Gotta love footnote 1, about the ordering of author names :)<p>> 1. In keeping with our argument, and following in an extensive tradition of subverting traditional scarce markers of prestige, the authors have adopted a redistributive approach to the order of their names in the byline. As an international collaboration of uniformly nice people (cf. Moran, Hoover, and Bestiale 2016; Hoover, Posch, and Bestiale 1987; Hoover et al. 1988; see Tartamelia 2014 for an explanation), lacking access to a croquet field (cf. Hassell and May 1974), and not identifying any excellent pun to be made from ordering our names (cf. Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow 1948; Lord, de Vader, and Alliger 1986), we elected to assign index numbers based on alphabetical ordering by surname and to randomise these using an online tool. For the avoidance of doubt, while several of the authors have pets none of them are included as authors (cf. Matzinger and Mirkwood 1978). None of us are approaching a tenure decision (cf. Roderick and Gillespie 1998). And none of us are fictional entities who generate their papers algorithmically using SciGen (see Labbé 2010 for the contrasting case of Ike Antkare nevertheless greatly outranked all of the authors on several formal measures of excellence before he [it?] was outed).
This reminds me of the time in my doctoral program when I turned in a draft journal article to my advisor. He returned it a week later with no marks or written commentary whatsoever, other than telling me "do it again." I asked what was wrong with it and what I needed to do differently on the next draft. He replied "this isn't excellent. Don't give it back to me until it's excellent." I asked what excellence entailed and he said "you just know."<p>People ask me if I learned anything in grad school.
An unfortunate fact about academia is that you do tend to be punished for being overly honest. e.g. "Our lab is #1 in the world at X." usually translates roughly to, "Our lab is doing X, and it's so bloody obscure and masochistic that nobody else has bothered. Although what we're doing seems a bit pointless, We hope it will prove useful for something eventually." Saying the latter is honest, but won't get your grants renewed.<p>The really frustrating thing is when your lab is doing something that another lab is doing better because you're trying to get into what looks like a really interesting and useful area. Then you have to justify why you're the worst in the world at Y but still deserve funding vs a lab that's #1 in the world at X.
I think "excellence" is about owning mistakes, not being 100% perfect 100% of the time. Here is an interview with a former Blue Angel #8<p><i>One of the tenets we are taught as a Blue Angel is the ability to admit when we've made a mistake, or have not "achieved perfection." This is done in the form of "Safeties." Each debrief is started by an around the room tally of "safeties", starting with the Boss and working down to the supply officer in order. For example when it was my turn I might say "I'll take a safety for late hits on the Low Break Cross and Fortus and an additional safety for an early hit on the Delta Roll. I'll also pay $5 for not shaving before I went downstairs for a coffee and I'll pay $5 for a zipper. I'll fix it tomorrow, Glad to Be Here." This is essentially telling the Team that I made mistakes on 3 maneuvers and also recognize I violated policy by being in public unshaven and for having a zipper on my flight suit unzipped. Since the latter two are policy violations, they cost me $5. The essence of my mistakes is not important, that will come out during the meat of the tape review during the debrief, but the fact that I recognized them and owned up to them IS important.</i><p><a href="http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/confessions-of-a-us-navy-blue-angel-1689568343" rel="nofollow">http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/confessions-of-a-us-navy-bl...</a>
When I worked at the BBC we were told that the new motto was "Putting quality first".<p>Someone asked what we were putting first before, and what we should be putting second in future.
I'll admit I started skimming after pg. 15, but this paper is mainly an argument for using "excellence" in academia (and particularly publishing articles).<p>While I don't disagree, the paper falls flat to me because:<p>1) Journals are usually judging by first "interest to the broader academic community" and then "technical accuracy" not "excellence".<p>2) There wasn't any new data presented. Citations to prior work, but even then it was just an argument of statements not fact.
>> “Excellence” is not excellent, it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship.<p>That's one person's opinion: one that I happen to agree with. Yet the faux- objectivity in the style and language of this paper ironically apes usage of the term; exactly in the manner they purport to condemn.<p>You did not come close to proving that "excellence" is pernicious. So don't write like this is science. It is just (in my opinion) a sound and interesting opinion
This is along the lines of a train I have been on for the past week or so, fulminating about institutionalization of authority. Reification is death - so much of what we do is taking organic, living masses dripping with pus and nutrients and clean them down to bone. "This is the essence!" we say, holding up this dead thing. Then we get surprised that our dead system has all sorts of deficiencies - abuse of power, incompetent dunderheadedness, fraud, deceit.
Hi, I'm one of the authors of this piece. This is just a note to say thanks for the comments. For some context this is what we call a "preprint" (terrible term) of an article which has been submitted for peer review at a research journal. That means that we'll be able to make changes based on comments from reviews by appointed researchers as well as in response to the comments here. In particular your comments are useful in suggesting some changes in how we signpost our argument to make it clearer.<p>The article is in "academic-ese" and that's deliberate, if understandably irritating to a more general audience. We're targeting a specific audience, and we'll have a shorter and snappier version as well for the final version. As people here know well, the pitch has to be shaped to fit the audience and here we trying to change (a specific kind of) researchers' minds.
Direct link to the PDF, in case you don't want to scroll a letterboxed view across pages that are swaying for some reason: <a href="https://ndownloader.figshare.com/files/5344417" rel="nofollow">https://ndownloader.figshare.com/files/5344417</a>