That's an interesting wrinkle. If anything, externally funded international students seem like exactly the case where you'd still want the interview, since the funding answers "who pays for this?" but not "does this person have the background and understanding to do the work?"
The tricky part is that live review is much more expensive than async review. But maybe that just means we were getting away with a cheap proxy because it happened to work reasonably well.
Unfortunately, from my experience, forcing people to talk about their research to an audience mostly just condemns introverts and people with social anxiety. Being able to formulate your thoughts clearly in writing and in speech are two radically different skills. I've seen world class scientists give the most horrible conference presentations to the point where everyone in the audience agreed they'd rather have just read the paper when it came out, because they had no clue what he said while the author is amazing at writing. If we want to switch academia and to purely oral skills, you'll probably need to replace a ton of people. And in the industry these fields are already dominated by fast talking bullshitters.
The key shift seems to be from "can you produce mathematics?" to "do you understand mathematics?"... Those used to be correlated strongly enough that a thesis or paper could serve as evidence of both. If AI breaks that correlation, evaluating people through defenses, discussion and live problem solving suddenly makes a lot more sense.
I kind of agree, but I will push back just to work through my conflicted feelings. In America 50% of people basically can't read. I think the official stat is 48% read at or BELOW a 6th grade level. The average American reads 0 books a year, shamefully myself included. Especially post covid, there is a serious degradation in social skills and using a phone instantly makes people more comfortable and less likely to socialize. The mobile gaming industry is 148B this year.
All that is to say, I don't think this forum is indicative of wider behavior AND smart people definitely inflate the value of "work" and "productivity" they do on their phone. We will never know unless we get Apple data, but I suspect a phone might be like 90% entertainment and 5% communication for most people. Maybe 5% is semi-productive work email, reading an article, etc.
I guess I am not sure if it matters where their attention goes. Although, it might be a bit of selective memory in how social people were before phones.
The first rule reduces platform power. The second potentially requires platforms to build even larger classification and moderation systems. I'm very much in favor of the first, but I don't think they belong under the same conceptual umbrella.
And the incentives are arguably worse than QA: you get little credit if the result replicates, and potentially a lot of grief if it doesn't. Novel results build careers. Checking them mostly doesn't
I'd be pretty wary of stretching wire fraud law to cover this. Prosecutors deciding whether scientific results are fraudulent sounds like it could create its own set of ugly incentives
Fraud law doesn't need to be stretched, academic fraud is covered and criminally prosecutable in the USA for decades. It has to be because they're using these results to apply for grants paid from tax monies.
Occasionally someone is even prosecuted! Unfortunately, even when the government wins, the institutions just treat the resulting fines as a cost of business. See the Dana Farber Cancer Center: prosecuted by a third party on behalf of the government, found guilty of faking their science for a decade+, paid the fine - and nothing anywhere on the DFCC website mentions anything about it.
> and nothing anywhere on the DFCC website mentions anything about it
That doesn't really surprise or bother me - I wouldn't exactly say it was a coverup just because they aren't heralding some major Fed case against them on their own website. But I do find it shitty that the Wikipedia page of Dr. Laurie Glimcher, who was president of the institute at the time, had some papers retracted and apparently resigned over the issue, makes it sound like she just retired because she completed her mission and has no mention of the scandal.
The bigger issue I see is that someone wasn't prosecuted, just the institution. I didn't spend a ton of time looking, but AFAICT no individual faced any serious consequences beyond "reputational damage". This is why the "corporations are people" shit is so aggravating. If corporations are people, then some people who committed these crimes should have faced legal consequences, not just have their malfeasance paid out by the organization.
Prosecutors (and juries) already are expected to adjudicate fraud across cases that IMO are much more ambiguous than this.
I think it's fair to debate whether it's a good thing that, as I heard it put once, "everything is wire fraud" (i.e. lots of crimes require lying on documents that are sent electronically and thus become federal crimes), but I see zero reason to think that committing academic fraud (which, again, is done for personal gain and causes real, measurable harm to others) is any less of a crime than lots of other things that are prosecuted as wire fraud.
Perhaps we need a new/updated law to cover this kind of thing. This sort of academic fraud should absolutely be criminalized, but I'm not sure I'm the biggest fan of the "everything is wire fraud" approach to achieving that.
>Peer reputation and self policing works in a system where no money is at stake.
It works in systems where money is at stake too. You need a high trust, conscientous society. Doesn't mean that having one solves the issue entirely. The ocassional bad apple will fraud there too, but it wont be rampant enough to be a systemic problem.
>When your career and income are at stake, why would you take the risk of opposing Dan Ariely? Only someone who was already rich could do that.
You don't need independently wealthy scientists to expose fraud.
You just need an environment where if regular salary dependent scientists expose fraud, they're not punished for it.
If you don't have that, sure, then you need independently wealthy scientists to dare.
Do you know a trick to pay my bills in self-respect? Most of my creditors demand I pay in money.
Edit: For some reason this account has been restricted. Goodbye HN, see you on the next sockpuppet. I wasn't expecting an account named after a racial slur to last so long.
>Do you know a trick to pay my bills in self-respect? Most of my creditors demand I pay in money.
Nobody said that shit. You can pay your builds with the monetary salary from doing your job honestly. That was my first point.
If many people discover that such a salary is not enough to get by, or if many people aren't content with "enough to get by" and decide to perform academic fraud for extras, then that's a society that already lost the plot. That was my second point.
At this point the surprising part isn't that another Ariely result has problems, it's that some of these datasets apparently went decades without this kind of basic scrutiny
I'm really sorry for your loss. There's not much to say to something like that except that I hope this treatment came too late for fewer people than it did for your sister
reply