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Science is very good.

Pseudoscience like measuring cost to fix a bug in a classroom setting is bad. Specially if it literally does "cost" and "classroom" together. That's just a sad way to grab some more research funding to keep the machine going.

The "garbage pile" of papers is not a new problem. It's been plaguing the science world for quite a long time. And it's only going to get worse because the metric and the target are the same (Goodhart's Law).

From the article itself, each mentioned paper scream of "the author never had to write actual functional code for a living" to me.



The "garbage pile" of papers is not a problem, they are deliverables, representing completed work for which people have been payed.

If we stop paying for those "garbages", the problem might disappear. But what about the researchers or scientists who depend on that funding to live?

What needs to change is the very way academic work is organized, but nothing comes for free.


Creating metrics for code quality is about as reliable as doing it for essay quality


> The "garbage pile" of papers is not a new problem. It's been plaguing the science world for quite a long time. And it's only going to get worse because the metric and the target are the same (Goodhart's Law).

I don't think this observation is valid. Papers are not expected to be infallible truth-makers. They are literally a somewhat standardized way for anyone to address a community of their peers and say "hey guys, check out this neat thing I noticed".

Papers are subject to a review because of editorial bars from each publication (that is, you can't just write a few sentences with a crayon and expect it to be published) and the paper should not just clone whatever people already wrote before. Other than this, unless you are committing academic fraud, you can still post something you found your conclusions were off or you missed something.


Not a bad argument in an ideal world.

In such trajectory science is meant to cross the information overload / false equivalence threshold, where the "hey, check this out" scenario won't scale and the cost of validating all other people's papers outweigh the (theoretical) gains.

Not sure if you think that threshold has been crossed already or not.




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