Its odd how I viewed academia as a beautiful place where people were judged by merit not by politics. Then I joined it and realized its even more cutthroat than corporate politics, I guess you cant escape human fallibility no matter the system since all systems are reflections of human nature.
Former solar researcher here, had the same experience.
I'll summarize it like this:
- join one of the most prestigious laboratories for my master's thesis in the world
- be assigned work based on a paper published in the same lab by a previous researcher
- can't replicate the results for s*t for months, put in insane overtime hours getting ridiculously good at all the processes, still nothing
- randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by the system in the publication is literally impossible, but by raising the voltage you can easily fake out the amount of electricity generated by the system. Nobody really caught it before because you need some very intimate experience with those systems, and it's just one random (albeit important) point.
- ask why this happens
- she explains that only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid
- she explains that only professors that run labs with a huge number of citations can find good funding
- only good funding can allow you to get the material, equipment and countless number of bodies (phds) to run as many experiments as possible and thus grow your position in the scientific world
Essentially there's way too many incentives to cheat and ignore the cheating for all the people involved.
And due to the fact that as soon as you enter a niche (and literally everything is a niche in science) everybody knows each other toxic things happen all around.
I wanted to be a researcher, but having wasted ultimately 7 months of my life trying to get numbers that were impossible to get, and having understood it was ALL about money (no funds -> no researchers/equipment -> papers -> citations -> funds) and politics I called it quits.
I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.
My mother worked in academia on the teaching and administrative side and said it was pretty much the same there too. In her experience even at public universities, it was all about the money. In order for the department or faculty to justify itself, it needs to bring in revenue, and the number one way to do that (along with those research grants) is international students. But the most reliable source of international students who can afford the fees are not necessarily the world's best and brightest, they're the kids of wealthy elites who see education as a business transaction - we pay, you pass our kids. So the syllabus is adjusted to suit, and the teaching methods are adjusted to suit, and in the end everybody suffers because the system becomes structured around keeping the money train coming in. The education still happens, just like the research still happens, but it's happening in a suboptimal fashion, or as a side-effect rather than as the primary focus.
Sometimes I think about tapping out of private industry and getting into academia because in my imagination at least the work would be more pure, but then I think back to the stories my mother told me and realize most likely it isn't.
I agree that the only answer seems to be serious change at the highest levels of government, i.e. revolution. Aside from advocating for that, it seems the best we can do is try exist within these systems and find niches where we can create value for society without feeling too much like our morals are being compromised in the process. It's not easy.
Great story and it shows what everybody knows but won't say - normal academics are the frauds. Not just mysterious strangers in foreign countries, paper mills, etc. but normal medium or high status academics in prestigious universities in western countries doing the fraud themselves.
You can say it's not their fault - they're forced into it because it's the only way to succeed. But it's still their fault. I remember a case of a politician in China being arrested for corruption and he said that the only way to reach his position was with corruption. Yea he was probably right but he was still corrupt.
For the curious, the laboratory I'm talking about is the Laboratory of Photonics Interfaces[1] at the EPFL in Switzerland ran by Michael Gratzel[2].
I want to stress out that the lab is great, the people in there are extremely hardworking, Gratzel is a great scientist, but at the end of the day research is what it is and stuff like this can slip under both your lab managers and reviewers. I have never ever seen the slightiest indication that lab staff ever encouraged nor tolerated such stuff, but it's easy for it to happen and there's not enough incentives (nor possibility) to review every single experiment.
But the reproducibility problem does exist and the number of scientists tweaking numbers by tiny percentages here and there to make sure they publish is relevant.
I can understand mistakes happening and going unnoticed. But from what that lady told you, it sounds like they have a culture of sweeping mistakes under the rug. Was the affected paper retracted or at least a correction published? If not, they're still benefiting from the fake success which makes it unethical even if it's not technically academic fraud.
There are so many other ways to make money that don't involve crime. And there are even many crimes that make more money that are far less harmful to society.
> I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.
This is just aggravating the problem. Science is mostly fraud because it's mostly done on behalf of a funder who doesn't want it. It's easier to write a paper describing the results you'd like to get than to actually get those results. And the funding agency is indifferent between those two things. So mostly you just get the papers.
Feels like the incentives are backward and it pushes people to publish fast instead of verify. You could try HifiveStar to track and surface trustworthy feedback signals across sources, it helped me sift noise from solid input. The result is fewer wild claims and more time spent on work that holds up.
The current system has essentially no requirement of reproducibility.
Having a paper that only allows reproducible experiments (where there's funding for random labs to reproduce results) may be difficult, or an utopia, or whatever, but not aggravating for sure.
It's aggravating the problem because you're proposing to put that indifferent funder in charge of ensuring quality. There are two problems here:
(1) This is not a recipe for actually getting any quality.
(2) By virtue of providing the funding, they already are in charge. They're not going to get better results by wishing harder. But they can easily waste more money than they already do.
Your mental model seems to be that the government received a mandate to cause research to happen, and they did that as faithfully as they could, with the only problem being that we forgot to specify that we didn't want fake research. So if we change the mandate to "cause non-fake research", the kind of research we get will change.
But that makes no sense. "Non-fake" was always a requirement. It was an unenforced requirement because it didn't matter to anyone, but you aren't proposing to change that.
Reproducibility can be a working requirement before publication when the progress is expected to be serious.
At ASTM the publishing company is non-profit and more non-academic industries pay for the (not cheap) publications every year. The employees are well-paid journalists and efficient bureaucrats specializing in continuous quality improvement themselves, highly skilled at organizing the scientists. The scientists are all volunteers.
>indifferent funder in charge of ensuring quality.
Nice not to have. Publication requires complete consensus of the volunteer scientists, and the institution is crafted to progress toward valid consensus.
It's all about quality from day zero.
In more ways than one, more than you can count actually.
So it didn't take 125 years to get that way, it had a better start than most, and has only gotten more strict over the recent decades as computer statistics became mainstream.
Edit: Forgot to mention, there's no eminence. Nobody's name appears at the top of the document, and almost nobody (still living) ever appears within the text.
Further edit: I guess you could say that ASTM is a product of the Industrial Revolution, and there hasn't been an equivalent Academic Revolution yet.
Seeking eminence costs more than making breakthroughs.
How else are you going to pay for lack of breakthroughs?
Some people aren't going to be capable of breakthroughs anyway, lots of them even know it from the beginning, so they naturally or intentionally seek different things using the same institutions and resources that could otherwise yield breakthroughs instead.
Edit: As a footnote suggested by my own question, you pay for lack of breakthroughs by building eminence out of thin air, if it wasn't obvious.
This is likely a generalized problem with basic science. In applied science you need to be very careful about fraud because ultimately the application of research findings will end up in customers hands who can and will pursue legal action if the original claims turn out to be false.
One thing that helps to counter this somewhat is that if your paper is proven to be wrong, the journal can force a retraction. A retraction isn't exactly career ending, but it is a huge deal and will have an impact on future jobs and funding.
my gut feeling is that the more famous a group/lab, the more likely there is some funny stuff going on. Smaller groups/labs are less cutthroat. But it also depends on the discipline...
> randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by the system in the publication is literally impossible
I'm interested in the apparent contradiction between the "tens of thousands of citations" credential for your evidently competent labmate who caught the fraud, and the "only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid" indictment of the evidently mediocre fraudster.
How much of the science that happens do you think is due to people like your labmate, who seems to have earned her citations organically with talent, and how much is due to the fraud? Are most citations still going to talented people?
My parents were both academics who built their careers in the 70s and 80s. I don't know that they had a perspective on fraud per se, but they did say that science used to be totally different—lots of money going into a smaller research community. But because each PI trains many PhDs, the research community has grown unsustainably and now funding is highly competitive. For the system to be sustainable, the vast majority of PhDs need to leave science, and there need to better exits for those people (or else there need to be many fewer PhD candidates and researchers need to stop relying on PhD candidates for labor). I wonder if the fraud is a consequence of this problem.
> I'm interested in the apparent contradiction between the "tens of thousands of citations" credential for your evidently competent labmate who caught the fraud, and the "only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid" indictment of the evidently mediocre fraudster.
Not every paper out there is fake and Yella Aswani [1], was an excellent PhD in Switzerland before becoming a full time professor in India.
That being said, some of her colleagues might have felt desperate to publish something meaningful before ending their PhD and cooked the numbers by that 8/10% that makes it impressive. Either that or they took an outlier result that overperformed for some reason (poor instrument calibration e.g.) and never investigated and just published.
Funny, as someone who works in private sector, I always had the opposite view of academia:
A zero-sum system based around a fixed pool of grants and positions that everyone competes for, and a terminal job ladder position where, once reached by successfully having competed for aforementioned grant $$, I become un-fireable.
I would have to sleep with a gun under my pillow in such a world.
There's already plenty of cheating in business, which is full of positive-sum win-win opportunities. I don't even want to imagine how badly I might behave in academia just in order to survive.
From 1945 to about 2000, academia in the western world was slowly growing. That made the pool of positions not-quite-zero-sum, and way too many people went into it expecting a much more genial environment.
If the pool grows at the same rate as the academics who need money from the pool, it's zero-sum. If the pool were ever to grow more slowly, then it's a negative-sum game. That's when all hell breaks loose -- by many accounts, this is unfolding now.
In other words, the academics do not grow the pool through their own actions, as in private business. They are forever reliant on the kindness of strangers.
That's not quite right. Academics do grow the pool through public outreach and demonstrating value to companies which lobby the government to fund them, but since there is usually one big pool (such as the NSF budget), it is impossible for people to grow their own pool directly. It's closer to working at a large company, where your impact on earnings is next to nonexistent and your career is determined by the beliefs of the people around you about your impacts on them.
Negative sum is the worst outcome. Only the cheaters win in that scenario and they slowly eat the legitimate players, then the weak cheats so only the biggest cheaters remain. The entire pool is then tainted.
We have acquired a couple such companies and the people that survived that environment are some of the most toxic players you ever meet. They are also really good at the game so they immediately rise to power and begin to devour their next victim.
You are un-fireable for the usual reasons for which people outside academia worry about being fired.
Layoffs aren't a thing in academia. Poor performance in the classroom isn't punishable. Failure to bring in grants isn't punishable. You can't be fired for disagreeing with your boss. You can (in most cases) publicly criticize the administration you work for, and advocate for many (yes, not all) controversial ideas.
That's an American thing. By default, you can fire anyone at any time for no reason. Universities then overcompensate and give extensive protections for tenured faculty.
In Europe, it's more common that a professor has roughly the same job security as a teenager in their first real job. There are some exceptions due to academic freedom, but they are mostly about the substance of the work rather than the performance in it. And other independent professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, and civil engineers, often have similar exceptions.
They are, but extremely infrequently and when they are it is minor numbers, at least at the largest universities. And when they are laid off it is for financial reasons not performance.
Look up "rubber rooms". They sequester teachers and professors accused of sexual harassment of children, and keep paying them, because they cannot be fired.
Look up teachers' and academics' unions (e.g. AAUP), and the contracts they have in place to keep them from being fired.
There's a more transparent and straightforward pathway to a lifetime appointment as a federal judge (which actually pays OK and has many social perks) than there is to a tenured professorship in most fields. Judges have Solomon-like-life-and-death power, and the lawyers who argue before them (often successful, high-status people in their own right) are professionally obligated to suck up.
By comparison almost all professorships are like becoming the most important hobo on a given street corner.
Yeah, it's mostly either students or academia who admire their hobo kings.
It's kind of like a sport like tennis. If you're in the system, you think that the world number 150 tennis player is amazing, but they barely make enough to afford travel to the matches.
In all fairness though, it's very difficult to become a judge. At least in my country, you have to have been both a defense lawyer and a prosecutor in order to become a judge. It takes many years of experience that is not easily gained.
At the state university in my smaller city, an actual professorship (not some adjunct) earns up towards $200k/year salary. Maybe pretty modest by FAANG standards, but for many people outside of tech that sounds like a lottery jackpot. So it's not just prestige, though that's on offer too.
Professors don't get the summer off. If you have a heavy teaching load, summers are your one window to get research work done. If you don't, like me, the difference between the summer and the rest of the year is its easier to find parking.
Fine, 3-4 months to think about interesting things all day long with basically zero expectation that you’ll be anywhere or show up to anything. Call it what you will.
I mean, its not completely untrue. You do not have set hours. You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs, depending on how despotic you want to be.
I do not have set hours, but I do have obligations. When a program officer wants to talk to you, and it's 6 AM because you're on the west coast, you say yes.
"You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs" is just untrue - there's always more work than there are people to do it, and I'm pretty sure a number of committees I'm on would be more than a little annoyed if I sent a postdoc.
Is it a job that has some nice properties to it? Yes. But the idea that we have summers "off", or that it's all time to contemplate blue sky research ideas, rather than go to curriculum meetings and work on monthly grant reports is a fantasy.
> When a program officer wants to talk to you, and it's 6 AM because you're on the west coast, you say yes.
Why? What happens if you as a tenured PI say no?
> "You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs" is just untrue - there's always more work than there are people to do it, and I'm pretty sure a number of committees I'm on would be more than a little annoyed if I sent a postdoc.
No this part is definitely true and I have firsthand experience of it. Your graduate students are paid less than minimum wage and are often immigrants from poorer countries. Often they are even paid zero by the PI. So they can be effectively serfs and beholden to you for literal survival.
Use your imagination. What's to stop you from recruiting a bunch of students and offloading all your grant writing to them, hunger games style?
Look, I know there are idealistic professors who put in the work. If that's you, thank you. But the system incentivizes what is effectively feudalism and the professors who take advantage of that climb faster than you and become program chairs. Acknowledgement of this perverse system is not an attack on you.
> Why? What happens if you as a tenured PI say no?
In the last lets say five years of my career, the range of possible consequences for this range from "Mildly annoying a colleague I like" to "Catastrophic outcomes for a 100+ million dollar research program".
Will I get fired? No. But we can't both argue that academia is incentivized toward grant-getting (which is true) and that pissing off the people who award and administer those grants is consequence free.
It also includes leaving a whole study section in the lurch (I was recruited for specific expertise, the meeting time was published in the Federal register, and then it had to move to an online format, which a 6 AM start for PST folks).
Or collaborators in various foreign countries who need to talk outside regular business hours.
A non-fixed schedule (and I only have one because I rarely teach - the times I do teach my schedule is much more rigid) is like unlimited paid leave. It's very nice, but it also has downsides - you can't reach for business hours. It works for me, but it also makes my GP go a little pale whenever I document my sleep schedule.
Ironically, the only colleague of mine I know who does do a good job with work boundaries does so by assertively working 9 to 5.
> Your graduate students are paid less than minimum wage and are often immigrants from poorer countries.
My unionized graduate students are paid considerably more than minimum wage.
> Use your imagination. What's to stop you from recruiting a bunch of students and offloading all your grant writing to them, hunger games style?
To be blunt? All our graduate students write a mock proposal as part of a professional development course. They are not good at writing proposals.
Beyond that, much of the actual work I do has nothing to do with what graduate students do. I'm not going to have a graduate student review and prepare my department's packets for this year for the Tenure and Promotion Committee. Or have yet another fight with IT. Or figure out how to best represent programs that exist in a multidisciplinary department so they both have a sense of identity but don't undermine a coherent whole (though I will ask their input on that, because it matters to them).
Academia has very real problems, including some of the ones discussed in this article. But Hacker News is very bad at understanding how academia actually works on a pragmatic level, including things like what being a professor is actually like, or how indirect costs work, etc. Even those who have been to graduate school struggle with it - partially because academia is bad at actually teaching to so-called "hidden curriculum" of how being a PI actually works.
> My unionized graduate students are paid considerably more than minimum wage.
This is not typical and you know it.
> To be blunt? All our graduate students write a mock proposal as part of a professional development course. They are not good at writing proposals.
That's the thing with hunger games, if they don't get good they don't survive. I've seen it. I know PIs who don't write a single one of their grants.
While maybe you don't abuse grad students and post-docs to do your job its simply not possible to say it doesn't happen unless you are willfully putting on blinders. Frankly, it sounds like you are in full denial of just how bad it can get.
But my entire field goes off NIH rates, which while not nearly high enough, are well above minimum wage. That's what I'm objecting to - the broad strokes exaggeration that covers up genuine problems.
> That's the thing with hunger games, if they don't get good they don't survive. I've seen it. I know PIs who don't write a single one of their grants.
Personally, I wouldn't put my name on any graduate student's first grant proposal attempt, because I don't like wasting my time, nor is that what I want them working on.
I am not saying abuse of graduate students and postdocs doesn't occur. I'm acutely aware that it does - and having helped colleagues through a number of crises, I'm very much not in denial about it. But it is also not the norm.
If you want to have an honest discussion about the problems facing graduate students and postdocs in academia, including abusive working conditions, that's one thing. But that's also a massive shift in goalposts from asserting that I get to spend 3-4 months thinking about interesting things all day because "You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs", which is just factually untrue.
Your setup sounds rather different than mine, though I am under the impression mine is typical. There are no “curriculum meetings” or any other sort of teaching or service work during the summer, for the simple reason that the university literally does not pay you in the summer. I meet with my group to talk about research, but that falls under “enjoyable” for me. Grant reports are due once a year, in the spring as it happens. I have never heard of monthly reporting grants, but I’m used to garden-variety NSF and R01 type stuff only.
If your job much of a grind as you are making it out to be, why not go make 3-10x in industry? Honest question.
The curriculum meetings are because we're starting a new program, and my entire department is on 12 month contracts, not 9 month ones. Honestly, those meetings are rather fun, because it's a chance to talk about what I think we should be teaching people in my discipline - it's just an example of something that can't be "pawned off on a grad student".
My NIH grants have annual reports, as do NSF. CDC and USAID (RIP...) have much more intensive reporting requirements.
Honestly, I love my job, and there are some very nice things about it. It's just not the case that all professors get the summers off, or that if they are working, it's all fun and games and sitting in my office thinking Big Ideas.
maybe those who fight for it have better information.
for example they realize that once they achieve tenure, the amount of work truly required to retain the for-life annuity is risibly low so they can go on to do just about whatever else they want or “consult” for extra dollars as needed.
My workload has only steadily increased once I got tenure. The nature of the work changed, but the "Kick back, relax and enjoy your zero effort forever job" is a fantasy of people who don't actually know what they're talking about.
i’ve personally known a number of tenured professors who’ve systematically shirked all responsibility after their tenure event. they’ve been willing to live as semi-pariahs within their peer group though.
even when required to teach they simply repeat classes they’ve taught many times before making no effort to optimize for reviews.
i don’t doubt your experience but i wonder how much it has to do with not wanting to endure your colleagues’ and departments’s disapproval vs actual threat to employment.
and fwiw, i’m not saying it has to be this way just that it can be this way due to the structure of the system. similarly there are many corporate situations in which one can scrape by for extended periods of time, but there is rarely a “for life” clause. even so, it hasn’t prevented the university system from helping to catalyze all the amazing discoveries we all benefit from in society every day.
fwiw, i agree with most of the points in @Fomite’s response below. the people i’ve known fall into a perverse version of his “ego” point.
they felt that when they got tenure they “won” and their “ego” was strong enough to allow them to ignore the disapproval of their peers for not doing the conventionally expected things. they felt that they knew better in their hearts what the discipline truly needed and that the rat-race of establishment approval wasn’t it. so they turned inward. which is not necessarily the healthiest path imo.
I mean, there are definitely people who coast, because there are people everywhere who coast.
But the vast majority of tenured professors I know don't do so, for one of the following reasons:
- I can't get fired, but I also don't need to get paid. My position has a non-trivial soft money component to it, and it's actually low for my field, which ranges from 50% to 100% soft money depending on the institution. A double-digit pay cut is motivation for most people.
- There are still promotions to be had, and those promotions are really the only way to get a raise beyond cost of living increases. At my institution there are two steps beyond Associate Professor with Tenure, and both of them are not obtained by phoning it in.
- Ego. It's hard to understate this one. Most academics are smart, determined people. There are other easier, more lucrative jobs. But there's a sense of purpose and ego that channeled them to the career they're in. Said ego is usually not fed by being in the doldrums. That's not how you get awards and invited to talks, and recruited elsewhere, etc.
Sure, the stick of "You could get fired" isn't there, but there are also ways to make a tenured professor whose coasting's life less pleasant. But even if not, I don't think it's nearly as common as the popular imagination (or this thread) think it is. Most people I know only really take their foot of the gas in the last few years of their careers, often well past retirement age.
I viewed academia as altruistic and relatively enlightened. And I've certainly met many who live up to that.
I've also occasionally heard of entire academic departments who should be in jail, for being pieces of crud.
Then there's what I'm guessing is the bulk of academia: care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be.
That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
> That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
I regularly see both worlds. What I find more troubling in academia is that it is difficult to openly talk about how flawed the system is, that people make mistakes, that papers have mistakes (the own ones as well as others'). We know all software has bugs; but the code that a PhD student hacks together over night is assumed to be flawless (the more senior people rarely even glance at it), otherwise the paper is all wrong, and papers are set in stone...
So I genuinely struggle with the lack of a proper failure culture in academia, as it is designed as a system that is fundamentally geared against openly discussing failure.
I suspect there's many reasons for the field/department cultures.
One of them, which was surprising to me (which I first heard from a friend in a hard STEM field), was what happens when student A's thesis result is found to be wrong due to flawed experiment... but only after student B is well into their own dissertation building upon A's result. Reportedly, everyone involved (A, B, their PI, the department, the university) has incentive to keep quiet about student A's bad result. B has an academic career to move forward, within funding and timeframes, and everyone else cares about reputation and money. And there is only downside for bystanders to complain, especially if it's other students especially vulnerable to retaliation/disfavor.
Another one I've seen, which is less surprising, is when there seems to be a culture of alliance or truce among faculty. So, if someone is misbehaving, or makes a mistake, it's understood that no one is going to call them out or interfere, and no one wants to even know about it more than they have to. In general, no selfish benefit can come from that, but a whole lot of negative feedback can. Mind your own business, glass houses, etc.
> care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be. That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
That's pretty much my experience from 20+ years ago.
One thing that I didn't appreciate when I left the ivory tower was the extent of the replication "crisis."
If other academics can't replicate your work in some esoteric corner of bio research, it's no big deal--some people get burned wasting time, but the research just atrophies in the end.
But in the biotech / pharma industry, we in-licensed a lot of un-replicatable garbage from academia.
And replication was important to us because we actually had to make a drug that was effective (which loosely translates to ... "clinicians must be able to replicate your drug's efficacy.").*
* I'm not sure how true this is anymore, given politicization of regulatory bodies, but it was an eye-opener to me years ago.
Yeah, I would say that my time in academia disillusioned me somewhat, but not to the level that some people here are expressing. I never got the sense that people were falsifying data, directly (but covertly) backstabbing one another, or anything really awful like that.
But there are plenty of disheartening things that don't rise to that level of actual malfeasance. People get so comfortable in their tenured positions that they can lose touch with reality (e.g., the reality of how difficult their grad students' lives are). Even if they don't engage in actual research misconduct, there's a tendency for people to put their thumb on the scale in various ways (often, I think, without being aware of it), many of them connected to a sort of confirmation bias, in terms of who they think is a "good fit" for a job, what kind of work they want to support, etc. In my experience they are at best dismissive and at worst offended by the idea that maybe the current financial/employment model of higher education isn't the best (e.g., that maybe you shouldn't have a two-tiered system of tenure-track and non-ladder faculty with wildly differing payscales, but rather should just have a larger number of people doing varying amounts of teaching and research for varying but roughly comparable levels of pay).
I felt like virtually everyone I met was in some sense committed to the truth, but often they were committed to their own view of the truth, which was usually a defensible and reasonable view but not the only view, and not as clearly distinct from other reasonable views as they felt it was. And they varied considerably in how much they felt it was acceptable or necessary to engage in minor shenanigans in order to keep moving forward (e.g., to what extent they'd compromise their actual beliefs in order to placate journal editors and get something published).
Also, there is often something endearing about how academics can be genuinely emotionally invested, sometimes to the point of rage or ecstasy, in matters so obscure that the average person wouldn't give them a second thought. It's sort of like finding someone who's a fan of some TV show that ran for 12 episodes in 1983 and is adorably gushy about it. Even the people I met who were quite cognizant of making strategic career moves and other such practical stuff still had a lot of this geeky obsession about them.
A lot of this may vary from one field to another. But on the whole there are many worse people in the world than academics.
As an US undergrad decades ago, at a major (non-elite) research school, I was already discovering these criticisms of the current academic system, in action, way back then. So I don't think we can blame much of any 'fraud' increase going on today on that system. Today, perception of fraud may be on the increase.
(I started to become alert to what that program was really about when I took one of the classes -critical- to my major. It involved a lot of heavy math, and was being taught by a TA with a -very poor- command of the English language. When I complained, my Princeton-grad advisor's reply was 'this course is to separate the men from the boys'. Yeah, thanks pal.
So far as I know, he published very few cited papers.)
Well, the amount of money being wasted is generally smaller, and often the results are not harming hundreds of millions of people around the world. (But it depends on the field.)
Tenured people carry it out, but in my experience, the goal tends to be for their students/subordinates/group colleagues/etc. to achieve tenure instead of others.
I've heard of an engineering faculty where there was basically a cold war between a few of the tenured profs. They would do everything they could to undercut or screw each other over. Pure spite-based politics. Toxic as hell and there was very little anyone could do about out.
i know of prestigious departments where after literally decades of political stalemate with colleagues (over things as petty as who gets what office) prestigious faculty finally managed to finagle a high-dollar offer from a lower tier institution and de-camped over the politics.
Well, I’m not sure I’ve seen that pattern quite so much, but if you’re seeing it, I would speculate survivor bias. The people who stay around are the ones who were good enough at the game to stay around.
the way i’ve generally understood the use of the word “vicious” in this context is in judging other academics’ work quality. which is also typically where i think most people from the outside perceive the stakes to be low: as in who cares whether one more journal article that no one will read gets published? but from the inside it can mean the difference between tenure and no tenure (for the young academic vying for it), respect and abject failure, money or no money.
Well sure but in this case the actual word was “viscous”, not “vicious”. Academic politics is thick, sticky, and insufficiently fluid and insufficiently solid at the same time. Okay it was probably a typo but it kind of works as an analogy.
sure, maybe it was intended as a novel coinage, but i assumed the “vicious” interpretation which is the more common one since the comment explicitly references Sayre's Law.
I was also wondering if it was a spelling mistake, a failure to know the difference between the two words, a legit description of academic politics as molasses-like, or a play on the user's own username. The layers of potential irony here are thick and viscous!
Especially when the position is filled by someone who couldn't earn half as much (in money, security, and prestige) if forced to compete on merit in the real world.
I think ideally academia needs to evolve to be open to everyone and worshiping of nobody. Pop in to publish your article, return to whatever else you had been doing after. Repeat. University professors are rarely that innovative or good in their teaching methods, so that part could be to be taken up by teaching faculty instead.
Pop in to publish your article, return to whatever else you had been doing after.
Nothing is stopping you. I've published papers and presented at academic conferences while working in industry. Both in collaboration with academics and without.
Well over half of college teaching is already done by "adjuncts" who are non tenure track teaching staff. The teachers are effectively unsupervised and do their best but have no incentive to improve other than self motivation.
Disclosure: I was an adjunct for a semester while I was between industry jobs.
The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability. One of the best lecturers I had at university was a postdoc who didn't get hired and ended up teaching at a 'third rate' university. One of the worst lecturers I had got head hunted by MIT.
>The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability.
Because they aren't intended to be educational. Universities (as they are run today) are primarily grant-revenue capture organizations, secondarily research organizations (at least to the degree necessary that grant money doesn't dry up because of fraudulent spending accusations), and finally after that, a begrudged effort is made at education for optics. If they could ditch the education angle entirely, they'd send the students home tomorrow.
That's not necessarily a problem. There are different options in the marketplace. If you attend an R1 research university then of course hiring decisions will heavily weight research productivity. But many other smaller schools absolutely do look at teaching ability.
No "system" can ever overcome such problems. Sure, some political orders are better than others in various respects, but nothing will overcome the basic origin of our problems, which is us! The "system" itself is made from the crooked timber of our humanity, and even if some perfect "system" could be made, its perfection could only be actualized by a perfect people.
Hence the need to focus less on systems and more on personal virtue. You want to find your greatest enemy? Look within.
To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”
Your post being down voted is unjust. There is a tendency to expect salvation from the system and the rule, but they only have power if they are kept by and defended by the commons.
This also applies to society as a whole. The role of the media as the fourth estate in the system is to inform the public when destruction is breaking the rules, to explain how it will bring down the house.
But when in a Res Publica the media susses the common man instead, when the outlets prostitute them to the destructive powers that finally will kill their enablers, all is too late. The common man will have exchanged his virtues for hate towards imaginary enemies. Then it turned out that the rules did not save the public.
>To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”
This gets invoked way too often by bad people defending bad things that they were warned not to do/support at the time but did/supported anyway because there was something in it for them.
Perhaps my wording was misleading. I am not claiming that reform is not possible. I am only claiming that the impulse, especially when it is messianic, that drives some reformers and revolutionaries is delusional, a dead end, and worse, usually involves tyrannical measures and produces more bad than it does good.
Of course, academia could absolutely benefit from certain changes and reforms - I have argued for this myself; education has been derailed by inferior goals - , but the primary place where the work has to happen isn't policy or institutional structure, but ourselves. Indeed, the counterpart to your criticism is that excessive talk of reform is a way of avoiding the difficult and unpleasant work of having to look in the mirror. This does not exclude the need for certain reforms, but unless you get your own house in order first, you will be in poor shape to know what to reform and how.
I think it's more beneficial to think in terms of incentive structures. How we structure societies and industries can incentivize virtue, but it can also disincentivize fradulance and incentivize good clean work more directly.
Sure, incentives are important. I don't disagree. The law is a teacher, and it involves the use of incentives and disincentives.
But there is a bootstrapping problem here. The first is that virtue is needed to know what and how to incentivize and disincentivize, and to be able to choose to do it. Corrupt men will tend to create incentives in their own image.
Another problem is that even when incentives are properly aligned, this alone does not guarantee good behavior. Murderers know what awaits them for their crimes. So while incentives are important, a purely game theoretic construction is not enough. It does not do enough to secure rational behavior. So the problem is not merely political, but moral. We each have a personal duty here to demand moral action from ourselves and to grow in virtue.
I was planning on going into academia in the early aughts and this was also around the time that there was a groundswell to take away tenure from professors. "They" wanted to set out a quota for how many times you needed to have your research published on a yearly basis to show you were still doing your job.
I opted out when all three of my advisors during my first year of graduate work told to get out and that the whole field of academia was not the romantic vision I had aspired to be. It was quickly becoming toxic. One of my advisors had stopped taking money from universities, and was leaving to go work for a large pharmaceutical company doing research out in Siberian Russia. Another was quietly working on a degree in statistics to go work for the government.
These were people who I admired and fashioned myself after. It's quite a shock when people you respect suddenly warn you academia is not where you want to be. I was lucky, the other two guys I was in grad school with went ahead anyways. Years later, I found out neither lasted more than a few years for exactly what you described and what I was warned of.
One thing that really needs to be unbundled is assessments for credentials, teaching, and research. As it is now you want to be assessed for credentials at a top institution, you have to pay to take classes and learn at that institution. Which often leaves you in a class being "taught" by a researcher who's uninterested in teaching and unresponsive, and who hands off the actual job of teaching to an inexperienced graduate student making minimum wage. And for this privilege, you're charged a massive amount of money.
Part of the problem is many academic institutions, even prestigious ones, simply don't prioritize teaching. They don't even really prioritize challenging education. They prioritize prestige and opportunity hoarding. The hardest part about many of these schools is getting in. Once you're in, then grade inflation and the desire for the institution to retain it's prestige brand means the classes aren't particularly hard --- graduating is particularly easy and most students actually barely put in effort. Getting in is the golden ticket more than graduating.
One solution, is for an institution to prioritize accessibility (easier to get in) but also prioritize difficulty (actually hard to graduate). This would reorient incentives around challenging education that pushes students to excel rather than coast after striving just to get in. Unfortunately, the priorities are the exact opposite today.
I had the same view until I went to do a small internship in a research lab. There, I realized that my research group's boss was spending most of his time submitting grant requests, that in my view distilled to 'Give use money and we will find X'. Which was absolutely antithetical to what I thought research was like(wait, aren't we supposed to not know what we will find ?). Then came the publishing part where you get reviews saying your paper isn't good enough because it didn't cite ${completely not relevant to the topic} paper (which sort of narrows down who the "anonymous reviewer" was). Then there's the quasi-feudal approach of putting the lab head in the authors. I mean, come on, I'm not sure the guy even knows the paper exists...
- Very few successful grants, in my experience, are "Give money and we'll find X". Rather, they tend to be "We're reasonably sure X is over here for $reasons, but we'd need money to actually confirm that."
I'm open to the idea that i somehow caught an outlier. then again, its a lab integrated to the general eu funding schemes, so it can't be that much of an outlier.
your summary of a grant request doesn't really sound all that different from mine tbh, just more charitable. Its just that i naively came in with the expectation that it would be something like "we need X$ to explore domain $Y" "sure. here you go", then 2 years later "we found x y and z, see $papers, now we'd like $x2 to explore $y2". and back to square 1/2.
a full broadcast over all available and unavailable channels of "please, master grant officer, just a few coins to explore $X a bit further, we'll very certainly find $Y", i was not ready for.
Im overdoing the tone a bit to highlight that it had to be tuned to the grant officer, way more than it had to be tuned to reality. to promise to find whatever was popular in the field at the time. regardless of the practical facts of the field. because the people evaluating the proposal didnt know shit about the field.
so when you were in the trench every day, it just sounded like absolute parody of what we were actually doing, explained to a kindergartener.
i realize this comes off as a knock on my boss way more than I'd like. i absolutely don't mean to. he did what had to be done, so that his team can keep working, within the system he had to work with to move our field forward. and the money we got was well spent, no doubt here.
but my view was : if I work my ass off for 10 years, I can be this guy. Do I want this? and the answer was a resounding, definitive "hell no".
all the paper publishing shenanigans were just extra irritants that sealed my decision.
I have a "We need X to explore domain Y" grant, and it's lovely. It's also pretty rare, but at the moment, most of my funding is from those types of mechanisms. That is, admittedly, somewhat unusual.
I will say that "the people evaluating the proposal didnt know shit about the field." isn't true in the U.S. For grants from the NIH, NSF, or CDC, they're almost all peer-reviewed. While some hot topics get a bit of needless shine to them, I've also seen grants ripped apart for "They just tacked LLMs onto this for no reason", etc.
I do definitely get not wanting that. There are people I know and respect immensely as scientists who went "I don't want to be a PI" and that's legit.
I will say, and this is not about your post, that Hacker News both often laments the paucity of staff scientist positions, and also likes to attack the PI who does nothing but write grants, but you can't actually have it both ways. Almost all of my grant writing is driven by keeping my people employed.
Academia these days is a lot like industry, but with worse pay, better schedule, and low consequences/verification if the data that is published is "wrong", intentionally or unintentionally.
The schedule is not better. My quality of life increased dramatically when I left academia and realized that I had time for things like hobbies.
Even in startups, there’s a tacit understanding that you’re exchanging your time for money and that this exchange has limits. This is simply not true in academics where the need to publish to keep funding (and often your job) is incredibly intense.
Sorry, you're correct. I specifically meant flexible, which I equate to better. Both academia and in some industries will likely be 50+ hrs weekly, especially in the early days of their careers. But academia offers substantially more flexibility. Especially once you bring kids into the mix where you're more likely to need to shift your day around for children/child care.
Posted this same comment elsewhere, but seemed equally appropriate as a response to you.
Sorry, you're correct. I specifically meant flexible, which I equate to better. Both academia and in some industries will likely be 50+ hrs weekly, especially in the early days of their careers. But academia offers substantially more flexibility. Especially once you bring kids into the mix where you're more likely to need to shift your day around for children/child care.
Not all humans are practitioners of the terminal gamesmanship that is infecting our economy and government. It's about electing, promoting, and buying from the right people, and having the courage to properly punish those who have betrayed the good faith that powers successful societies.
It seems to me that the "elephant in the room" no one has mentioned yet w.r.t. academia is the model of modern academic administration, where universities are run like cruise ships (look at the perks kids are paying for these days!) with hedge funds attached, and have no "skin in the game" with regard to the incredibly high financial risks that students take when they pay for tuition.
If: (a) students paid 1/10 of what they pay today[0], (b) all the on-campus expensive perks were ended (new buildings sold, etc.) and the administration headcount dropped to 1 per every 50 students, (c) tuition went directly to professors, research, and basic groundskeeping, (d) some kind of financial arrangement were put in place so universities had skin in the game with regard to the success of their graduates[0]
then I'm positive the academic system would become far more effective at educating students and preparing them for life, and there would be a positive trickle-down effect to scientific research and the politics there.
[0] State-funded secondary education in European countries costs far less than university education in the US. There's a reason for that - unlike students with easy access to debt, the government won't pay such exorbitant fees.
[1] A very rough stab at an idea for making universities have skin in the game: make tuition for degrees conferred refundable by some percentage (50%?) if more than a certain fraction (10%?) of graduates with B- or higher GPA in their majors are collectively unable to find a job in their field within 2 years of graduation. If a university needed to withhold that guarantee for some majors, that would be a very helpful signal for prospective students.
But the point isn't the specifics, it's that just the presence of such a lever (and its absence at some universities or majors) would be a powerful signal to prospective students, better align the university's incentives, and cause a lot of necessary changes.
Most universities do not have "hedge fund" class endowments.
It should also be noted that there are reasons tuition is the way it is. State allocations for higher ed were slashed in 2008, and didn't really get put back even when the economy was doing well. Similarly, federal research dollars (which fund the vast bulk of research, not tuition) has been pretty flat for decades (the amount of a non-modular NIH R01, for example, hasn't changed since the Clinton administration).
Tuition is the only lever left to most institutions.
> Tuition is the only lever left to most institutions.
No, cutting costs (especially slashing the administration and facility budget) is another lever that few institutions use. The other really important levers are professor hiring and pay, and admissions standards.
Build a reputation for hiring a great faculty, paying them well, keeping a minimal administration, and cultivating a student body that is hungry to learn, and the right people will come. Everything else is mostly fluff with regard to a quality education.
Have a look at the average admin headcount per student in 1995 vs 2025. It has grown to be the largest department by far of modern US universities (and a lot of places in Europe as well, unfortunately) - usually significantly larger and more well-paid than the faculty.
In one extreme example, I heard the ratio of student:admin is nearly 1:1. That is bonkers.
And no - administration employees don't need to justify their ongoing employment by constantly publishing new research in academic journals. For them, the gravy just keeps rolling in. Just keep increasing tuition, increasing the endowment fund (often through real estate deals and other hedge fund like activity), increasing donations, increasing their own budget, and threatening to cut research & academic department budgets.
Yes, academic and research departments have often had budget cuts. But expenditures per student are way up to pay academic administration salary.
(If I sound angry, it's because I am. MBA types have caused so much harm to these institutions.)
Another ex-researcher here. Similar experience. I went in with hopes of a lot of rationality and intense cooperation between people who would be there mostly for a shared curiosity. Fast forward years and... Good grief - so, so many people publicly being shouted down, shamed, bullied, insulted. So many serious abuses of power - up to sexual and bodily - essentially without consequences for the abusers (often with way more negative consequences for the victims if they complained). So many tears, so many ends to academic careers of people who were really smart and really cared - in quite a few cases accompanied by burn-outs and other long-term health consequences. So much tax money down the drain with questionable accounting up to outright lies. So, so many utterly absurd intrigues and wars between mini-kingdoms based on nothing but the feelings of the biggest, loudest and most vicious narcissists. So many publications of questionable methodology that are sliced as thinly as they possibly can be and are hyper-targeted towards all-important journals or conferences. And so much more soul-destroying nonsense.
I'm still mostly in academia but nowadays, I focus on teaching and infrastructure. Especially with teaching, I feel that I can make more of a long-term impact that I ever could as a researcher - not least because I have way more freedom for discussions and interesting projects with students (I still have to deal with way more hostile, petty and sometimes outright dangerous BS than I feel comfortable with - but it's better than in the even-higher-pressure parts of the system).
I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism. If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently. Because what you see in small, specially poor communities is that trust in each other is strong.
You could argue that the church tried it and we had the inquisition, but I think it's different. We have way more benefit of hindsight and the population is way more educated than it was in the middle ages.
Not advocating for a renaissance of the Christian kingdom, but for embedding care and charity as first class moral values in economics.
It's not what I see. I go out and I see people helping each other, people having fun and taking care of the environment, social justice being discussed at the government level. I'm Brazilian though so I might be biased, but I think I prefer to be an idealist than a defeatist.
If the world is like what you say it is, shouldn't you just drop dead? Thinking like this is like committing philosophical suicide anyways, if you can't imagine a better world that's worth fighting for, even if it's just in a thought experiment.
This learned helplessness is by design, not by nature, so you don't question the status quo and keep working to make the elites richer without realising it's killing the world.
I think one of the core failures of our current economic religion is that we can rely solely on anonymous transactions. But many transactions fail when everything is black boxes. We can't easily evaluate (1) if the thing we got is of good quality and (2) there wasn't any harmful side effects.
Transactions need more trivially verifiable metadata. That could solve one of many issues.
> I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism
This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don’t have capitalism, they’re all getting along, right? Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for mates?
Being competitive is human nature. People will always compete for things, even if you try to artificially remove or forbid financial incentives. There are always more incentives. There will always be social standing to pursue, a coveted position, or the recognition of having accomplished something.
> If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently.
Alternate economic systems that forbid capitalism rely on heavy government enforcement to prevent people from doing capitalistic things: Running unapproved businesses, being entrepreneurial, selling goods and services at market rate.
This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).
We should be able to tell which behaviors are not properly included in the concept of "humanity".
And when we find these behaviors within ourselves, recognize those as a vestige of inhuman nature.
We should be constantly striving not to confuse the unsuitable animalistic stuff as "human nature", otherwise that's the lamest excuse of all and has leveraged more stupidity than probably anything else in history.
I'm with you on competitiveness though, to a degree it's all not purely animalistic, especially not financially ;)
OTOH, the cutthroat stuff can be so inhuman there's not any question, or it wouldn't be called that.
animals do frequently get along and cooperate, ironically what youre doing is a reflection of capitalism, youre projecting the current economic system onto the animal planet. Think of that famously wrong study from the 70s about alpha wolves, its been disproven but people still of it as true because it molds to the economic system they understand.
But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly: will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses. Market economies, command economies, mercantile economies, and any other economic system must deal with these scarcities somehow. Even in the animal kingdom this must be contended with, albeit at a much lower level of abstraction. We deal with scarcity in a number of different ways, e.g. higher prices, waiting lines, by need, or some other metric or any combination thereof. Animals tend to deal with resource (food) scarcity through violence, abandonment, and a few other processes because not eating means death. That isn't to say cooperation doesn't happen, it absolutely does, but it is still constrained by resource scarcity.
> But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly
All economic systems are a set of trade-offs and capitalism in general tends to outperform all other economic systems we know of. That isn't to say it's a perfect system, it isn't, but I've noticed people who profess your opinion implicitly assume the alternative is a utopia that which simply does not exist. We may find a better system in the future but it will still be constrained by the law of supply and demand, resource scarcity, and human nature and hence will have trade-offs.
And humans do, too. So what’s your point? I’m drawing parallels between animals and humans and you are too! You seem to be supporting my point, not refuting it.
Humans get along and cooperate at scales far beyond anything the animal kingdom can do. Capitalism has driven the advancements that enable it.
> will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
The classic vacuous anti-capitalism rhetoric: Capitalism will destroy the world, but unspecified alternative which doesn’t exist and isn’t described is better. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the non-existent superior non-capitalistic that solves everyone is the bad person, right?
> Capitalism will destroy the world, but unspecified alternative which doesn’t exist and isn’t described is better. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the non-existent superior non-capitalistic that solves everyone is the bad person, right?
And this is the classic positivist rethoric that prevents self assertion and self criticism. Every doctrine that can't take criticism and take care of it's flaws while maintaining it's benefits is doomed to fail.
Nobody is saying that you are bad in essence, that is the whole idea. There is no essence. You create the meaning you see in the world.
You've nailed it: this is exactly why Soviet socialism failed in the past, and also paradoxically the reason why neoliberal capitalism is failing today.
Although I am a Marxist, I reject the idea that Communism is going to be the "final" form of human society. We may be able to get there someday, but only constant care and effort towards maintaining the system will be able to sustain it, and there is no "deterministic" answer to what the ultimate form of human society is.
>an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly: will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
Not my downvote, but . . .
More like so there will be massive corporations to work for instead of the appropriate number of small businesses and farms that could substitute. For instance if things wouldn't have pivoted long ago, including major milestones like the formation of the Federal Reserve system.
Nothing like how it could have been if things would have been allowed to continue as they were progressing, the working citizens would have continued to gain wealth at a faster rate than the government, even more so than many established Wall Street capitalists. Especially the ones who have no talent for creating wealth and instead resort to just moving money around, and they were as powerful as any.
All pressure has been put on to reverse independent prosperity, whatever it takes, whenever the threat to centralized control appears on the horizon.
Those who prefer to centralize their power over you are not the ones wanting you to have an opportunity to start a small business someday. They just haven't completely eliminated that possibility. Yet.
> This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don’t have capitalism, they’re all getting along, right? Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for mates?
Even if this was true, humans aren't subjective to their base instincts and can adapt and reinvent themselves.
> Being competitive is human nature.
I'm not and I'm human.
> People will always compete for things
Sometimes you want something, but you let others have it when they need it more than you. Otherwise if you always compete for things you are just a little kid.
> This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).
This is a misunderstanding of what I said. If you read back I never said competition should be tossed out of the window, it's just that caring for the other as it is right now it's not a core value of the economic system. It's just best effort, if we can say that to the eventually charitable billionaire.
This is a weird quirk of history. I feel like open source, and especially free software, was at least left-adjacent when I was coming up in the 90s. The bad guys were the megacorps. Open source was the counter-culture. I guess it changed around the dotcom boom.
Netscape feels like a big part of the story - a company staffed with hackers coming out of a public-funded research institute who rewrote a closed-source version of their browser that quickly killed off the predecessor and helped the company to a massive IPO. Then, only when threatened by a more established player, they finally open-sourced it. From the outside that came across more as a Hail Mary than an authentic expression of principles. Around then we also had the Red Hat IPO, the Slashdot/Andover/VA Linux thing etc. It was clear by then that open source had become another gimmick that capitalists could leverage to compound their wealth, rather than a fundamental belief that users of a piece of software should have the right to modify and reconstruct it as they see fit.
Nowadays capitalists love open source because their startups and big tech investments are the users - open source provides free labor whose products these companies can repackage and sell as a platform. Meanwhile a lot of that "free" labor is no longer done by hobbyists or researchers, but by workers at other for-profit companies looking to boost their personal brand or the company's profile, so the whole motivation to contribute has changed too.
In a free market system people can transact as they wish, including giving away something for free if they want.
There is nothing at odds at all. If you don’t see it, you might have a rather cartoonish, villainy view of a capitalism that gets promulgated by people who refuse to allow anything good or nice to be ascribed to capitalism.
If you can’t understand why capitalists can also like open source, have you considered that maybe it’s your understanding of the system that is flawed, not theirs?
I understand that capitalism is the doctrine that is based on economic growth and profit. This is invariably going to be at odds with the core tenets of open source, because given enough time ownership will have to give way to profit, hence the embrace, extend, extinguish and the various changes in licensing in major opensource projects.
However that's not even the case because op wasn't criticizing capitalism as whole, just how absurd the ethos in HN is where we seem to defend contradictory values.
one of the core tenets of capitalism is the profit motive, its a central piece of it: the idea that people innovate and create and labor for the expected reward of a pile of money, but so much of tech actually bucks this idea between open source projects and public funded initiatives (maybe not as relevant for app based coding, but the space race was pretty important for technology overall.)
>capitalism is the doctrine that is based on economic growth and profit.
These are not actually essential.
I'm not going to put down a better definition of capitalism, but if you're not handling Other Peoples' Money, and they're not handling yours, you are definitely not a capitalist.
No matter how financially successful you are as an entrepreneur with your own money, even when you out-compete capitalists in a pro-capitalist market.
