From: yarvin@cs.yale.edu (Norman Yarvin)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Subject: Academic Perversions, part 2: The Revenge of Reality
Date: 12 Nov 1992 05:22:12 -0500
Organization: Yale Computer Science Department
NNTP-Posting-Host: cathy.na.cs.yale.edu

I recently peeved about a certain breed of academics who do computer
modeling of processes which are not fully understood.  For instance, people
who have models of how the temperature of the entire world evolves, and use
them to predict global warming.  One thing I assumed was that the researcher
eventually, by lots of tweaking, would get his model to agree with what is
presently known about the process in question.  But this does not always
happen.  Sometimes, with all his efforts, he cannot get his computer program
to work.

Which poses an interesting conundrum to him.  Because computer programs tend
to have bugs in them.  He is left with the question: is his program failing
because it has a bug, is it failing because it was not tweaked enough, or is
it failing because his ideas are totally hokey?  He does not know what the
results would be if his computer program were working, so he cannot debug it
in the normal fashion.  Instead he must go over his code again and again,
looking for errors.

But say he has debugged it enough so that he is 99.999% sure it is bug-free.
Now he is left hanging on the question of whether he tweaked the coefficients
enough.  Maybe if he changed two minor coefficients at once everything would
work out right.

Now suppose our researcher has tweaked coefficients until his fingers have
grown calluses, so that he is thoroughly convinced the method under
investigation will not work.  After all his effort, he will want to share
his conclusions with others.  The standard way of doing this is to publish
in an academic journal.  But the poor man whose program does not work will
have an extremely hard time getting his results published.  For all the
journal knows, he did not completely debug his program.  Or perhaps he made
a ridiculous error in his coefficients.

Suppose that the journal somehow knows that our hero committed neither
mistake.  Even then there is very little chance he will get his article
published.  If the method he tested out was not invented by someone
well-known in the field, the chance of publishing will be zero.  Who would
want to read a report by some loser who could not get some other loser's
ideas to explain anything?  There are millions of such idiots.

Indeed, our man probably wouldn't even submit his results to a journal.  He
has his reputation to consider.  As one individual explained to me, "I don't
publish results which I can't explain theoretically."  And if it didn't
work, how could he possibly explain it theoretically?

So after all this unpleasant mucking with inscrutable formulas, he is left
with nothing.  But we should not be tricked into feeling sympathy for him.
He was the one who chose to go into a fundamentally flawed field.  He was
the one who failed to come up with some results that superficially looked
good.  So let him pay the price.  It is the revenge of reality.


--
Norman Yarvin						yarvin@cs.yale.edu
 "The prevailing view seems to be that mere stupidity is at the bottom of
  the yearning to annoy other people, but I believe its true springs are to
  be found in an inferiority complex."  H. L. Mencken