When I had a job I didn’t want, in a city i didn’t want, no kids, no wife, and prospects abounding, it was easy to speak truth to power. I did it, and I was right technically, businesswise, and
morally. What a win...(?)
Now, I have my dream job, my dream location, my own damn house, and my family. -Whole thing feels like a dream I might wake up from if I am not careful... and I feel totally weighed down when it comes to speaking up in a way I would have never countenanced a few years ago.
All that to say, this poor kid... I can only imagine the incentive structures that led him to choose this route, but I know academia being f’ed is a big part of it, and it ticks me off.
Tragically, a non-trivial number of Ph.D. students commit suicide. It's natural to gradually put all your eggs in the imagined Ph.D. outcome (e.g., an idealized notion of a professorship) with increasing depth as the years wear on. After multiple years and a huge emotional and intellectual commitment, if you start to see the cracks in the structure, and you cannot reconcile the newly perceived reality with your model and goal, it can be absolutely devastating.
An experience I had as an undergrad of walking around a not-yet-bleached spot on the sidewalk in front of Pierce played some role in my not going to grad school.
A concrete surface (such as a sidewalk) needs to be cleaned with a bleaching agent in order to remove bodily fluid stains, which can otherwise persist for years.
They put up a barrier and some "biohazard" signs around the spot, until they had a chance to clean the concrete thoroughly. It would be unseemly for students to trod on the remains of their recently deceased schoolmate.
Totally understandably so. However I think that it is also a matter of perception: If we view it as a matter of living the dream while some intrusion might endanger that dream, surely minimizing the damage done to the dream is a logical consequence. But what if the intrusion stops making your job a dream job?
I was in a similar situation where a superior demanded that I breach the trust our users had in the privacy of our service. This would not only have been illegal, but there was no way to make use of that data without revealing that we broke that trust. Additionally it made no sense, because the info my superior hoped to gain through this wouldn't have been readable from the data anyways.
My superior was a typical authotarian male: Saying no to him is something he took very personal. This was my dream job, but breaking privacy rules goes against anything I stand for (which no longer would make it my dream job), so I did what needed to be done and stood up. I explained carefully what he needs to know before making that decision and why I wouldn't do it that way, all the time making sure there is a way out for him where he can keep his face.
Guess what, I didn't need to breach that trust and the superior ultimately was thankful that I stopped him from running into this. But it left a very bitter taste in my mouth that the guy even considered this as a possibility.
In my experience, people who try to intimidate others into unethical acts are pretty much rotten at the core. They either lack morals, or empathy, or both. Chances are your superior did some damage control when expressing gratitude towards you later on.
It sounds like he didn't understand what he was asking for and was thankful for you informing him. Seems like a reasonable case, although maybe there's something about the initial demand that made it more of an intimidation tactic?
If you interpret a grammar (in this case, a list of dimensions for evaluating one's choices) in the terms of another grammar (in your interpretation, the ranking order of horse race or other competition) you impose a structure on the conclusion and what logically follows, that is orthogonal or irrelevant to the original statement.
There is no reason I see that placing morals last in that list places it below the technical or business dimensions, and assuming good intentions would seem to require that they were ordered that way because morality is in fact the bottom line or last word, rather than tacked on as some also ran, in itself requiring technical and business success to be actualized, while in fact standing as the higher goal.
The most charitably I can view your response is that you discount technique and business due to some prevalence of corruption in them but do not likewise discount moralism.
What shall it profit a man to lose the whole world? Immorality itself often follows failures to thrive, ie cheating to get an edge in one way or another.
>"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?
It will profit them, well, the whole world. Duh!
(Yeah, I know what the Christian sentiment means. But it requires the belief, if not in soul, in some trancedental good, for people to care about "loss of soul" over "gaining the world". Which, alas, we don't have as much...)
Well, there's the even more secural interpretation "who said I don't respect/recognize myself? Those 'morals' are just ideals and don't exist, meanwhile I have the world".
That's not an interpretation, that's just pointing out that people who do not have a strong conception of themselves or have self-imposed limits on their behavior according to their moral system have no reason not to blindly pursue enhancing their material wealth.
How so? Material wealth gives all kinds of tangible benefits as control, pleasure, influence, access, etc -- even better health and surely better healthcare.
Whereas, what does being moral/good give (to the invididual practicing it, not to the community) except a feel-good feeling (and that only on those who care for it)?
(I'm in favor of being moral, just point their point of view).
I tend to think of morality as an emergent property of successful social structures.
It's a necessary common value system that underlies peaceful cooperation. In this sense it's an evolutionary advantage to treat each other morally and have a shared ethic. That includes not exploiting others for personal gain.
>It's a necessary common value system that underlies peaceful cooperation. In this sense it's an evolutionary advantage to treat each other morally and have a shared ethic. That includes not exploiting others for personal gain.
It's an evolutionary advantage for a species.
For an individual animal it's an advantage to not follow morality anytime it can get away with it, and thus gain more sexual partners, food, influence in the herd, etc, and from that, more progeny.
Well, the soul (as in "ultimately yourself") might not give a fuck about morality and goodness, and judge you on failing or not to get what you want. What then?
As for family and friends, people find that those like you just fine if:
(a) you can fake being good succesfully (while still being bad and doing bad things for your benefit - common with politicians, CEO doing "charity" with corruption and cruelty on the side, etc.)
(b) you win material wealth and so they depend on kissing your ass
(c) they are actually treated well and kindly by you (while you're still fine to fuck over everybody else for profit - king of like in mob - their families don't dislike them because they're mobs)
Losing your soul to acquire something less valuable defeats the point of acquiring the inferior good in the first place. Every sin, every immoral act, is such an act of self-betrayal and spiritual self-mutilation. It is an act that is so profoundly nonsensical, stupid, and absurd that it boggles the mind. But given what we might call the human condition, the moral life is made difficult, especially because we have a tendency to rebel against the truth and because we are cowards. But it is the only road to true happiness.
So here's your city of gold and your garden of delights, but only if you desecrate and destroy yourself, cripple your mind, poison your heart, and blind yourself first. Oh, and here's the cherry on top: when you lay in your self-made gutter, let all these riches taste to you like ash.
Even if you don't subscribe to that belief, you still have something to lose -- conscience.
Conscience doesn't really die overnight (and this is from my experience of living in a corrupt society), it's a death-by-a-thousand-cuts situation. The beginning is "Come on, everyone is doing it" and you can guess the end.
> Even if you don't subscribe to that belief, you still have something to lose -- conscience.
Integrity also works as an asset that can be lost to corruption. And for those that aren't inclined to put much stock in that sort of inner-life intangible, consider reputation as an outward facing stand-in.
Yes, but do they really start out like that, or is it a gradual descent? There's usually a catalyst that starts it in kids. Parents demanding success at all cost / rampant cheating around them (or just being surrounded by ruthless kids) / a very competitive rat race that turns out to be pretty dirty / the parents themselves are without conscience / etc.
I think children tend to be pretty cruel when given the chance, many of whom grow up to be decent people. While there are certainly bad people out there who were already rotten as children, I don't subscribe to the theory that people are born perfect and then somehow experience moral decay as they grow older.
You can look at it metaphorically. Whatever that thing is that people are talking about when they say, "have a heart!!", that's the soul. It's supposed to be your innermost self. If your innermost self becomes unethical or immoral as a habit, that's, "losing your soul."
> and I feel totally weighed down when it comes to speaking up in a way I would have never countenanced a few years ago.
The prevalent "cancel culture" today makes this even more difficult. If you don't go by the groupthink, you lose your livelihood and can't support your family anymore.
I'm sorry, but I have to strongly disagree with the way you've ended your comment. This lets the people responsible off the hook. The guilty party is an individual (and perhaps several individuals). Academia, peer review, conferences, and organizations didn't cause this. The professor was responsible. He wasn't just a cog in the system.
The incentive structures in academia make it easier to opt to cheat. A furious mediocrity is considered more desirable than thoughtful work : Thoughtful work is not "high impact", high "h-index" or whatever, but stuff that makes you enlightened, and makes you smile and go "oh yeah! now I see it".
But academic administrators do not understand that, because they have never had that experience, and have no idea why some professors go very quiet when an obscure faculty member speaks up to make a point in a quiet voice - that is because that quiet person has earned genuine respect from the other faculty present.
Quality is rare, quality has pauses and takes breathers.
Given that Academia is a toxic cesspit of vipers at every level, I'd hesitate a little more to attribute it to individuals. Something about the environment brings out the worst in people and that's worth scrutinising.
The whole point of the blog post is that the University Department is supporting the (allegedly guilty) Professor to the hilt.
There are countless such scandals, including an epidemic of Title IX sexual assault "investigations", where universities are repeatedly shown to be supporting the wrongdoer.
Academia is definitely f'ed up. In this case, the family of the person who committed suicide don't have any recourse: it's up to the university department to give a semblance of justice, which they have apparently failed to do.
I went to MIT. MIT has procedures involving NDAs and non-disparage agreements to cover up academic fraud. Academic fraud widespread, at least in the departments I worked with, and the Institute can apply *a lot* of pressure to get people to shut up. Except for anonymous web forums, I did.
I'm sorry, but this isn't letting the individuals off the hook, any more than accusing the KKK of being racist isn't letting a particular KKK member off the hook, or a mafia of engaging in extortion letting any particular member off-the-hook.
There are no effective, enforceable structures for stopping academic fraud. Most people who've engaged in it did not become persona non grata, let alone been fired; most continue to hold tenured academic jobs. Worst-case outcomes are a multiyear slap-on-the-wrist of some kind. That, combined with intense competition, led some people to cheat. Eventually, when it turned out to work okay, it became a culture of cheating.
Yes, the individuals involved should be punished, but much more important are:
1) Procedures for getting crooks out of the academy
2) Reducing competition, so there aren't the intense incentives to cheat
3) Implementing transparency. Why do universities get to use taxpayer dollars (grant / tuition overhead) and charitable contributions to cover up this stuff? Governance should be transparent and open. Data should be transparent and open whenever possible. NDAs and non-disparage agreements should be off-bounds.
4) Big money should be out. Yes, I know how much the typical professor gets paid, but the million-dollar salaries for presidents, Nobel laureates, and similar high-ranked positions distort things.
5) Related to the prior, conflict-of-interest provisions should be just a couple orders of magnitude more enforceable. The industry<->academia and especially startup<->academia pipelines help ground things and prevent things from getting detached, but if you're doing research to start a startup to make a few million dollars, that tends to apply extreme pressure to bake data.
6) Hiring and promotion structures shouldn't be so impact-focused. The easiest way to have impact is to tell politically-popular lies. P-hunt for data that shows liberals are smarter than conservatives, atheists are more open-minded than evangelicals, racism is wholesale, wokeness is the way to solve it, and so on. On this list, the really most harmful is when you reach correct conclusions from false data (much more so, even, than false conclusions from false data).
... and so on. This should happen wholesale, across academia, to be eligible for federal grants or tuition subsidies.
Any worldly institution that operates this way will implode. Establishment academia has lost a great deal of clout, deservedly so. It's going to collapse sooner or later because people aren't intoxicated by the mirage of establishment academia like they used to be. Eventually, new schools and institutions will emerge that will better conform with human nature and human needs that will replace these obsolete and failed institutions of today. The example of the Benedictines is probably especially meaningful. When the Roman Empire fell, it was the Benedictines that preserved what they could and around which new communities formed that hunkered down for the long winter. European civilization then sprang from these Benedictine communities. And frankly, not just academia is collapsing, though academic rot is often one canary in a coal mine for other manifestations of cultural and social rot and itself a symptom of rot higher up the chain.
Yeah. It ain't happening. I thought Harvard would take some flack when people noticed 43 percent of white students admitted are legacy, athletes, or related to donors or staff. That blew over in a week. Varsity Blues did nothing either.
Liberals will have faith in elite schools. Conservatives will have faith in churches. Liberals will distrust religious organizations, and conservatives will distrust the academy. We're polarized enough that scandals probably won't change that.
MIT had a huge Epstein cover-up. They did an investigation, threw everyone who came forward under a bus, and did nothing to faculty who partied with ladies on Epstein's island. If you'd like references:
* MIT's factfinding report mentions no faculty visits to the island
* Epstein's web page has a ton of photos of himself with top MIT faculty on the island. Those are the tip of an iceberg -- he didn't bother posting photos with lower-tier faculty, many of whom partied there too.
* News reports indicate Epstein coerced one of the girls to offer herself to Minsky.
By all accounts, Minsky declined and behaved with all propriety (he was there with his wife), but he was far from the only one on the island, and at least rumors suggest others weren't as proper. Are rumors true? That's kind of the point of a fact-finding report.
This became super-visible within some MIT communities, and I kinda expected MIT to implode. It didn't even merit a news story. MIT just shut down internal mailing lists where this was being discussed.
Even if a scandal did do something, the endowments are now astronomical. A mere scandal won't shut anything down.
I believe the only way to do this is to place restrictions on government funding. Institutions which use NDAs, non-disparage agreements, don't respond to FOIA-style requests, don't publish in the open, don't share research data when reasonable (e.g. except for PII), and otherwise shouldn't receive federal funds, shouldn't receive foundation funds, and shouldn't receive alumni donations.
That's hard, but I'm not sure if impossible. Elite schools have a lot of power in government, but things are over-the-top enough that if this isn't brought under control, this isn't getting kept bottled up forever. Brands will suffer.
I agree, mate. I've decided to stop brooding over things less. I do still sniff the toxic sludge at my workplace, but turn away by thinking about technical and intense.
>Now, I have my dream job, my dream location, my own damn house, and my family. -Whole thing feels like a dream I might wake up from if I am not careful... and I feel totally weighed down when it comes to speaking up in a way I would have never countenanced a few years ago.
I'm not at this point yet, but reading this makes me wonder why any employer would ever prefer younger employees with nothing tying them down, for any reasons other than the fact that we cost less. Sure, you'll save money on salary, but odds are that we're going to move on within a year or two if you're not a top-paying company. Even then, there's no guarantee.
Meanwhile, someone who has dependents and a mortgage has more to lose and less leverage.
> makes me wonder why any employer would ever prefer younger employees with nothing tying them down
Probably a lot of reasons, but a major one may be that young people with no family of their own got all day, every day, to think about work-related problems - especially so, if they derive a lot of meaning from their work, as many people do. It's probably also a lot easier to boss them around, especially if said people crave acknowledgement from some authority figure.
Oh yes, some (many?) employers do prefer those with more to loose.
Years ago I actually had a hiring manager tell me "all of our guys have families" and later "we're really looking for people who want that stability". Direct discrimination against single people. Fortunately I did not get that job, and ended up much better off elsewhere.
I’m convinced that it’s because younger people are easier to control and less likely to speak up about messed up stuff. So while it would be in the company’s best interest to hire more experienced developers, it’s in the interest of individual managers to prefer younger folks.
This makes sense. I didn't think about it specifically from a manager's POV, since I'd like to think they're more likely to act in the company's best interests when it's a tiny/small eng org.
Sure, but is it cheaper in the long run when you account for attrition, hiring costs (recruiters, engineer hours spent interviewing), and ramp-up? Let's go ahead and assume that things like code quality and technical debt aren't factors here, and that the replacements for regrettable attrition would receive (and accept) offers with comparable TC.
That depends on project duration. Most projects did not go on more than a year or two. If that's the case your ramp up would happen once every two years even if everybody stayed forever. If you're reasonably efficient about it, you can hire someone with maybe a few hours of engineer time. If the average engineer stays even a year it's not that much.
You don't bother thinking about that. Over time you have a large enough sample size for attrition rate and you hire based off that. it doesn't matter if a few leave, a few will always leave.
It costs time and value when you really can't control it.
No matter what there will be attrition for reasons completely outside of a company's control. You find a comfortable attrition rate for your business. if it's too high you deal with it.
Younger workers have less to lose, so tend to leave more — but they’re also less experienced and tend to have lower expectations for the workplace.
Older workers are less likely to leave because it’s disruptive, but they’re also more experienced at the political side of life — and tend to insist on things like reasonable hours, professional management, etc.
My personal stance is that trying to exploit your workers is a losing game — but from the employers who act that way...
There’s some who prefer the lower expectations (eg, Amazon) and some who prefer the more stable crew (eg, ATT).
> My personal stance is that trying to exploit your workers is a losing game
Maybe in highly paid and creative fields, but for the vast majority of business around the world, I observe exploiting the power imbalance between employer and employee to be very beneficial for the employer.
I don’t understand what kind of sympathy this is supposed to express. Presumably the “kid” was really desperate and didn’t know what else to do. Even if someone from successful picket lane might know better.
But let's face it: the Academia peer review process is pretty rotten.
- Many organisations could not care less about whatever crap you publish as long as you publish. And if possible a lot.
- Many journal's reviewers are friend of friends and you can often easily guess their names, even in double blinded review.
- Many reviewers care more about you quoting their own paper than giving any relevant feedback.
- There is plenty "pay2publish" journals that care about quantity not quality that are commonly used by academia to "force" validate crappy researches/PHds
- The publishing world is full of oversized-ego individuals that will destroy a paper just because it comes from a competing lab/department/professor and not because it is scientifically irrelevant.
And that is only a little subset of the problems...
My experience is different. Peer review is far from perfect but:
* Most of my papers have had thoughtful comments. Typically, they improved the paper, sometimes a lot.
* I have very rarely been asked to quote a specific paper from a specific author. Of course, pointing out important references that the paper has missed is part of peer review, so this would not necessarily be evidence of corruption.
* There are loads of crap pay-to-publish predatory journals, but publishing in those journals would harm my career, not help it. Nobody cares about them.
* I've not experienced people rejecting papers from rival labs or departments. I don't say it doesn't happen, but I haven't experienced it.
* I myself try hard to give high-quality reviews that explore the paper's value in depth.
I am from one particular discipline, country and subfield. Others may have very different experiences.
Again, I am not claiming academic peer review and publishing doesn't need a lot of improvement. Removing the parasitic mainstream publishers like Elsevier and Springer would be a great start.
It varies field-by-field. In my field, peer review is a joke. I'm glad it's not a joke in your field yet, but incentive structures say it eventually will be. If incentives don't change, it's a question of when, not if.
High-quality academic curation doesn't effect anything in your career. On the other hand, the impact of your own research does does affect it. I'd like my taxpayer dollars to go a little less towards publish-or-perish, and a little more towards QA to make sure the papers coming out are credible.
I agree with the general point of your comment, but my personal experience with the usefulness of reviews is not so great.
Nearly all reviews were superficial, not a single review ever found any technical flaw, even when some were discovered later. The acceptance recommendations seem to be governed by the overall impression the reviewer had from the paper and not by any factual points they make in the review.
This manifested in getting 5 reviews at one conference, where all reviewers made nearly the same points in their review: all about the presentation of the paper. The paper received all of the five recommendations: Accept, weak accept, borderline, weak reject, reject. (The most critical and useful with a small correction of one formula was the "Accept" review.)
Many reviewers also leave the impression they didn't read the paper in full or at all, or ran out of time while for the review, so looked for a reason to reject the paper and didn't look any further.
Note: I am not saying my papers should have been accepted, 2 had serious issues I glad I discovered later! I also had a few very useful reviews to improve the presentation of my paper.
I largely agree with this comment, but this just means the underlying issues are more subtle. For example:
* I typically get thoughtful reviews, and in particular critical reviews are often thoughtful. Still, I know that some people assert influence on the outcome of the reviewing process of their own papers. Also, there's a fine line: for example, many journals allow you to recommend reviewers for your papers. If you're well-connected, you can recommend your best friends and your editor friend follows your advice. Is this misconduct? I'd say it depends. After some decades in a math-heavy community, most people who are experienced and competent in the context of a highly specialized sub-field will be your "friends".
* Journals that are outright predatory are, of course, a no-go. Still, there are edge cases like some MDPI journals; sometimes there are special issues from credible, relatively junior people in my community. Should we support them or not? Also, my funding provider wants me to publish in high-profile, "big publisher" journals and pays the open access fee; these journals typically rank much higher than community-owned/not-for-profit venues. On the long run, it's better to fully move to community-owned venues only, but as a junior researcher I feel I cannot afford it at the moment.
Personally, for me the problem does not come from outright and obvious ethics violations; sure, I know of some individuals who I consider somewhat problematic, but I don't think these people control the community. For me the problem is to navigate all the grey areas, knowing that the system is largely ethics-agnostic.
Do you checkout your co-worker's branches and run the unit tests for every PR they make? In an ideal world that might be nice but in the real world with normal sized projects that's to time consuming so everyone just reasons through patches.
If reproducing were a requirement for reviewing, publication cost might be exorbitant (like when CERN tries to publish a paper you have to rebuild the particle accelerator?)
I don't know enough about the specific situation of computer science at the University of Florida to add anything useful. It sounds like a serious scandal.
Oh sure, the system is bad; it has perverse incentives and insufficient checks. But that doesn't also mean that these specific actors aren't more specifically bad in very concrete, condemnable ways.
> - Many reviewers care more about you quoting their own paper than giving any relevant feedback.
My supervisor once told me that I should quote a paper from a pair of reviewers (he knew exactly who was reviewing the papers) before he'd allow publishing. It was a CS paper and the reviewers were in the field of geology.
A few of those fun cases were the reason why I left the academia - corporate bs doesn't come close to academic bs.
Academic BS is just as bad, if not worse. You have far less options. It's way easier to just "find another job" than it is to "find another phd program" and colleges/professors abuse the shit out of it.
Curious. In Swedish we say "konkurrerande" for "competing", I guess adev speaks a language that does something similar.
In Danish they say konkurrence for competition.
This sounds like something like the tragedy of the commons or Gresham's Law for academia. It's in everyone's best interest to do take advantage of the system, at least as long as there's public support for academia.
I don't see the situation getting much better. Republicans like free-market solutions, but not facing market constraints is part of the value of academia. Meanwhile, especially with consternation around student debt, Democrats will blindly support academia, failing to put any pressure on it.
The reason you know about academic fraud is that lots of the process is public and has many unaffiliated people involved that are potential leaks. So, sure, fraud happens and clearly that’s bad. But you do hear about it.
By contrast the same events within corporate culture happen behind veils of secrecy and HR departments & heavy hitting lawyers to make life hell if you don’t toe the line. And the cult of personality and oversized egos is very well represented in boards and upper management.
But the problem is, apart from peer review process, what measures can be used to ensure the quality of the paper being published? And what should be used as the metric for academics?
Someone really, really, really needs to get this professor's current students to safety immediately. Don't forget that shortly before the student's suicide, according to a screenshot of a conversation with the student who took his own life (same Medium account, earlier article), the professor threatened to kill the student if he "ruined his reputation." His students are not safe and the focus should be on making sure they are safe.
If any one of his current students are reading this, feel free to reach out to me (use ringertalia@gmail.com), and I will help you find resources that may help you while prioritizing your safety. I recommend doing this from a non-university email because university emails are not truly private.
> Considering that this will have an impact on my career in the future and my reputation in the area of Computer Architecture, my future life will be worse than death and I will be totally in a dilemma.
Maybe we also need to change academic culture to allow people to confess academic fraud, receive punishment and than be forgiven and continue academic careers.
Currently once you started, there is no exit and fraudsters are incentivized to continue to sustain their building of lies.
With financial debt we allow people to go bankrupt and be reborn free (after some time and a honest effort; not including American student debt).
but it also gives the moral hazard of someone wanting to start such a regime, because they know they can profit/garner personal wealth during their reign, then beg for amnesty after a while (when it looks like their grip on power is lowered), and possibly, hiding their wealth gained away somewhere secret.
Where as, in a world where such amnesty doesn't exist, they may have to face the possibility of being executed when they lose power (which, if history is to be believed, they eventually do). Therefore, some who are more cowards but cunning won't want to be a dictator, and thus, you end up with a more democratic system.
There must always be punishment. The comments above are too summarized to get into it, but when that kind of amnesty happens, it is never complete.
But if the punishment is so crass that the people prefer to lose their lives instead, that's a clear signal that your society has a problem, and your new regime isn't all that good either.
> Maybe we also need to change academic culture to allow people to confess academic fraud, receive punishment and than be forgiven and continue academic careers.
Are you suggesting we forgive the professor who’s pressure and influence seems to have cause the phd students suicide?
If anything I think we need to stand firm on the harsh one direction only nature of academic misconduct, and simply provide better training and whistleblower options for students. There should never be any doubt in a students or professors mind that academic misconduct when discovered will be an end to their academic carrier.
The analogy with financial debt is misleading: people go bankrupt even if they don’t do anything “wrong”, things don’t pan out, or disasters hit. For people that do commit financial crimes, they are prosecuted and face criminal punishment and often lose their ability to continue to be involved in finance.
Academia doesn’t have that kind of strict laws, likely because academic fraud doesn’t affect the general population and is limited in the damage it can do, or hasn’t received similar attention as financial fraud. So making it even more tempting to commit academic fraud isn’t something I would recommend.
The really straightforward solution here seems to be to make these institutions recognize the professors (even the prestigious ones) are human and can commit fraud, and thus to create ways for students to give feedback on such kinds of frauds to the institution, based on which the institution must take action.
> For people that do commit financial crimes, they are prosecuted and face criminal punishment and often lose their ability to continue to be involved in finance.
Wealthy white-collar criminals often only face minor fines and are able to keep operating. The industry perception of people who get caught (who are known to still be only a small percentage of those who commit them) is almost universally "they were stupid enough to get caught."
I wonder whether this is yet another tendril of the student loan debt bubble and the privatization of a public good (education) contributing to deep, structural rot in American society. Most of the quality academic talent gets picked off into the industry, where there are real opportunity costs for mis-execution, and a much more healthy and liquid market for labor supply and demand. Does that mean that maybe the only plausible end-state for academia is a market for lemons?
The low rate of prosecution doesn’t mean that the laws are useless. It has coerced the financial industry into behaving in more pro-public ways than it would have without them. In this case it would likely ensure that academic frauds are not engaged in lightly.
I don’t think Research fraud specifically has much connection to student loan debts. Most PhD students are fully funded by their programs. Most of them are international students anyway and would likely not have access to the sweetest US based loans.
Forgiveness definitely should have its place, particularly for minor offenses, however the consequences are often multifaceted and tangled. For example, as research often uses public (government) funds, there are sometimes criminal consequences attached. [0][1]
A secondary issue is trying to determine what penalty is fair and trying to determine whether an error was intentional or unintentional. The boundaries are admitted by most to be fuzzy. Moreover there is a desire to exact punishment:
> A recent survey of roughly 1,800 people in the United States found that 90 percent of those who responded believe that fabricating data is morally repugnant. Preferred punishments include being blacklisted from university positions and being banned from government funding for future research, but don’t end there.
> “Most respondents who support criminalization prefer a sentence of incarceration, rather than a fine and/or probation,” according to the researchers, Justin Pickett and Sean Patrick Roche, both of the University at Albany. “The results indicate that slightly over half of all Americans would prefer both to criminalize data fraud and to sentence fraudsters to a period of incarceration.” [2]
... and then there's China, where the penalties sought seem even higher. [1][3] However, given the investment in most researchers and their specialized skills, it seems a huge waste to lock up that person in a way that prevents society from benefitting.
Finally, you have the problem of coordinating the action. With criminal behaviour, society coordinates action (for the most part) in order to achieve reasonable justice: Otherwise every person willing to act independently (as a vigilante) to extract an additional pound of flesh. We would need everyone to agree, otherwise you have situations where there is no punishment because someone breaks an embargo or you have too much punishment because multiple agents inflict punishment separately.
Your typical person breaking the law is stuck within one country. It's a bit more complicated for researchers, since most are highly mobile. A PhD in a STEM topic means visas are almost automatically granted, so it's relatively easy to get a position in a different country.
(It would be really interesting to see a follow-up on all of the researchers featured in [1], since that was written back in 2007.)
> Finally, the paper with academic misconduct got retracted by ACM as Huixiang’s last wish. The ACM imposed a penalty of a 15-year ban on participation in any ACM Conference or Publication to the offenders.
Wow. It does sound like the student discovered suicide as one of the only known effective methods of triggering accountability for research misconduct.
That's awfully depressing.
I can't now find the article I remember reading, perhaps from HN, of someone who came across then spent a lot of time demonstrating/reporting apparently falsified data to journals, to pretty much no consequence. (except teaching the researcher how to falsify data better to evade the particular tests the exposer used in that case).
Having read this article it made me sad. On a good note, ACM seems to have reacted in a proper way. Glad to see this.
This student must have been very very alone and suffered immensely to take this decision. Sadly, I have witnessed this exact same thing at a very well known university in Germany. With great effort this was kept away from the public and blamed on the PhD student himself ('This guy had _other_ problems'). Even though he left a letter, which was also very explicit about his situation. This left me thinking, how often this actually happens but receives no publicity...
I believe most people, who enter the world of academe have good principles and ideals. In German pedagogy this is called "Humboldtsches Bildungsideal" which translates unfortunately into this [1]. Humboldt's model was very much based on many ideas of the enlightenment, esp. concerning one's pursuit of intellectual growth for its own sake and the world citizen.
Unfortunately the economic grip on the world of academe in many fields gets stronger and at one point in time ones sees these ideals destroyed.
It's best witnessed with what happened to the internet. Wonder how many can remember how it 'felt' in the beginning after CERN opened it to the world... and now, look at it.
ISCA is a particularly horrible "top" conference. We've been trying to reproduce some papers with questionable methodology from ISCA'20 (including using "1 cycle access L1 cache" in simulations, something that's not really possible on modern CPUs).
Of 5 paper groups contacted, 4 have not responded despite repeated requests, even when VPs of research at the university contacted.
One group eventually replied, said that they were "too busy" to release their simulator changes, and then also saying they weren't going to because they were worried about it being classified as a munitions export.
What I believe one problem with a lot of conference papers is:
- It is very important to go to conferences, to meet your (international) peers, see what is new, what interesting results have been achieved/are work in progress and to forge the next collaboration
So far so good. Now, all academic institution I know of, only allow you (means paying) to attend a conference if you present a paper. I guess this might be universal. So since you want/need to go, a lot of people just write up what the current status about a problem is, and this leads to a lot of half-baked presentations.
also, at ISCA'19, over half the papers were PC papers, meaning they were papers where one of the authors was on the committee that picked which papers get in. It's probably why the highers ups have been so reluctant to change the culture at the conference because it would so negatively effect all the higher-ups' publication counts
I do some work in a certain field of digital signal processing. From time to time I look at the latest academic papers in that field and am always shocked by the poor quality. Probably 90% of the papers couldn't be repeated due to a lack of source code , the worse ones just have Simulink 'blocks' to illustrate the code. The techniques in this field used by industry for commercial products are never mentioned it's as if they exist on another planet. I can only presume anyone who knows what they are doing in this field works in industry while what remains in Universities have to produce a certain number of papers every year despite the quality. It really is a waste of everyones time and effort.
Indeed, during my undergrad I have seen the exact same behaviour with the Electrical Engineering faculty(at one of the most prestigious in the EMEA region). Most of the so called academical output from my department was hidden source code simulink visual spaghettis closed for scrutiny. It seemed to me as the profs spun out a web of lies out of EE jargon plus matlab blackboxes.
"If you see one cockroach in your house, there are probably many more". It's great that this fraud was finally exposed, but sad that there are probably many more similar instances going on unnoticed.
This is really shocking and heart breaking. Really angry that University of Florida did nothing and the professor is still in the position and giving speech.
It's bad enough that ethical people find themselves in a situation like this. But when suicide is the result, it's tragic.
Finding out you've thrown your lot in with - and been trapped by - scumbags that you thought you could trust - must be very difficult. But suicide is not a solution ... you lose all. The best choice is to walk away.
Meanwhile, I'd guess this will be branded a "bad apple", but of course the worst apple in the bunch is more of a sign of issues in the whole farm/system.
Of course colleges are overloaded with managerial vampires that are supposed to be overseeing this better than the old days where there wasn't as much tuition/loan money flowing through the system.
Higher ed administration is broken, financing is broken, research is broken, phd programs are broken, adjunct professorship is broken, there is corruption everywhere.
The paper is "3D-based video recognition acceleration by leveraging temporal locality". Haven't found a copy online. I'd expect a paper like that to come with examples and a link to Github. Why fake something like that? Either the paper is ignored, or someone implements it and finds it doesn't work.
I spent a lot of time in my career implementing and comparing different algorithms based on published papers. This might surprise you but:
- Most of them don't publish any kind of code or only snippets.
- Most of the algorithms are incomplete (think "we add constant M here into equation tuned by an expert"). The chosen constants aren't documented and they're tweaked before publication to maximize results for the given dataset.
- Most results are only good for the chosen dataset and based on very fine tuned constants (which is the reason they're not published). As soon as you apply them to a slightly different dataset they fall apart.
- Even if you get code for a given paper, it's usually a disatrous mess of quality and runs only on the given researchers computer with given version of Windows and a weird patched version of Python they found somewhere in the internet.
There ARE better written papers out there. But most of them are just made to publish "something" and get the publishing metrics up. That means minimum effort for actual research and maximum effort to tweak and tune results to make them look good.
It's tragic that academics have no metric for quality in published work.
The only metrics are journal status and citation count, which is partly why we're in this mess.
There should be some form of public post-review attached to all public work, with explicit requirements for rigour and reproducibility.
Some domains - like math - do at least attempt this, more or less. But CS doesn't seem to.
Aside from motivations - now skewed towards business outcomes - the underlying problem is that paper publishing as the gold standard for disseminating new research is a 17th century process and badly needs an update.
> I'd expect a paper like that to come with examples and a link to Github
You'd expect that, but you'd probably be surprised in a lot of cases. One of the strong reasons why good conferences mandate code nowadays.
The quality of the code, and whether it actually reproduces what you claim, isn't checked systematically though. That's down to the reviewers' enthusiasm, and whether they actually have the technical means to reproduce. That's not a given for more niche robotics or high-profile AI applications where hardware can be an issue.
> Why fake something like that? Either the paper is ignored, or someone implements it and finds it doesn't work.
The "formal" academic world does not care one bit about stuff working or not. It's all about self-promotion, papers and meaningless academic rituals and procedures.
(And it's even worse outside of the US let me put it that way)
As someone with a little experience in ML research, I feel like outside of the top 5-10 conferences, there rarely is a code repo [1]. I think an even bigger issue is that even when a repo is provided, it's often poorly documented, contains dead links, or _hard to reproduce on other machines_ without code-wrangling.
Tangentially related, even popular repos can have implementations of models that differ from the paper cited. So, who knows how far errors can propagate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Somethings that’s personally bothered me for a long time is that as far as I know, there’s now current way to check the test accuracy on imagenet, as the test server has been gone for awhile. Yet somehow people still report a test accuracy…
I’m shocked at how little I can find about this. Maybe I’m naive but I thought there would be more coverage on what’s going on. Sadly it’s just this blogger, the school doesn’t seem to be commenting. What could take so long?
I never understand why phd students who are going through mental torture don't just quit their phd program. I mean ... noone can force you to finish a shi*y phd right? Why not just drop out and pursue sth that actually fulfills you? With your Masters degree / diploma in your pocket and the vast theoretical knowledge you have all doors standjng eide open for you, don't you?
- it looks really really really bad on your CV to not finish a graduate degree. I dropped out for health reasons with an A+ GPA and still have to delicately explain what happened to interviewers. It looks worse than just having a masters degree.
- “just one more year of misery and then your career prospects will increase dramatically” is a very powerful argument and not just a sunk-cost fallacy.
- young people in PhD programs tend to have a lot of identity and psychological investment in getting their PhD and working as a researcher. For most PhD students, the occupation that most fulfills them is their research. It strikes me as very strange that you think PhD students have some secret marketable passion that they would pursue but instead they somehow got stuck in graduate school. Speaking for myself: a PhD program was the only feasible part for me to do something fulfilling. My current work as a software developer is tedious and boring by comparison and, frankly, not at all what I wanted to do with my life.
- PhD students rarely have any savings and their meager stipends are the only income they have. So “pursue [something] that actually fulfills you” is most likely impossible, since that ‘something’ is probably not a routine office/engineering job.
> it looks really really really bad on your CV to not finish a graduate degree.
That's something people who have no real world experience say. For one thing, nobody is forcing you to put any information on your CV. Lastly, only the lowest of the low judge such things so harshly that they won't even interview you.
This is one of those things that's hard to see until you're out though. Combined with the fact that inside academia there definitely is a bias against those who don't finish the program ("they couldn't hack it") this perspective is relatively rare for those who are in it, especially those without prior industry experience.
I am kind of frustrated that I am reporting my real-world experience after having been “out” of academia for 10 years and yet you and another person are assuming that I don’t have any real world experience and am just lacking perspective! Please read the comment! And that “bias” you mention 100% exists outside of academia.
You're right and I apologize, I did not mean to imply that just because your experience was different than mine meant it was invalid or not true.
My intent was to point out that the parent's perspective is not necessarily a common one inside of academia, and even though that unfortunately isn't the experience you had, it's regardless one that would mostly come about after grad school anyway.
In computer science, though, I have several “ABD” (all but dissertation) acquaintances that have had fine and lucrative industrial careers. I don’t see it as such a black mark.
My point was that PhD dropouts can land on their feet but it’s not a question of “following their passions and do something that makes you happy.” It’s really a question of “give up your passions and do something pragmatic.”
My career in software is also “fine” and even somewhat “lucrative” given that I don’t work at for-profit companies. But it’s not how I pictured my life going and it was a difficult adjustment.
It’s tough to make the jump. Part of the trouble is that pure science and research is what interests and fulfills you -- in principle. It just doesn’t pay enough, and only a tiny fraction of researchers see real success. To make the jump into industry, you have to admit to yourself that a) the academic life isn’t what you hoped for and never will be; and b) you, personally, will never make the kind of scientific breakthrough you still dream about.
For all that you may be able to go from a tiny salary to a six-figure salary, you still need to admit failure at some level, and that’s hard.
Similar to the reason why someone is married the wrong one but just can't get himself/herself to divorce. Certain types of people tend to be very averse of sunk cost even if they are well-aware that they will lose more if keep going. This is very unfortunate though.
I found that academically excellent people are especially easy to get in this type of trap -- maybe because that "never give up" and "overcome the difficulties" rather than giving up is engrained by the process.
This is such a sad story. Nothing can bring back the dead, but we can try to prevent a repeat of the events, and ensure that their death was not in vain. It is heartening to see that ACM took the investigation seriously, and actually did discover and condemn serious academic fraud. However, while I can guess who is has been banned from submitting to ACM conferences for the next 15 years, apparently it is ACMs policy not to announce publicly! Just look at the report[0], it's completely anonymous. Am I mistaken? What is the justification for this? At a practical level, how am I as a co-chair of an ACM event supposed to enforce a ban if I don't know who is banned?
It's rather sad that you can guess from the title that this is probably about academia. I have to say though that I can't confirm any of this for my institutions, professors, and fields of research. I've always worked with honest and caring professors, who cared more about correctness of results than headlines and fame.
In both academia and corporate I've known many who find it difficult to stand up for themselves. It is already a difficult and yet courageous act to express a different view to your professor, boss, employer, etc. Things are never the same if speaking out. There are those who simply just do what is told. Simply Leave. Or fall through a deep hole when there is imbalance when taking on an action that is against what you stand up for.
Don't let the Chinese name of the professor fool you. This happens all the time with Americans, Europeans, Chinese, Indian, etc professors and "peer" reviews.
It's just that usually there's no conscience to take it bad from the student, on the contrary, it's the thrill of being published that prevails.
Sad story. An interesting question is if you were him, what to do?
My intuitive thought is simply to quit, and start another academic pursuit (assuming you are really interesting in science and research); it could be rather hard, but that is life. LIFE never goes easy.
1. When under an abuser, frequently you internalize their narrative.
2. Allegedly the professor threatened to kill him if he "ruined his reputation."
3. If he was an international student (I do not know if he was), he could quite literally lose his visa for losing his spot in the program.
4. If your advisor hates you and you haven't managed to safely switch advisors, good luck getting a letter for any future academic pursuits. (Unless you're willing to speak out about what happened, or you have someone willing to write an explanatory letter on your behalf.)
5. When you're being abused and threatened with retaliation for speaking out and so on, you aren't thinking rationally. It's really traumatic and scary, and sometimes it's hard to imagine a path out that is tolerable, and death sounds safer and easier.
We in academia need to respond by setting up better systems to recognize and safely escape abusive situations without permanent harm to one's career and mental or physical wellbeing. And also by making those systems known to students and very easy to access and use.
I know someone who knew his prof was doing some weird shit. He came up with a story and took the summer off from working in the lab, and went and worked for another influential prof. Impressed the new folk (worked his ass off cuz he knew he had to get out) and it worked. He switched labs by the end of summer.
Agree, I don’t think it’s worth it to end your life because of work. But, obviously, everyone is different. Also, we don’t know how he felt. He was under a ton of stress, for sure.
the IEEE probably won't do anything. We've been trying for 2 years to even get an e-mail reply from them on the issue, let alone say anything useful. See the whole story here:
https://pbzcnepu.net/isca/timeline.html
Can you (the family) sue UF/the professor over this? I feel like this is the only way now to make them to take the responsibility after almost two years of nothingness.
It's a sad story.
The action of the student is difficult to understand in my opinion, and may have been the consequence of some other underlying issue. However, even if he suffered from of mental issues, the fact that he didn't get support speaks very badly for the university and the supervisor.
The lack of reaction from the university is also hard to justify. Even if one doesn't want to jump to conclusions about the professor, some temporary measure should have been taken, at least to reassure the family that due investigations were being done.
though it is more about the ACM/IEEE side of things rather than what was going on in Florida.
Many researchers seemed to know there was weird stuff going on with peer-review at ISCA, but if you asked the researchers they'd just shrug and more or less say something to the effect of "don't hate the player, hate the game"
I read it and the thing doesn't make sense: so the author is complaining that the victim knew the names of the reviewers? Who cares? What does this have to do with anything? Also there seems to be almost no relation to the conference with the suicide except for the pressure his supervisor put on him.
The other thing from the web page is murky, they basically found breached confidential info on the victims laptop. Ok, this is more serious, but again, this is seems to me also a total sideshow;what am I missing here.
Same reason the conference allowed the professor to present the paper even though the first author committed suicide over it and left a suicide letter which blamed the misconduct and the professor —- nobody in academia gives a shit. Don’t mistake the penalty for integrity. These are the same guys that abuse vulnerable students to fuel their ego-trip (which they call careers).
University administrations are all in prairie dog mode. They are all run by fat unneeded administrative fat cats, charging wayyyyy tooooo much money, are all frightened of a bubble burst in higher ed that will cost an unknown number of institutions.
In situations like that, it is ripe for scapegoating a single institution that gets in the news for the wrong reasons.
Outside of the cream of the crop, large institutions in higher education are also tenuously tied to "reputation".
A couple bad runs, and you go from, say the University of Florida's current reputation (which is pretty good as the SEC schools go) to, say, the Mississippi schools which are basically second-rate Cal State schools academically being propped up by football money.
And then you might get dumped from your conference.
We are really sorry for these mistakes in langauge. Can you please send an email to huixiangvoice@gmail.com with details of these language mistakes so that we can try to fix it. Thanks
We are really sorry for these mistakes in langauge. Can you please send an email to huixiangvoice@gmail.com with details of these language mistakes so that we can try to fix it. Thanks
Sincerely, I wouldn't worry about it. This is a powerfully written, emotive, bombshell. Anyone who is genuinely worrying about apposite word choice and non-native syntax is missing the wood for the trees.
Of course. It just makes it quite a bit more difficult to read; I need to spend some effort trying to figure out the exact nuance the author was trying to convey.
In a way, you have respect the integrity of the PhD student. But also, publishing a fraudulent conference paper in this field (neural networks), the real damage to anything is minimal.
Nobody expects a random paper in this field to be particularly true or useful. A lot of papers are trivial applications of old ideas, obfuscated behind complicated word soup. Or false good results due to buggy code, which you can never check because they don't publish the source code. Or useless or irreproducible due to many other reasons. The field produces also good results, but you need to follow bigger trends, as individual publications are mostly just noise.
I just want to note that nothing caused suicide other than his decision to kill himself. I don't condone suicide as a method of protest. The damage to the family and the person are too severe. He talked about another world in his letter. That doesn't happen and I hope he meant that metaphorically, because otherwise he really did not know what he was doing. I wish media stopped reporting on suicides except in statistics. Not that I'm saying academic fraud is okay, it's not, it's evil and I would hope they get jail. But the media should not put suicide on a pedestal.
When I had a job I didn’t want, in a city i didn’t want, no kids, no wife, and prospects abounding, it was easy to speak truth to power. I did it, and I was right technically, businesswise, and morally. What a win...(?)
Now, I have my dream job, my dream location, my own damn house, and my family. -Whole thing feels like a dream I might wake up from if I am not careful... and I feel totally weighed down when it comes to speaking up in a way I would have never countenanced a few years ago.
All that to say, this poor kid... I can only imagine the incentive structures that led him to choose this route, but I know academia being f’ed is a big part of it, and it ticks me off.