alt Hacker NewsWhy would someone ruin their academic credentials and reputation (at a reputable university) like this? Maybe there was nothing to begin with? Otherwise I can't understand this.
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I think it might be taking a position in the use of AI, They don't appear to be concealing their use.
If the papers were of a uniformly high standard then I might not have a problem with it.
If they are hoping some of them are good and the review process will filter out the bad then it seems like they are not doing research, they are writing hypotheses and at pushing the work of testing them onto the reviewers.
I could also see that being done to make some sort of statement about the review process, but it's not clear if that is their goal.
He's wasting people's time, which is already the resource that many people lack any to spare. I'm not sure if he realises this part.
It's incentivized by the system. You get grants, clout, importance, job opportunities based on your publishing in major conferences. As of last year, the variance of review scores have been higher between reviewers on the same paper than between the same reviewer on different paper. So it's effectively become a coinflip. The best strategy when it's random is just to spam stuff.
Oh also at least 40% generated peer-reviews are contributing to this statistic.
Because they won't. The various algorithms that create the "publish or perish" incentives actually reward this. Academic reputation isn't a term in those algorithms, so it isn't rewarded. Same for verifying other's papers and other parts of science and research that aren't actually publishing papers. This is the cause of the reproducibility crisis in academic.
"Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome"
Not surprising. Many academics held in high-esteem in these behavioral offshoots are nothing more than frauds to begin with. Almost every X-studies paper is equally fluff these days (see the recent frontpage CHI post) - at least these have some semblance of theory given their equations, though are still largely garbage.
AI psychosis? They think they're actually putting out high-quality papers. Nothing else makes sense.
More and more evidence is surfacing that suggests AI addiction is real. It may be as simple as that Nicholas Polson has developed a severe case of AI addiction.
A ton of academia is based on putting out slop into not so well-read journals and crossing fingers it passes some dead-exhausted postdoc TA's peer review.
If the past 30 years have shown us anything, it's that academic credentials and reputation are very difficult to blemish.
Polson is just pushing the knob to 11 because it's louder.
We've been in the dark ages of science for so many decades...
This is economics though, a discipline where you be like Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart and commit the most impactful fraud of the century and face absolutely no consequence on your career.
When you compare that to the consequence of the hydroxycholoquine paper, which is comparable in public policy impact, where Didiee Raoult lost all its legitimacy and his job, it's easy to see that economics as an academic field doesn't value probity much.