Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Really grateful for people like Wang making an effort to deter this behavior.
Hoping more folks like him defend the guardrails.
ill-incentives have always influenced academia, but I’m hoping we’re able to walk it back a bit
by googaar - Some context to this is recently the big "step 1" board exam that covered the basic science portion of medicine went from being graded to being pass/fail. Since then, all the medical students where I work have started trying to get any kind of research on their CV to stand out during their residency application. New 120 participant "conferences" where med students can present posters are popping up, more med students trying to get into the labs for rotations than ever before. A lot of it is really low quality, but for them, if they don't have any research, and someone else does, they will be ranked lower and get worse jobs. Weird effect of whatever happened to make Step 1 pass/failby bagelbob432
- My assumption is the credibility of a non-PhD-holding medical student’s research is 0, just like (almost) any other inexperienced researcher.by fn-mote
- That aside I am a bit perplexed that almost absolute insistence of medical students to become researchers as well, it seems just become a pure practitioner is not a feasible option. To make it worse it looks more acceptable that a doctor really provide bad service or lacking communication and empathy to patients than not being a researcher.by eunos
- Researcher/academics pay/promotoins should be contingent on reviewing,challenging and reproducing papers rather than publishing quantity, because publishing cartels and AI has already degraded most research fields.by whizzter
- I’m currently facing a severe health condition and I can’t help but ask various LLMs about it. They all will eventually offer solutions or avenues that sound promising or ‘easy’ when I know better, that the path ahead of me is hard, however they will non-chalantly offer a path forward they insist will work. The best part is when it cites commercial websites promotional statements as facts, though it will also misinterpret medical journals if I say to restrict itself to that.
In closing, my Redfin escapism has shifted to LLM medical escapism, I know better but if you don’t or you are in even more dire straits, it provides such an illusion of hope and that’s dangerous.
- residencies have decided to outsource part of their hiring decisions to journal peer-review processes. so now for some submissions, editors and reviewers are not actually doing scientific peer review, but rather screening job candidates for hospitals.
peer review is built to assume good faith work by people who are all part of a community of scholarship, it can partially hold up to people within the community gaming metrics. if people are just going to appear, game the system to publish some papers, and then disappear into their real careers, there's no hope of this working.
i don't understand why residencies want med students to publish papers anyway. it's very difficult to do good scientific research, it requires training, time, and almost always apprenticeship. none of this is part of the medical school curriculum, which is why we need special MD-PhD programs for people who want to do both. nobody expects that doing a PhD in biology or epidemiology would give you any clinical know-how, why is it reasonable to expect the reverse?
by currymj - As a former scientist it's embarrassing how easily the dismal state of science today could have been predicted decades before by applying Goodhart's Law, or any simple train of thought on incentives and moral hazard. Instead we chose to assume scientists collectively behave on a higher plane. No wonder the general public distrusts "the intelectual elite", we deserved it.