[HN Gopher] Star neuroscientist may have manipulated data to sup...
___________________________________________________________________
Star neuroscientist may have manipulated data to support a major
stroke trial
Author : EndXA
Score : 265 points
Date : 2023-12-01 13:43 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| rand0mx1 wrote:
| Earlier posted here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38257700
| mhb wrote:
| It's happened to many of us.
| tokai wrote:
| Universities and funders should start suing these quacks. Like
| how sponsors sometimes have gone after an athlete busted for
| doping. Its insane how free scientific fraud is to do.
| notyofriend wrote:
| They want them to quietly go away less they reveal the rest of
| the fraud culture going on in other labs
| boringg wrote:
| I doubt this is the case. However they should deal with it
| before it ruins the reputation of the broader community - it
| would prevent comments like this one from gathering steam.
| notyofriend wrote:
| They can't... it's so endemic they can't just fire half the
| labs and give up all that sweet grant money. The reputation
| hit would be ruinous. Universities would rather look away
| and pretend there is no problem because it's too big to
| deal with.
| jampekka wrote:
| This was downvoted for some reason but it is very clearly
| true that universities just can't go on firing sprees if
| they want to stay solvent.
|
| Universities run a lot of even basic functions on grant
| money (university takes a cut in money and/or labor) and
| researchers and labs are the ones that apply for the
| grants.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| Outright fraud, bad experiment design, and bad statistics.
| At this point a good rule of thumb is if it hasn't been
| replicated it's bullshit.
| jampekka wrote:
| And replication studies are very difficult to get
| published, let alone funded.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| That's why commercialization is a better metric than
| replication. If nobody is willing to pay for it, why
| should my taxes fill the gap?
| pcrh wrote:
| There's no shortage of dodgy science in commerce.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Perhaps, but a sizable cohort of people that paid their
| hard earned cash for a product and go on the recommend
| others do the same is much more reliable a signal than an
| academic convincing their buddy in some government agency
| to allocate them more taxpayer dollars.
| jampekka wrote:
| It took a few millenia from discovery to commercialize
| such things as number theory, electricity and the wheel.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| And nobody's tax dollars paid for their development.
| What's your point?
| jampekka wrote:
| Number theory and electricity development was/is very
| much paid from public funds, even dollars. For wheel
| there obviously was no money at all, let alone dollars.
|
| For most science there is no obvious commercialization at
| least in any predictable timeframes. When there is, it's
| typically called R&D.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Similar to the VC industry not seeking damages against
| fraudulent CEOs.
|
| It would just make them look worse and make people question
| why they're giving that VC money.
| peteradio wrote:
| Wouldn't companies with frauds for CEOs avoid VCs that are
| diligent? Wouldn't that mean those bulldog VCs would get
| more (honest) money? I guess investors want to support the
| good ol' pump and dump rather than real new value creation.
| notyofriend wrote:
| Why do you think soft bank is so popular with the frauds
| uoaei wrote:
| > I guess investors want to support the good ol' pump and
| dump rather than real new value creation.
|
| This is the primary critique from the left of the VC
| phenomenon.
| stillwithit wrote:
| Gen pop wants ultimate freedom from obligation and endless
| externalization of responsibility too
|
| Turns out human meat suits are just driven by biology to
| survive and not egalitarian human philosophy and psychology
| dspillett wrote:
| Universities themselves likely don't have the reserves required
| to fund a good legal team for that.
|
| Commercial sponsors maybe benefitted from the positive results
| and don't want to risk losing future such benefits by biting
| the hands that feed them...
| conception wrote:
| Enough Universities, such as USC in the article, definitely
| have the funding to do this however. Enough Universities do
| that could start some precedence and give researchers at
| smaller unis payse before bad behavior.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, USC has a $7.4 billion endowment.
| some_random wrote:
| Universities are some of the wealthiest institutions on the
| planet, and they don't seem to have any issues getting a
| legal team together when it comes to other matters.
| jampekka wrote:
| Why would universities sue them? They are benefactors of
| research funding, not the ones paying them.
|
| NIH and other funders would be the ones that would like their
| money back (although they don't probably care either).
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| The call is coming from inside the house. Why do you think this
| is a systemic problem in the first place?
| ethanbond wrote:
| Do we know this is a systemic problem? There is _a lot_ of
| research going on. A few cases here and there do not
| "systemic" make.
| whythre wrote:
| Yes it is a systemic issue. A cursory search for academic
| research fraud will reveal this. Some fraudsters are very
| high profile. There are all kinds of perverse incentives;
| prestige, grant money, not wanting to waste time with
| 'useless' negative results.
| jampekka wrote:
| Also outright fraud is just the tip of the iceberg.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Yeah, it's systemic. Faked fluorescence etc. Lots of
| photoshopped biotech.
|
| Everyone who I know who has encountered it just switches
| who their research is based on. Then doesn't go get smacked
| down. Quite risky to do so.
| jampekka wrote:
| It's very systematic.
|
| https://retractionwatch.com/
| pvaldes wrote:
| The unofficial motto in academy: "cheat or perish"
|
| but well... people gets what they asked for, so everybody
| should be happy with the current situation.
|
| If cheaters have the money it means also that somebody has
| zero money. Is a double loss. This people simply pass over
| the other researchers and push them out of the road.
| somenameforme wrote:
| It depends on the field, but medicine has replication rates
| [1] that are so absurdly low that it's near to impossible for
| there not to be significant scale shenanigans going on in the
| research:
|
| ---
|
| 'A 2012 research paper found that only 11% of 53 pre-clinical
| cancer studies had replications that could confirm
| conclusions from the original studies.[79] In late 2021, The
| Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology examined 53 top
| papers about cancer published between 2010 and 2012 and
| showed that among studies that provided sufficient
| information to be redone, the effect sizes were 85% smaller
| on average than the original findings.[80][81] Another report
| estimated that almost half of randomized controlled trials
| contained flawed data (based on the analysis of anonymized
| individual participant data (IPD) from more than 150
| trials).[83]
|
| ---
|
| There's also a simple pragmatic issue. When finding something
| is effective gives you billions of dollars in profits, and
| finding it ineffective gives you millions in losses, you have
| motivations beyond just the truth. This is where regulatory
| agencies are supposed to come into play, yet those agencies
| tend to be staffed (if not lead) by people from the exact
| same companies they're supposed to be regulating.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Have these people become all that individually wealthy? Is
| there really any likelihood of recovering anything significant?
| jampekka wrote:
| If they don't start a company on the side or something, no.
| They get a relatively nice salary, but probably less than
| e.g. many high-in-demand programmers.
| thaw13579 wrote:
| It depends, the compensation is highly skewed. The PI in
| question is likely compensated over $1M/year, while other
| investigators involved (assistant and associate professors)
| have compensation comparable to entry-level programmers. To
| confirm these things, you can explore this database (only
| public CA universities though):
| https://www.sacbee.com/news/databases/state-pay/
| jampekka wrote:
| $1M/year sounds insane. In Finland at least top salaries
| for professors is about tenth of that. And I don't think
| any of the professors I know make much more, in Europe or
| North America.
|
| Admin people like the principal may get obscene salaries
| (like 4 times the max professor salary) though.
|
| As an academic, I think academics (including me) are paid
| too much. We need people who are interested in the
| science, not those who (pretend to) do it for money.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's rare for an academic to make over $1M in salary, but
| mid-high six figures is not uncommon for a highly
| published, well known name with a track record of winning
| large grants.
| floor2 wrote:
| > We need people who are interested in the science, not
| those who (pretend to) do it for money.
|
| In the US, the problem is mostly the opposite. Lots of
| people would rather do science, but it's hard to choose
| using your skills for real science when some company will
| pay you 2x-10x to instead optimize ad clicks on their
| website or algorithmic trading or whatever.
|
| In some of the humanities, liberal arts, social sciences
| etc academia may pay better than other options for those
| people. But for most STEM folks, it's a tradeoff between
| "low-paid meaningful work" vs "high-paid meaningless
| work".
|
| Medicine and AI research may be the only two areas where
| people can simultaneously do cutting edge research and
| make high salaries.
| jampekka wrote:
| Maybe a bit harsh, but I'm not sure science would get
| more trustworthy if we'd get more people who choose to
| optimize clicks just because it pays better.
|
| It's really easy to do "shortcuts" in academia that gets
| one better salary if that's what they want. As seen in
| this post.
| pcrh wrote:
| $1M/yr for clinical scientists is not uncommon. Take a
| look at this public list of senior researchers in the U
| Cal. system.
|
| https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/university-of-
| cal...
| jampekka wrote:
| What is their pay structure? The top earning prof gets
| $0.3M "regular pay" and $3M "other pay".
|
| Offtopic: At least for an european it's totally absurd
| that the top 10 or so on that list are sports coaches.
|
| https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2022/universit
| y-o...
| pcrh wrote:
| The person you linked to is a plastic surgeon at UCLA. So
| I presume they get $300k for their role as an academic,
| and the $3M through clinical work.
| luma wrote:
| Universities are the ones collecting the checks from the fraud,
| they have zero incentive to uncover anything for the same
| reason they never looked too hard at their athletes.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yep. 50% or more of the grant funding goes to "overhead"
| which is a huge income stream to the university.
| 303uru wrote:
| Most of the grant money goes to the university, they have no
| incentive to crack down on this fraud.
| robswc wrote:
| You can make the data say almost anything. IMO, this happens way
| more than anyone thinks. When you only have 2-5 people that
| _actually_ read a paper and they have to slog through it, its not
| too shocking stuff like this could happen.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| >"When you only have 2-5 people that _actually_ read a paper"
|
| Even when a paper goes through a vigilant, rigorous peer
| review, it relies upon the data that the research team
| supplied. Over and over again cases like this have encountered
| manipulated data. Humans are flawed creatures, and if you spent
| a lot of time and professional credibility on a hypothesis,
| there is a strong motive to find what you sought. Doubly so if
| the results are salacious or contrarian in some way and thus
| get viral attention. Just convince yourself that it's the data
| that was wrong somehow and you know your assumptions are right
| so just this One Time you need to do a little manipulation.
|
| A study I have seen cited on here countless times is the
| "honesty pledge" one by Ariely et al. It was the one that
| claimed that when a person signs a form at the beginning,
| they're more honest. It was complete and utter BS, based
| entirely on fabricated data. It joins an infamous list of
| studies that have had enormous influence (especially if they
| have an "aha!" factor -- if it is the sort of thing that
| Malcolm Gladwell would talk about, consider it suspect) but
| were the creation of someone making up data in Excel.
| bumby wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, Ariely is asked about this on the
| "Armchair Expert" podcast. His claim was that he did not
| manipulate the data personally and it was someone further
| upstream whom he trusted. His point was that at some point,
| trust has to enter the process, except in the rare cases
| where a single person is doing all the research themselves
| (apologies if I'm misremembering this, but I think the
| following point still stands.)
|
| IMO the researcher still has some responsibility because
| ultimately, it's their research. So the questions to me are:
|
| 1) How much due diligence is reasonable? Does it change
| depending on the source? For example, is it more/less
| reasonable to accept government-provided data at face value
| vs. data collected by an undergraduate?
|
| 2) What processes can be implemented to safeguard data
| manipulation? I know there is a movement to provide data with
| peer-reviewed submittals, but it's still a low probability
| that a peer-reviewer has the time or inclination to really
| dive into the data to assess the claims.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Ariely tried to frame both his assistant and the insurance
| company he got the data from. The insurers provided the
| same data to a journalist who found there had been very
| substantial alterations made. The assistant showed that the
| Excel metadata indicated Ariely was the last to edit it.
| robswc wrote:
| Oh for sure. It would be very easy to determine if the data
| is bad (in most cases) if someone tells you where to look. It
| is almost impossible to expect people to put their mental
| resources to trying to "crack" every paper that comes across
| their desk tho... so we have a bit of a problem, to say the
| least.
| kemiller2002 wrote:
| In my experimental design class in college, I remember the
| professor talking about the difficulties of dealing with data
| and what to include and what not. He pointed to a case where a
| datapoint looks like an anomaly and possibly should be removed.
| He showed the math behind it and including it means the
| experiment doesn't show a positive result and excluding it
| does. So which to do you do? If including it means you don't
| get funding for you and your team, what do you decide? This, of
| course, led into the ethics portion of the course, and how easy
| it is to go down a bad path, because you can manipulate data to
| make it say what you want.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Long while back, I had a big pile of numbers and I knew they
| could offer some meaning if only I could extract it. There's
| this whole discipline that advertises techniques for doing
| that, called "Statistics", so I looked there for lessons.
|
| What I found was "How to throw away data that doesn't support
| your desired conclusions," for the most part. "Actuarial
| Science," a different field, had some useful techniques but
| not many. They're most interested in ensuring the bad data
| doesn't get into the tables in the first place; but at least
| they are doing "data on data" comparisons and not "data to
| expectations"
|
| We're building "AI" right now but think about the inputs
| those see: The very first step is to throw away the
| statistically too common "stop words" ...
| nerdponx wrote:
| > What I found was "How to throw away data that doesn't
| support your desired conclusions," for the most part.
|
| What exactly are you referring to here? This seems like a
| wildly misguided characterization of statistics, which I am
| sure cannot be based in expertise or practical applied
| experience.
|
| > We're building "AI" right now but think about the inputs
| those see: The very first step is to throw away the
| statistically too common "stop words"
|
| This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a "stopword"
| is and how it's used.
|
| Words like "the" are hard to utilize within with a bag-of-
| words model specifically. Removing them is not something
| people do/did because they are clueless monkeys. The goal
| is to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
|
| For example, traditionally spam filtering uses a very crude
| variety of bag-of-words model called "Naive Bayes", in
| which we assume (wrongly of course) that word choice is
| completely random, and that the only difference between
| spam and not spam is that random distribution of words. Are
| you really going to argue that the word "the" is critical
| to that process? If you can build a better NB spam filter
| by including stop words, by all means go ahead and do it.
| But both linguistics and decades of success in the field
| are against you.
|
| On the other hand, words with grammatical function like
| "the" are absolutely important and relevant to the overall
| structure and meaning of a document. Therefore, training
| pipelines for modern deep-learning-based LLMs like GPT
| don't remove stop words (as far as I know at least),
| because the whole idea of a stopword doesn't make sense in
| a model like that.
|
| I want to be respectful here, but it sounds like you took a
| cursory look through three vast literatures, without the
| perspective of having actually used any of this stuff in
| real life, and drew some invalid conclusions.
| h2odragon wrote:
| > I want to be respectful here,
|
| Thanks!
|
| Many people in these fields agree my conclusions are
| invalid. I say the same about theirs.
| nerdponx wrote:
| You're entitled to your own opinion of course, but your
| conclusions appear to be based on beginner-level
| misunderstandings. That doesn't seem like a constructive
| or productive way to conduct oneself through life.
| h2odragon wrote:
| you should see my rants about why normalizing weights is
| a bad idea and how a limited context window is
| effectively random interpolation
| nerdponx wrote:
| You're describing a legitimately hard problem faced by honest
| researchers. This case, it seems like we have enough evidence
| to suggest that we are not dealing with honest researchers,
| but rather deliberate fraud.
| EnigmaFlare wrote:
| That's not a hard problem for an honest researcher. Just
| explain the risk of that data point in the grant
| application and if the funders decide not to take the risk,
| that's their perogative.
| bsimpson wrote:
| There are so many complications because of data fraud and the
| fear of perception of data fraud.
|
| I'm the guy who builds the experiments on a team of user
| researchers. There are all sorts of things that seem
| intuitive to an outsider but are poo-pooed by practitioners
| as unethical. For instance, you might run a study that
| doesn't have enough participants to have a statistically
| significant conclusion. An outsider would deploy it to more
| participants to see if the trend becomes significant with
| more data. A trained researcher will cringe at that proposal.
|
| So far as I can tell, researchers consider the experiment
| final as soon as you peek at the data. If you want any
| changes - more data, different demographics, etc - you have
| to throw out everything and start over. Even though it's
| logically interchangeable, the data you've already collected
| is considered spoiled, because they don't want allegations of
| tampering/data grooming.
| bumby wrote:
| > _You can make the data say almost anything._
|
| A coworker had a saying:
|
| "Data is like a prisoner of war. If you beat it around enough,
| you can make it tell you almost anything."
| robswc wrote:
| Yep. I actually am a co-author of a paper that has been
| published and while I was working on it, I realized how easy
| it would have been to make the data agree or disagree with
| the hypothesis. Based on the feedback of reviewers, you see
| they don't dig into how you get your data and it seems as if
| its based on "good faith."
|
| I could have made a mistake, or I could have been malicious.
| I don't think they would have caught it because it would have
| involved hours and hours of work on their part.
| jampekka wrote:
| With current complex data processing pipelines it is almost
| trivial to add e.g. a wrong sign to some variable to get
| "results" from data that doesn't contain any. I've had many
| "results" disappear after I found a bug. I could have
| probably gotten papers quite easily by ignoring the bug.
|
| I'm quite certain a huge share of "results" are due to
| bugs. Probably many of my own too even though I stress
| about this constantly.
|
| An intentional bug would be practically impossible to show
| to be intentional. With notebook/REPL style analysis there
| wouldn't necessarily even be any documentation of the bug.
| I'd wager it actually happens, and even surprisingly often.
| We only know of fabricators who are bad at fabrication.
| codedokode wrote:
| > When you only have 2-5 people that _actually_ read a paper
|
| But his papers got thousand of citations as I understand ...
| that means thousands of people read them?
| robswc wrote:
| >that means thousands of people read them
|
| ahah, if only that were the case :)
|
| "read" is a pretty loose term. I think its a house of cards.
| When you cite something, you do so (usually) because it
| supports your paper, basically "X did Y and we need Y to be
| true for the foundations of this paper." When you cite "X",
| you do so with the assumption that X did their due diligence
| and peer review would have caught any issues... but its still
| only an assumption. If you had to re-create every experiment
| for every paper you cite, I'm not sure if one would ever
| actually finish their own research.
|
| I have only ever published one paper though, so take what I
| say with a grain of salt. It's just my experience.
| u32480932048 wrote:
| lol
| ska wrote:
| > that means thousands of people read them?
|
| It doesn't, but that's counter-intuitive.
|
| With relatively new, relatively small citation counts, the
| numbers are probably indicative of the number of actual
| readers.
|
| But well established, high citation number papers often take
| on a "shorthand" role. You'll often see them in introductory
| sections or other supporting text with statements like
| "previous authors have X", "common approaches such as Y",
| etc. Here they often have little to do with the core of the
| paper, they are providing context.
|
| Now really people _should_ have read them, but sometimes
| Jones, et. al. 1998 just becomes a collective shorthand for a
| set of ideas. As such people will quote it just because the
| papers they did read quoted it, etc.
|
| Often, over time, a single paper becomes the landmark for a
| set of ideas, and just gets cited to pull those in by
| reference. In theory this is the paper that "invented" those
| ideas, but in reality it's more complicated. Overall it's not
| a terrible practice, as a way to frame things, but can be
| error prone.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| If you read papers in the less reputable parts of science
| (public health, epidemiology...) you'll quickly notice
| citations going to papers that contradict the cited claim, or
| which are about something totally different, or that don't
| contain any support for the claim within them. It's common.
| Peer reviewers don't notice this stuff, journal editors don't
| either. They might scan read the paper but they aren't
| checking it adversarially.
| el_cujo wrote:
| Absolutely, but most of this stuff happens outside of what
| shows up in the paper like coming up with excuses on why data
| points can be dropped or shopping around for different
| statistical methods that make things look the best. There can
| even be legit reasons for doing this kind of thing and that's
| what makes it hard to detect, it's basically just the honor
| system on whether you're "p-value hacking" or following common
| methods.
|
| This is kind of why it annoys me a bit when I hear people
| harping on about trusting science, most science is not as
| simple as finding objective truths and just reporting them.
| That's not to say all science is bs and you're better off
| consulting a magic 8 ball, just that it should never be
| discouraged to look at methods and conclusions with a critical
| attitude. There is room for things to be fudged or pushed and
| very strong incentives for people to do it given how much money
| and prestige are on the line. It doesn't even have to be as big
| as a drug trial, one high profile publication can be enough to
| make a career so you can see how tempting it can be to just
| change a couple pixels in an image to boost a theory you
| earnestly believe is true
| epups wrote:
| There should be stronger consequences for this behavior. It costs
| hundreds of millions of dollars and several careers to deal with
| the outcome of data fabrication. Meanwhile, the worst case
| scenario for the fraudster is losing their job.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It also indirectly delays advances in medical care that, on a
| population-level scale, undoubtedly kills people. Murder in
| everything but name.
| packetlost wrote:
| Does it though? I find it hard to believe that this type of
| fraud wouldn't also lead death in some circumstances (maybe
| not this one).
| bumby wrote:
| The difficulty is in proving damages, though. Even if
| probable, it's still conjecture and our court systems have a
| higher bar than that, generally.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yeah, we have a societal problem in this regard;
| _statistical_ murder is tough to quantify and thus is
| largely unpunishable. Coal power, for example, likely kills
| thousands of people a year in the USA, but none of it
| directly enough to count as a crime.
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/23/coal-
| pow...
| bumby wrote:
| I think negative externalities should be priced in. But
| it's a very complicated problem.
|
| With the above premise, where do you draw the line? For
| example, are you complicit if you use that electricity
| (or buy that cell phone made from unsavory practices)?
| From a legal standpoint, should you be charged because
| you materially benefitted from a criminal action?
| codedokode wrote:
| But copyright owners prove damages by number of torrent
| file downloads pretty easily.
| bumby wrote:
| Copyright infringement is easier to quantify because you
| can quite literally count the number of copies.
|
| How do you copy the number of deaths that happened
| because _Research_X_ went unfunded due to fraud occurring
| in _Research_Y_?
| nairboon wrote:
| You could start with claimed increase in life expectancy
| in the target population times actual deaths during the
| fraudulent research funding period times the usual value
| of a life.
| bumby wrote:
| But again, this is just a statistical argument, not
| actual damages. For a tort case, you generally need to
| show real damages. For a criminal case, I don't think a
| statistical argument would sway a jury beyond a
| reasonable doubt that academic fraud caused specific
| deaths. There's a reason why the burden of proof in our
| court systems is structured the way it is.
|
| Besides, you don't even know that the unfunded research
| would have resulted in increased life expectancy because
| _the research was never conducted._ You 're trying to
| prove a counter-factual where you don't have data.
| Additionally, there are probably far too many confounding
| factors in health science to make a strong statistical
| claim against a single action as you're insinuating.
| laborcontract wrote:
| How are the feds able to stick a wire fraud charge on almost
| anything except for academic fraud? It's one thing to make a
| mistake like Reinhart and Rogoff's embarrassing excel blunder.
| It's entirely something else to falsify data.
|
| > Under Zlokovic's leadership, the USC institute has expanded to
| more than 30 labs and grown its annual funding more than 10-fold,
| exceeding $39 million in 2022. NIH grants to Zlokovic have
| totaled about $93 million. A prodigious fundraiser, in the past
| decade alone he has added at least $28 million from private
| sources, according to USC.
|
| So the NIH has given the man $93m. Surely that's a place to
| start?
| boringg wrote:
| The LOE to figure out if someone manipulated data vs wirefraud
| is significantly different and probably much harder.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I would assume that once law enforcement has established
| facts were materially altered for the purpose of obtaining
| funding, the jump to wire fraud would be relatively trivial
| (given today's heavy reliance on email/internet to do just
| about anything).
| chiggsy wrote:
| > once law enforcement has established facts were
| materially altered for the purpose of obtaining funding
|
| If you establish this, that's the case right there.
| jvans wrote:
| Wire fraud and prison sentences would be a good start. Besides
| the absolute dollar amount, the amount of damage done in the
| form of second order affects is enormous.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Could the NIH file some kind of civil suit here?
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Potentially for something like fraud. There could also
| maybe be a False Claims Act suit here.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| If you (like me) weren't familiar with the Excel mistake:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/reinhart-and-rogoff-admit-ex...
| Brentward wrote:
| I thought it was going to be the Excel DNA to date
| conversion.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-
| renam...
| teachrdan wrote:
| I love that the grad student who caught it came from a
| Marxist-oriented economics program. He legit figured it out
| by trying to replicate the results published by Reinhart and
| Rogoff.
|
| Not-so-fun fact: Economists don't publish their actual Excel
| spreadsheets, which would have made their error trivial to
| prove, but just the results!
|
| https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-excel-error-heard-
| round...
| manvillej wrote:
| what exactly is wire fraud?
|
| it seems like its basically "If you get money from lying
| electronically, go to jail"
| alistairSH wrote:
| That's the gist of it. It's basically a modernization of
| previously existing mail fraud statutes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_wire_fraud
| theultdev wrote:
| They _usually_ don 't use the wire fraud trick on academics
| ever since they killed Aaron Swartz.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Let us at least be truthful in our tactless descriptions of
| history: he killed himself to avoid spending 6 months in low
| security prison.
| jstarfish wrote:
| Now _you 're_ being dishonest. The 6-month sentence was a
| plea deal he declined. It was a 35-50 year sentence if he
| fought and lost all charges.
|
| It remained to be seen if he were actually guilty.
|
| > Carmen Ortiz, the federal prosecutor who hounded Aaron
| Swartz in the months before his Friday suicide, has
| released a statement arguing that "this office's conduct
| was appropriate in bringing and handling this case." She
| says that she recognized that Swartz's crimes were not
| serious, and as a result she sought "an appropriate
| sentence that matched the alleged conduct - a sentence that
| we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low
| security setting."
|
| > That's funny because the press release her office
| released in 2011 says that Swartz "faces up to 35 years in
| prison, to be followed by three years of supervised
| release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1
| million." And she apparently didn't think even that was
| enough, because last year her office piled on even more
| charges, for a theoretical maximum of more than 50 years in
| jail.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/01/17/aaron-
| swa...
|
| > Some have blithely said Aaron should just have taken a
| deal. This is callous. There was great practical risk to
| Aaron from pleading to any felony. Felons have trouble
| getting jobs, aren't allowed to vote (though that right may
| be restored) and cannot own firearms (though Aaron wasn't
| the type for that, anyway). More particularly, the court is
| not constrained to sentence as the government suggests.
| Rather, the probation department drafts an advisory
| sentencing report recommending a sentence based on the
| guidelines. The judge tends to rely heavily on that
| "neutral" report in sentencing. If Aaron pleaded to a
| misdemeanor, his potential sentence would be capped at one
| year, regardless of his guidelines calculation. However, if
| he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced
| to as many as 5 years, despite the government's agreement
| not to argue for more. Each additional conviction would
| increase the cap by 5 years, though the guidelines
| calculation would remain the same. No wonder he didn't want
| to plead to 13 felonies. Also, Aaron would have had to
| swear under oath that he committed a crime, something he
| did not actually believe.
|
| https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/01/towards-
| learning-...
| theultdev wrote:
| Thank you for detailing exactly what happened.
|
| The intimidation of the stacked charges led to Swartz's
| suicide.
|
| The gov. was 100% responsible for his death, which is why
| I say they killed him, indirectly, but they still caused
| the anguish that made him feel like suicide was the only
| way out.
|
| Sadly this strategy is used all too often on citizens,
| plea deal offered to say "look they pleaded guilty, we
| were right", otherwise you get the stick, life in jail.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| > The gov. was 100% responsible for his death
|
| Not if you believe in personal accountability. He made a
| choice, he faced the consequences; he made a choice
| again, he faced those consequences. If I kill a man and
| am given a very long sentence, then kill myself to avoid
| the wait, it's not the government's fault I died.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Ahh, "personal accountability" for the victims. It's the
| victim's fault the government threatened them with
| decades of imprisonment over a minor "crime".
|
| Where is the personal accountability for the prosecutor?
|
| There is a notion of reckless disregard for human life in
| the law. If you are throwing bricks off an overpass just
| for fun, you are still guilty of murder if you kill
| someone - because you have reckless disregard for human
| life even though you weren't trying to kill anyone.
|
| Likewise, a prosecutor who threatens someone with decades
| in prison for freely distributing academic material
| displays a reckless disregard for human life. Even if the
| prosecutor didn't intend to provoke a suicide the
| prosecutor was doing something bad with a reckless
| disregard for human life and it got someone killed.
| That's murder, in my view.
|
| Perhaps you should ask for accountability from the
| prosecutor/murderer rather than from her victim.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| > The 6-month sentence was a plea deal he declined.
|
| Right, so he could have picked the option where he walked
| free in six months, but instead he picked the option
| where he's dead.
|
| > Felons have trouble getting jobs
|
| > aren't allowed to vote
|
| > and cannot own firearms
|
| He's not doing any of those now, so I do not see how his
| would-be restrictions are relevant. The following
| speculation is just that, and also irrelevant.
|
| > Aaron would have had to swear under oath that he
| committed a crime, something he did not actually believe.
|
| Ah yes, the "Sure I secretly entered the networking
| cabinet of an institution I have no formal relationship
| with, to install my personal equipment into it without
| their knowledge (much less consent) in order to exploit
| their access levels to fulfill personal objectives that
| would otherwise be impossible to me, then hopped around
| IP's as the institution I was stealing documents from
| blocked the IP I was stealing until the entire IP range
| of the institution whose access I was hijacking was
| blocked due to my hacking and hence all the researchers
| doing legitimate work at that institution could not
| access the resources they paid for, but how could I have
| known that was unlawful?? I fundamentally cannot accept
| any blame for my actions." defense. I don't buy it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I think it's fair to say that attributing suicide is not
| something that can be done in anything but shades of
| grey, and that everyone in this thread appears to be
| trying to be truthful and honest.
| sevg wrote:
| Before you complain that a comment is a tactless
| description of history that distorts the truth, you should
| perhaps try learning some of the facts about said history.
| Such a habit will serve you well, I promise :)
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Did he or did he not reject a plea deal that would have
| had him walking a free man in 6 months time?
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Even the concept of a plea deal is morally atrocious in
| this and similar cases. The government threatens you with
| decades in prison in hopes of bullying you into pleading
| guilty where you are not.
|
| 6 months in prison is extremely inappropriate for what he
| was accused of. Threatening far worse to compel someone
| to accept a sentence they don't deserve is a crime orders
| of magnitude worse than anything Swartz was accused of.
| ykonstant wrote:
| Emetic.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| "I was just telling this guy I was going to take away his
| life, lock him in a cage for decades, and force him to live
| with violent criminals in a place notorious for violence
| and rape as punishment for his victimless 'crime' - and
| then _he_ killed _himself_. "
| raincom wrote:
| Feds don't prosecute the stuff their own tribe is involved in.
| Once retired, federal bureaucrats become honorary professors,
| chairs, fellows at 'X school of international
| studies/government', 'Y school of comparative law', 'Z school
| of efficient administration'. All such schools are hotbeds for
| govt spies, other folks. Where and how do these schools get
| money from? They use the same techniques that this
| neuroscientist uses. Once they open a front, charging academic
| fraud in the name of wire fraud charge, etc, if they succeed in
| doing that, expect the next round to be after these sinecure
| schools and their fundings, when power structures change.
| profsummergig wrote:
| "Director of Strategy at Georgetown's Center for Security and
| Emerging Technology"
|
| https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-board-set-
| ba...
| __loam wrote:
| This seems like needlessly conspiratorial thinking.
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| This is a deeply uninformed comment. I don't even know where
| to start. Nearly every sentence is wrong.
|
| You can absolutely get hauled in front of a judge for fraud
| and abuse in the use of NIH grants. You can be required to
| pay all of the money back, among other punishments. Google
| will reveal a variety of cases.
|
| It is in fact rare for retired federal bureaucrats to become
| professors. It is much more common for people at the
| Secretary level to get _teaching_ positions at schools of
| public policy. I am not aware of any former CIA directors
| holding those roles but I invite you to look.
|
| These schools are not "hotbeds of spies" - truly that it is a
| completely uninformed statement.
|
| By the way, very few law professors work via grants and even
| fewer via NIH grants.
| chiggsy wrote:
| >Feds don't prosecute the stuff their own tribe is involved
| in
|
| I get it. The world is complex, and grouping helps make it
| more manageable. However, in no way are the "Feds," part of
| the same tribe, especially in 2023.
|
| >All such schools are hotbeds for govt spies, other folks.
|
| Maybe recruitment? I'm not familiar with the curriculum at
| USC. Seems like you'd get them when they finished their
| degrees, unless they offer "wetwork" as an elective.
|
| >They use the same techniques that this neuroscientist uses.
|
| Disagree. Whatever tribe or faction these people you describe
| belong to, they are definitely not publishing papers. They'd
| be administrators. They are not involved in prosecuting
| academic malfeasance, and certainly the prosecution, is not
| taking advice from retired government employees. He/she/they
| have their own careers to consider!
| ak_111 wrote:
| Where do you draw the line? I saw many funding proposals for
| extremely abstract category theory justified on the basis it
| helps number theorists solve problems related to cryptography
| and protect e-commerce. Between friends everyone knows this is
| not true. Am not against abstract research: given how cheap it
| is, I don't understand why we can just allow it to be funded
| without having to provide justification that makes everyone
| feel a bit of a criminal while writing the proposal. It should
| be seen sort of how we public commissions art.
|
| Another type of mini-fraud: you could say almost 80% of applied
| machine learning papers contain serious methodical mistakes
| that are almost equivalent to falsifying data, and what's worse
| the authors are well aware of and even the reviewers. I am
| talking about the kaggle-type ones where you apply some kind of
| PCA or neural network on some relatively small dataset.
| rdedev wrote:
| It's kind of sad that you need to jump through a lot of hoops
| for research funding but when talking about things like
| military funding everyone is ready to find it more than
| required and not ask too many questions
| golergka wrote:
| Because it actually is? I don't understand how one can
| compare abstract research into category theory and
| investment into millions of people not getting killed and
| conquered and get sad that the latter comes up on top.
| whatshisface wrote:
| We're not talking about Saddam's military budget, we're
| talking about the one they used to kill and conquer him.
| nickff wrote:
| Saddam Hussein started the Iran-Iraq war, in which Iraq
| achieved no significant gain, at the cost of between one
| and two million lives. This war took place in the middle
| of his 40-year tenure as a president who killed hundreds
| of thousands of his own people with the same military
| equipment.
| whatshisface wrote:
| How is that an argument in favor of military spending?
| hindsightbias wrote:
| It would almost sound like a noble motivation for all
| that shock-and-awe spending, except that wasn't the
| motivation.
|
| Nobody cared when he was actually killing Iranians or
| domestics. Back then, kids of exiled Shah-regimers were
| protesting US gov't support for Iraq (widely reported
| overseas, widely ignored in the US) at colleges in CA,
| Michigan and Texas and getting beat up for their trouble.
|
| Plus we were rolling in all that $15/b oil with the
| flooded oil market so domestic win-win. Except for all
| those oilmen in TX who went bust. Well, they voted for
| Ron, so I guess they got what they wanted.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Yes and who was supplying the weapons and other support
| during that time? Arguably defence spending in the US and
| western Europe directly contributed to the deaths.
| rurp wrote:
| There is a _lot_ of defense spending that does nothing to
| support that mission, or does so in a terribly
| inefficient way. Given the scale of spending we 're
| talking about, many billions of dollars get wasted every
| year, but folks who get worked up over a few million
| wasted on research are often unconcerned with 1000 times
| more wasteful projects as long as they have the military
| labeled slapped on them.
| whatshisface wrote:
| If we had a social norm against pretending abstract research
| would "enable the creation of new materials, advance quantum
| computing, and enhance the security of your bank account" the
| agencies would learn to fund it anyway, because they would
| realize you run out of applied directions in the absence of
| basic research. Right now it's all laundered, so they think
| they can fund far more applied research than is available.
| jltsiren wrote:
| We used to have a social norm like that. It eroded, because
| populist politicians started ridiculing research proposals
| they found frivolous. Now most proposals are riddled with
| fake justifications, because people wanted more
| accountability in how tax money is spent.
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| Some of that blame should be pointed at those that
| proliferated frivolous and ridiculous research proposals.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Some of that blame should be pointed at those that
| proliferated frivolous and ridiculous research proposals_
|
| There are fewer of these than you'd think. Modeling
| wobbling plates is easier mocked than done, for example.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Who were these "populist politicians" exactly? I don't
| remember any of them ever talking about university
| research.
|
| It'd actually be great to have some politicians who
| ridicule frivolous academic research. It's not like
| there's a shortage of it especially in the humanities and
| social sciences (where there's no such thing as basic
| research anyway). Alas, their attentions are all
| elsewhere.
| omginternets wrote:
| >where there's no such thing as basic research anyway
|
| Did you mean "applied research"?
|
| >It's not like there's a shortage of it especially in the
| humanities and social sciences (where there's no such
| thing as basic research anyway).
|
| Careful where you cast stones, my friend. There is a lot
| of bullshit in software engineering, too.
|
| _Gestures towards pile of discarded JS frameworks..._
| rplst8 wrote:
| Was the development of those JS frameworks funded with
| federal tax dollars?
| omginternets wrote:
| That's a separate point (and we'd be largely in
| agreement, I suspect).
|
| In fact, I'm sure you've noticed the heaps of government-
| funded software trash.
| omginternets wrote:
| At the risk of being controversial, the latter half of
| your statement tracks very well with my experience of
| organizational DEI initiatives, in particular. We have
| reached a point where tenure-track faculty are expected
| to provide justification, in writing, for the value of
| their research to various marginalized communities. That
| alone wouldn't be a huge deal if conference talks,
| research funding and, increasingly, tenure committees
| weren't being similarly pressed to provide these kinds of
| justification.
|
| From where I'm standing (I hold a Ph.D in a scientific
| field, and my spouse is a tenure-track academic), an
| unsustainable portion of academic work consists in
| justifying one's research program, _on grounds that have
| little to do with the subject of study._
|
| It should hopefully be obvious that I'm not trying to
| stir a DEI flame war. Rather, I can't shake the feeling
| that DEI activism isn't accomplishing much beyond
| creating bureaucraty, and that this benefits neither
| research in general, nor marginalized groups trying to
| establish themselves in academia.
|
| Anyway, this seems like a specific instance of a larger
| trend you're pointing to. Possibly not even the largest
| or most absurd one.
| whatshisface wrote:
| It's difficult to tell where the initiatives are coming
| from because the willingness to write _and accept_ empty
| claims of relevance appears to exist at all levels and
| stages in the process. (For both DEI and "questionably
| applied number theory.") If they are getting that little
| buy-in from even the administrators I can't imagine how
| they get there in the first place.
|
| It's like the same people put application and social
| consciousness first in their RFPs and then turn around to
| accept invisible fig leaves during evaluation... Who's
| getting fooled, the government? Politicians? The public?
| omginternets wrote:
| >It's difficult to tell where the initiatives are coming
| from because the willingness to write and accept empty
| claims of relevance appears to exist at all levels and
| stages in the process.
|
| Is it, though? In the case of DEI, it appears to me (on
| the surface, anyway) that these initiatives are being
| implemented at the request of very vocal special-interest
| groups, and at the orders of the politicians who
| represent them. It seems like a fairly straightforward
| case of lobbying by institutions whose existence depends
| on the existence of a social problem. It's a rough analog
| to Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex idea.
|
| The same is true with what you call "questionably applied
| number theory". The only difference is that special-
| interest group isn't defined along ethno-racial lines,
| but instead comprises various bean-counters and ad-men
| who sell various forms of investment.
|
| In my view, there used to be a consensus that such
| lobbyists were not welcome in universities, or at least
| not in droves, because of their tendency to subvert
| intellectual pursuits in favor of short-term profits.
| louwrentius wrote:
| Feels to me the risk of discovery is deemed so low that it is
| cultural/ systemic. How many other cases will be uncovered?
|
| But speaking to Science anonymously, four former members of
| Zlokovic's lab say the anomalies the whistleblowers found are no
| accident. They describe a culture of intimidation, in which he
| regularly pushed them and others in the lab to adjust data. Two
| of them said he sometimes had people change lab notebooks after
| experiments were completed to ensure they only contained the
| desired results. "There were clear examples of him instructing
| people to manipulate data to fit the hypothesis," one of the lab
| members says.
|
| The incentives are clear to me, but punishment is less of a
| deterrent than good incentives, but which incentives would reduce
| this allegedly fraudulent behavior?
| thenerdhead wrote:
| "Medicine is broken. We like to imagine that it's based on
| evidence and the results of fair tests. In reality, those tests
| are often profoundly flawed." - Ben Goldacre
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| I think we have an inflated respect for modern medicine because
| it gets a lot of the credit for health outcomes we actually owe
| to modern sanitation.
| u32480932048 wrote:
| "Never trust a drug that hasn't been on the market for at least
| 30 years"
|
| - Samuel Shem's "The Fat Man" character(IIRC)
| shever73 wrote:
| An example of what Charlie Munger would have called "the power of
| incentives to cause rationalized, terrible behavior".
| mnode wrote:
| In this case perverse incentives. Check out 'How not to study a
| disease: the story of Alzheimer's' (by Karl Herrup) for a
| perspective on why this is not at all surprising.
|
| That being said, I think it would be unfair to tarnish all of
| science with this brush though. There are many fields that
| don't suffer these problems nearly as much.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I like that quote a lot. Incentives scale.
| Eumenes wrote:
| From the inside, researchers/scientists see this as a non-issue.
| A few bad apples. From the outside, the public sees this as a
| systemic problem. Theranos, failed promises of covid vaccine
| efficacy, to mask or not mask, polyunsaturated fats are bad for
| you .. no wait, they're good for you.
|
| Science has a PR problem and like it or not, science needs the
| support of society at large to succeed and move forward.
| mhb wrote:
| That's the opposite of what the "few bad apples" expression is
| intended to mean.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| > From the inside, researchers/scientists see this as a non-
| issue. A few bad apples.
|
| What "inside" are you in?
|
| I don't see this as a non-issue as a scientist. It's a massive
| problem. It means that when I read papers, I'm constantly
| extremely suspicious of the results.`
| wddkcs wrote:
| If it is widely perceived as a massive problem, why are there
| no moves to change the system? The intransigence shows there
| is no recognition of the problem, or the perverse incentives
| prevent change, which is the same problem at another level.
| bumby wrote:
| Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to
| understand something when his salary depends upon his not
| understanding it."
|
| This applies to multiple levels in the publication game.
| Lab grants would likely dry up if the size of the problem
| was revealed to be massive. Publications would lose
| credibility, prestige, and money if the problem proved
| large. It can be recognized as a problem by those who's
| salaries don't depend on it, but still remain unchanged
| because those in the best position to change it have
| salaries that do.
| Eumenes wrote:
| I'm glad you think this is a big issue. I'd be curious to see
| polling around the level of trust scientists have in the
| integrity of the system. I doubt its below 50% approval.
| InSteady wrote:
| To be fair, 55-65% trust in the _integrity_ of scientific
| research among scientists is still abysmal and indicates a
| huge problem.
|
| If we are talking about the number of scientists who see
| flaws and hold skepticism, that's absolutely fine (I'd
| argue the number could be much higher and be quite healthy
| overall). But we are talking about integrity. Ethical
| research, lack of fraud, lack of bias, lack of perverse
| incentives, a system that produces high quality and
| trustworthy output by design, etc.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I think the hard problem is that if science was direct, most of
| the population - the majority, are either not intelligent
| enough to understand it or not intelligent enough to understand
| why it is that way.
|
| Take masking for example, and here is a bomb most people are
| totally unaware of:
|
| You want the population to wear masks _so that the sick people
| are wearing masks_. Masks aren 't going to do much to prevent
| healthy people from getting sick. But they will do a lot to
| stop sick people from getting others sick.
|
| This truth is almost never communicated though. Why? Because
| then wearing a mask becomes a "mark of illness" and nobody
| wants to label themselves as sick or potentially sick. So the
| solution to this is everyone wears a mask all the time. But you
| cannot communicate this whole scenario either because most
| people aren't smart enough to grasp it or not smart enough to
| understand why they need to wear a mask healthy or sick.
|
| So this is the kind of problem science faces, and frankly I
| think the best thing to do is exactly what they did: Insinuate
| that wearing a mask protects you and insist everyone wear a
| mask.
| confd wrote:
| This way of thinking falls apart as soon as the people who
| are capable of effectively communicating the truth (or at
| least, gesturing toward evidence that the dominant narrative
| is being falsified) reach those who are believed to be
| incapable of comprehending the truth (or at least, the
| evidence that suggests that the dominant narrative is being
| falsified).
| abnry wrote:
| > This truth is almost never communicated though. Why?
| Because then wearing a mask becomes a "mark of illness" and
| nobody wants to label themselves as sick or potentially sick.
| So the solution to this is everyone wears a mask all the
| time. But you cannot communicate this whole scenario either
| because most people aren't smart enough to grasp it or not
| smart enough to understand why they need to wear a mask
| healthy or sick.
|
| I can't help but think this attitude is awful. Most people
| are too dumb to understand that it is the sick people who
| should wear masks!? Like what in the world!?
|
| No. You shoot straight with the public. Then you plead with
| them to do what is best for everyone by wearing a mask when
| they are sick.
|
| The alternative, as you suggested, is extremely damaging to
| society longterm.
| DanielleMolloy wrote:
| Many destructive behaviours are rewarded in a system that is
| putting emphasis on the quantity and proposed impact of
| publications. Many scientific fields suffer from behaviours of
| individuals who are more interested in social status (or just
| economic security) than in seeking truth. Just like in overall
| society the humble truth seekers necessary for slowly chiseling
| out the firm ground of solid knowledge are in the minority. They
| are definitely disadvantaged in this system, and more likely to
| be driven out than those who lie, rush or cut corners.
|
| At the modern complexity and importance of science, we do need to
| put much more emphasis on checking whether it is done right. The
| original vision of the Royal Society involved rigorous peer
| review, to the point of demanding scientists to demonstrate their
| experiments in front of their peers:
| https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/17th-ce...
| The curator of these literal peer reviews held the first paid
| position in science.
|
| Journals do have the profits to hire or otherwise pay peer
| reviewers full time. They would become experts in their field in
| the process, and thus more suited for the task than the ones in
| the current system, where even undergrads are asked to review for
| high-profile outlets like NeurIPS. Also, full-time rigorous peer
| reviewing would be an interesting career prospect for many
| current scientists. And here is your startup idea..
| jampekka wrote:
| Rigorous peer review, let alone paid (which causes its own
| issues beyond money), is totally infeasible with the current
| publication pressure. It's hard to find reviewers even with the
| current lax criteria of both reviewers and quality of their
| review (the latter is more problematic).
|
| The publication volume is just way way way too high. But
| researchers who don't publish multiple articles per year,
| regardless if you have anything of value to publish, perish. If
| you don't churn out paper-per-year in your PhD, you don't get
| the PhD.
|
| Much of the manuscripts that get submitted to journals are
| incredibly bad. Most are just bad. But as both editor and
| reviewer, I usually let them be published out of pity if the
| stuff isn't blatantly wrong; the poor PhD student's whole
| career is on the line.
|
| Journals being full of crap is not SO bad within science
| because everybody knows they are full of crap. But if an
| "outsider" thinks that being published in a peer-reviewed
| journal, even a "good" journal, means that the article isn't
| crap, it can be literally life-or-death (like in this case).
|
| Academia is broken because it's being run as a business whose
| purpose is to churn out papers. Welcome to neoliberalism.
| cscheid wrote:
| Although the above comment might sound negative and harsh, it
| is a perfect distillation of modern research-oriented
| academic environments. (I was a moderately-successful
| professor in these environments. I woke up one day and simply
| couldn't do it anymore.)
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| Publication rate DURING your PhD is highly variable from
| field to field...I don't know what field you are in but
| generally speaking across my 3 fields students are required
| to have at least 1 from the entire PhD to graduate. Some even
| have none published by time of graduation.
|
| 1 per year is a ridiculous standard.
| jampekka wrote:
| This does vary across countries, and fields. In UK I was a
| bit surprised that you're not expected to publish at all
| before post-doc.
|
| In Finland usually at least 3 peer reviewed (first author)
| papers are required for a PhD in my field (cognitive
| science). In some fields (e.g. many engineering fields)
| even more. And PhD grants are typically for three to four
| years.
|
| It is ridiculous and the paper quality is what you'd
| expect.
| ska wrote:
| It is wildly different, true. In some areas, it is not
| uncommon to see PhD "thesis" that is essentially an intro
| stapled to 3-4 papers.
|
| It's also true that publication rates post PhD vary wildly
| as well, e.g. expectations for a tenure packet.
|
| However, it's also fair to say that expected publication
| rate has significantly grown universally. A generation or
| two ago, a solid career could be built on a handful of high
| impact papers. That's hard to imagine now.
| swatcoder wrote:
| It's way way bigger than that. The whole world changed since
| those early days of modern science.
|
| During those days, the science you were talking about was one
| of countless hobby clubs for aristocratic circles, where bored
| rich folk could dedicate themselves to one upping each other in
| the discovery game their peers and recent predecessors had
| invented. There were certainly cheaters then, too, but the
| whole thing was very insular and the only people who even cared
| about it were the people who were in on the game themselves. So
| excelling within the rules and elaborate demonstrations of the
| game were all part of the club sport.
|
| 400 years later, billions of people across five or six
| generations have been told that this game is the secret to
| human prosperity on earth and that the more its played, the
| more aligned we'll be with the truth of the universe, the
| longer we'll all live, the more leisure and luxury we'll all
| enjoy, etc
|
| That's a whole different game! The demand for scientific output
| has gone from an exhibition sport shared among a small and
| snobby circle to a replacement for an eroded theology. Trillion
| dollar governments and globe-spanning trillion dollar
| industries now (ostensibly) make their billion dollar decisions
| based on each day's summary of the sport, and billions of
| people dreaming about prosperity or salvation await the next
| big game's result as though it were a demonstration of divine
| grace.
|
| There are now so many games being played, by so many people,
| with so many bets and spectators, that incentives are
| unfathomable and referees are sparse and cheating is rampant.
|
| Unfortunately, you're not going to clean all that up by telling
| some journals to reshuffle their revenue allocations.
| wredue wrote:
| Sorry but who actually thinks that being a scientist is the
| "key to prosperity"?
|
| I think far and away most scientists become researchers
| despite the fact that it's generally not at all a prosperous
| venture.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Not "being a scientist": "science".
|
| Science is seen as the road to _human_ (not just personal)
| propsperity by people educated in the last 100-ish years,
| which is mostly everybody now, which puts _extreme_
| pressure to perform /produce on what was once a pure little
| hobby sport whose spectators were almost all invested as
| players themselves.
| starcraft2wol wrote:
| Like journalism, they trade money for social status and
| prestige.
| bumby wrote:
| Maybe, but it's probably a relatively small circle that
| elevates someone's status by being in academia. (Not to
| say that isn't the circle whose opinions matter to them,
| though).
| jampekka wrote:
| Or just to do something that they are interested in. And
| to have quite a bit of freedom.
| starcraft2wol wrote:
| After seeing that academics still have to take a "two
| job" approach with serious research and fun research I'm
| not convinced of this. Not to mention the very protracted
| timelines to get to that stage of freedom.
| jampekka wrote:
| That depends on whether you accept the risk of having to
| find another line of work. Depending on the place, you
| can do almost anything you want even at PhD level. I've
| been on a chain of grants, doing quite freely what I
| want, for over a decade. But I accept it may break at any
| point and then I'll just go do something else.
|
| After PhD there will be nobody telling, and often not
| even caring, what to do. But that may mean that you don't
| get your PhD or you don't get another grant to live on.
| If you get a tenure it almost literally means that you
| can't be fired even if you do nothing at all. What is
| surprising is that almost all with tenure keep running
| the rat race even though they don't really get anything
| at least material out of it.
|
| (Nitpick: I think serious research is the fun one. The
| one churned to get another grant is neither serious nor
| fun.)
| starcraft2wol wrote:
| How did you get a position without a postdoc?
|
| > After PhD there will be nobody telling, and often not
| even caring, what to do.
|
| If you make the hiring cut in you're in for about 5 years
| of grunt work and committees as an assistant prof, right?
|
| By "serious research" I mean the one they do for career
| advancement and hiring.
| jampekka wrote:
| > How did you get a position without a postdoc?
|
| I am a postdoc, just have been for quite a while (on four
| different grants at least). In Finnish academia it's not
| that uncommon to stay a postdoc even until retirement.
|
| > That's not true. If you make the hiring cut in you're
| in for about 5 years of grunt work as an assistant prof.
|
| For teaching and admin yes. But at least in fields I
| know, what research you do or whether you do at all is
| all up to you. Of course the risk is that you'll be
| unemployed after the assistant prof. term ends. My point
| is that if you don't care about that, you're quite free
| to do whatever research-wise.
| feoren wrote:
| Science and the advancement of technology is literally the
| only thing that has ever led to lasting prosperity for
| humans. All other periods of prosperity over the last ten
| thousand years have been temporary and highly localized.
| You can lose your golden age of prosperity through a single
| assassination. Only science breaks the wheel.
|
| If you factor in all future humans in your utility
| calculations, then science is by far the #1 noblest pursuit
| humans can ever undertake. We're talking about scientific
| advancements potentially helping _trillions_ of people
| before all is said and heat-deathed. Great works of art can
| also be enjoyed by all future humans, but science has a
| super-linear (if not actually exponential) growth curve
| where every advancement makes future advancements a little
| easier.
|
| The question is whether the noble pursuit of "science" and
| the day-to-day activities of "being a scientist" have
| diverged or not. There is mounting evidence that _the
| institution_ of science has been subverted to the extent
| that many people who are professional scientists are not
| actually contributing to the pursuit of science. Or, far
| worse, detracting from it, as we see here. It 's one of the
| great tragedies of our era.
| fock wrote:
| > Science and the advancement of technology is literally
| the only thing that has ever led to lasting prosperity
| for humans. All other periods of prosperity over the last
| ten thousand years have been temporary and highly
| localized. You can lose your golden age of prosperity
| through a single assassination. Only science breaks the
| wheel.
|
| How exactly do you know this civilization will not crash
| too? (and take with it that highly localized habitat)
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| That was exactly my question when I read that quote too.
|
| Everything is temporary on a large enough scale and
| everyone w/i that golden era also thought it would last
| and that belief is part of why it didn't.
|
| Humans will never build anything that truly lasts for a
| very simple reason. The lessons learned get forgotten
| after 2 generations (3 at most). Stop and consider how
| the US fought for its freedom and how nowadays many
| people from the US would vote to have more limitations on
| speech.
| feoren wrote:
| > The lessons learned get forgotten after 2 generations
| (3 at most).
|
| What are you talking about? Did we all forget the
| Pythagorean Theorem after 3 generations? Did we forget
| the force-multiplying effect of levers and pullies a few
| generations after Archimedes died? How can you sit here
| with Wikipedia at your fingertips and tell me that the
| collective sum of humanity remembers nothing from over
| 100 years ago?
|
| > everyone w/i that golden era also thought it would last
| and that belief is part of why it didn't
|
| Yet from almost every collapsed golden era, scientific
| progress from that era made its way back to collective
| knowledge (sometimes very slowly, admittedly). People in
| this modern age have this extremely simplified view of
| what "collapse" actually looked like.
| feoren wrote:
| Which civilization? The U.S.? That might slow science
| down, but it would not significantly reverse progress on
| it. Of course nations/kingdoms/empires/civilizations wax
| and wane, but you can't use the word "too" if you're
| talking about a total worldwide collapse of human
| civilization as a single event -- such a thing has never
| happened. If your point is that a Chicxulub or a worst-
| case Wyoming Supervolcano could outmatch the progress
| that science has made, then: sure, what's your point?
|
| The vast majority of established science will outlive
| mere nations and petty politics. There are too many
| copies of Wikipedia, too many printed textbooks and
| encyclopedias, to lose a significant portion of
| established science. The possibility of worldwide
| humanity-destroying events does not disprove this at all.
| In fact, if we ever faced a humanity-destroying event,
| then it would be nothing less than our collective
| scientific progress that would have any chance of seeing
| us through it.
| wredue wrote:
| Every institution is exploited to some degree.
|
| What do you mean by many? As an institution, I sincerely
| doubt that science is exploited to a similar degree as
| basically any others.
|
| I don't really accept these ridiculous trumpisms. "Many
| people are saying".
|
| How many people are *doing*? I'll wager it's far and away
| a major minority.
|
| Can you back up your "many" with actual numbers as a
| percentage of investment?
| feoren wrote:
| > I sincerely doubt that science is exploited to a
| similar degree as basically any others.
|
| The world being shitty in other ways does not diminish
| the tragedy that we are only a fraction of how effective
| we could be at pursuing science.
|
| > Can you back up your "many" with actual numbers as a
| percentage of investment?
|
| "A 2011 analysis by researchers with pharmaceutical
| company Bayer found that, at most, a quarter of Bayer's
| in-house findings replicated the original results."
|
| "In a 2012 paper, C. Glenn Begley, a biotech consultant
| working at Amgen, and Lee Ellis, a medical researcher at
| the University of Texas, found that only 11% of 53 pre-
| clinical cancer studies had replications that could
| confirm conclusions from the original studies"
|
| "The ... paper examined the reproducibility rates and
| effect sizes by journal and discipline. Study replication
| rates were 23% for the Journal of Personality and Social
| Psychology, 48% for Journal of Experimental Psychology:
| Learning, Memory, and Cognition, and 38% for
| Psychological Science"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
|
| > I don't really accept these ridiculous trumpisms. "Many
| people are saying".
|
| I didn't say "many people are saying", and comparing me
| to Trump is a much greater insult than things comments
| get flagged and removed for. Respond to what I actually
| said and avoid the (extreme) personal insults.
| jampekka wrote:
| The rot has set in relatively lately, but is getting
| exponentially worse. Probably still in the 1990's or even
| early 2000's (depending on the field) an academic could have
| had a fine career publishing (a good paper) every few years.
| Or write a (good) book or two in their whole career.
|
| I did my PhD under a professor who was very respected and
| influential in his field. He published quite rarely, although
| he had piles of manuscripts that would have passed review but
| he didn't find them worthy. And refused to have his name on
| his lab's papers if he didn't feel like he contributed enough
| (nowadays many/most professors who won't even read the paper
| require them to be added as an author).
|
| In the current system he would have no chance in academia. He
| said so himself. As has Peter Higgs:
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-
| higgs-...
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| The professor sounds like a man of class.
|
| As I was reading the article I got to the part where the
| whistleblowers accused zlokovic of pressuring them to
| change data.
|
| If you changed data then you're also responsible. Every one
| of those whistleblowers should have refused.
| jampekka wrote:
| In my experience a lot of older professors are like this,
| likely because it wasn't yet about counting papers for
| them to get their tenures (other games were involved for
| sure).
|
| I agree they should have refused. I hope I would in their
| situation.
| concinds wrote:
| I think you underestimate the possibility of cultural change
| happening from the top. It's in fact a very common way to
| achieve cultural change.
| Balgair wrote:
| > where bored rich folk could dedicate themselves to one
| upping each other in the discovery game their peers and
| recent predecessors had invented. There were certainly
| cheaters then, too, but the whole thing was very insular and
| the only people who even cared about it were the people who
| were in on the game themselves. So excelling within the rules
| and elaborate demonstrations of the game were all part of the
| club sport.
|
| I see this meme about the early scientists a lot.
| Unfortunately, these first early scientists are not so easily
| categorized. I would encourage others to delve into the
| biographies of these progenitors. It is true, some were
| _very_ much in the vein of this meme. But many were much more
| complicated individuals.
|
| For example, Darwin is about as blue blooded as it comes. Yet
| _Origin of Species_ has a very long section at the beginning
| where Darwin painstakingly goes over all the scientists
| before him that that in any small way had already discovered
| evolution.
|
| Another good one is that while digging potatoes with his
| hands at the family farm in his native New Zealand,
| Rutherford got the news that he had been awarded a
| scholarship to study physics at Cambridge under William
| Thomson (Lord Kelvin).
|
| Many other scientists came from very 'low' births. But
| science is a 'strong-chain' domain where only the 'correct'
| ideas survive. Anyone can, and did, contribute despite those
| obstacles.
| hibikir wrote:
| It's not necessarily even status, just feeding themselves:
| Publish or die, and you aren't publishing if your conclusions
| aren't positive and strong.
|
| In medicine it's especially tough, as testing is among the most
| expensive and the number of available data points is quite low,
| so one gets to fignt over individual data points that make a
| difference. Did this person not follow the protocol, and I have
| a paper, or not?
|
| I've seen something similar when working in agriculture: Early
| tests of new plant strains are low data, because a company will
| start by testing so many experimental plants that it'd be
| unaffordable to test them all very strongly. This makes people
| really argue about single data points in those early tests. Was
| this chunk of the field contaminated? Attacked by a wild
| animal? But there at least the interest in fraud is small. If a
| breeder gets a stinker through, it just goes into trials on the
| other hemisphere, where it's planted in an order of magnitude
| more fields, and therefore just lead to disappointment 6 months
| later.
|
| With medicine, the cost of replication is so high, and often
| takes so many years, that it's not just that an honest mistake
| is catastrophic, but that the difference in outcomes for the
| person doing the curation is so high, one doesn't have to be
| all that dishonest to make biased decisions that will lead to a
| strong career.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _It 's not necessarily even status, just feeding
| themselves: Publish or die, and you aren't publishing if your
| conclusions aren't positive and strong._
|
| The wider science needs to learn a lesson from the Economics
| science: Incentives Matter. A lot.
| jampekka wrote:
| Much of the problem is that wider science has taken too
| many lessons from economics.
|
| Incentives matter a lot but creating incentives that work
| is almost impossible.
|
| Science used to run on ethics (like many other
| professions). But we learned from economists that there are
| no such thing, only utility (money) maximizers.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| Incentives that work are easy. Do research in corporate
| labs. That's all it takes. Now there is an incentive to
| do work that replicates (because it is intended to be
| used to build useful things), there are people
| responsible for detecting and resolving fraud (managers),
| they are incentivized to do so by a mix of carrots and
| sticks some of them legal.
|
| Fact is, corporate R&D doesn't have this relentless
| problem with reproducibility. It's academic output that
| does, because academics only care about getting a paper
| published and don't expect that anyone will use their
| results. Often they don't even make their code or data
| available at all because it's not to their advantage for
| others to be able to replicate their work, as that would
| yield fewer papers. But this is all wrong. Science exists
| to be used in technology, not for its own sake.
| jampekka wrote:
| There are corresponding responsibilities in academia.
| Perhaps even more so. But like a business culture can,
| and often does, rot the incentives and responsibilities,
| so has the academic culture.
|
| I've worked for two corporate labs and have collaborated
| with several. There was less rigor if anything.
|
| Corporate lab work is quite cozy and stable. In corporate
| lab your job doesn't end if you don't (pretend) to get a
| new major discovery every year. They don't make anything
| available, often not even internally.
|
| Science is about a lot more than technology.
| mbreese wrote:
| _> Also, full-time rigorous peer reviewing would be an
| interesting career prospect for many current scientists. And
| here is your startup idea.._
|
| I don't know about this. (But I don't have any answers for the
| question either).
|
| If you're a full time peer reviewer, first, are you really a
| peer? But more importantly, your motivations change. No longer
| are you looking to try to see if the paper is worthy of
| publishing or if it is sound; instead, your motivation is to
| push through as many papers as possible. When getting paid
| depends on approving papers, the quality will drop.
|
| Maybe the problem is where the money exchange occurs. What
| about if authors paid to have their paper reviewed, instead of
| published? Currently, journals only get paid when a paper is
| published. What about if they got paid to review the paper at
| all? It would limit the paper submissions to
| Nature/Science/Cell, but you'd be paying for a high quality
| review (which often makes a paper better). You might even have
| luck with decoupling reviewers from journals completely... make
| the journals compete over the best (already) reviewed papers.
| bumby wrote:
| > _instead, your motivation is to push through as many papers
| as possible._
|
| I think this is an assumption that doesn't have to hold true
| in practice. Maybe it's biased by the 'publish or perish'
| paradigm that's pervaded academia, but there's no reason to
| replicate the same problem elsewhere.
| moralestapia wrote:
| I support the (probably unpopular) opinion that scientific
| fraudsters should face criminal consequences. People die because
| of this, and the authors of these schemes go and get awards for
| their "substantial contributions".
| londons_explore wrote:
| We shouldn't have any one scientist able to manipulate results
| like this
|
| When it comes to trials where the results matter (ie. for
| approving a medecine), the blinding process should blind the
| scientists doing the trial.
|
| There should be a third party who will mix up the placebo and
| real vials of treatments. The treatments should stay in a sealed
| bags until used, and when used there should be two people in the
| room recording anything that happens.
|
| For treatments involving "inject this drug", the scientists,
| investors, and anyone else with a horse in the race shouldn't
| even be present.
| noqc wrote:
| I'm sure you've thought of how to keep the third party's
| incentives clean? Not just organizationally, but down to the
| man.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| That's why you need a _fourth_ party[0]!
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zo9PqubWSg
| londons_explore wrote:
| I don't really see how the third party can manipulate
| stuff...
|
| The third party is told "please mix up these tubes randomly
| and don't tell me how you mixed them".
|
| Both the third party _and_ the scientists would need to be
| dishonest for the scheme to break down.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Stories like this make me a smidge more sympathetic towards
| people who were against coerced COVID vaccinations.
|
| I.e., this supports the suspicion that policy makers who claim
| "the science" supports certain policies are drawing on bad
| information / compromised experts.
|
| Note: I'm personally very pro-vaccine. I'm suggesting that we
| treat academic misconduct according to the harm it could cause.
| bradley13 wrote:
| Ditto. I took all the vaccinations, but the reality is that the
| testing of the vaccines was rushed. It was only in the real
| world that we discovered that they could cause blood clots and
| myocarditis.
|
| The vaccinations were still a net benefit for COVID, but the
| unexpected side effects have seriously damaged people's trust
| in vaccines in general. We're going to pay the price for that
| for decades to come.
| fabian2k wrote:
| You cannot see these kinds of very rare side effects in
| typical phase III trials. Those trials are already pretty
| large for vaccines, but even then they're simply not powerful
| enough to detect very rare events. Nothing would have changed
| here with the normal vaccination approval process, those side
| effects would not have been detected there either. That's why
| side effects are monitored after approval of the vaccines as
| well, because then you have the large numbers you need to
| detect very rare events.
| callalex wrote:
| The side effects you discuss are much more rare than the
| harms caused by the disease itself.
| iinnPP wrote:
| I have three shots and zero covid.
|
| See the problem?
|
| People who believe they know what is best for any other
| person are exclusively idiots.(not saying this is anyone in
| particular)
|
| Also, please don't suggest the shots did anything. I get
| sick once per five years. It's plausible that the shots
| helped but not definitive.
| tensor wrote:
| I think the anti-science sentiment was already there, and the
| vaccine work for COVID being rushed was just an excuse for
| people who had already decided that science was inconvenient
| to become full on outspoken anti-science people.
| newsclues wrote:
| Science publications need to ensure reproducibility of research
| before publishing.
|
| There needs to be a journal dedicated to documenting
| unreproducible science studies and papers.
|
| The inability for scientists to police themselves is the death of
| Science.
| jampekka wrote:
| This would require/requires a total overhaul of how the current
| academia works. E.g. PhD would be unattainable with that
| publication criteria. Tenure and funding criteria would have to
| be totally overhauled.
|
| I'm all for the overhaul of course. But it's not fixable solely
| by publication criteria. In fact publishers benefit from poor
| quality. The publisher system makes no sense and is actively
| detrimtal to science and disseminating information.
| fabian2k wrote:
| > Several former lab members provided details of experimental
| data from Zlokovic's lab that they say were falsified. These
| included experiments referenced in the whistleblower dossier. In
| some cases, they said, data points that would have invalidated
| the desired results were removed. "It was not real science. He
| already knew what he wanted to say" before the experiment was
| completed, one says. "I started hating science. ... It made me
| sick."
|
| > Two of the insiders also say Zlokovic sometimes had his team
| improperly alter existing notebooks. Normally these notebooks--in
| which scientists record details of their work as it proceeds--
| provide a ground truth for an experiment's methods and results.
| As a result, they're also often central to misconduct
| investigations.
|
| > But two of the former lab members say that after an experiment
| was completed and its results published, Zlokovic sometimes
| admonished his scientists to make sure the notebooks were
| "clean." That was understood to mean pasting into them printouts
| of the published results and methodology or omitting contrary
| details that challenged the paper's conclusions. Zlokovic
| explained that those changes were needed in case of an "audit,"
| according to the two scientists.
|
| Those allegations are pretty damning if they are true. Falsifying
| lab notebooks is very obvious scientific misconduct, and there
| are no benign explanations for that.
| nerdponx wrote:
| > scientific misconduct
|
| At what point do we just call it "lying" and "fraud"?
| dist-epoch wrote:
| At no point, because that would increase distrust in science.
|
| Trust scientists, even when they lie and cheat, they do it
| for a higher purpose that the general public can't
| understand.
| macinjosh wrote:
| Science (with a capital S) is the modern incarnation of the
| church. They have special knowledge, special privilege,
| special language that the average person can't understand
| (like the church had Latin). We are supposed to listen and
| trust lest we be damned.
|
| I think its time for a reformation.
| acdha wrote:
| This is a terrible hot take. Science is no more immune to
| human misbehavior than any other institution but it has
| self-correction as a core principle. This guy is going
| down due to it, not getting shuffled off to another
| diocese. Many people would like that process to be faster
| but it's doing better than most other areas of our
| society because there are so many people who do
| prioritize truth over personal loyalty or institutional
| reputation.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| It is literally the same but a more refined term. Just like
| calling something distended instead of fat.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| Science needs grant rewards for whistle blowers?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| That's probably part of it. Science needs an incentive
| rethink overall.
| codekilla wrote:
| Peer (or any type of institutional) review needs to be
| implemented at the national level--same as the funding for the
| original research. Why would you pay for research and not check
| that it is correct? Congress needs to fund a new science agency
| that explicitly does this. I have suggested before that part of
| graduate training should be replicating select studies that are
| published (a national review board could select those that seem
| the most high impact). State-funded schools could take this on,
| and students would probably learn at least as much doing this as
| they do in their other studies.
| bumby wrote:
| What about all the funding that's not done at a national level?
| There's still a large amount of research funding that is
| private.
| codekilla wrote:
| Sure, and that's on the private funders to ensure they are
| getting what they pay for. Google pays for plenty of research
| --since they are the payee, it's their responsibility to
| ensure it's accuracy to whatever degree satisfies them.
| Institutions like the FDA are supposed to regulate private
| research when it comes to market (.i.e pharmaceuticals and
| the like). Whether or not the FDA and related agencies are
| effective is a different, but just as important question.
| Taxpayers desperately need a formal, funded system to verify
| the science they are paying for--particularly for biomedical
| research where the incentives for fraud are so high.
| bumby wrote:
| I think that's reasonable for the "institutional review"
| aspect of the OP. But regarding the "peer review" aspect, I
| don't think it works, at least in the bulk of the current
| framework. Peer-review is typically performed by separate
| organizations, independent of the funding organization. To
| expect a national-level organization to essentially take
| over the duties of peer-review journals is a very big ask
| (not in small part because the current system benefits from
| free labor from the reviewers).
| codekilla wrote:
| > To expect a national-level organization to essentially
| take over the duties of peer-review journals is a very
| big ask
|
| Fair, but what is the alternative that would actually
| work? What is the budget of all of the journals compared
| to the NSF+NIH? Is medical research that is true, and
| certainly actionable worth as much as an F whatever
| fighter jet? People will have to decide.
| bumby wrote:
| The tradeoff is a different arguement and a digression,
| so while it's likely we agree, I'll side-step it here. I
| do think it's an uphill battle to pursue a massive
| reappropriation of funds though.
|
| There are some alternatives that I'm aware of. Here's a
| few:
|
| 1) One is to allow journals to focus on less-than-great
| results. Right now the focus is on novelty, so there is
| an incentive to show that your work has some new, great
| outcome. But there's also value in showing "Hey, we
| thought this idea had legs but it turns out it didn't."
| Publishing that work should be part of science but right
| now its not. (As a side benefit, you could prevent a lot
| of researchers wasting effort on the same idea simply
| because they weren't aware that other people already
| tried, and failed.)
|
| 2) Journals can put a premium on sharing your data and
| code during the review process. Right now, it's often
| just up to the author and there are lots of veils to hide
| behind that essentially give the impression of sharing
| data, but not in a very useful way.
|
| 3) Give value to replicating work. Maybe not as much
| prestige as creating new work, but showing that it can be
| replicated obviously has value to society as a whole.
| Most of the time this won't get published, except in the
| cases where it's sensationalized, like fraud. (This
| effect is related to #1)
|
| 4) Journals can do a better job vetting their reviewers.
| They struggle to get timely reviews and reach to anyone
| who accepts the duty. Reviewers may agree to review
| something they have little background in, and as a
| result, it's easier to skirt bad articles through the
| system.
| codekilla wrote:
| I don't disagree with any of these points, it's just I've
| been involved in open science circles, where these things
| are always mentioned, and I just don't see any material
| progress (maybe I'm not looking that closely though). I
| think the reason for the lack of progress is mainly
| funding--so until someone gets serious about funding
| (billionaires or taxpayers), it just seems like the same
| merry go around. It's very expensive to replicate
| biomedical studies--but it's the only thing that works.
| Maybe the tide is turning though and simply
| incentivizing/protecting grad students to become
| whistleblowers will do more good, but I fear this case
| was more the exception than the rule.
| bumby wrote:
| I think the difference is between a ground-up or top-down
| approach. Maybe both are needed. My current stance is
| that while a top-down approach would work, there's very
| little chance of it happening. For one, government
| research funds have largely flat-lined in the last 20
| years, and expecting them to take on more costs for
| managing peer review would likely exacerbate the problem.
| I also don't see the govt clamoring for additional
| administrative burden. I don't think replication has to
| be the only method (although I think it's probably the
| best). Opening the data to the public can do a lot to
| suss out bad practices or outright fraud, as we saw with
| the Ariely situation. The progress has been slow, for
| sure, but I think there is some. For example, there are
| now journals that specialize in publishing "non-
| surprising" results.
| linuxftw wrote:
| Peer review can't catch manipulated data. Replication studies
| do, that's a whole separate concern.
| pneumic wrote:
| Where are there so many seemingly dishonest Alzheimers
| researchers lately?
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| Falsifying in research feels a bit like doping in sports.
|
| At some point the prestige & funding are just too much of an
| incentive to not take advantage of it.
|
| It's probably easy to morally justified in their minds because
| they believe their hypthosis is correct
| nerdponx wrote:
| Doping in sports doesn't waste millions of taxpayer dollars and
| murder stroke victims who might have otherwise recovered.
| starcraft2wol wrote:
| Maybe the public shouldn't be handing out these incentives
| then.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| Sports benefit to society is hard to quantify.
|
| But most agree there is benefit to having sport activities in
| our society. And that doping is detrimental to it.
|
| It also attracts millions of taxpayers money, lots of
| athletes, especially those going to Olympics, get funded.
|
| But originally I wasn't making a comparison based on negative
| impact on society, but comparing the incentive structure.
| bradley13 wrote:
| There are three reasons this happens, and money is at the root of
| all of them.
|
| - Publish-or-perish: You want to keep that professorship, you had
| better publish, frequently. Experiments that don't yield results
| don't count.
|
| - Grant money: You want to get funding for your lab, your
| assistants and your students, you had better publish. Experiments
| that don't yield results don't count.
|
| - Start-up culture: Just another permutation of "get rich quick",
| but you need a saleable product. Experiments that don't yield
| results don't count.
|
| So there are massive incentives to fake results. "Fake it until
| you make it", only with actual lives at risk. Say hello to
| Elizabeth Holmes.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > money is at the root of all of them
|
| Money doesn't seem to be at the root of the first one.
| jampekka wrote:
| Perishing here means losing your career and the sustinence
| its salary gives. So its very much about money, just not
| getting wealthy type money.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| A friend did her PhD in climate science and the research involved
| weather station data. She said all of the data is full of gaps,
| outliers, messy, and the way the "science" solves it is to just
| get rid of reports that don't align with priors and use very
| basic functions to fill in missing data.
|
| When people say "trust the science" it means making scientists
| and researcher High Priests of the Religion of Truth. Until every
| single experiment is pre-registered, all data is public and
| transparent, and all results are published, the entire
| experimental scientific establishment should be treated with
| massive skepticism.
| adam_smith123 wrote:
| That's called fraud and no it's not how "science" functions.
| doitLP wrote:
| It's absolutely how a dishonest science _institution_
| functions. Science itself is nothing more than a method. The
| disdain is for people who confuse the process with the
| institution. And at that point it is just blind faith like
| any old religion. Show me the preregistration, the conflict
| of interest disclosure and the third party replication and
| then I'll "trust the science".
| adam_smith123 wrote:
| PEOPLE are abusing bad incentives. I'm quite certain that
| if this lab was exposed for doing what the poster claims it
| would be a major controversy just like other cases we've
| seen. That's the institution correctly reacting to bad
| actors.
| u32480932048 wrote:
| See also: Normative vs. Positive analysis
| mistermann wrote:
| How science functions is how it functions. You do not have
| knowledge of the entirety of scientific endeavors, it only
| seems like you do, presumably due to being trained on
| propaganda, like an LLM.
|
| Maybe you are conflating it with how it is supposed to, and
| is claimed to function by people who share the same form of
| faith based epistemology as you.
| adam_smith123 wrote:
| Science is a set of methods. If you abandon those methods
| and fake data to fit your needs you aren't doing science
| you are committing various kinds of fraud. Maybe ChatGPT
| can explain that to you instead of listening to Alex Jones.
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| It's not called fraud in climatology and yes it is how
| "science" functions. There are no universal standards in
| academia. Climatological norms involve heavy processing of
| thermometer readings to "clean" them in various ways. They
| all do it and do not see any problems with what they do.
| Every claim you've ever read about temperatures from
| climatologists is based on that kind of procedure.
|
| Some of this has good intentions, at least originally.
| Weather stations aren't normally intended to be used by
| climatologists. They exist for other reasons. So they get
| moved around, or not moved even as the environment changes
| around them, get placed in inconveniently unrepresentative
| places like airport runways, and more. Climatologists scrape
| this data from the internet or collect it from logbooks and
| then try to work out what's happening, but the data is super
| noisy.
|
| Now the way science works is that you characterize the
| uncertainty in your data and propagate it through any
| calculations you do, in order to track your uncertainty
| intervals. Then you communicate those and take them into
| account when making predictions.
|
| But in climatology they don't do this. Instead they use lots
| of algorithms and manual tweaks to try and "fix" the data to
| bring it into line with what they know it "should" be, and
| then report the data without CIs, as having 100% confidence.
| For example if a time series at a weather station is stable
| for 20 years, then experiences a short break, then it returns
| but the average is consistently 0.3 degrees different than
| before, they infer that it must have moved and they then
| "correct" it back to the previous baseline. If there are gaps
| in the data then they generate fake readings by interpolating
| between the nearest alternative weather stations, and so on.
|
| Outsiders might expect that they would investigate and try to
| improve the quality of their source data but they don't.
| Like, if their algorithms infer a station move, they don't
| contact the station operator to figure out if that really
| happened. They just assume their corrections are fine and
| move on.
|
| Another fun thing they do is alter data that was already
| published. When they update their algorithms for deciding
| what data points to include/drop/change, they don't just use
| it for new data running forwards. They reprocess the entire
| historical data set. That can yield outcomes that would
| normally be taken as a clear indicator of scientific fraud,
| for example where NOAA declared a temperature record, and a
| few years later declared a new record that was lower than the
| previous one [1]. Or where scientists invalidated decades of
| published papers (thousands of them) by deciding that the
| temperature trend in the first 15 years of the century was
| totally different to what had previously been reported:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700
|
| The underlying data on which those papers were built was
| announced to be all wrong, but nothing was retracted! That's
| how science functions. And the best part is that they've
| trained the public so well that for anyone who calls any of
| this fraud, as you just did, they are instantly ostracised
| for being a heretical Denier.
|
| [1] https://retractionwatch.com/2021/08/16/will-the-real-
| hottest...
| u32480932048 wrote:
| A friend of mine used to be responsible for (among other
| things) water temperature measurements on naval ships.
|
| Speaking loosely to make the point, they used to measure
| temperature from the front of the ship, then inexplicably (to
| him, anyway) changed the procedure to sample from behind the
| ship (where the water was warmer from engine exhaust/water
| output), leading to a sudden increase in water temperatures.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| The issue is that a lot of scientists and researchers don't
| even know basic math or stats lol. The biggest idiot in a PhD
| program still gets a degree.
| pcrh wrote:
| The drop-out rate for PhD programmes is about 20-50%.
| adam_smith123 wrote:
| If it didn't come out of a Physic Lab or a hard Engineering Lab
| dont trust the results at face value and even it did there's
| plenty of reason for doubt. See LK-99 or Ranga Dias.
| meroes wrote:
| Seems like freshmen need to practice their academic dishonestly
| more to have these skills ready by career time! Maybe the
| academic integrity councils need to include professors' work.
| perihelions wrote:
| I'm astounded that this guy's the world #1 in his subfield by
| academia's success metric, citation count. (The table about 2/3rd
| of the way into the article).
| bumby wrote:
| It kinda makes sense to me. The people who are most likely to
| have a high citation count are those who value making
| publications. Those who treat publications are the primary goal
| are probably those most likely to take an "ends justify the
| means" approach to publishing. (That's not to say all those who
| value publication count are unethical, just that the unethical
| group is more likely a subset of those whose primary metric is
| publication count).
|
| Goodhart's Law says: "When the measure becomes the target, it
| ceases to be a good measure." When the target is "publication
| or citation count" rather than "meaningful research or the
| pursuit of truth" things can get weird.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Francesca Gino was famously prolific before she was outed as a
| fraud - publishing monthly when her peers were publishing a few
| times a year.
| wslh wrote:
| I think corruption is a very poorly studied (and solved) topic.
| Not religious, but the Ten Commandments seems to have more wisdom
| that its application in the real world.
| jboggan wrote:
| The best "researchers" are poor scientists and vice versa. I
| thought I had hitched my wagon to a star in grad school when I
| joined a lab with a high profile and big money-raising PI. After
| awhile I realized they did no research themselves and focused
| solely on hype and raising money.
|
| When I found out a software bug had invalidated a year's worth of
| simulations they pressured me to present the false data as true
| at a large talk. That's when I realized that being honest and
| truthful with data was not the way to succeed in academia. I also
| unknowingly ended my career that day by not going along with my
| professor's fraud.
|
| That being said, nothing surprises me anymore about academic
| dishonesty and research grant funding.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| Unfortunately the systemic incentives support PIs that are
| basically hype salespeople. PIs gain prominence on metrics:
| number of dollars raised, number of PhDs mentored, number of
| post-docs on staff, number of papers landed, number of awards
| granted...
|
| They are not supported on number of hours of research done--
| they arguably put in that time when they were PhD candidates or
| post-docs themselves.
|
| When I was a PhD candidate (couldn't handle the papers-or-die
| academic environment so I left) I really, really loved my PI.
| He had immense academic and intellectual humility. But even he
| had 10+ papers in-flight at the same time and rarely had time
| to do any work himself!
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| These days science is done as a "collaborative" effort, there
| are tons of people gaming that, like putting their names on
| papers where they didn't do that much, churning out papers
| which doesn't really add much to science etc...
| dguest wrote:
| In my collaboration you get to be an author on every paper
| (around 100 a year) just by doing any work in the experiment.
| I'm an author on around 1000 papers that I haven't even
| downloaded, much less read.
| jampekka wrote:
| Are you in HEP?
|
| I think that's actually a good thing. Makes publication
| metrics unusable (which is a good thing) and sidesteps many
| gaming strategies.
| dguest wrote:
| It's a thing for sure. It would be great in a post-
| scarcity society where everyone can be funded regardless
| of what they do, but people are still competitive. For
| example:
|
| - There are still internal databases (which funding
| agencies can access), people fight over who gets on which
| paper there. There are people trying to game that system
| as much as they would try to game a public metric.
|
| - There's a whole cottage industry of people in these
| collaborations who simulate the experiment, show that it
| _could_ do something, and then publish a paper (with a
| shorter author list) about it. This is so popular that
| many of these people never get around to doing the real
| experiment.
|
| Unfortunately I don't think we've broken free of
| Goodhart's Law so easily.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Also, between the lines there. Why was there a software bug
| that existed for a year, where was the checking. Researchers
| also do not care about any kind of software best practices, or
| the value of software. So it is all, fast and dirty hacks.
| fock wrote:
| also fun along that:
|
| - oss-project implements paper in another framework. makes a
| small mistake to the paper.
|
| - original lab takes the OSS code because they switch
| frameworks
|
| - they find and fix the mistake
|
| - sit on that for 2 years without doing a PR.
| icedchai wrote:
| I've worked with "research" code and the lack of best
| practices is very true. Few to no tests. Little to no
| modularization or reuse. The same code copy-and-pasted all
| over the place. Reinventing the wheel poorly instead of using
| a 3rd party package/library. Dev environments that are
| difficult to reproduce since various pieces are either not
| checked in or in some external drive share. I won't even talk
| about the actual code itself.
| Kevin09210 wrote:
| Daniel Promislow ?
| dheera wrote:
| The incentives are wrong in the first place. People are judged
| based on number of papers published to prestigious journals,
| and demoted when they don't have quarterly positive results,
| and given promotions and financial boosts accordingly. People
| attempting to reproduce past results for verification get
| little to no reward. This incentive structure is in direct
| contradiction to honesty and real science.
| isthatafact wrote:
| Knowingly publishing wrong simulation data is stupid -- (imho,
| no blame should have gone to you, a student, even if you had
| gone along with it, but rather to your supervisors in that
| situation) -- because published simulations would always be
| reproducible, by definition, if you think about it.
|
| Anyone trying to replicate the results will discover that the
| previous simulations are wrong, though will probably assume
| mistakes and not fraud by the original researchers. Of course
| it could take years for someone else to notice the problem (if
| ever), depending on how exciting were the claimed results and
| how easy to run are the simulations.
| yafbum wrote:
| Scientific fraud robs the community twice: the first time by
| wasting research funds on fraud, the second time because
| experiments with the appearance of success funnel more dollars to
| them, taking away funding from other areas that might look less
| sexy but might have yielded a breakthrough of they'd been
| pursued. Grant issuers should insist on some form of end-to-end
| third-party data custodianship to prevent tampering with data
| during analysis. Seems better than the many billions of $ being
| wasted on fraud and subsequent missed opportunity.
| Voultapher wrote:
| So many problems in science could be alleviated if we changed
| the culture and processes to multi replication. Your paper can
| only be accepted into a paper if an unrelated group can
| replicate the results with only the paper and associated
| submitted info.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| Someone will need to pay that other group though. Sometimes
| quite a lot.
| Voultapher wrote:
| I'd argue it's worth it.
|
| Some practical ideas, when allocating the money for
| research 30% or so has to be kept back for replication.
| Public science is mostly government funded. And the
| government could allocate X% percent of the budget for
| replication work. It sounds like a solvable problem to me.
| ffgjgf1 wrote:
| I agree in principle but forcing institutions or
| governments to allocate money for this and enforce is
| pretty much an unsolvable problem at this point IMO.
| Voultapher wrote:
| Yeah, as I said it's also a question of culture and
| that's very difficult to change.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| It is a misconception that replication doesn't occur. In
| vanguard basic science, every journey crosses replicating the
| most recent results.
| Voultapher wrote:
| I'd like to learn more, could you please provide some
| sources.
|
| Based on the recent Ranga Dias fraud, I'd think replication
| culture still has a long way to go.
| coolhand2120 wrote:
| Is that true? Do you have any citation? It sounds
| incredible. Every study?
| pcrh wrote:
| It's _broadly_ true that most research is eventually
| subject to attempts at replication. However the
| replication isn 't explicitly attempting to reproduce the
| exact prior research, but to build on it.
|
| If the foundation established by the prior research is
| flawed, attempts to build on it will _usually_ fail.
| tnecniv wrote:
| This doesn't scale. Sometimes only a small number of labs
| have the equipment needed to run an experiment, let alone the
| training on the equipment to do what needs to be done. This
| equipment can cost millions. Even if the results are correct,
| experimental science is very finicky by its very nature.
| Getting an experiment to work can take months.
| Voultapher wrote:
| I'd say if no one can afford to, or knows how to replicate
| the thing you did. What point is there in it? And only
| because such an approach has downsides it's not clear it
| means the overall benefit of lessening the replication
| crisis and forcing scientists to provide enough information
| their work can be replicated at all would be a huge win.
| Based on people like
| https://www.youtube.com/@AppliedScience experience, 9 out
| of 10 times there is some crucial information missing in
| the papers they are trying to replicate.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > I'd say if no one can afford to
|
| Because sometimes they can afford to _build_ on your
| prior results, and advance the state of the art.
| Factoring in all of the malfeasance, what 's the trade
| off between not publishing due to inability/unwillingness
| to replicate, and publishing bad results? We should know
| this tradeoff before significantly changing the status
| quo.
|
| > or knows how to replicate the thing you did.
|
| Agree completely.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Like what? I can think of extremely few domains that any
| decent research university isn't well equipped to
| competently replicate. One of the very few benefits of the
| tuition explosion - even undergrads get relatively casual
| access to equipment worth millions of dollars.
|
| Of course they can't replicate things like ultra high
| energy particle research, but these sort of obscure things
| make up a very negligible chunk of all science produced,
| even if it's quite an important little chunk.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I guess you're not thinking hard enough. I estimate >90%
| of research in most technical fields would require 10s of
| years to replicate unless you are one of the few labs
| already working on the same topic.
|
| For example in on of the research areas I'm familiar with
| (optical communications), there are maybe 10 academic
| labs in Europe (and even less in the US) who have the
| equipment to reproduce some of our experiments. In our
| lab there is 1 PhD student who could pull off reproducing
| the more sophisticated experiments (because he is the one
| focusing on communications) it took him 2 years to get to
| that stage.
|
| This is an relatively easy area, i.e. equipment is
| largely off the shelve, very applied with lots of
| industry involvement. There are plenty of experiments
| published which could only be done in 2 labs (both of
| them industrial), just due to the cost of the required
| equipment.
|
| In other areas (e.g. with fabrication in the clean room)
| reproduction would require even more time investment.
|
| Don't get me wrong, reproducing results is important, but
| what people don't realise it happens all the time when
| people do adopt part of published results into their
| research. Mandatory reproducing results would just create
| large overheads which would get us nowhere.
| rtsil wrote:
| Fine, let's just do it on those that scale. Not all science
| is done in high-end, expensive labs, and this type of
| control will help the young researchers who are publishing
| their first works to gain more credibility and develop
| healthy habits.
|
| Sadly, as long as the tyranny of publishing exists, the
| other researchers will always prefer working on their own
| things than replicating someone else's not yet published
| experiment.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Agreed - having done a PhD in an experimental neuroscience
| lab, there's a nonsignificant number of things that nobody
| else in the world, even in my own lab, can do. I can train
| the techniques to others, and do, but this is separate from
| scientific discovery. There are no incentives for someone
| else to spend their time replicating my work using
| unbelievably challenging and expensive methods. It just
| wouldn't work in practice without a more fundamental
| restructuring of the whole enterprise (which is also
| necessary but hard).
| hcks wrote:
| If this had been enacted, there would never have been any
| scientific progress. Should tell you something
| Voultapher wrote:
| You base this claim on what exactly?
| ska wrote:
| You don't really need that (and it would be too expensive),
| you just need to fix the incentives so that people do more
| replication.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| And a third time when they ask for research funding in the
| future and the public says "No, last time you used the money
| fraudulently"
| azinman2 wrote:
| And a fourth time when the scientific community says "this is
| our hard earned conclusion" and the public says "I don't
| trust this."
| fooop wrote:
| nor should they, since the public is indeed being lied to.
| azinman2 wrote:
| About...? By whom..?
|
| Whatever it is, know that science as a whole is giant,
| diverse, and self correcting over the long term.
| verisimi wrote:
| I don't agree.
|
| When you have lots of people whose livelihoods depend on
| the gravy train, who can't be sure that what they are
| working on is fraudulent because they are so specialised,
| who would take that risk?
|
| Its all about funding. And in the US basically all
| funding comes from the same source - government, military
| or corporations - what I think of as the governance
| system.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Not to mention all of the students who end up dropping out or
| having to take Masters instead of PhDs because their theses
| built on the fraud fail.
|
| Just like we should place failed results (when due to wrong
| science, not bad skills) on an equal level with successful
| results, we should place failed thesis projects on equal level
| with successful thesis projects as having added to the general
| knowledge (again, when the failed projects demonstrate a
| falsified theory, not when they fail due to mistakes or
| inability on the part of the student).
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| Great comment. I would encourage all PhD students to bomb-
| proof their thesis topic and build it on as solid a
| foundation as possible. I chose perhaps a less flashy,
| relevant, and lucrative topic for this reason but I would
| rather finish than be staring down the barrel of a "my entire
| work has been based off a lie"...
| bsimpson wrote:
| And a third time: reputation
|
| Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino were two of the most well-known
| behavioral economists. Hell, Ariely even published a a board
| game about it (as well as a bunch of popular books). They've
| both been accused of data manipulation this year.
|
| My friends in the field are worried that the whole field will
| be tainted. It grew out of a controversial idea - that despite
| what past models demand, people don't consistently behave in a
| rational way. If the two biggest practitioners of a new
| discipline are outed as frauds, what does that do the the
| reputation of the discipline as a whole? Will people be
| skeptical of any behavioral hypothesis that bucks tradition
| because Ariely was accused of fraud?
| macinjosh wrote:
| Fraud is fraud, lock 'em up.
| iinnPP wrote:
| This. The answer is so simple.
| smegsicle wrote:
| i sure hope our sun never has a stroke
| somenameforme wrote:
| I found this [1] interesting:
|
| "Zlokovic is recognized internationally as a leader in the fields
| of AD and stroke research. Thomson Reuters and Clarivate
| Analytics listed Zlokovic as one of "The World's Most Influential
| Scientific Minds" for 21 consecutive years (2002-2022) for
| ranking in 1 % of the most-cited authors in the field of
| neurosciences and behavioral sciences. He received [lots of
| awards.]"
|
| [1] - https://keck.usc.edu/faculty-search/berislav-v-zlokovic/
| kingkawn wrote:
| When will it be acknowledged that this corruption is a feature of
| academic institutional self-preservation not a bug? This is
| inherent to the process.
| mmmmpancakes wrote:
| Scientific fraud makes me sad and angry.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| I have seen peer review hinder actual research more than actually
| catch fraudulent papers. There is no incentive to call out
| bullshit in academia because you might not even pass peer review
| when you call out bullshit. Might as well work on another paper
| instead.
|
| Meanwhile people doing actual work get scooped or ignored by
| people abusing the practice or just doing outright fraud.
| twothreeone wrote:
| It's a bit sad to see people jump on the witch-hunt bandwagon
| every time something like this is published. That kind of
| reaction is an absolute disservice to the public. Even if this
| guys turns out to be a totally 100% evil fraudster who took
| millions of NIH funding to buy coke, b&*#!es, and fancy cars
| while knowing that his drug might kill dozens of people, it just
| demonstrates that the system for awarding such funds is deeply
| flawed. Science is about fact finding, how are we even pretending
| that that's a remote possibility with a sample size of one?
| Studies need to be independently verified _multiple times over_
| to actually establish them as facts.. that's standard procedure
| in other fields. That we just abandon that scrutiny by blindly
| accepting anyone's claims because they wrote X number of papers
| on a topic is not on that guy at all. And worse, nothing will
| change buy burning him at the stake of public opinion. The next
| guy comes along and the story repeats, science.org and the
| "whistleblowers" get their five minutes of fame (and click $$$).
| If we want things to change we need to hold the institutions who
| award such grants and fast-track permissions accountable, instead
| of allowing them to get away with a cheap scapegoat.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-12-01 23:01 UTC)