Sayre's Law: Academic Politics Are So Vicious Because the Stakes Are So Small
Maybe universities, tenure committees, and funding sources should stop measuring academics by vanity metrics such as H-Index and publication counts. And don't get me started on the tendency toward "minimum publishable units."
That said, abusing power as an editor deserves a special place in hell...
I've heard that some universities set aside $5-10 million whenever they grant someone tenure. It's a fiscally prudent accounting measure. And it's also a measure of how valuable the contract can be. (Of course one still needs to do some work soooo....)
I wonder if that's the amount to endow a chair or something, because $5m is well within the "never work again" FIRE amount - but perhaps a tenured professor not only has his salary, but that of his assistants, etc.
How should they be judged then? Any metric can be gamed. And if it will be kind of qualitative assessment then politics will be 10000x more important. The system is clearly broken but I’m not sure if alternative is not even worse.
Every serious academic knows it is complete crap, the problem is finding a better metric. Although the crappyness competes with "no metric at all" and I think the latter would be superior.
The only advantage the current system has is that it is stupendously simple, so at least it is hard to manipulate.
Institutional design needs legibility to track people's reputation at scale. The problem is that these metrics are often poor substitutes.
The difficulty is that nobody knows how to. My guess is that if you want good signaling, you'll need to find something that is difficult to fake. My guess are evolving benchmarks that measure many things in multiple dimensions, but benchmarks were easily gamed.
You can have it without benchmarks that can be gamed, but then it's basically down to "this feels right" and you have to trust the leadership to not be discriminatory, etc.
The funny thing is, if the guy wasn't quite so greedy with this racket, probably no one would notice. Surely if the number of your publications and citations shoots up exponentially and surpasses those of much more well-known scientists, folks are bound to ask questions. I wonder if this got out of control or whether he really did think it's a good idea to collude his way to such prominence.
This is typical behavior from psychopaths when they get away with the crime for so long, they believe they are untouchable and start becoming sloppy and get caught.
I am not arguing against the facts expressed in the piece. This is not an area in which I have any expertise.
However, I am a bit uncomfortable with the pithy language used. It's possible (likely, even), that the fired editors deserve the pithiness, but it's still a bit weird to read that kind of prose, in a scientific context.
This is an investigative substack, not a piece of academic literature. God forbid the author home some (admittedly, strong) opinions and speaks negatively about fraudsters.
> This is an investigative substack, not a piece of academic literature.
Professional news is usually written without expressing judgement and minimizing opinion.
> fraudsters
It's an allegation.
The author only hurts themself: My impression is that they don't believet the fundamentals of truth and humanity: they are certainly partially wrong, could be very wrong, will never know the complete truth, and their judgment of others is too flawed to rely on. Also it seems they are acting more on their emotions and less on fact and reason.
I certainly apologize for hurting feelings. That was not my intent.
I've just learned (the hard way, of course, because how else do we learn?), that using this kind of terminology, even though we may be feeling quite pithy, gives ammo to those that wish to discount us.
This goes double, in my experience, for any context that prizes objectivity and articulate discussion.
I'm with you on this. There's a difference between exposing wrongdoing and being antagonistic.
Doing them both together increases the amplitude of the signal at the cost of reducing the integrity of the signal.
If you wonder why the world is informationally too loud and too noisy these days, it's because everyone who does this is turning up the volume to be louder than others who are also, in turn, turning up the volume for the same reasons.
Maybe I'm just naive or dense, but I'm not seeing language I'd be concerned about in the article? Help me get calibrated, is there something in particular that bothers you? or just a general vibe?
Literally zero need for that; none. And it's that kind of language that calls into question the authors motives. I went from "Excellent reporting here" to "This guy is emotional and not a reliable source of information" in 6 words.
Unfortunately I had the same impression. Or the comment on Anna Du's looks. Otherwise great reporting that, even in an informal substack piece, lose the shine with these types of aggressive comments. The content speaks for itself and is already quite damning to the corrupt editors. No need for ad hominem attacks.
I must however, take the time to be the ever-sensitive snowflake and highlight a troubling trend in this person's other posts. He seems to have some anti-trans leanings[1], refusing to gender people correctly and all that (and certainly not pushing back against comments which declare "M to Fs are psychotic bullies who would kill all of us to maintain their sacred illusion". Not to imply that one must rebuke every unkind thing in their comment section, but I hope you can understand that it is illustrative of his audience.). Now I'm no proponent of death threats or double standards, it's just a convenient way to highlight a lack of respect. He will misgender you if he does not like you, and he does not like any delusional transwomen[2].
He's also quite concerned about Canada's population. The capital-W White population specifically [3]. Note that this is presented separate from later graphs about TFWs, so I don't even think he has the right to hide behind that paper-tissue-thin shield. He is quite sad to see the Great White North get a little less white. I am not saying that Canada has managed its immigration well, but I do not believe that he is overly concerned with those matters.
I'm not here to litigate his arguments, I have other things to do with my life. He has his principles, and I have mine. I'm certain he'd be happy to talk for hours about the transwomen and the Indians and all the topics polite society cowers from. His anti-Zionism and dislike of the Rothchilds, I am certain, comes from a strongly-voiced anti-Imperalist lense.
I'm torn about your comment. On the one hand, the context is interesting. On the other hand, it's almost unrelated to the substance of this post of his. I suppose there's a general anti-mainstream-science bias propagating through national-conservative/far-right/alt-right circles, specifically about how the world of academia functions. However, the facts of this post about how a corner of academia functions ought to stand up or fall down independently of all that. 95-100% of this is facts (falsifiable, and maybe wrong, but stated as such), and a tiny percentage is opinion.
Oh yeah, it's a fine post! Interesting read. But I don't think it's that silly to say that success for a person who espouses these views is success for the views themselves, and that a tone-shift might arise if gradually, more and more posts about inoffensive topics written by "Mr. Don't Worry About It ;)" make their way onto the front page.
I don't think it's strange at all to see this post, and the argument, in the context of Brunet's general antagonism towards academe. Certainly suggests that some arguments might be made in bad faith, or as performative gravy-train applications for the broader conservative news ecosystem.
Elsevier has a history of 'promoting' successful millers to more or other journals, so they can 'drive growth', as it's sometimes put in IT, there as well.
Information for non-commercial purposes should be free for general social enrichment. Information for commercial purposes should have some path towards monetization but the one we've got right now is clearly a terrible fit.
For the future, though, usually if you just email one of the paper author's with even a hint of interest you'll get the full paper and often a neat discussion about how your specific interest relates to the paper. I think people assume researchers get hounded by fans like celebrities but they're usually folks that love to talk about their topics of interest.
Agreed - I emailed some people about a paper recently - they no longer had some supporting stuff that I was interested in but they were very helpful all the same.
Well, isn't libgen no longer accepting uploads for years now? The last few years really haven't been great for shadow libraries which is incredibly unfortunate.
What troubling language and slurs are you referring to exactly?
I didn't see anything "troubling" (let alone "extremely troubling") or anything that would indicate that anyone other than the implicated authors have an integrity issue.
I didn't immediately see a red flag that would make me discount all of their work. It's clear what the author's general opinions are. They're entitled to them of course.
Sayre's Law: Academic Politics Are So Vicious Because the Stakes Are So Small
Maybe universities, tenure committees, and funding sources should stop measuring academics by vanity metrics such as H-Index and publication counts. And don't get me started on the tendency toward "minimum publishable units."
That said, abusing power as an editor deserves a special place in hell...
The stakes are pretty large now. You are judged on the number of publications, positions, citations, etc.
It’s not even about philosophical disagreement as much as future career
I've heard that some universities set aside $5-10 million whenever they grant someone tenure. It's a fiscally prudent accounting measure. And it's also a measure of how valuable the contract can be. (Of course one still needs to do some work soooo....)
I wonder if that's the amount to endow a chair or something, because $5m is well within the "never work again" FIRE amount - but perhaps a tenured professor not only has his salary, but that of his assistants, etc.
How should they be judged then? Any metric can be gamed. And if it will be kind of qualitative assessment then politics will be 10000x more important. The system is clearly broken but I’m not sure if alternative is not even worse.
Goodhart's Law strikes again.
Corporate KPI-chasing culture ruins everything. “Publish or perish” has hit such an extreme level.
I imagine most academics would gladly not participate in this game if their entire livelihood didn’t depend on it
Every serious academic knows it is complete crap, the problem is finding a better metric. Although the crappyness competes with "no metric at all" and I think the latter would be superior.
The only advantage the current system has is that it is stupendously simple, so at least it is hard to manipulate.
Institutional design needs legibility to track people's reputation at scale. The problem is that these metrics are often poor substitutes.
The difficulty is that nobody knows how to. My guess is that if you want good signaling, you'll need to find something that is difficult to fake. My guess are evolving benchmarks that measure many things in multiple dimensions, but benchmarks were easily gamed.
You can have it without benchmarks that can be gamed, but then it's basically down to "this feels right" and you have to trust the leadership to not be discriminatory, etc.
I think an awful lot of people would rather receive their livelihood without being subject to measurement.
I didn’t say no measurements at all. I was very specific with my language
After decades of dealing with Elsevier, Springer-Verlag and the rest; I hope they all go out of business.
The funny thing is, if the guy wasn't quite so greedy with this racket, probably no one would notice. Surely if the number of your publications and citations shoots up exponentially and surpasses those of much more well-known scientists, folks are bound to ask questions. I wonder if this got out of control or whether he really did think it's a good idea to collude his way to such prominence.
This is typical behavior from psychopaths when they get away with the crime for so long, they believe they are untouchable and start becoming sloppy and get caught.
> probably no one would notice.
It probably wouldn't have risen to this level. People always notice but don't always react in ways you can measure.
I am not arguing against the facts expressed in the piece. This is not an area in which I have any expertise.
However, I am a bit uncomfortable with the pithy language used. It's possible (likely, even), that the fired editors deserve the pithiness, but it's still a bit weird to read that kind of prose, in a scientific context.
This is an investigative substack, not a piece of academic literature. God forbid the author home some (admittedly, strong) opinions and speaks negatively about fraudsters.
> This is an investigative substack, not a piece of academic literature.
Professional news is usually written without expressing judgement and minimizing opinion.
> fraudsters
It's an allegation.
The author only hurts themself: My impression is that they don't believet the fundamentals of truth and humanity: they are certainly partially wrong, could be very wrong, will never know the complete truth, and their judgment of others is too flawed to rely on. Also it seems they are acting more on their emotions and less on fact and reason.
Well...the reactions were ... enlightening
I certainly apologize for hurting feelings. That was not my intent.
I've just learned (the hard way, of course, because how else do we learn?), that using this kind of terminology, even though we may be feeling quite pithy, gives ammo to those that wish to discount us.
This goes double, in my experience, for any context that prizes objectivity and articulate discussion.
Your comment was fine. Sorry that others felt the need to be so hostile. As (I hope) you know, that's not what we want to see on HN.
I'm with you on this. There's a difference between exposing wrongdoing and being antagonistic.
Doing them both together increases the amplitude of the signal at the cost of reducing the integrity of the signal.
If you wonder why the world is informationally too loud and too noisy these days, it's because everyone who does this is turning up the volume to be louder than others who are also, in turn, turning up the volume for the same reasons.
Maybe I'm just naive or dense, but I'm not seeing language I'd be concerned about in the article? Help me get calibrated, is there something in particular that bothers you? or just a general vibe?
> Despite working at a terrible school
Literally zero need for that; none. And it's that kind of language that calls into question the authors motives. I went from "Excellent reporting here" to "This guy is emotional and not a reliable source of information" in 6 words.
Unfortunately I had the same impression. Or the comment on Anna Du's looks. Otherwise great reporting that, even in an informal substack piece, lose the shine with these types of aggressive comments. The content speaks for itself and is already quite damning to the corrupt editors. No need for ad hominem attacks.
What on earth is the problem you people have with emotional appeals? It's so weird.
I thought the caption "looking normal" was possibly a bit unnecessary.
Then again, I also found it rather funny. I suspect this is because I am a bad person.
pithy: Concise and meaningful.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pithy
It'd be nice to check whether some llms still have "memory" of the paper she has deleted
That's the neat part. You can never know for sure.
No but maybe if you get the correct name extracted by an llm and search it online you'll get cached sites, or links showing that they actually exist
It will be interesting to see how Goodell's citations drop going forward.
3 down, thousands to go.
This will continue until Elsevier and their 3 or 4 peers are removed from the academic publishing process entirely.
A fun and interesting article!
I must however, take the time to be the ever-sensitive snowflake and highlight a troubling trend in this person's other posts. He seems to have some anti-trans leanings[1], refusing to gender people correctly and all that (and certainly not pushing back against comments which declare "M to Fs are psychotic bullies who would kill all of us to maintain their sacred illusion". Not to imply that one must rebuke every unkind thing in their comment section, but I hope you can understand that it is illustrative of his audience.). Now I'm no proponent of death threats or double standards, it's just a convenient way to highlight a lack of respect. He will misgender you if he does not like you, and he does not like any delusional transwomen[2].
He's also quite concerned about Canada's population. The capital-W White population specifically [3]. Note that this is presented separate from later graphs about TFWs, so I don't even think he has the right to hide behind that paper-tissue-thin shield. He is quite sad to see the Great White North get a little less white. I am not saying that Canada has managed its immigration well, but I do not believe that he is overly concerned with those matters.
I'm not here to litigate his arguments, I have other things to do with my life. He has his principles, and I have mine. I'm certain he'd be happy to talk for hours about the transwomen and the Indians and all the topics polite society cowers from. His anti-Zionism and dislike of the Rothchilds, I am certain, comes from a strongly-voiced anti-Imperalist lense.
[1] https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/this-phd-student-at-brown-univ...
[2] https://substack.com/@chrisbrunet/note/c-244102564
[3] https://www.chrisbrunet.com/i/175390557/6-white-population
I'm torn about your comment. On the one hand, the context is interesting. On the other hand, it's almost unrelated to the substance of this post of his. I suppose there's a general anti-mainstream-science bias propagating through national-conservative/far-right/alt-right circles, specifically about how the world of academia functions. However, the facts of this post about how a corner of academia functions ought to stand up or fall down independently of all that. 95-100% of this is facts (falsifiable, and maybe wrong, but stated as such), and a tiny percentage is opinion.
Oh yeah, it's a fine post! Interesting read. But I don't think it's that silly to say that success for a person who espouses these views is success for the views themselves, and that a tone-shift might arise if gradually, more and more posts about inoffensive topics written by "Mr. Don't Worry About It ;)" make their way onto the front page.
I don't think it's strange at all to see this post, and the argument, in the context of Brunet's general antagonism towards academe. Certainly suggests that some arguments might be made in bad faith, or as performative gravy-train applications for the broader conservative news ecosystem.
To be honest, the skepticism around non-STEM fields is completely deserved. It's a complete shithole.
Elsevier has a history of 'promoting' successful millers to more or other journals, so they can 'drive growth', as it's sometimes put in IT, there as well.
https://forbetterscience.com/2023/10/24/elsevier-choses-pape...
This type of corporation is nasty and should not be allowed to exist, but thanks to people like the Maxwell clan, they do. For now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnmFTvlrsOo
Is it just me or this makes me feel less guilty for using libgen all these years
Information for non-commercial purposes should be free for general social enrichment. Information for commercial purposes should have some path towards monetization but the one we've got right now is clearly a terrible fit.
For the future, though, usually if you just email one of the paper author's with even a hint of interest you'll get the full paper and often a neat discussion about how your specific interest relates to the paper. I think people assume researchers get hounded by fans like celebrities but they're usually folks that love to talk about their topics of interest.
Agreed - I emailed some people about a paper recently - they no longer had some supporting stuff that I was interested in but they were very helpful all the same.
I don't know anyone who should be feeling guilty from using libgen in the first place.
I feel guilty for publishing in elsevier and paying for their “services”. By all means using scihub and libgen is morally superior position.
Well, isn't libgen no longer accepting uploads for years now? The last few years really haven't been great for shadow libraries which is incredibly unfortunate.
Why would you feel guilty. Its just information. Go get it.
[flagged]
What troubling language and slurs are you referring to exactly?
I didn't see anything "troubling" (let alone "extremely troubling") or anything that would indicate that anyone other than the implicated authors have an integrity issue.
I think GP was referring to https://www.chrisbrunet.com/s/politics/archive?sort=new and https://www.theamericanconservative.com/author/christopher-b...
I didn't immediately see a red flag that would make me discount all of their work. It's clear what the author's general opinions are. They're entitled to them of course.