From afar at least academia seems absolutely brimming with mops, sociopaths, and geeks. The question should be how does it still function? Several answers, which I don’t have enough information to differentiate between:
It doesn’t. It sucks, and we should expect most intellectual advancement to happen elsewhere.
1000 shit papers do nothing to lessen a single great work. The lesson? Set up your subculture so that it prioritizes strong-link problems.
There is a (slow) ground truth signal in the form of replicable experimental evidence that acts to cull the excesses of sociopaths. Psychology had a replication crisis, but after 50 years it was able to realize it had a replication crisis, and get better, despite the fraction of mops and sociopaths in the field likely at an all-time high.
Academia is a(n) (un?)holy alliance between mops, geeks, and sociopaths, where mops get legibility & credentialism, geeks get to work on neat technical problems, and sociopaths get to game grant money & status. Everyone mostly knows who everyone else is, but doesn’t talk very loudly about it.
You can tell who are the mops by their milk-toast papers, you can tell who are the sociopaths by their money & unnaturally high h-index, and you can tell who are the geeks by their quality work.
[edit] Academia is not unified, and has many subcultures within it and outside of it. These subcultures compete among each other for the small number of geeks in order to maintain their institutional status, which puts a limit on how charmed they can be at their sociopaths, or how deluded they can be by their mops.
Since different papers and different fields have largely different average number of co-authors and of references we replace citations with individual citations, shared among co-authors. Next, we improve on citation counting applying the PageRank algorithm to citations among papers. Being time-ordered, this reduces to a weighted counting of citation descendants that we call PaperRank. Similarly, we compute an AuthorRank applying the PageRank algorithm to citations among authors. These metrics quantify the impact of an author or paper taking into account the impact of those authors that cite it. Finally, we show how self- and circular- citations can be eliminated by defining a closed market of citation-coins.
They still can’t be compared between subfields though, only within.
From afar at least academia seems absolutely brimming with mops, sociopaths, and geeks. The question should be how does it still function? Several answers, which I don’t have enough information to differentiate between:
It doesn’t. It sucks, and we should expect most intellectual advancement to happen elsewhere.
1000 shit papers do nothing to lessen a single great work. The lesson? Set up your subculture so that it prioritizes strong-link problems.
There is a (slow) ground truth signal in the form of replicable experimental evidence that acts to cull the excesses of sociopaths. Psychology had a replication crisis, but after 50 years it was able to realize it had a replication crisis, and get better, despite the fraction of mops and sociopaths in the field likely at an all-time high.
Academia is a(n) (un?)holy alliance between mops, geeks, and sociopaths, where mops get legibility & credentialism, geeks get to work on neat technical problems, and sociopaths get to game grant money & status. Everyone mostly knows who everyone else is, but doesn’t talk very loudly about it.
You can tell who are the mops by their milk-toast papers, you can tell who are the sociopaths by their money & unnaturally high h-index, and you can tell who are the geeks by their quality work.
[edit] Academia is not unified, and has many subcultures within it and outside of it. These subcultures compete among each other for the small number of geeks in order to maintain their institutional status, which puts a limit on how charmed they can be at their sociopaths, or how deluded they can be by their mops.
Probably more hypotheses.
Tangential to your comment’s main point, but for non-insiders maybe PaperRank, AuthorRank and Citation-Coins are harder to game than the h-index:
They still can’t be compared between subfields though, only within.