[dnautics]

I’m also going to suppose that in order to find truth, the basic prerequisite is that you, as a researcher, have to be brutally honest – first and foremost, with yourself and about the quality of your own work. Here one immediately encounters a contradiction, as such honesty appears to have a very minor role in many people’s agendas. Very quickly after your initiation in the academic world, you learn that being “too honest” about your work is a bad thing and that stating your research’s shortcomings “too openly” is a big faux pas. Instead, you are taught to “sell” your work, to worry about your “image”, and to be strategic in your vocabulary and where you use it.

contrast with the article and discussion at:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6353957

[gioele]

The problem with being "too honest" about your work is that you would be the only one doing it.

When you read a "scientific" paper, you read it expecting it to be a sweetened account of the reality. The test have obviously been performed using only few samples; out of the the ten described features of a system, only the two described in depth are currently implemented; the source is not available because it does not work on the famous really hard cases of the class of problems it should solve.

The system is so polluted that if you start being as honest as you should be, the reviewers will think that you have done even less.