and competent in the context of a highly specialized sub-field will be your "friends".
* Journals that are outright predatory are, of course, a no-go. Still, there are edge cases like some MDPI journals; sometimes there are special issues from credible, relatively junior people in my community. Should we support them or not? Also, my funding provider wants me to publish in high-profile, "big publisher" journals and pays the open access fee; these journals typically rank much higher than community-owned/not-for-profit venues. On the long run, it's better to fully move to community-owned venues only, but as a junior researcher I feel I cannot afford it at the moment.
Personally, for me the problem does not come from outright and obvious ethics violations; sure, I know of some individuals who I consider somewhat problematic, but I don't think these people control the community. For me the problem is to navigate all the grey areas, knowing that the system is largely ethics-agnostic.
These reviews seem far from what you hear about for disproving N rays and the like
My supervisor once told me that I should quote a paper from a pair of reviewers (he knew exactly who was reviewing the papers) before he'd allow publishing. It was a CS paper and the reviewers were in the field of geology.
A few of those fun cases were the reason why I left the academia - corporate bs doesn't come close to academic bs.
I don't see the situation getting much better. Republicans like free-market solutions, but not facing market constraints is part of the value of academia. Meanwhile, especially with consternation around student debt, Democrats will blindly support academia, failing to put any pressure on it.
By contrast the same events within corporate culture happen behind veils of secrecy and HR departments & heavy hitting lawyers to make life hell if you don’t toe the line. And the cult of personality and oversized egos is very well represented in boards and upper management.
> Considering that this will have an impact on my career in the future and my reputation in the area of Computer Architecture, my future life will be worse than death and I will be totally in a dilemma.
Maybe we also need to change academic culture to allow people to confess academic fraud, receive punishment and than be forgiven and continue academic careers.
Currently once you started, there is no exit and fraudsters are incentivized to continue to sustain their building of lies.
With financial debt we allow people to go bankrupt and be reborn free (after some time and a honest effort; not including American student debt).
Why not with your past academic fraud?
Basically giving authoritarian regimes an alternative to fighting to the death might increase overall utility.
Where as, in a world where such amnesty doesn't exist, they may have to face the possibility of being executed when they lose power (which, if history is to be believed, they eventually do). Therefore, some who are more cowards but cunning won't want to be a dictator, and thus, you end up with a more democratic system.
Are you suggesting we forgive the professor who’s pressure and influence seems to have cause the phd students suicide?
If anything I think we need to stand firm on the harsh one direction only nature of academic misconduct, and simply provide better training and whistleblower options for students. There should never be any doubt in a students or professors mind that academic misconduct when discovered will be an end to their academic carrier.
This is a big part of the reason for the suicide. Reread the quote with this in mind
The analogy with financial debt is misleading: people go bankrupt even if they don’t do anything “wrong”, things don’t pan out, or disasters hit. For people that do commit financial crimes, they are prosecuted and face criminal punishment and often lose their ability to continue to be involved in finance.
Academia doesn’t have that kind of strict laws, likely because academic fraud doesn’t affect the general population and is limited in the damage it can do, or hasn’t received similar attention as financial fraud. So making it even more tempting to commit academic fraud isn’t something I would recommend.
The really straightforward solution here seems to be to make these institutions recognize the professors (even the prestigious ones) are human and can commit fraud, and thus to create ways for students to give feedback on such kinds of frauds to the institution, based on which the institution must take action.
Wealthy white-collar criminals often only face minor fines and are able to keep operating. The industry perception of people who get caught (who are known to still be only a small percentage of those who commit them) is almost universally "they were stupid enough to get caught."
I wonder whether this is yet another tendril of the student loan debt bubble and the privatization of a public good (education) contributing to deep, structural rot in American society. Most of the quality academic talent gets picked off into the industry, where there are real opportunity costs for mis-execution, and a much more healthy and liquid market for labor supply and demand. Does that mean that maybe the only plausible end-state for academia is a market for lemons?
A secondary issue is trying to determine what penalty is fair and trying to determine whether an error was intentional or unintentional. The boundaries are admitted by most to be fuzzy. Moreover there is a desire to exact punishment:
> A recent survey of roughly 1,800 people in the United States found that 90 percent of those who responded believe that fabricating data is morally repugnant. Preferred punishments include being blacklisted from university positions and being banned from government funding for future research, but don’t end there.
> “Most respondents who support criminalization prefer a sentence of incarceration, rather than a fine and/or probation,” according to the researchers, Justin Pickett and Sean Patrick Roche, both of the University at Albany. “The results indicate that slightly over half of all Americans would prefer both to criminalize data fraud and to sentence fraudsters to a period of incarceration.” [2]
... and then there's China, where the penalties sought seem even higher. [1][3] However, given the investment in most researchers and their specialized skills, it seems a huge waste to lock up that person in a way that prevents society from benefitting.
Finally, you have the problem of coordinating the action. With criminal behaviour, society coordinates action (for the most part) in order to achieve reasonable justice: Otherwise every person willing to act independently (as a vigilante) to extract an additional pound of flesh. We would need everyone to agree, otherwise you have situations where there is no punishment because someone breaks an embargo or you have too much punishment because multiple agents inflict punishment separately.
Your typical person breaking the law is stuck within one country. It's a bit more complicated for researchers, since most are highly mobile. A PhD in a STEM topic means visas are almost automatically granted, so it's relatively easy to get a position in a different country.
(It would be really interesting to see a follow-up on all of the researchers featured in [1], since that was written back in 2007.)
[0] http://navier.engr.colostate.edu/CH693/prot/Nature_445_244_2... [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1747016119898400 [2] https://www.statnews.com/2016/08/04/fraud-science-jail-time/ [3] https://www.statnews.com/2017/06/23/china-death-penalty-rese...
Wow. It does sound like the student discovered suicide as one of the only known effective methods of triggering accountability for research misconduct.
That's awfully depressing.
I can't now find the article I remember reading, perhaps from HN, of someone who came across then spent a lot of time demonstrating/reporting apparently falsified data to journals, to pretty much no consequence. (except teaching the researcher how to falsify data better to evade the particular tests the exposer used in that case).
Having read this article it made me sad. On a good note, ACM seems to have reacted in a proper way. Glad to see this. This student must have been very very alone and suffered immensely to take this decision. Sadly, I have witnessed this exact same thing at a very well known university in Germany. With great effort this was kept away from the public and blamed on the PhD student himself ('This guy had _other_ problems'). Even though he left a letter, which was also very explicit about his situation. This left me thinking, how often this actually happens but receives no publicity...
I believe most people, who enter the world of academe have good principles and ideals. In German pedagogy this is called "Humboldtsches Bildungsideal" which translates unfortunately into this [1]. Humboldt's model was very much based on many ideas of the enlightenment, esp. concerning one's pursuit of intellectual growth for its own sake and the world citizen.
Unfortunately the economic grip on the world of academe in many fields gets stronger and at one point in time ones sees these ideals destroyed.
It's best witnessed with what happened to the internet. Wonder how many can remember how it 'felt' in the beginning after CERN opened it to the world... and now, look at it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...
Of 5 paper groups contacted, 4 have not responded despite repeated requests, even when VPs of research at the university contacted.
One group eventually replied, said that they were "too busy" to release their simulator changes, and then also saying they weren't going to because they were worried about it being classified as a munitions export.
- It is very important to go to conferences, to meet your (international) peers, see what is new, what interesting results have been achieved/are work in progress and to forge the next collaboration
So far so good. Now, all academic institution I know of, only allow you (means paying) to attend a conference if you present a paper. I guess this might be universal. So since you want/need to go, a lot of people just write up what the current status about a problem is, and this leads to a lot of half-baked presentations.
(of course fraud is something different)
> “I hope this will make a change in this world. I hope you can keep simple and stay honest in this society. I will bless you in another world.”
[1] - https://twitter.com/sigarch/status/1358873198222311427
Finding out you've thrown your lot in with - and been trapped by - scumbags that you thought you could trust - must be very difficult. But suicide is not a solution ... you lose all. The best choice is to walk away.
Tomorrow will need you.
Of course colleges are overloaded with managerial vampires that are supposed to be overseeing this better than the old days where there wasn't as much tuition/loan money flowing through the system.
Higher ed administration is broken, financing is broken, research is broken, phd programs are broken, adjunct professorship is broken, there is corruption everywhere.
Edit: and I totally forgot... college sports.
- Most of them don't publish any kind of code or only snippets.
- Most of the algorithms are incomplete (think "we add constant M here into equation tuned by an expert"). The chosen constants aren't documented and they're tweaked before publication to maximize results for the given dataset.
- Most results are only good for the chosen dataset and based on very fine tuned constants (which is the reason they're not published). As soon as you apply them to a slightly different dataset they fall apart.
- Even if you get code for a given paper, it's usually a disatrous mess of quality and runs only on the given researchers computer with given version of Windows and a weird patched version of Python they found somewhere in the internet.
There ARE better written papers out there. But most of them are just made to publish "something" and get the publishing metrics up. That means minimum effort for actual research and maximum effort to tweak and tune results to make them look good.
The only metrics are journal status and citation count, which is partly why we're in this mess.
There should be some form of public post-review attached to all public work, with explicit requirements for rigour and reproducibility.
Some domains - like math - do at least attempt this, more or less. But CS doesn't seem to.
Aside from motivations - now skewed towards business outcomes - the underlying problem is that paper publishing as the gold standard for disseminating new research is a 17th century process and badly needs an update.
You'd expect that, but you'd probably be surprised in a lot of cases. One of the strong reasons why good conferences mandate code nowadays. The quality of the code, and whether it actually reproduces what you claim, isn't checked systematically though. That's down to the reviewers' enthusiasm, and whether they actually have the technical means to reproduce. That's not a given for more niche robotics or high-profile AI applications where hardware can be an issue.
The "formal" academic world does not care one bit about stuff working or not. It's all about self-promotion, papers and meaningless academic rituals and procedures.
(And it's even worse outside of the US let me put it that way)
Tangentially related, even popular repos can have implementations of models that differ from the paper cited. So, who knows how far errors can propagate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- it looks really really really bad on your CV to not finish a graduate degree. I dropped out for health reasons with an A+ GPA and still have to delicately explain what happened to interviewers. It looks worse than just having a masters degree.
- “just one more year of misery and then your career prospects will increase dramatically” is a very powerful argument and not just a sunk-cost fallacy.
- young people in PhD programs tend to have a lot of identity and psychological investment in getting their PhD and working as a researcher. For most PhD students, the occupation that most fulfills them is their research. It strikes me as very strange that you think PhD students have some secret marketable passion that they would pursue but instead they somehow got stuck in graduate school. Speaking for myself: a PhD program was the only feasible part for me to do something fulfilling. My current work as a software developer is tedious and boring by comparison and, frankly, not at all what I wanted to do with my life.
- PhD students rarely have any savings and their meager stipends are the only income they have. So “pursue [something] that actually fulfills you” is most likely impossible, since that ‘something’ is probably not a routine office/engineering job.
That's something people who have no real world experience say. For one thing, nobody is forcing you to put any information on your CV. Lastly, only the lowest of the low judge such things so harshly that they won't even interview you.
For all that you may be able to go from a tiny salary to a six-figure salary, you still need to admit failure at some level, and that’s hard.
I found that academically excellent people are especially easy to get in this type of trap -- maybe because that "never give up" and "overcome the difficulties" rather than giving up is engrained by the process.
[0]: https://www.sigarch.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/JIC-Publi...
In both academia and corporate I've known many who find it difficult to stand up for themselves. It is already a difficult and yet courageous act to express a different view to your professor, boss, employer, etc. Things are never the same if speaking out. There are those who simply just do what is told. Simply Leave. Or fall through a deep hole when there is imbalance when taking on an action that is against what you stand up for.
It's just that usually there's no conscience to take it bad from the student, on the contrary, it's the thrill of being published that prevails.
My intuitive thought is simply to quit, and start another academic pursuit (assuming you are really interesting in science and research); it could be rather hard, but that is life. LIFE never goes easy.
1. When under an abuser, frequently you internalize their narrative.
2. Allegedly the professor threatened to kill him if he "ruined his reputation."
3. If he was an international student (I do not know if he was), he could quite literally lose his visa for losing his spot in the program.
4. If your advisor hates you and you haven't managed to safely switch advisors, good luck getting a letter for any future academic pursuits. (Unless you're willing to speak out about what happened, or you have someone willing to write an explanatory letter on your behalf.)
5. When you're being abused and threatened with retaliation for speaking out and so on, you aren't thinking rationally. It's really traumatic and scary, and sometimes it's hard to imagine a path out that is tolerable, and death sounds safer and easier.
We in academia need to respond by setting up better systems to recognize and safely escape abusive situations without permanent harm to one's career and mental or physical wellbeing. And also by making those systems known to students and very easy to access and use.
Such conduct is infectious.
If you don't oppose it, it invites other to both try, and ignore it.
Can you (the family) sue UF/the professor over this? I feel like this is the only way now to make them to take the responsibility after almost two years of nothingness.
The lack of reaction from the university is also hard to justify. Even if one doesn't want to jump to conclusions about the professor, some temporary measure should have been taken, at least to reassure the family that due investigations were being done.
though it is more about the ACM/IEEE side of things rather than what was going on in Florida.
Many researchers seemed to know there was weird stuff going on with peer-review at ISCA, but if you asked the researchers they'd just shrug and more or less say something to the effect of "don't hate the player, hate the game"
The other thing from the web page is murky, they basically found breached confidential info on the victims laptop. Ok, this is more serious, but again, this is seems to me also a total sideshow;what am I missing here.
In situations like that, it is ripe for scapegoating a single institution that gets in the news for the wrong reasons.
Outside of the cream of the crop, large institutions in higher education are also tenuously tied to "reputation".
A couple bad runs, and you go from, say the University of Florida's current reputation (which is pretty good as the SEC schools go) to, say, the Mississippi schools which are basically second-rate Cal State schools academically being propped up by football money.
And then you might get dumped from your conference.
Nobody expects a random paper in this field to be particularly true or useful. A lot of papers are trivial applications of old ideas, obfuscated behind complicated word soup. Or false good results due to buggy code, which you can never check because they don't publish the source code. Or useless or irreproducible due to many other reasons. The field produces also good results, but you need to follow bigger trends, as individual publications are mostly just noise.
