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0 pointsabetusk10mo ago0 comments

The argument is about pursuing research for discovery or pursuing research for career advancement. Both scenarios require communication but for different reasons. You're not really addressing main critique.

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jszymborski10mo ago

> I did my PhD in the US, and it is very unfortunate that "gaming" publications and focusing on "grants" is the meat of research.

I interpreted GPs above statement as reacting to the strategies in the article for "gaming" publications and grants, but perhaps I misunderstood GPs comment.

MPSFounder10mo ago

My argument is time vested into this is time away from discovery and research. Communication is certainly a valuable skills. But by most accounts, significant effort is spent on grants and to make publications appealing to employers (the author himself argues for fun branding in a scientific paper). Instead, I argue the focus should be on advancing the field. Of course, you can argue that conference papers with fun branding and a neural network improvement in one benchmark (where selection bias makes the model look robust), is advancing the field. And it's all about getting paper accepted, so I can get a high h-index, so I can get a high paying job or a job in academia. But I believe the real impact of scientific research is in its footprint on the next generation, and I sincerely doubt any of these papers (using fun branding and focusing on the wrong things), will have an impact then. I hope I am proven wrong.

bonoboTP10mo ago

The two are not as orthogonal as the cynical takes make it seem. This is also a bit like the idea that attractive people are less smart and vice versa, when the two are actually positively correlated.

The people who won the career game at top US universities in technical fields don't simply get there by making their plots fancier or using the right words in the abstract in otherwise trivial papers. The papers do make valuable contributions. Pursuing research for pure personal discovery is great, but if you don't tell others about it, why should they care? Most discoveries are not General Relativity or Evolution.

And there's also a component of "cope" in these lamentations. Oh, I'm a lone wolf genius, misunderstood by all, the contrarian who is rejected by the in-crowd yadda yadda because of career failure. It's a way to preserve ego. If only it wasn't for the social games, I'd be the next Einstein, my intentions are pure, while the establishment is rotten. It's a bit more nuanced than that. You have to do good work AND know how to present it and spread awareness about it. Both are needed.

abetuskOP10mo ago

You're not really addressing the point head on. The argument about how science is communicated is orthogonal. The argument is that science academia prioritizes career over pursuing academic science.

I won't speak for anyone else but here are three things I think are all true:

* We live in a renaissance of academic research that is giving us profound scientific discovery

* Prioritizing a scientific career over scientific discovery can lead to a net positive of good scientific results, and, so far, has

* Prioritizing a scientific career over scientific discovery produces low quality science

Saying that people who know how to maneuver the political academic landscape, to secure a position, also produce valuable contributions might be true (I believe it is) but the argument doesn't address the cost of prioritizing, or promoting, that behavior.

I'm reminded of "The Economics of Superstars" [0]. If someone is "better" by a measure of 2x, say, but gets (10+)x the amount of resources, this is not a good allocation of energy. Saying that the 2x person should get more resources is true. Saying that they're justified in getting orders of magnitude more resources, at the cost of everyone else who might use them to better effect, is not.

These conversations are subtle. I notice that one of the common crutches is to attack people as "just being bitter". This seems like a cheap attack and I wish you and others would try to be more thoughtful.

[0] https://home.uchicago.edu/~vlima/courses/econ201/Superstars....

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