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Incentives in Academic Research

43 points · 42 comments · zero_k

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jruohonen · 1791136458 · focus · HN ↗
While I agree with the points raised about incentives, the logic is once again in the antagonistic camp and even plain wrong. That is: the problems are in the system.
Better: if not plain fraud, the "faulty" papers should stay where they are, and editors (or conference chairs, etc.) should encourage follow-ups, which, with "modern" technology, could be linked to the papers.
1. zero_k · 1791140230 · focus · HN ↗
  It's a fine line. Fraud? No, they are just sloppy, and so one questions whether they ought to be amended, retracted, or a note by the editor attached. The solution you propose, about a follow-up paper is that who will accept a paper that simply demonstrates that the original work was so full of bugs/issues/misconceptions, that many/most of the claims of the paper don't hold? Would you accept that paper into a top-rated conference? And if it's in a 2nd or 3rd rate conference, wouldn't most people question it authenticity (remember, 2nd and 3rd rate conferences have less rigor in reviews) or simply not hear about it? I think these are legitimate concerns.
  A slightly sad side-effect of the follow-up-paper idea, is that it sometimes means that the authors get one more citation, and furthermore, since some of the authors may themselves write part of it, it would mean even more papers by the authors, potentially further cited. So we may be unfortunately incentivizing sloppy research -- the authors can now make two papers: one sloppy, and one fixed. Not sure that's great.
  I am not saying what you are proposing is wrong. But it has side-effects that are not great.
  1. _kulang · 1791149470 · focus · HN ↗
    What’s the difference between sloppiness and fraud when you stand behind the paper all the same? I would argue that sloppiness in academia is a form of fraud. It’s one thing to be bad at writing, and another to have poor methodology
    t0mpr1c3 · 1791164685 · focus · HN ↗
    How you react to being found out. An honest researcher who has made a mistake will seek to correct the scientific record, even at a cost to their reputation. An unethical researcher will not.
2. bonoboTP · 1791148761 · focus · HN ↗
  It's very rarely worth damaging your career prospects by picking a fight like this, especially if the other side has good standing in the research community network with powerful allies.
  What people typically do is just to ignore bad research, and withhold praise, and do their own research in a better direction.
malshe · 1791147786 · focus · HN ↗
I see the author's point but I respectfully disagree. If anything, there is now much more pressure to make sure the research is error-free because so many people independently look at it. In the past if you found an error in published research, you had limited ways to share your findings. Most journals are reluctant to put their papers under scanner. Now we can just write a blog or tweet out the findings. The researchers today face much more scrutiny compared to the ones in the past. In economics, people are using AI to replicate older famous papers and reporting problems with them. Tools like refine.ink can help researchers identify the errors in their research before even submitting the paper anywhere for a peer review.
1. xqcgrek2 · 1791149256 · focus · HN ↗
  Error-free is not the goal, which is the author's point. Citation metrics mean the goal is not to be error free but attention grabbing, sensational or even error filled so other people are forced to tackle the problem and cite you
  1. malshe · 1791161115 · focus · HN ↗
    Where did you get the idea that error-free research is not the goal? The author even mentions this:
    Recently, I have bumped into multiple cases where I believe the correctness of the results, the honesty of the people writing them, or the lack of curiosity once they are told that their results are wrong, incorrect, faulty, or misleading, has been unsatisfying.
    Note "I believe the correctness of the results....has been unsatisfying." Sure it might be unsatisfying for the author but on average the correctness is only increasing because of the increased scrutiny
2. bobmarleybiceps · 1791167145 · focus · HN ↗
  I think part of the issue is that there is basically no downside to having bad papers. In ML conferences, I think the only paper I have ever seen retracted was because some of the authors had an affiliation with a Russian institution. There are LOADS of bogus papers at the big ML conferences and none get retracted afaik ... The worst that can happen is someone tweets about it and then everyone forgets about the paper.
bonoboTP · 1791148335 · focus · HN ↗
I think everyone who enters academia goes through this phase of disillusionment. This thing you revered so much as this temple of knowledge turns out to involve the same kind of human business you see anywhere else, with petty fights, little cliques opposing each other, grudges, backscratching, quid pro quo etc etc.
I think once you come to terms with this, you come out on the other side realizing that this is nothing new. The idealized version never existed. What's new is the scale and all the quantitative metrics regarding publication.
> Academic research was meant to be about breaking new ground, keeping to honesty and good scientific conduct, being clear and upfront about uncertainties, errors, and mistakes, and improving our common understanding of science, all the while training the new generation to follow these goals and principles.
This is a naive idealism. Research takes effort and someone has to pay. Sometimes this someone's may profess beliefs that they only want to sponsor unrestricted objective inquiry, but everyone has biases and in an iterated game, soft preferences will be gamed too. In other words, there's is always an effect of "the one who pays orders the song".
The one who pays wants results. He wants prestige through the sponsored project. He doesn't want the researcher to just sit in a room and fail to generate results for years. He wants the researcher to have groundbreaking results. What they are matters less than that they be impressive and improve prestige of the funding source, among peers (in case of nobility funding it), or among the political classes (when government funds it), or to improve the PR and make the sponsor look good and charitable (if a company funds it as a sort of donation to academia).
Much of this "reward" that accrues to the funder does not really depend on the technical content of the work, only inasmuch as such quality was necessary to convince the research community to designate the work as impressive. However if this designation can be helped along via other paths, ie the quid pro quo and backscratching networks, that can be just as good for the funder as long as it doesn't rise to the level of fraud or something that may really damage the reputation.
Always,always follow the money and follow the chain of decisions.
Who will feel good at a cocktail party among their social peers when some impressive research result happens? Who can puff up their chest and say "We paid for that! Look how awesome we are!" and when they summarize the result in a soundbite will it impress their social peers?
This is not only applicable to the actual funding provider but also other orgs in the chain like university administration who provide facilities to the lab etc.
1. breezybottom · 1791152166 · focus · HN ↗
  What point are you trying to make? The quote says "it should be like this", and your snide response is "yeah but it's not like that". Obviously it's not, that's the whole impetus for the post. Maybe learn about positive and normative statements before going off on a rant.
  1. akoboldfrying · 1791160911 · focus · HN ↗
    I see the comment's point as being that we should not really be surprised to discover that academics are vulnerable to the same weaknesses as humans are in other spheres of life, since academics are after all humans.
    > The quote says "it should be like this"
    It should also be that I don't need to lock my car door, but (in most places in the world) I do. If I were to write an article voicing this "it should not be like this" statement, would I seem to you like a brave defender of cultural standards, or just a bit naive?
    That's not to say that the culture of academia, with its norms of honesty and integrity, has zero effect. I still think it has a large positive effect and is worth preserving, and it's valuable to talk about it (as TFA does) when it seems to be slipping. But overall, I'm not surprised that this is how things are in academia.
2. black_knight · 1791155598 · focus · HN ↗
  > I think everyone who enters academia goes through this phase of disillusionment. This thing you revered so much as this temple of knowledge turns out to involve the same kind of human business you see anywhere else
  My experience and disillusionment is different from yours. I was inspired to do research from nerdy blog posts from researchers in my field. And my experience has mostly been that people in my field are honest, hard working, genuinely interested in doing their research as well as possible – mostly to satisfy their curiosity. Any disillusion I have experienced has been about the fact that doing research is more or less something they squeeze in between teaching, applying for money and administrative tasks.
3. glitchc · 1791163467 · focus · HN ↗
  If that's what academia has become, then maybe the forces trying to tear it down are right in doing so. We're wasting a tremendous amount of money just to stroke a few egos.
4. SubiculumCode · 1791164488 · focus · HN ↗
  Except, at least in America, almost all research funding comes from the Federal government, from a process of peer review, by reviewers who have no conflicts of interest, or stand to personally benefit by the applicant's success. So while I appreciate your sentiment, I don't see how it applies.
5. augment_me · 1791170036 · focus · HN ↗
  I am currently generating about 10 papers per month for marginal increments/architectural additions that are autoreviewed in a loop by Claude + Codex until those tools don't spot any major issues and then sending them in to various conferences. Since more than half of the reviewers are just using these tools to review, it's really easy to get a good score. This year I got into ICLR, ICML, NeurIps, SIGGRAPH and ACL with 2-authors papers (me and my supervisor).
  I feel completely disillusioned with academia, this is apparently the "reward" that the funder wants. In the end I have time to do whatever I want because this business it running itself.
tacostakohashi · 1791150601 · focus · HN ↗
Sounds a lot like the incentives for making a software change / PR or whatever at BigCo...
Publish a PR that has the word "fix" in the description, get it approved, release it to prod... you are the hero, took action, will get promoted, etc.
When it turns out that the "fix" makes everything worse... well, that's everyone _else's_ problem, like whichever users run into that change blowing up, whoever is on support that day, whoever has to undo it.
The old... "concentrated benefits and diffuse costs" problem.
smath · 1791150696 · focus · HN ↗
There is a great blog post that sohl dickstein had a couple years ago, about what happens when the metric being optimized is only a proxy for the thing you want to maximize — what happens eventually is “overfitting”. The original metric (which we cannot directly optimize for) actually starts to get worse.
I believe publishing papers and citations are those proxy metrics.
1. Loquebantur · 1791158255 · focus · HN ↗
  The article here correctly points out another thing though: society/academia rewarding a fundamentally wrong thing.
  This isn't just "misaligned rewards", it's academia pretending to reward one thing when really it does something else entirely.
  As the author observes, objective truth is no longer socially rewarded. Pretense is all that matters and accepted as "social truth".
  1. jltsiren · 1791160103 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't like objective truth as a concept, because it makes truth a matter of belief and easily turns into just another name for social truth. If you believe that something is objectively true but new evidence challenges that view, people will often ignore the evidence, because it goes against their established views.
    Science, and research in general, should mostly be concerned with effective truth. The best objective-ish explanations so far, but something that can always be challenged with new evidence. The difference to objective/social concepts of truth is that you should always be willing to question the assumptions, beliefs, and reasoning ability you and people who agree with you have. If you discover something that goes against established beliefs, you should always start by assuming that you made a mistake somewhere. And if other people discover something like that, and it looks like they are seriously questioning the discovery, you should also take it seriously.
    Loquebantur · 1791160896 · focus · HN ↗
    That's remarkable nonsense.
    "Objective" truth is what you can derive from physical reality by logical arguments. The very opposite of "belief".
    Social truth is what your social peer group wants you to believe.
    "Effective" truth I've never heard about and your explanation merely describes a simplistic popular scientific method concept. Leading ideally to the objective truth I was talking about.
    The internet describes "effective truth" (or "effectual truth," from the Italian la verità effetuale) as a philosophical concept introduced by Niccolò Machiavelli in his book "The Prince". It means judging people, leaders, and situations by their actual actions and real-world results rather than by their stated words, ideals, or moral promises.
    jltsiren · 1791162840 · focus · HN ↗
    Logical arguments can be used only in theoretical models. Whether the conclusions made within a model are also valid in reality is an empirical question that can be ideally tested with falsifiable predictions. But no matter how many falsification attempts you make, you cannot prove that your model is a correct description of the real world.
    Loquebantur · 1791167625 · focus · HN ↗
    True, but you can get pretty good estimates that suffice for real life.
    glitchc · 1791163370 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not a big fan of gravity either, but it will happily kill me if I make a wrong move, whether I like it or not.
auggierose · 1791154395 · focus · HN ↗
What I am seeing is not people not being diligent in their research, but people not being diligent in their reviewing of research. But maybe there is a positive feedback loop here...
toomim · 1791156428 · focus · HN ↗
We can be more specific than "the incentives are wrong in Academia", because we know what the incentive is: it's peer-review.
The problem is that today's peer review, while better than nothing, is far from a perfect judge of research quality. If peer-review was a perfect judge of research quality, there would be no incentive problem. The incentives would be aligned.
I happen to be working on an improvement to peer review. An early prototype can be viewed at <a href="https://peeryview.org/about" rel="nofollow">https://peeryview.org/about. Holler at me if you're also working on this problem!
1. t0mpr1c3 · 1791164171 · focus · HN ↗
  I don't think peer review is the only problem, or even the main problem, and is not directly related to the misalignment of incentives.
  We can tweak the process, but for better or worse peer review (in various forms) has been the principle metric of quality since the enlightenment.
oddIdentities · 1791158813 · focus · HN ↗
>I am not sure how to fix this problem.
Be brave. Go public. Name names. And don't be a part of the system.
You'll earn more and do more with your life and for society at large by getting to a place in engineering where you can spend an increasing fraction of your time on research.
alpineidyll3 · 1791160368 · focus · HN ↗
Couldn't agree more. Excellent piece.
senshan · 1791161933 · focus · HN ↗
Hmm... The author starts with C.Munger's quote “Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome”, then proceeds to express dissatisfaction with the current outcome of academic research. Regrettably, the author never returns back with:
a) analysis of current incentives; and
b) proposal to change those for a better outcome;
1. atrettel · 1791163052 · focus · HN ↗
  I agree. I would have thought that the author would have discussed the incentives and then show how changing the incentives would lead to a better outcome. Instead the article just ends nebulously by saying "I am not sure how to fix this problem". I find that pretty confusing as a reader. The first sentence of the article implies a particular kind of solution, so it would at least make sense to discuss how changing the incentives might help. I am no fan of "publish or perish", so I would have loved to read about some alternatives.
  1. breuleux · 1791168549 · focus · HN ↗
    I think any alternative system has to figure out how to attract and reward the kind of people who are intrinsically motivated by truth, discovery and knowledge, and repel the kind of people who aren't.
    The chief issue with external incentives like "fame" or "money" is that they will attract a lot of people who care about the reward, but not the work. If they can find a way to cut corners, they will. So it works fine if you have a very tight, objective and reproducible evaluation criterion such that you can't get rewarded for poor or sloppy work, but even in science this is difficult to establish, especially in a crowded field where most advancements will be small and incremental. Science works a lot on trust, if only trust that the described experiments were indeed made and the results were indeed as reported.
    That's why I feel we get the best science when it's driven by people who just intrinsically want the best science, because getting it right is a reward in and of itself. It'd be neat if it was possible to identify them and just let them cook, regardless of whether results are produced or not. Paradoxically, I think this may be easiest in a setting where academia is undervalued -- the knowledge-seekers will always self-select into research (provided the conditions are good enough and they are not too undervalued), but the fame-chasers will have to find their validation elsewhere.
t0mpr1c3 · 1791162533 · focus · HN ↗
I would add that the problem is not limited to junior researchers. In my first faculty position, I followed a line of research that a senior (MacArthur Fellowship-winning) colleague had pioneered. After a few of negative results, I came to suspect that several high-profile publications were p-hacked and likely false positives. It was extremely demotivating, and shortly afterward I quit the field entirely. A very senior scientist later confirmed my suspicions about their disregard for professional ethics.
jamesforestwest · 1791163457 · focus · HN ↗
Hasn't it always been that way? But it is sad, admittedly.
1. t0mpr1c3 · 1791165818 · focus · HN ↗
  Probably, but the profession has changed a lot over the years.
  The eternal hope is that meritorious research will eventually be recognized by the academic community, even if professional incentives reward low-quality work.
SubiculumCode · 1791164050 · focus · HN ↗
The author provides no empirical evidence to support their claims, providing no empirical evidence. Their claim might be true, might be truer in some places/departments/countries than in others, I don't know. Or the opposite could be true...maybe we are starting to care.more than ever before? Probably not, but maybe.
I do share their feelings though that one should feel embarrassed for doing shoddy work..
Also anecdotal, as a peer reviewer, I too often encounter shoddy, careless, or even probably fraudulent conduct papers, and it frustrates me because peer review is not cost free: Authors are asking scientists to spend their precious time to understand the author's work, and that only works under a social contract....that authors only send out manuscripts for peer review after they have tried their best to do their best science.
I hate to say it, because I know that China has great scientists, but most of the manuscripts I receive and reject due to sloppy work, or purposeful negligence in citing most directly relevant to their manuscript (often because that literature did exactly what they are trying to pass if as new), or out-right making shit up, have been manuscripts from Chinese Universities. Yes it happens from western authors as well, but what I am naming is real, and is increasingly a major burden on peer-review as a scientific institution. So much so that many have confided to me that they will refuse to serve as a reviewer of a manuscript out of China unless it is from a known lab of some standing. In science, there must be a culture motivated not by number of papers published or grants funded, but by its rigor and integrity, and like the finest craftsman who cares most cares about doing the finest of work. That matters, and that culture of integrity and personal pride, does need to be encouraged and rewarded, no matter where the lab is located.
This is all to say that I agree with the author, despite their lack of empirical evidence, that these values are under threat.
So, that is to say
augment_me · 1791169925 · focus · HN ↗
As a PhD student, I am seeing the same thing. I am currently generating about 10 papers per month for marginal increments/architectural additions that are autoreviewed in a loop by Claude + Codex until those tools don't spot any major issues and then sending them in to various conferences. Since more than half of the reviewers are just using these tools to review, it's really easy to get a good score. This year I got into ICLR, ICML, NeurIps, SIGGRAPH and ACL with 2-authors papers (me and my supervisor).
Its fucked up, but I am getting a lot of praise from the department/supervisor, I got an very good internship lined up next summer, and I have plenty of time to study whatever I find meaningful because the slop generates itself. I think that this ship will sink if enough people do this, so I set up similar systems for some of my colleagues as well. The only way to break the system is to overload it until it doesn't work, so I can only hope for this.
1. esafak · 1791171106 · focus · HN ↗
  Hold on a minute. What's your vision for what will happen once you collapse the system? Revolutions tend not to have happy endings.
  1. augment_me · 1791175360 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't really care, I got my ticket out already in case I don't like whatever is coming next.
    Best-case, funding will be given with less strings attached, and academia will be about science and discovery instead of status chasing, hierarchy building and number of papers as an incentive.
    Worst-case, everything will be clout/social-based instead. Your papers will only be accepted if your dept/supervisor/company has clout.
    Either way, the outcome that things will break is inevitable, and the monkey-patching the conferences are applying currently due to the overload like max submission counts and prompt-injections are temporary measures that will not fix the core of that the incentive of paper count and H-index does not make sense in a world where information can be generated for free.
2. great_tankard · 1791171120 · focus · HN ↗
  >The only way to break the system is to overload it until it doesn't work, so I can only hope for this.
  This is a joke, right?
  1. augment_me · 1791175467 · focus · HN ↗
    Not really, with a slow transition you will just have people in power clutching on to their careers, tenure and more general gatekeeping with whatever means they have. You can already see this starting with the paper count limitation that is 1 for new scientists and 20 for established scientists for ICLR 2027.
frognumber · 1791174098 · focus · HN ↗
I think part of the problem is we don't talk about these issues openly. I see a lot of posts like (from this thread):
"I followed a line of research that a senior (MacArthur Fellowship-winning) colleague had pioneered... After three years and a few negative results, I came to suspect that several high-profile publications were p-hacked and likely false positives... A very senior scientist later confirmed my suspicions about their disregard for professional ethics."
These issues should be discussed openly. This also means that the consequences should be appropriate. In many domains -- anything dealing with sex / gender in almost any culture is a good example to look at -- the consequences are draconian, be that stoning or cancel culture or ... which prevents open conversations.
These are all spectra.

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