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.
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.
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.
> 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 and sharing their findings with others. 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, ICLR submissions have gone 11k to 20k to 60k in 2025, 26, 27.
Most reviewers hate reviewing, don't get rewarded for it, the papers they reward are usually bad (as acceptance rate is around 20-25%), so they are forced to do it via reciprocal reviewing rules where submitter must also review, but they review with AI, the area chairs write their meta review with AI, they (area chairs) can arbitrarily reject a paper even with "accept" reviews, delaying people's graduation by half a year or more. Also, meanwhile much of the research in eg AI ML application areas where you tweak the architecture and beat a benchmark (vast majority of the tens of thousands of submissions) can now be done better with AI.
Yes there are elite academics who do deep foundational thoughtful stuff but the system is totally subverted because most participants don't give a shit and don't feel any long term allegiance to the "research community". They take what they can, and are out very soon. Of course this means the signal and prestige of papers on your CV will tank. And having too many may have the opposite effect l already today.
I'm not sure about your goals, and whether your comment is ragebait, but typically this won't help you with academic careers or industrial positions where people know academia eg because they themselves have done PhDs. If you are the sole author of dozens of papers a year, it's a huge red flag for most good labs. It's just not plausible. And if they suspect you did it with AI, which they increasingly will, why would they need to hire you instead of just paying for AI subscriptions? Why the need for the middleman?
I think AI can be very effective in research but spending more effort on making one or two really great papers per year gets you better career results than 10 mediocre ones per month.
bonoboTP · · focus · HN ↗
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.
breezybottom · · focus · HN ↗
akoboldfrying · · focus · HN ↗
> 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.
black_knight · · focus · HN ↗
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 and sharing their findings with others. 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.
glitchc · · focus · HN ↗
SubiculumCode · · focus · HN ↗
bonoboTP · · focus · HN ↗
augment_me · · focus · HN ↗
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.
bonoboTP · · focus · HN ↗
Most reviewers hate reviewing, don't get rewarded for it, the papers they reward are usually bad (as acceptance rate is around 20-25%), so they are forced to do it via reciprocal reviewing rules where submitter must also review, but they review with AI, the area chairs write their meta review with AI, they (area chairs) can arbitrarily reject a paper even with "accept" reviews, delaying people's graduation by half a year or more. Also, meanwhile much of the research in eg AI ML application areas where you tweak the architecture and beat a benchmark (vast majority of the tens of thousands of submissions) can now be done better with AI.
Yes there are elite academics who do deep foundational thoughtful stuff but the system is totally subverted because most participants don't give a shit and don't feel any long term allegiance to the "research community". They take what they can, and are out very soon. Of course this means the signal and prestige of papers on your CV will tank. And having too many may have the opposite effect l already today.
bonoboTP · · focus · HN ↗
I think AI can be very effective in research but spending more effort on making one or two really great papers per year gets you better career results than 10 mediocre ones per month.