[sbalamurugan]

Another lofty comment about honesty in academia. No research job lets you spend 6 months redoing stuff just to make sure it’s 100%. It’s about publish what you have with enough disclaimers. It’s about convincing the reviewers to get the paper in. Rest will be resolved later.

Classic cases are the Bell labs guy finding organic semiconductors and fermi lab guy finding new elements. They both were just making up stuff which they believed existed but just needed work to be found and published. They would make up experimental data to support existence of theoretical things. The assumption was just publish this first, get the accolades then use it to get money to get someone to eventually do this properly. But they just predicted stuff which weren’t true. Nobody knows the amount of bullshit that was made up that eventually turned out to be true.

All of this because scientists these days are not expected to work on things. They are expected to produce results. Nobody is giving passionate people time and space to explore things. It’s all about results now.

The irony is that the reward for running the rat race is freedom from rat race. Postdocs publish random crap to boost numbers for their tenure which they think will relieve them of this stupidity and let them focus on pure research. but once they catch the tigers tail they gotta keep running.

[jldugger]

> No research job lets you spend 6 months redoing stuff just to make sure it’s 100%.

These jobs do exist[1], and we as a society need to figure out how to stop organizing research around a single manager (professor) with zero meaningful oversight.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/leu2016193#