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disclaimer: I'm a university professor, though in a european country and not in health-rrlated area The article is excessively negative in tone, and very dramatic and aggressive. I have found many people adjacent to academia, drop outs, or even some inside, very disenchanted and angry at how it works. And it's true, the sets of incentives, structures and political organisation in academia don't relate at all to academic excellence, and are something we have to "suffer". I wish we could come up with a better set of incentives, but it's very hard to do in a mostly vocational and passion-based activity. So what people have come up is structure the incentives along the chores (eg teaching) and easily measurable results (eg publications). And whenever you come up with an incentive structure, some people will game it. And the current state of publication stress (publish or perish) is extreme and counterproductive. But please note that these measurement requirements and incentives are imposed from outside academia. Of course, I'm not saying leave us to our devices, academia is nepotistic and political enough. But the system sure could use some overhaul. Suggestions welcome. On the other hand, this "fraud" is incentive fraud, but not "truth" fraud. The way science Truth works is by accumulation of imperfect, even erroneous results, leading to an ever more refined understanding of the world. Scientists don't just blindly trust others, even if they cite each other (nowadays, citations are a political and incentive-gaming tool more than actual references). So these massive scale frauds don't bother us so much because they don't make understanding necessarily go backwards. Of course the payer feels it's a waste of money, but in academia we see money as support for research, which is mostly failed anyways because you only make discoveries by failing and failing again. And progress in knowledge is nowadays still going on, even in the medical fields. And academia still works, much as healthcare and compulsory education, becausemany people feel a calling to do these professions properly, even if it doesn't seem so from outside. So let's be optimistic, even while trying to come up with improvements to the current model. PS: So sorry for the wall of text |
I have mixed feelings about this article. I agree with the sense of ignored crisis it points to, but also think it doesn't understand the problems with the solutions it recommends, or maybe misunderstands the sources of the problems, like you're saying.
Academics is different from finance maybe in that outside of outright fraud, things are murky. What one person considers "unscientific" another might consider perfectly reasonable or even rigorous, and vice versa. I've seen debates like this, where the two sides both consider the other unscientific and theoretically and methodologically unrigorous. I don't see the outright fraud as the core of the problems either, it's an extreme version of something that exists because of rotten incentive structures. Getting rid of it is akin to replacing the roof on a house that has rotten foundations: important, but not solving the problem.
The problems in academics can't be easily reduced to one thing. There's lots of extremely competent people working under a broken model of reality, one that assumes that such competence is rare rather than common, that progress is due to single individuals rather than collaborative groups, administrations looking for money from research rather than money for research, fame rather than truth, and so forth and so on. Then there's the other side of the coin, employers using degrees to avoid competent training and hiring, reducing people to specific degrees etc.
Increasingly I see the problems with academics as pervasive to society (at least US society), something deeper, just incentivized and maybe manifest more clearly because it's so broken when applied to academics. I don't think it's a coincidence that health care and academics have both seen huge inflation in the last several decades, for example, and are both huge sources of controversy in US society. I think the average people working in those fields are doing so in good faith, but I also think there's systemic pressures that create huge problems and bad actors in both, and there's enormous reluctance in both to change things because of power structures and poor understandings from the rest of society about what's going on.