[HN Gopher] The 'attention economy' corrupts science
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The 'attention economy' corrupts science
Author : respinal
Score : 56 points
Date : 2022-10-01 04:42 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (bigthink.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bigthink.com)
| syncerr wrote:
| Attention is not the problem; it's the lack of accountability.
| Social platforms care about engagement, not quality of content
| (there's virtually no mechanism to incentivize content meets any
| standard of quality other than what can be measured in the
| moment).
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Quality is subjective, but there's no accountability about
| harmful or illegal content either, so platforms don't only
| promote "general purpose" spam, but actively harmful content
| that intentionally seeds outrage or encourages violence as that
| generally leads to more engagement.
| jostmey wrote:
| Having spent over 10 years in a university and been a professor,
| the problem isn't attention seeking behavior but a lack of
| accountability. For example, you can literally make up any data
| you want in a grant proposal and so long as it sounds right no
| one can or will double check it. The foundation of academia is
| rotting, but maybe it's always been like this
| anonporridge wrote:
| > but maybe it's always been like this
|
| The older I get, the more I believe this is the truth. For most
| institutions we've been taught to hold in high regard.
| nramanand wrote:
| Isn't this also related to how the vaccines-cause-autism
| conversation started? The study involved only had a handful of
| subjects (a few of which were very unqualified), and then a big
| important journal (The Lancet IIRC) picked it up for the novelty.
|
| The article mentions attention economy as in media, TikTok, etc
| playing a role before "community assessment." But it's not like
| scientists don't also gravitate towards the new shiny thing in
| their own ways.
| syncerr wrote:
| Yeah. Andrew Wakefield was stripped of his medical license in
| 2010 for publishing fraudulent research and it was later
| discovered that he was paid to discredit the MMR vaccine.[0]
|
| And yet, ~10% of Americas still believe the study. [1]
|
| [0] https://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-summary.htm
|
| [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/276929/fewer-continue-
| vaccines-...
| the_only_law wrote:
| I'm frankly shocked it's only 10%
| hashtag-til wrote:
| The article is very insightful and explains a lot why do you get
| a growing number of useless inflated headlines arxiv papers
| trying to gather views from twitter or linkedin.
| turlockmike wrote:
| This boils down to a fundamental question. Why do we spend any
| time doing science to begin with? Historically scientists were
| drawn to the field in order to improve human understanding of our
| reality. These individuals often died quite poor and unknown, but
| advanced us forward. Now popular science is the goal and getting
| huge money grants. The goal is no longer the pursuit of
| knowledge, it's a money game. Like journalism. The only useful
| science done at the moment is at tech companies who will use it
| to build better products.
| woah wrote:
| Pretty sure the money a scientist can personally earn with
| grants is far less than they can at a tech company.
| Fomite wrote:
| This is absolutely true.
|
| I could leave for industry tomorrow and likely double my
| salary.
|
| The money I've personally earned from grants is... $0. And
| I've been very successful in getting grants.
|
| I only got a job offer at one university where the PI of a
| grant directly got a monetary benefit from it, and while it
| was nice, it was never going to be more than "That's a nice
| little bonus" money.
|
| If you want to make money as a scientist in academia,
| consulting or a startup is where it's at.
| theptip wrote:
| > The goal is no longer the pursuit of knowledge, it's a money
| game.
|
| I don't know about that. All the PhDs I know are dirt-poor (or
| were until they left science to get tech jobs), and are in the
| game because they are passionate about science and the project
| of advancing human knowledge.
|
| It's true that your ability to get a tenure-track position is
| very dependent on your ability to successfully obtain grant
| money, but most of the scientists I know view that as a
| necessary evil, not the game in itself.
|
| > The only useful science done at the moment is at tech
| companies who will use it to build better products.
|
| This is trivially demonstrably false.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope for
| the first example that came to mind from recent news.
| wanderingmind wrote:
| " Scientists list media exposure counts on resumes, and many PhD
| theses now include the number of times a candidate's work has
| appeared in the popular science press." This is a mandatory
| requirement to a EB1A green card. Maybe the government can do
| something from its side to reduce the fluff.
| Fomite wrote:
| "The attention a scientist's work gains from the public now plays
| into its perceived value. Scientists list media exposure counts
| on resumes, and many PhD theses now include the number of times a
| candidate's work has appeared in the popular science press.
| Science has succumbed to the attention economy."
|
| Sitting on a tenure and promotion committee at an R1 university,
| this type of stuff is just as likely to torpedo you as it is to
| boost you.
| version_five wrote:
| I agree with some of the problems listed (over-hyping minor
| results) though personally I think the link to attention economy
| feels a bit contrived. There are much greater forces leading to
| these problems - notably the emphasis on metrics for science work
| (as mentioned) and politicization. This didn't convince me the
| attention economy lens adds anything
| kossTKR wrote:
| Having multiple family members working actively as scientist and
| academics i've been pretty blackpilled about what "science"
| actually is for the most part.
|
| Off course there's heaps of interesting papers and progress out
| there but at least 90% of money and time seems to be spent on
| politics, careerism and working actively for some
| disproportionally funded but "profitable" niche.
|
| It's get ahead in the game, "earn money for investors" or further
| some industry astroturfed cause. Also a lot of PhD's use them to
| grift like cheap salesmen these days unfortunately.
|
| Probably has something to do with the corporate incentive
| structures that have emerged.
| dendrite9 wrote:
| I'm curious if you think there is more of this in science than
| in other places. Or is it that we want to think of science and
| academia as better than/more idealistic?
|
| This comment is similar to comments I've heard about
| nonprofits, govt work, and a quite a few large businesses. For
| a long time I thought nonprofits were generally good, in
| college I learned more about what nonprofit means and how that
| kneejerk reaction of mine could provide cover for a huge range
| of behaviors.
|
| "money and time seems to be spent on politics, careerism and
| working actively for some disproportionally funded but
| "profitable" niche"
| sinenomine wrote:
| Why go to such a long tangent, when you could make a solid case
| about the legacy grant distribution system[1] corrupting science
| for decades? It is as close to funding and career success as it
| gets.
|
| https://newscience.org/nih/
| swayvil wrote:
| It suggests that science is an artifact of attention. That bears
| study. Maybe get a nice paper out of it.
| axiom92 wrote:
| Don't forget to tweet about it with paper alert emojis!
| (U+1F6A8)
| adamrezich wrote:
| if a scientist writes a paper in a forest and nobody's around
| to retweet the headline, does it even exist at all?
| alexfromapex wrote:
| The "economy" corrupts science too.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Well, yes, but what else can we do? Certainly we shouldn't give
| out Nobel prizes on the number of like buttons clicked on TikTok,
| but at some point the most influential science is the science
| that influences the most people. Sure, it's possible that someone
| has written a great paper that will be super influential in three
| or four hundred years, but we have no way to measure or
| accurately predict that. So we're stuck with the citation counts
| and the votes for best paper at the conferences. It's all we've
| got.
| gerikson wrote:
| Absolute tautology corrupts absolutely.
| swayvil wrote:
| That's just the eddys in the attention-flow talking.
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