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A comment on ‘A very disturbing picture’: another retraction for controversial physicist. Parent comment

Re:‘A very disturbing picture’: another retraction for contr... by rcxdude on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @02:28PM (#36882560)
How is it a slap in the face? The point is the metrics by which academia judges science have been divorced from what actually produces good science for a while (and you'll find very few scientists who disagree with that), but it does reward cheaters quite well.
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Re:‘A very disturbing picture’: another retraction for contr... by shortlongterm on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @02:49PM (#36882906)
Short term or long term?

Sure in the short term dishonesty might work for a scientist but long term? Legacy after death? I'm not so sure on that.

Surely the conditions for being a professional academic are much more favorable than times in the past. (By virtue only that University is more accessible to more people today than any other time)

Just because we see flaws today doesn't mean that those flaws can not be 'fixed'. (Nor that we won't discover new flaws and new fixes: engineering is an interative process).

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Re:‘A very disturbing picture’: another retraction for contr... by rcxdude on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @03:47PM (#36883802)
Well, cheaters are generally more interested in the short term than the long term, and non-cheaters have to content with it too, before they can get to the long term.

> Surely the conditions for being a professional academic are much more favorable than times in the past. (By virtue only that University is more accessible to more people today than any other time)

If anything this has made things worse in the current system, because it has grown so much more competitive. Competition is good only so far as success in the competition is based on contributing to the overall goal, and academia lacks a good alignment between that and rewards, so the competition has some fairly significant negative effects.

I agree there are likely ways to fix the current system, but it will require a concerted effort from many directions, as the current incentive structure rewards many in the current system for perpetuating it.

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