Comment by anoncow
2 days ago
When research is just means to an end...
I think as children if we are taught what earning a living means, people who only want to make ends meet would try to do it using other less damaging methods. For e.g., sales and marketing are not bad places for such people. When it comes to research people should know that perhaps money will not be great.
It is because we aren't aware of the full picture as children, we follow our passions (or we follow cool passions) and then realise that money is also important and then resort to unethical means to get that money. Let's be transparent about hard fields with children so that when they enter such fields they know what they are getting into.
I suspect there's a lot of people that end up pursuing research because they enjoy college and learning with the idea of seeking out a job sounding rather less enjoyable, and more education will just equal more $$$ in said job anyhow, right?
In the past this wasn't an issue because university was seen as optional, now in most places it's ostensibly required to obtain a sufficiently well paying job, and so much more of society ends up on a treadmill that they may not really want to hop off of.
> so that when they enter such fields they know what they are getting into
I don't think this would help. IMO, it's a money vs. effort thing. Yes, real research is hard, but if someone learns early on that the system can be easily gamed, then the required effort is relatively low.
Plus, there's the friction factor. Moving from undergrad to grad to post-grad to professor keeps you within an institution you know.
The game is this: get hired at a research university and pump out phony papers which look legit enough to not raise any suspicions until you get tenure. Wrap the phoniness of each paper in a shroud of plausible deniability. If anything comes out after you're tenured, then just deny and/or deflect any wrongdoing.
Yeah that's about right.
I think in some fields you walk into them with some kind of noble ideology, possibly driven by marketing but then you find out it's all bullshit and you're n-years into your educational investment then. Your options are to shrug and join in or write everything off and walk away.
I don't blame people for taking advantage of it but in some areas, particularly health related, there are consequences to society past financial concerns.