The fraudulent nature of university research

updated on September 30th, 2024 at 10:58 am

Academia is said to have many problems. Having spent significant time there, and having published a few papers myself after getting my PhD in 2016, I know this all too well. But it has one incredible weakness: academia at its core is a big business dependent on pure quantitative output of research.

Yes, academia operates largely as a business. Their aim is to attract as many students as possible for the sake of money. And the primary ways they do this is through advertising their strength in various research fields. If the university doesn’t have a strong research program, it means fewer students, and less money. And herein lies the problem: this mechanism does not, and cannot take into account the law of diminishing returns, or the fact that over time, research in any single individual field becomes less and less valuable to the majority of people.

I already wrote about this a little in my article on academic mathematics. But it’s true in many other fields as well, especially theoretical physics. Because of the business-first mandate of universities, many of these fields are artificially maintained on life-support because they have the property that they are good at generating research papers and research activity, even past the point of being remotely interesting. Quantitative and mathematical fields are very good at that because of the infinite nature of numbers. Have you proved that the equation x² + y³ + z⁴ — t² = 0 has no solutions? Just add some more variables, or change a subscript or two to prove that x² + y⁵ + z⁴ — t² = 0 has no solutions. Or prove that a whole class of equations like this has no solutions. Or link this class of equations to some surface and use their geometry to prove that there are no solutions, or…

Now, I’m not saying that none of these questions are worthwhile. What I am saying is that we are working on a disproportionate amount of boring generalizations simply because it is the path of least resistance to get more publications which leads to more research grants which leads to more publications, which…

The point is, unfortunately, some fields of knowledge are becoming so narrow that the only people who are interested in them are a handful of researchers whose primary job is to generate more research and attract more people to do so. That’s totally dishonest, and way past the point of natural curiosity.

Instead, research should not be directed by the pressure that universities place on it as a big business, which forces it down the crazy ‘path of least resistance’. Do I think research should be halted? No, of course not! But it should move according to the curiosity of those doing it, not according to the needs of generating impressive citation figures for grants. Universities are frauds, because they advertise research as something driven by scientific curiosity, when in reality it’s about selling your mind like a used car salesman.

The worst part about this is that there is no outside valuation of research that is conducted by researchers. Peer review is insufficient because the only thing it does is give it a stamp of quality, which says that the research met some minimum research standard. Peer review says nothing about the quality of the research with respect to its value to anyone else other than those whose jobs are to further research.

The sad thing is that education takes a back seat to this process. Education is no longer about learning, or about making someone a better person through discovering the universe. It’s about churning out more generalizations and papers. Students take a back seat, and are used as lab monkeys or as human calculators to investigate fields that they would never really delve into except for the push of the senior researcher whose prestige is dependent on grants that are awarded by colleagues whose own motivations are also furthering highly specialized research. If a student’s curiosity leads them somewhere else, sorry! They are only permitted down paths that lead to the money and to another line on a curriculum vitae.

This entire process leads to one inescapable fact: that research is heading off into a direction far and away from the curiosity and desires of the majority. And worst of all, it’s all being advertised through the propaganda of the university. Of course, students do gain some value out of it: we have integrated the university into our social system so that people who pass through it are more likely to get jobs.

But as a result, we have a society where people are becoming more and more like cogs and less like people. It’s no wonder that we have so many problems in the world. People don’t think for themselves, and I think a large part of the blame can be laid at the foot of the university that insists on keeping up a charade of pushing for more advanced research simply so they can charge more for education.

How did this all come about? It’s quite simple: humans cannot handle scale. Once a human social process scales, it takes on a life of its own and sustains itself. It’s like an atomic explosion that needs a minimum critical mass to enter into an explosive phase: once human endeavours go past a certain scale, they become explosive, mechanical, automatic, and self-sustaining. That is the nature of all things, and we must fight against it. Scientific research moved past that critical zone and now it is self-sustaining, beyond our initial spark of curiosity, beyond our initial desire to make life better through knowledge. By agreeing to be subsidized and supported by the big business approach of the modern university, science has become an abomination.

Again, I would never deny that there is still interesting and valuable research being done, and that should be done. But the vast majority of it, especially in fields like computer science, physics, mathematics, and medicine, are now part of a self-sustaining machine producing almost nothing of value except that which sustains the research machine. As a result, universities have become not a place of genuine learning, but a place where young minds are indoctrinated into being human components of that machine. The end result is the suppression of human souls.

This self-sustaining machine is a disease, and we as a society must wake up and fight against it. For young people, I hope they start taking time to ask themselves, what is life all about? How does going to university fit into really living? And how will spending years on funding this crazy machine actually make the world a better place? Personally, if there’s one piece of advice I would give to very intelligent young people, it would be this: be wary of getting involved in university research, not because science is an inherently bad thing, but because the way it’s done today is likely not for your benefit.

My love of science started at a young age, and I still admire its principles. But I am disgusted on how science and research has been institutionalized into a grotesque entity. And this entity is nothing more than a popular club that accepts members based on whether they pass the initiation of producing useless specializations because it sustains fraudulent institutions of higher learning.


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