<story><title>Cracking down on research fraud</title><url>https://undark.org/2020/07/23/cracking-down-on-research-fraud</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>opportune</author><text>All three of those examples are missing a step of like 5-20 years in the middle. Nobody is &lt;i&gt;running&lt;/i&gt; a venture fund as a 22 year old ivy grad (barring someone who&amp;#x27;s taking over for their family member, but in that case it has nothing to do with being an ivy grad), nobody is running the FED right out of a PhD, nobody is a director at a big corporation right out of a PhD.&lt;p&gt;Presumably once those people are in such high-power positions, they also have a track record of real accomplishments behind them; it&amp;#x27;s certainly possible they&amp;#x27;ve lied and cheated their entire career but it&amp;#x27;s definitely less likely they&amp;#x27;ll make it that far that way.</text></item><item><author>logicslave</author><text>The root of the problem is that we allow people with high esteemed credentials to run society. They jumped through a hoop.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You got straight As at 14 - 18 years old and got into an ivy league school as a result? Here run this venture fund.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You got a PhD in Economics with a good publication by P-hacking your secret data? Here take a run at the FED with power over the US Economy. Your Phd shows that you are the man for the job.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You got a PhD in ML by making some incremental improvement on some already existing model and then doing massive hyper parameter tuning? Here, become director of research at this big corporation.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Research will never be fully productive in this system, there are too many people who have too much to gain from gaming the publication system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>logicslave</author><text>Part of the point is that the gap in the middle often doesn&amp;#x27;t matter. I&amp;#x27;ve hung around the Stanford crowd and as I enter my thirties I am awestruck by the opportunities they have regardless of what they have done since graduation. The credential is almost all that matters, as long as they dont mess up massively.&lt;p&gt;A common path is:&lt;p&gt;Graduate Stanford =&amp;gt; Work at Mckinsey =&amp;gt; Get hired into VC.&lt;p&gt;Graduate Stanford =&amp;gt; Raise 15 Million dollar series A with your buddy =&amp;gt; Doesn&amp;#x27;t matter what happens you will end up rich.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not a cynical opinion, I have seen it myself and I am doing very well for myself. I worked under an Economics PhD who was the number one in his class (top 5 phd program) and graduated top of his undergrad at UPenn. His incompetence relative to his credentials shattered my respect for the way that we allocate positions of power</text></comment>
<story><title>Cracking down on research fraud</title><url>https://undark.org/2020/07/23/cracking-down-on-research-fraud</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>opportune</author><text>All three of those examples are missing a step of like 5-20 years in the middle. Nobody is &lt;i&gt;running&lt;/i&gt; a venture fund as a 22 year old ivy grad (barring someone who&amp;#x27;s taking over for their family member, but in that case it has nothing to do with being an ivy grad), nobody is running the FED right out of a PhD, nobody is a director at a big corporation right out of a PhD.&lt;p&gt;Presumably once those people are in such high-power positions, they also have a track record of real accomplishments behind them; it&amp;#x27;s certainly possible they&amp;#x27;ve lied and cheated their entire career but it&amp;#x27;s definitely less likely they&amp;#x27;ll make it that far that way.</text></item><item><author>logicslave</author><text>The root of the problem is that we allow people with high esteemed credentials to run society. They jumped through a hoop.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You got straight As at 14 - 18 years old and got into an ivy league school as a result? Here run this venture fund.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You got a PhD in Economics with a good publication by P-hacking your secret data? Here take a run at the FED with power over the US Economy. Your Phd shows that you are the man for the job.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You got a PhD in ML by making some incremental improvement on some already existing model and then doing massive hyper parameter tuning? Here, become director of research at this big corporation.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Research will never be fully productive in this system, there are too many people who have too much to gain from gaming the publication system.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aspenmayer</author><text>That some aspects of the self-fulfilling nepotistic bureaucracies are meritocratic begs the question if those meritocratic elements only exist to justify the nepotism, and indirectly, the gatekeeping meritocracy.</text></comment>