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.
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.
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.
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 ↗
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.