Also, people inside academia have this strong tendency to say negative things about each other's work for the sake of supplying constructive criticism. As the article points out, this is all well, but we should also develop a habit of saying something positive every now and then.
My experience is that people are generally very positive towards their peers.
But, the professors are definitely too harsh on graduate students. We have to know that graduate students are the ones doing the actual research work most of time. And this probably is more important than what the article suggests.
That's part of the reason I think there should be an informal forum-of-science or wiki-of-science where scientists are allowed to submit less rigorous/developed ideas. Where people can say things like "this paper isn't as famous or well done as some others, but I really think the authors are on to something!" or "This paper isn't really that novel, but it sure does have the best explanation of the topic out there!"
Despite all the news over 'safe spaces' and SJWs on campus, the academic process itself (including peer review, tenure, and other aspect) tends to be very illiberal. Capitalism tries to make everything fast, efficiently and easy (provided there is a market) but academia can be frustratingly bureaucratic in its effort to be 'above' money.
I was going to say something about feels being paramount at the university in this day and age, but at least for now, at the postgrad level you are somewhat expected to wear your big boy/girl/nonbinary pants and roll with the punches.
There was a lot of news about creating academic "safe spaces" last year. This article seems to want to ride on the same bandwagon. I found it onesided and useless
The real favor is to deny tenure for your fuckin ass, cause a loser is a loser!
I drove here in a 2014 Subaru, you rode here on a bike, THAT'S my name!
EDIT: btw for everyone downvoting me- tech industry is bullshit, funding down, layoffs coming, and you are worried about DOWNVOTING quality comedic content??
A-B-C. A Always. B Be. C Correlating. Always be correlating. ALWAYS BE CORRELATING.
A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, action. Attention, do I have your attention. Interest, are you interested, I know you are because it's publish or walk. You get published or you hit the bricks!
Decision, have you MADE your DECISION for 10 years of soul-crushing underpaid labor?
When I was a student (undergrad and postgrad) I liked the constant judgement and competition. It can be quite addictive if you're good at it. Even the subjective assessments where half the game is figuring out and playing to the lecturer's biases, which I imagine is quite a bit like the academic review process.
In the end though I do prefer working commercially, in a field where I can get intrinsic satisfaction from solving real-world problems instead of just having my name at the top of a list or being judged worthy by my peers.
(P.S. Not wanting to be too critical, but this page is almost impossible to read on mobile due to all of the pop-overs coming from different directions.)
> When I was a student (undergrad and postgrad) I liked the constant judgement and competition. It can be quite addictive if you're good at it
The problem is that you're never good enough. Considering research is global competition, it's likely that there will be a bunch of people much better than you, in more prestigious institutions. They will be very critical of your work. Some will dismiss your work publicly in conferences or seminars and so on... not my idea of fun :)
> In the end though I do prefer working commercially, in a field where I can get intrinsic satisfaction from solving real-world problems instead of just having my name at the top of a list or being judged worthy by my peers.
It's possible to do both. Some researchers do try to solve real-world problems :)
I'm not trying to minimise the real-world impact of research! I guess I'm saying in some fields (e.g. IT, and startups in particular) there is much tighter feedback between ability+effort and real-world results.
I can imagine two situations as a researcher where constant criticism is damaging. (a) If you've built your self-image on being the best, and suddenly you're a small fish in a big pond, you're left with not much. (b) If you want to make a real difference but the culture of negativity/elitism holds you back, you end up frustrated.
But if you are actually making a difference then you can probably withstand any amount of sniping!
Academia has the most severe hierarchical system out there. There is also an insane amount of unjustified credentialism. Unjustified because so much depends on luck that things like "swoon that researcher published in PNAS" are misguided. I actually heard someone doing basic science in an elite school say this, "That guy's research is garbage, he publishes in Nature Scientific Reports, which is a junk journal compared to Nature and Science where we publish."
Then there's basic science people shitting on engineering, which is probably one of the dumbest forms of elitism I've encountered.
And, there is the most significant hierarchy of all: which university you are affiliated with. Academics who hit it big in the tenure track job hunt quickly forget the role of luck in deciding which university hires them and shit on folks from lower ranked universities.
Frankly, the capitalist structure of industry discourages these kinds of hierarchies with egalitarian targets like revenue (and schmoozing) deciding your worth than other things.
I haven't found academia exceptionally hierarchical in computer science (though I'm not full-time in it at the moment). Even quite famous people tend to be pretty accessible, people take your talks at conferences seriously regardless of what university you come from, etc. There is definitely some hierarchy, but if anything it's precisely because of the "capitalist structure" you mention, which big universities are definitely not immune to. There are some power differentials especially around money, with grad students needing to work for a well-funded lab to get paid, which gives power to professors who have lots of money (depending on the area, that usually comes from either grants or corporate funding).
In fact at AI conferences, the non-academics are way more hierarchical about academia than the people actually in academia are. Journalists, investors, recruiters, and industry consultants who show up to a conference like AAAI or ICML seem to really care about people's pedigrees, especially impressed by names like MIT and Stanford. Professors are more likely to choose what talks to go to based on sub-area, talk title, or knowing a specific person, rather than going by institutional affiliation.
I have hovered in EE, CS, and math circles. I find CS and math to be made up of more genuinely curious folks than EE. But this comment and my parent comment are just a few points of observations, too few to generalize from.
But, once you get into the grants and peer review game, connections and credentials, unfortunately, matter a lot. It is not explicit in that no one says "hey you are from XYZ university, hence I am rejecting your paper." What happens commonly is that for peer-reviewers opinions are colored by your credentials. My hypothesis is this: if one were to control for quality of paper, a credentialed or pedigreed author's paper is likelier to get accepted than the non-credentialed ones.
There are many exceptions and there are deliberate programs like EPSCOR (for grants) to prevent such things from happening, but the inequality exists nonetheless. The inequality is sometimes justified, sometimes not.
I obviously can't speak for other fields, but at least in my field, "peer review" means that the people reviewing your papers are from all kinds of academic (and sometimes industry) settings; it's not like it's just a bunch of MIT professors criticizing all submissions and discriminating based on the authors' credentials. For instance, here is a program committee that I'm on right now for a top conference in my sub-field ... you can see for yourself which institutions people come from:
The chances of your paper being reviewed exclusively by "top credential" people (whatever that means) is astonishingly low; reviewers come from all sorts of institutions around the world. Even if someone exhibited an "elitist" opinion in discussions, they would be summarily shot down by the majority of people on the committee, who are not from top-ranked institutions. Again, N=small personal anecdotes, but in paper/grant review meetings I've sat on, I've never seen this to be an issue simply because most members are not from top-ranked institutions.
The same is true for NSF grant reviewing in the U.S.. Again, different funding agencies have different models, but the NSF is a peer-based model just like papers.
I didn't claim anything about the peer reviewers' credentials! I said that if a person is from a big shot pedigree or from a top school, it certainly helps in a situation where a paper or proposal is as good. It is a common flaw in academia to pay too much attention to one's pedigree or affiliations. In my experience it is quite common to hear people say admiringly, "XYZ is Big_Shot's student" and so on. It is sometimes justified to attach importance to pedigree, sometimes it's not.
... though I will concede that one legitimate source of inequality is due to larger institutions simply having more financial and material resources, so they can perform more "high-impact" sorts of research. e.g., if I'm at a small school without a $100m piece of state-of-the-art lab equipment or a staff of 20, i can't do certain kinds of research and thus can't publish certain kinds of Big Science sorts of papers as easily.
But Nature Scientific Reports is junk compared to Nature. It's not actually a junk journal, but it's a huge step below Nature or Science. It's an open access journal that charges $$$ and explicitly only reviews papers for technical validity (e.g. making sure you made no errors). It does not judge papers based on whether they are interesting, impactful, useful, or whether papers actually make a meaningful contribution to the field.
The hard part about research isn't getting something technically correct. It's about getting something meaningful that advances the field.
The argument for PLOS and Scientific Reports is that in an age where there are no constraints on size of journals, number of papers in a journal, effort required to sift through papers, etc. selecting for impact is less important than before.
Then again, this is not a certain conclusion and there is a lot of room for debate. With extensive searching on Scholar, etc. I Find lesser and lesser need for the stamp of Nature/Science/etc. to certify a paper as high impact.
How is that begging the question? You didn't say. Look, you're making a normative statement, and that's fine. It does not address at all the fact that Nature/Science is seen as hugely more prestigious in the scientific community.
I can totally relate to what is said in this article. I find this constant competition in academia very tiring and to me this is the worst part of the job.
Besides I noticed many researchers are very dismissive of their colleagues work. I often hear things like "this guy has been working exclusively on abstract interpretation, he should open himself to other ideas", coming from the guy that has been working exclusively on timed automatas.
The statements of affirmation at the end of this piece are noble and something I'm 100% behind, for everybody.
But it troubles me that this author does not see a connection between her work ("reading “against the grain” of dominant cultural or critical texts [...] and identifying problematic elements in texts") and this atmosphere of "extraordinarily harsh and total self-criticism" that she rightly identifies as toxic.
There is nothing wrong with analyzing cultural or critical texts and offering new perspective on them. And I can't speak to this specific author's work, because I haven't read any of it.
But in my experience of reading a lot of this cultural criticism, it is rarely dispassionate analysis. It is usually passing harsh judgment on whatever it deems "problematic." This judgment is not always overt; it often takes the form of tying an entire history of slavery and wrong to the actions of anyone who is perceived as reinforcing any social pattern that can be tied to historical forms of oppression.
I have compassion for anyone who has gotten to the point that they can't recognize their own goodness and accomplishments. But how much of that result has come from subscribing to a system of thought where any misstep could mean that you too have become "problematic"?
These writers have constructed a new story of "original sin," but this time there is no Jesus to wash it all away. And their "Garden of Eden" -- a world where nothing is "problematic" -- is just as much of a fairy tale as Genesis.
One of the major flaws I find with academia these days is the almost obsessive focus on critical thinking rather than constructive thinking.
It is almost a given that you need to be able to dissect any intellectual claim but what I have found often is that academics are less good (in general) about making decisions. I.e. putting forward a proposition for others to critique.
This has created a whole breed of corporate academics who survive and often climb the corporate latters purely by pointing at the wholes in the cheese rather than fixing them or creating a cheese without any whole in it.
not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises . . . [In being the so-called ‘candid friend,’ the pessimist is not really candid.] He is keeping something back—in his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. . . . He is using the ugly knowledge which was allowed him [in order] to strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it.
51 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadBut, the professors are definitely too harsh on graduate students. We have to know that graduate students are the ones doing the actual research work most of time. And this probably is more important than what the article suggests.
You can't publish these results, you can't publish shit, you ARE shit, hit the bricks because you are DONE.
I drove here in a 2014 Subaru, you rode here on a bike, THAT'S my name!
EDIT: btw for everyone downvoting me- tech industry is bullshit, funding down, layoffs coming, and you are worried about DOWNVOTING quality comedic content??
You think this site still has a purpose?! LOL!
My old college town had free busses to be fair. But you can get a bike for like, a few weeks worth of not eating
These are the new grants. These are the NSF grants. To you, they're gold, and that's why you, don't get them....
because to give them to you is to throw them away...
A-I-D-A. Attention, interest, decision, action. Attention, do I have your attention. Interest, are you interested, I know you are because it's publish or walk. You get published or you hit the bricks!
Decision, have you MADE your DECISION for 10 years of soul-crushing underpaid labor?
And action....
EDIT: also, "what's your name?"
Fuck YOU! THAT'S my name!
In the end though I do prefer working commercially, in a field where I can get intrinsic satisfaction from solving real-world problems instead of just having my name at the top of a list or being judged worthy by my peers.
(P.S. Not wanting to be too critical, but this page is almost impossible to read on mobile due to all of the pop-overs coming from different directions.)
The problem is that you're never good enough. Considering research is global competition, it's likely that there will be a bunch of people much better than you, in more prestigious institutions. They will be very critical of your work. Some will dismiss your work publicly in conferences or seminars and so on... not my idea of fun :)
> In the end though I do prefer working commercially, in a field where I can get intrinsic satisfaction from solving real-world problems instead of just having my name at the top of a list or being judged worthy by my peers.
It's possible to do both. Some researchers do try to solve real-world problems :)
I can imagine two situations as a researcher where constant criticism is damaging. (a) If you've built your self-image on being the best, and suddenly you're a small fish in a big pond, you're left with not much. (b) If you want to make a real difference but the culture of negativity/elitism holds you back, you end up frustrated.
But if you are actually making a difference then you can probably withstand any amount of sniping!
Then there's basic science people shitting on engineering, which is probably one of the dumbest forms of elitism I've encountered.
And, there is the most significant hierarchy of all: which university you are affiliated with. Academics who hit it big in the tenure track job hunt quickly forget the role of luck in deciding which university hires them and shit on folks from lower ranked universities.
Frankly, the capitalist structure of industry discourages these kinds of hierarchies with egalitarian targets like revenue (and schmoozing) deciding your worth than other things.
In fact at AI conferences, the non-academics are way more hierarchical about academia than the people actually in academia are. Journalists, investors, recruiters, and industry consultants who show up to a conference like AAAI or ICML seem to really care about people's pedigrees, especially impressed by names like MIT and Stanford. Professors are more likely to choose what talks to go to based on sub-area, talk title, or knowing a specific person, rather than going by institutional affiliation.
But, once you get into the grants and peer review game, connections and credentials, unfortunately, matter a lot. It is not explicit in that no one says "hey you are from XYZ university, hence I am rejecting your paper." What happens commonly is that for peer-reviewers opinions are colored by your credentials. My hypothesis is this: if one were to control for quality of paper, a credentialed or pedigreed author's paper is likelier to get accepted than the non-credentialed ones.
There are many exceptions and there are deliberate programs like EPSCOR (for grants) to prevent such things from happening, but the inequality exists nonetheless. The inequality is sometimes justified, sometimes not.
http://www.educationaldatamining.org/EDM2016/committees.html
The chances of your paper being reviewed exclusively by "top credential" people (whatever that means) is astonishingly low; reviewers come from all sorts of institutions around the world. Even if someone exhibited an "elitist" opinion in discussions, they would be summarily shot down by the majority of people on the committee, who are not from top-ranked institutions. Again, N=small personal anecdotes, but in paper/grant review meetings I've sat on, I've never seen this to be an issue simply because most members are not from top-ranked institutions.
The same is true for NSF grant reviewing in the U.S.. Again, different funding agencies have different models, but the NSF is a peer-based model just like papers.
The hard part about research isn't getting something technically correct. It's about getting something meaningful that advances the field.
The argument for PLOS and Scientific Reports is that in an age where there are no constraints on size of journals, number of papers in a journal, effort required to sift through papers, etc. selecting for impact is less important than before.
Then again, this is not a certain conclusion and there is a lot of room for debate. With extensive searching on Scholar, etc. I Find lesser and lesser need for the stamp of Nature/Science/etc. to certify a paper as high impact.
Besides I noticed many researchers are very dismissive of their colleagues work. I often hear things like "this guy has been working exclusively on abstract interpretation, he should open himself to other ideas", coming from the guy that has been working exclusively on timed automatas.
But it troubles me that this author does not see a connection between her work ("reading “against the grain” of dominant cultural or critical texts [...] and identifying problematic elements in texts") and this atmosphere of "extraordinarily harsh and total self-criticism" that she rightly identifies as toxic.
There is nothing wrong with analyzing cultural or critical texts and offering new perspective on them. And I can't speak to this specific author's work, because I haven't read any of it.
But in my experience of reading a lot of this cultural criticism, it is rarely dispassionate analysis. It is usually passing harsh judgment on whatever it deems "problematic." This judgment is not always overt; it often takes the form of tying an entire history of slavery and wrong to the actions of anyone who is perceived as reinforcing any social pattern that can be tied to historical forms of oppression.
I have compassion for anyone who has gotten to the point that they can't recognize their own goodness and accomplishments. But how much of that result has come from subscribing to a system of thought where any misstep could mean that you too have become "problematic"?
These writers have constructed a new story of "original sin," but this time there is no Jesus to wash it all away. And their "Garden of Eden" -- a world where nothing is "problematic" -- is just as much of a fairy tale as Genesis.
It is almost a given that you need to be able to dissect any intellectual claim but what I have found often is that academics are less good (in general) about making decisions. I.e. putting forward a proposition for others to critique.
This has created a whole breed of corporate academics who survive and often climb the corporate latters purely by pointing at the wholes in the cheese rather than fixing them or creating a cheese without any whole in it.
not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises . . . [In being the so-called ‘candid friend,’ the pessimist is not really candid.] He is keeping something back—in his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. . . . He is using the ugly knowledge which was allowed him [in order] to strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it.
- G. K. Chesterton