https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/01/07/french-bio-lab-research-scandal/ Skip to primary content Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science Search [ ] [Search] Main menu * Home * Authors * Blogs We Read * Sponsors Post navigation Ben Shneiderman's Golden Rules of Interface Design To Neon54 Casino dekhetai kruptonomismata kai nomismata fiat pou perilambanoun euro, kanadika dolaria, dolaria EPA, iaponika gen, ouggrika phiorinia, norbegike korona, rosika roublia kai alla. Casibom Jojobet The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they're mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled. Posted on January 7, 2024 9:55 AM by Andrew Dorothy Bishop has the story about "a chemistry lab in CNRS-Universite Sorbonne Paris Nord": More than 20 scientific articles from the lab of one principal investigator have been shown to contain recycled and doctored graphs and electron microscopy images. That is, results from different experiments that should have distinctive results are illustrated by identical figures, with changes made to the axis legends by copying and pasting numbers on top of previous numbers. . . . the problematic data are well-documented in a number of PubPeer comments on the articles (see links in Appendix 1 of this document). The response by CNRS [Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique] to this case . . . was to request correction rather than retraction of what were described as "shortcomings and errors", to accept the scientist's account that there was no intentionality, despite clear evidence of a remarkable amount of manipulation and reuse of figures; a disciplinary sanction of exclusion from duties was imposed for just one month. I'm not surprised. The sorts of people who will cheat on their research are likely to be the same sorts of people who will instigate lawsuits, start media campaigns, and attack in other ways. These are researchers who've already shown a lack of scruple and a willingness to risk their careers; in short, they're loose cannons, scary people, so it can seem like the safest strategy to not try to upset them too much, not trap them into a corner where they'll fight like trapped rats. I'm not speaking specifically of this CNRS researcher--I know nothing of the facts of this case beyond what's reported in Bishop's post--I'm just speaking to the mindset of the academic administrators who would just like the problem to go away so they can get on with their regular jobs. But Bishop and her colleagues were annoyed. If even blatant examples of scientific misconduct cannot be handled straightforwardly, what does this say about the academic and scientific process more generally? Is science just a form of social media, where people can make any sort of claim and evidence doesn't matter? They write: So what should happen when fraud is suspected? We propose that there should be a prompt investigation, with all results transparently reported. Where there are serious errors in the scientific record, then the research articles should immediately be retracted, any research funding used for fraudulent research should be returned to the funder, and the person responsible for the fraud should not be allowed to run a research lab or supervise students. The whistleblower should be protected from repercussions. In practice, this seldom happens. Instead, we typically see, as in this case, prolonged and secret investigations by institutions, journals and/or funders. There is a strong bias to minimize the severity of malpractice, and to recommend that published work be "corrected" rather than retracted. Bishop and her colleagues continue: One can see why this happens. First, all of those concerned are reluctant to believe that researchers are dishonest, and are more willing to assume that the concerns have been exaggerated. It is easy to dismiss whistleblowers as deluded, overzealous or jealous of another's success. Second, there are concerns about reputational risk to an institution if accounts of fraudulent research are publicised. And third, there is a genuine risk of litigation from those who are accused of data manipulation. So in practice, research misconduct tends to be played down. But: This failure to act effectively has serious consequences: 1. It gives credibility to fictitious results, slowing down the progress of science by encouraging others to pursue false leads. . . . [and] erroneous data pollutes the databases on which we depend. 2. Where the research has potential for clinical or commercial application, there can be direct damage to patients or businesses. 3. It allows those who are prepared to cheat to compete with other scientists to gain positions of influence, and so perpetuate further misconduct, while damaging the prospects of honest scientists who obtain less striking results. 4. It is particularly destructive when data manipulation involves the Principal Investigator of a lab. . . . CNRS has a mission to support research training: it is hard to see how this can be achieved if trainees are placed in a lab where misconduct occurs. 5. It wastes public money from research grants. 6. It damages public trust in science and trust between scientists. 7. It damages the reputation of the institutions, funders, journals and publishers associated with the fraudulent work. 8. Whistleblowers, who should be praised by their institution for doing the right thing, are often made to feel that they are somehow letting the side down by drawing attention to something unpleasant. . . . What happened next? It's the usual bad stuff. They receive a series of stuffy bureaucratic responses, none of which address any of items 1 through 8 above, let alone the problem of the data which apparently have obviously been faked. Just disgusting. But I'm not surprised. We've seen it many times before: - The University of California's unresponsive response when informed of research misconduct by their star sleep expert. - The American Political Science Association refusing to retract an award given to an author for a book with plagiarized material, or even to retroactively have the award shared with the people whose material was copied without acknowledgment. - The London Times never acknowledging the blatant and repeated plagiarism by its celebrity chess columnist. - The American Statistical Association refusing to retract an award given to a professor who plagiarized multiple times, including from wikipedia (in an amusing case where he created negative value by introducing an error into the material he'd copied, so damn lazy that he couldn't even be bothered to proofread his pasted material). - Cornell University . . . ok they finally canned the pizzagate dude, but only after emitting some platitudes. Kind of amazing that they actually moved on that one. - The Association for Psychological Science: this one's personal for me, as they ran an article that flat-out lied about me and then refused to correct it just because, hey, they didn't want to. - Lots and lots of examples of people finding errors or fraud in published papers and journals refusing to run retractions or corrections or even to publish letters pointing out what went wrong. Anyway, this is one more story. What gets my goat What really annoys me in these situations is how the institutions show loyalty to the people who did research misconduct. When researcher X works at or publishes with institution Y, and it turns out that X did something wrong, why does Y so often try to bury the problem and attack the messenger? Y should be mad at X; after all, it's X who has leveraged the reputation of Y for his personal gain. I'd think that the leaders of Y would be really angry at X, even angrier than people from the outside. But it doesn't happen that way. The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they're mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled. I'm sure that Dan Davies would have something to say about all this. This entry was posted in Miscellaneous Science, Sociology, Zombies by Andrew. Bookmark the permalink. 12 thoughts on "The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they're mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled." 1. [1e06a63a]Anoneuoid on January 7, 2024 10:54 AM at 10:54 am said: Don't waste any more resources attempting to distinguish between fraud and incompetence. Someone else needs to repeat the experiments (or whatever) to see if they get the same results. This is very simple and was already figured out hundreds of years ago. In fact, most people assume that is what scientists are actually doing. Reply | + [61c1]John G Williams on January 7, 2024 11:50 AM at 11:50 am said: I was not a lab scientist, but my wife was, and I gather from her that repeating laboratory experiments in biology is sometimes not that simple. Consider that people do sabbaticals at other labs to learn how to work with an experimental system developed there. There can be a lot more to the experiments than what gets described in detail in the methods section of a paper. Reply | o [1e06]Anoneuoid on January 7, 2024 12:03 PM at 12:03 pm said: I was a lab scientist, and the methods sections of the papers are largely worthless. They are that way because no one is repeating each others work (it is actively discouraged due to "lacking novelty"), so we don't know the important factors that need to be communicated in the method sections. The "its so complicated" excuse is just an excuse for doing a bad job. Of course the individual scientist will find it nearly impossible to do a good job because it takes so much longer than doing a crappy job. So they simply can't compete (Gresham's law). It won't stop until people stop paying researchers for doing a bad job. Reply | 2. [efc72cd3]Random political scientist on January 7, 2024 11:30 AM at 11:30 am said: Part of the problem is also there are few (almost zero) senior scholars with the combination of prestige and personal temperament to rail against such things. Within our discipline, look at Don Green after the LaCour scandal: rather than people rightly rail against the fact he at best committed research fraud by putting his name on an article he didn't contribute to, he was feted with a workshop at Stanford on research ethics and transparency (invite-only and non-public, naturally). And even those who are inclined, like Andrew, often shade into vague references or euphemisms rather than directly calling out the miscreants: I'm fairly keyed into disciplinary stuff, but I'm not aware of what award that went to a plagiarized book he is referring to, or who the plagiarizer is (and it's not like this is the sort of thing that one can discover via some Googling). Reply | + [d582]Andrew on January 7, 2024 11:52 AM at 11:52 am said: Random: I'm not shading into vague references or euphemisms! I just find the examples more interesting than the people. Here's the background to different awards that went to two different plagiarizing social science faculty, one at Rutgers and one at Columbia. Reply | o [247f]Random political scientist on January 7, 2024 1:49 PM at 1:49 pm said: Andrew, for the record, I did not think you weren't doing it on purpose. It was just offered an example of something I generally observe in academia, which exacerbates the issues your post highlights. It was the opposite of a criticism: if more senior scholars rejected the wagon-circling of elite academic circles like you, we'd be in a better place. Reply | 3. []Anonymous on January 7, 2024 12:33 PM at 12:33 pm said: Sturgeon's law in combination with Clarke's law and the Piranha Principle tell me that fraud isn't actually a big problem for science at all. At least, not every crappy research paper should have a big negative impact, there are way to many crappy research papers! I'm not convinced by many of the 8 points they make. Does fraud slow down science? Is there any proof for that claim? Actually, after reading many papers from the 40ies and 50ies, I'm convinced that the standards have risen by quite a lot. Nowadays, it's a widespread practice to cite one's sources and just making up numbers is generally frowned upon. On another note: according to some paywalled NYT article that is cited by wikipedia, some study "discovered [that piranhas] are timid fish that schooled for protection from their own predators". So maybe "Piranha Principle", although a very intuitive term, is still a misnomer. Reply | + [d582]Andrew on January 7, 2024 1:06 PM at 1:06 pm said: Anon: 1. Excellent to see my various laws and principles used in combination! 2. Yes, I've heard that piranhas can coexist peacefully. Indeed, in our most recent trip to the zoo, we saw a fish tank full of piranhas swimming around. We took a picture but it somehow got lost on the phone, which was too bad because I was going to use that photo as the basis for a blog post on just this topic. Reply | o [e0c5]Howard Edwards on January 7, 2024 2:21 PM at 2:21 pm said: That reminds me: where have all the cat photos gone? Reply | # [d582]Andrew on January 7, 2024 2:33 PM at 2:33 pm said: Howard: If people send 'em in, I'll post 'em. 4. [e779ff0e]Kyle C on January 7, 2024 2:13 PM at 2:13 pm said: The linked July 2023 review of the Davies book raises an interesting point about trying to get a rough handle on the prevalence of fraud by thinking about one's personal associates. (I can't recall reading the July post; maybe I should comment back there, but I prefer to stay in the present timeline.) I'm not an academic but I attended "fancy schools." I have (at least) one classmate out of ~1600 from undergrad in the 1980a who went on to be a notorious financial fraudster and another from my professional school class of ~170 in the 1990s whose business fraud became known more recently. I know them both personally (meaning they would remember me). And these are just people that got caught! That gives me the impression of a fairly high rate. Reply | + [d582]Andrew on January 7, 2024 2:17 PM at 2:17 pm said: Kyle: Nobody I knew from college became a financial fraudster, but I do have a cousin who was known as the King of Spam and was sent to prison, and I have a friend--ok, I haven't seen him for a few years now, I guess that would make him more of an acquaintance, who, ok, I don't know if he was an actual financial fraudster but he did have to pay a hundred-million-dollar fine to the government. I think he's still doing fine in business, so I guess he had a few million left over after paying the fine, or maybe he got a favorable payment plan. And then I've had various academic friends and colleagues who've engaged in scholarly and professional misconduct, but I guess that's so common we don't even think about it. Reply | Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Comment * [ ] Name [ ] Email [ ] Website [ ] [Post Comment] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] D[ ] * Art * Bayesian Statistics * Causal Inference * Decision Analysis * Economics * Jobs * Literature * Miscellaneous Science * Miscellaneous Statistics * Multilevel Modeling * Papers * Political Science * Public Health * Sociology * Sports * Stan * Statistical Computing * Statistical Graphics * Teaching * Zombies 1. Dale Lehman on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 4:01 PM Your response to Roxana is a mixture of incoherence and self-indulgence. Briefly: Roxana is pointing out that in a meritocracy... 2. Andrew on Ben Shneiderman's Golden Rules of Interface Design January 7, 2024 2:38 PM Jay: Here's something odd. Back when I was a student at the University of Maryland, we called it UM. Nobody... 3. Jay Patel on Ben Shneiderman's Golden Rules of Interface Design January 7, 2024 2:35 PM I'm at UMD in the School of Information Studies now and Schneiderman is at UMD CS Department. He occasionally visits... 4. Andrew on The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they're mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled.January 7, 2024 2:33 PM Howard: If people send 'em in, I'll post 'em. 5. Jens on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 2:31 PM @Roxana >> There must be plenty of people who are better than you Sure! Especially if you consider the raw... 6. Howard Edwards on The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they're mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled.January 7, 2024 2:21 PM That reminds me: where have all the cat photos gone? 7. Andrew on The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they're mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled.January 7, 2024 2:17 PM Kyle: Nobody I knew from college became a financial fraudster, but I do have a cousin who was known as... 8. Kyle C on The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they're mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled.January 7, 2024 2:13 PM The linked July 2023 review of the Davies book raises an interesting point about trying to get a rough handle... 9. Random political scientist on The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they're mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled. January 7, 2024 1:49 PM Andrew, for the record, I did not think you weren't doing it on purpose. It was just offered an example... 10. Andrew on The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they're mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled.January 7, 2024 1:06 PM Anon: 1. Excellent to see my various laws and principles used in combination! 2. Yes, I've heard that piranhas can... 11. Kyle C on Cheating in science, sports, journalism, business, and art: How do they differ?January 7, 2024 12:50 PM Haha. With apologies to Andrew, Levine is my favorite writer, on any topic, currently active, almost entirely for his style... 12. Anonymous on The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they're mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled.January 7, 2024 12:33 PM Sturgeon's law in combination with Clarke's law and the Piranha Principle tell me that fraud isn't actually a big problem... 13. Roxana on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 12:23 PM Jens -- would you be happy with where you end up in what you deem a "true meritocracy"? There must... 14. Anoneuoid on The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they're mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled.January 7, 2024 12:03 PM I was a lab scientist, and the methods sections of the papers are largely worthless. They are that way because... 15. Andrew on The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they're mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled.January 7, 2024 11:52 AM Random: I'm not shading into vague references or euphemisms! I just find the examples more interesting than the people. Here's... 16. John G Williams on The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they're mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled.January 7, 2024 11:50 AM I was not a lab scientist, but my wife was, and I gather from her that repeating laboratory experiments in... 17. Random political scientist on The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they're mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled. January 7, 2024 11:30 AM Part of the problem is also there are few (almost zero) senior scholars with the combination of prestige and personal... 18. Dale Lehman on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 11:09 AM On a legal level, sure. However, it is obvious that this was not a legitimate attempt to find out about... 19. Anoneuoid on The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they're mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled.January 7, 2024 10:54 AM Don't waste any more resources attempting to distinguish between fraud and incompetence. Someone else needs to repeat the experiments (or... 20. John Hall on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 10:49 AM "Congress appears to have stuck their noses where they never belonged" Even though Harvard is nominally private, they receive federal... 21. Joshua on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 10:10 AM As an educator, i consider it a matter of principle to be equivocal about using "smart," but I do think... 22. Joshua on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 10:06 AM It's many varieties are constant in Trump's rhetoric. From just one article today at CNN (chipmunk, avert your eyes). The... 23. Dale Lehman on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 10:03 AM "Argument from ignorance." Well, Trump is the master of this, but I've heard that he is, in fact, very smart.... 24. Joshua on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 9:58 AM Dale - . I think it overlaps with a number of formal fallacies. When I asked GPT for suggestions, this... 25. Georgette on Ben Shneiderman's Golden Rules of Interface Design January 7, 2024 9:41 AM I am distributing this to my colleagues tomorrow. Ben Schneiderman is a little-known giant. Someone told me that 1) He... 26. Dale Lehman on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 9:34 AM Joshua Great example! We need to give this practice a name (or does it already have one). The "I heard....I... 27. Joshua on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 9:29 AM I found this special: https://x.com/BillAckman/status/ 1743984542883459455?s=20 I'm not saying that MIT is behind this "attack," but some people are saying that,... 28. Dale Lehman on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 9:23 AM Do we really need to debate whether men are treated differently than women? I accept that as fact, but without... 29. Andrew on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 9:16 AM Ackman, with his escalating no-compromise demands on university administration, is the mirror image of everyone's stereotype of student protesters. He's... 30. Joshua on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 9:09 AM Carlos - I wasn't suggesting they were selected to testify because they're women, but that being female may have affected... 31. Joshua on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 9:08 AM Combining approval of MIT with approval of Ackman is going to be a bit tricky: https://x.com/BillAckman/status/ 1743792224020619450?s=20 32. Andrew on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 8:04 AM Jens: You write, "the larger point is that Ackman does not appear to want Harvard to be a playground for... 33. Dale Lehman on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 7:28 AM Carlos Yes. But I think you misunderstand me. Stand behind is a loaded term. Citing Andrew's work does not mean... 34. Carlos Ungil on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 6:46 AM > I think this has some similarity to issues Andrew has raised about whether someone can be a good researcher... 35. Jens / Anon on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 6:44 AM @Andrew >> You can play around the numbers if you want. It seems pretty clear that middle-class students can afford... 36. Dale Lehman on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 6:28 AM I was going to stop, but I need to respond to this: "I was only referring to the linked post."... 37. Carlos Ungil on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 6:04 AM Leaving "duplicative language" aside there is also an interesting causal-inference-methodology / data-access-and-reproducibility aspect. https://www.karlstack.com/p/ the-king-has-no-clothes-claudine Note that the "King" in that... 38. Andrew on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 4:32 AM Anon: OK, I'll step in and disagree with another of Ackman's statements. Ackman writes, "the only students who can now... 39. Anonymous on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 4:24 AM @Dale >> Many other of Ackman's statements, I can agree with and some I cannot. I was only referring to... 40. Andrew on Bayesians moving from defense to offense: "I really think it's kind of irresponsible now not to use the information from all those thousands of medical trials that came before. Is that very radical?"January 7, 2024 4:12 AM Ronny: The collection of p-values studied in the paper by Jager and Leek had huge problems of selection, much beyond... 41. Anoneuoid on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 7, 2024 12:20 AM I like the guy who contacted the librarian who found the archived letters (that someone earlier bothered to archive) in... 42. Jessica Hullman on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 6, 2024 10:41 PM The Rufo piece essentially says its an attack on DEI. As somebody describes below, "A concern about the harm DEI... 43. Ronny Kohavi on Bayesians moving from defense to offense: "I really think it's kind of irresponsible now not to use the information from all those thousands of medical trials that came before. Is that very radical?"January 6, 2024 9:46 PM It feels like the criticisms the authors wrote in response to Jager and Leek's paper from a decade ago, using... 44. Joshua on Ben Shneiderman's Golden Rules of Interface Design January 6, 2024 7:54 PM One of my favorite Interwebs thingy's is when people complain about CENSORSHIP! if a blog comment doesn't go through or... 45. Phil on Ben Shneiderman's Golden Rules of Interface DesignJanuary 6, 2024 7:41 PM Preventing people from posting spam is censorship, of course. Not all censorship is bad! 46. Carlos Ungil on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 6, 2024 5:00 PM > Of course the argument could be made that it's about gender bias; all three university presidents were women. According... 47. Dale Lehman on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 6, 2024 4:47 PM Anon Well, perusing Bill Ackman's statements, I see this one: "Bill Ackman @BillAckman * Nov 11, 2021 Replying to @BillAckman... 48. Joshua on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 6, 2024 3:22 PM Jessica - I second your comment. I think it gets to part of the problem - that "DEI" in these... 49. Joshua on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 6, 2024 3:04 PM Sorry for the all caps also. 50. Joshua on In some cases academic misconduct doesn't deserve a public apologyJanuary 6, 2024 3:01 PM JFA - > But the right lobs tirades about the left taking over academia all the time and no one... Proudly powered by WordPress