In any case, I hesitate a little, for the above reasons.
Criticizing papers is..erm.. good and proper, I think. Sometimes the criticism will be crap, but a critical instinct isn't a bad thing here. Bias is, c'est la vie.
Critising academics... I feel we're far too comfortable dishing out personal criticism in the internet era. Leave that one there.
Criticising the system... All those "flags" that I raised are actually common and recurring criticisms of the system, within academia. But, they seem to fall short on how meta they go. Publish-or-perish & grant systems, the insider criticism sounds more like "my boss is a moron" talk, cheap shots.
What I'm hoping for is big ideas from academia, I guess. Ideas about how to structure the institutions of academia: publishing, grants, whatever else determines what research gets done, by whom. Something that promotes efficiency.^ Something that promotes completion/conclusion so that we end up with knowledge, not a collection of research findings. Negative results and data pooling. Seperation of data & interpretation. Replication. This is not an excel-vs-R problem. It's an "incentives-within-academia" issue.
^Remember, there're problems that these grant bureaucracies are clumsily trying to solve. This is a market, and a bad market can be a lot worse than a good one.
In any case, I hesitate a little, for the above reasons.
Criticizing papers is..erm.. good and proper, I think. Sometimes the criticism will be crap, but a critical instinct isn't a bad thing here. Bias is, c'est la vie.
Critising academics... I feel we're far too comfortable dishing out personal criticism in the internet era. Leave that one there.
Criticising the system... All those "flags" that I raised are actually common and recurring criticisms of the system, within academia. But, they seem to fall short on how meta they go. Publish-or-perish & grant systems, the insider criticism sounds more like "my boss is a moron" talk, cheap shots.
What I'm hoping for is big ideas from academia, I guess. Ideas about how to structure the institutions of academia: publishing, grants, whatever else determines what research gets done, by whom. Something that promotes efficiency.^ Something that promotes completion/conclusion so that we end up with knowledge, not a collection of research findings. Negative results and data pooling. Seperation of data & interpretation. Replication. This is not an excel-vs-R problem. It's an "incentives-within-academia" issue.
^Remember, there're problems that these grant bureaucracies are clumsily trying to solve. This is a market, and a bad market can be a lot worse than a good one.