[tom_mellior]

> If I'm reading conference papers, why would I worry about whether one of them is the product of review collusion?

Because the one you are reading may have crowded out a better one. Even if the current review system is essentially random, replacing it with something that is essentially a contest of well-connectedness is worse. Young researchers with good ideas but fewer connections, or people from less well-known institutions would have their ideas suppressed.

So you should be worrying about stagnation, and about not reading what might actually be new and exciting.

[thaumasiotes]

None of that reflects negatively on the paper. There is no additional caution warranted when reading papers. That's just a question of "are you happy with the state of the world?". You can think about that question any time.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> None of that reflects negatively on the paper.

I think it does. Good papers are written by people who care about doing good research, whose primary motivation is to do good research. Such people will not accept to collude or commit academic fraud to get their papers published, because they are idealistic and are in research because they want to do useful work. To such people, committing fraud is anathema, for personal reasons that have nothing to do with economic or other incentives.

There are such people in academia but they are also crowded out, to borrow tom_mellior's turn of phrase, from others, who don't hesitate to commit academic fraud to get published and who don't give two flying figs about the quality of their own work. This is obviously a concerning state of affairs that can only be detrimental to the overall quality of research.

So I'm sorry but you're dismissing the issue out of hand without having thought about all the consequences. Academic fraud is like, I don't know, broken windows? It just perverts everything around it and creates a black hole of bullshit that sucks everything in it. Good research cannot thrive in such conditions.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Actually, today an article was posted to HN (not by me) that points to Basquiat's parable of the broken window:

The parable of the broken window was introduced by French economist Frédéric Bastiat in his 1850 essay "Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas" ("That Which We See and That Which We Do Not See") to illustrate why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is not actually a net benefit to society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

I think this is relevant to our discussion, in particular the concept of "opportunity costs":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost

In microeconomic theory, opportunity cost is the loss of the benefit that could have been enjoyed if the best alternative choice was chosen instead.[1]