I hate academia. It feels like a rigged game, where some people don't have to do even the bare minimum to have their paper accepted, thanks to their associations/connections. I just read a paper who got accepted to a top robotics conference, with no published code, no bench-marking against other methods and obviously no looking for related and previous work on that topic. I am furious!

Yes. Published papers as a metric.

@magicMirror That's half-correct. I do know researchers who do meaningful things - usually they work closely with the industry, which ensures their outputs are actually valuable and not scientific masturbation.

@NickyBones Some do understand the value of good research. Others... are only interested in the amount of novel papers they can churn out, impact factor be damned.

your post reminded me of this video: https://youtu.be/PriwCi6SzLo

it's about the ethics of scihub and piracy, but i think it makes a good case about why these magazines are full of shit

Hehe yeah I recently saw someone's thesis paper, where the premise & experiment was pretty much identical to one of my Github side projects.

That's not a boast about the academical level of my side projects at all.

It was a fairly trivial TensorFlow "beginner's experiment" on a public dataset, with the results rendered in a pretty way on a geographic map.

I'm no machine learning expert, and I'm pretty sure both my method and results were trash.

But these days any artificial intelligence project immediately gets a bonus modifier in terms of grading, funding, media attention, etc.

That's one of the reasons I got out.

Double-blind review processes are basically a scam, they don't help. The people reviewing are in the know, they know exactly how the "inner circle" writes, they know what they're researching as they talk about it, and they know the papers that make their journals and conferences popular through the use of snazzy demos and clickbait rather than rigorous process and genuine academic advancement.

You can tell at the conferences too - always the same top people huddling around in their clique, while anyone else is an imposter to be heavily queried & questioned.

Hate to be negative, but that, coupled with the publishing targets, the low salaries, the huge egos, the diminishing pensions and the need to research something "profitable" as opposed to genuinely interesting made my mind up. It's a shame, but the decent research posts now pretty much seem to be all in industry.

@NickyBones , as is the case with industry, Academia is a rigged game.
The same way investment banks know nothing about productive industries and just pour money over those firms that churn out profits, grants are mostly poured over paper mills.

The point is, real science has staying power. It is an art form to write a paper on politics and culture and see yourself cited by nearly all early computer scientists (Hey, Chomsky!).

But, as any "non-sellout" artists, non-compromizing scientists have to get used to ramen, rancid coffee and sleepless nights because of the highway traffic upstairs.

My target is to get my MSc and hoard money for a half decade before going back for a PhD. Then more dirty money and finally "retire" into an adjunct position somewhere where tea is cheaper than booze.

The entire world economic system is rigged.

How do you think retards pushing garbage policy are able to survive in governments around the world? Think bigger, this is way beyond academia.

@AlmondSauce Labs specifically "brand" themselves with how they annotate and even the themes for their plots so you can know it's "famous lab X" even if the paper is "anonymous". Also, they publish a paper with the same name on arxiv, lol. And yes, the people in the know are familiar with the editors, and nobody wants to mess with the famous professors...
I just want to get my PhD and go back to the industry. Hopefully, people will be able to see past appearances then, and focus on my skills. This, or I will just get older - might actually help.

@JsonBoa I am a bit shocked that this is the case, but the industry felt less rigid and deterministic to me. I got shit because I looked young and was a girl, but it felt like I could still push forward somehow. Academic is just...inevitable dead-end.

@Demolishun I feel like the majority of people are stupid, uninformed or indifferent so they just elect idiots to the office every single time. I don't think it's rigged per se.
In the academic world though, you do have talent, passion and knowledge, and a well-oiled mechanism that actively suppresses them...

@NickyBones Grabbing the PhD and getting into industry was exactly what I did, and I've never looked back. I haven't really used it directly, but I'm still very glad I did it.