[HN Gopher] The problem is not plagiarism, but cargo cult science
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The problem is not plagiarism, but cargo cult science
Author : xyeeee
Score : 57 points
Date : 2024-01-18 20:05 UTC (2 hours ago)
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| tptacek wrote:
| _I estimate, conservatively, that about 90% of papers published
| outside the STEM fields can be categorized as Cargo Cult
| Science._
|
| I like the idea that he calls this a "conservative" estimate.
| That sounds much better than "factoid I pulled out of my butt".
| An unfathomably vast number of papers are published in every
| mainstream field of academia, STEM and not, every year. The
| reason we only have "conservative" "estimates" is that nobody can
| possibly read all of them.
|
| Pick a field and take it down if you can. But trying to build a
| case against all of social science using the example of someone
| notoriously elevated despite a lackluster career as a publishing
| academic doesn't get you anywhere!
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| And yet, this is a kind of figure that possibly could be
| proven, if you either assign a lot of people to read / analyze
| the papers and mark them "cargo cult" and "not cargo cult", or
| automate it with modern day text analysis tooling. Getting all
| the papers in one place will be a logistic challenge though.
| arp242 wrote:
| Even just 100 or 200 random papers would be okay for a rough
| indication. There must be someone who has done this?
|
| That _some_ papers are bollocks is not a controversial
| notion, but I genuinely have no idea if it 's 10%, 50%, or
| 90% that's bollocks. Even just a rough indication of "about
| 20%" or "about 80%" would be hugely helpful. It's also
| unclear that non-STEM is more bollocky than STEM - Oxman's
| thesis is STEM, and also bollocks. STEM word salad papers
| don't make the news because the conclusions are rarely
| interesting, whereas sociology and psychology papers do,
| because the conclusions tend to be more interesting.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Leaving aside the vast semantic Gulf between what Feynman
| was talking about and things being "bollocks", how do you
| evaluate the truthiness of novel _arguments_? The typical
| solution here is domain experts, aka peer review. The
| author 's point is that they don't trust peer review, so
| you need some other method that's both practical and
| universal. I can't imagine what that could possibly look
| like.
| programjames wrote:
| I've probably read 100 ML papers. They're pretty bad. Even
| the most cited ones like Adam, Attention, and Latent
| Diffusion are messy, unclear, or just straight up wrong at
| times.
|
| Adam - Their algorithm is inefficient. Their paper can be
| summarized as "use the signal-to-noise ratio," but the key
| idea is hidden in a page-long paragraph halfway through the
| paper.
|
| Attention - I probably read "keys, query, values" a dozen
| times before I realized the key and query matrices multiply
| with the same vector (where the "self" comes in).
|
| Latent Diffusion - Their theoretical grounding was just
| completely wrong. It's not some stochastic diffeq, or
| Markov process, or w/e terms they threw around. It's just
| finding the gradient of log-likelihood using finite
| differences (the error they add).
| jrgoff wrote:
| You could also do a random sampling.
| code_biologist wrote:
| SciHub provides an index of their DOIs [1] as well as
| torrents for the actual content. I presume one could cross
| reference citation counts and pull the top few hundred papers
| in different fields to get a pretty good sample over time and
| research fields.
|
| [1] https://sci-hub.se/database#download
| tolleydbg wrote:
| He might be surprised to learn how many papers published in
| STEM are cargo cult science.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| I'd say _conservatively ;-)_ about 75%
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| Also, Feynman was very clear that the field of physics is not
| immune to the underlying dynamics, citing both the historical
| reluctance to correct the Millikan oil drop experiment and
| sloppy methods being used in contemporary particle accelerator
| research.
| lliamander wrote:
| The fact that so many papers are published rather works against
| your argument. The more papers are published in a given field,
| the more likely they are to be bullshit.
|
| Of course, that applies for STEM fields as well as the social
| sciences. However, if we do comparisons across fields, such as
| looking at how many citations a typical paper in some field
| will receive, we find that STEM tends to do a lot better than
| the social sciences[1].
|
| >Pick a field and take it down if you can. But trying to build
| a case against all of social science using the example of
| someone notoriously elevated despite a lackluster career as a
| publishing academic doesn't get you anywhere!
|
| The longer such fraud goes uncorrected, the more rewarded a
| person is for their fraud, and indeed the more lengths other
| people go to cover up such fraud (as was argued by the OP) the
| more likely such fraud is normalized in a particular field[2].
| The Claudine Gay story suggests that, if anything, XKCD was
| wildly optimistic about the social sciences[3].
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5446096/ [2]
| https://danluu.com/wat/ [3] https://xkcd.com/451/
| tptacek wrote:
| How does that follow? Is your premise that a static number of
| people are producing ever-increasing numbers of papers?
| That's not what's happening at all. There are lots of papers
| because there are lots of people doing research. As the
| number of vulnerability researchers increased, drastically in
| the 2000s, the number of vulnerabilities went up --- there
| was a point where people we tracking new vulnerabilities,
| across all platforms, by hand! But the median quality of a
| vulnerability research result didn't fall; in fact, while the
| variance increased, the peak quality of vulnerabilities
| improved.
| lliamander wrote:
| I do not assume a static number of researchers, nor do I
| see why you would infer that from what I said. Of course
| there are more researchers going into these fields. The
| more people enter into a field, the more likely the typical
| person entering that field is going to be a mediocre
| researcher, and the more likely that their work is going to
| be crap.
|
| Sure, in the case of a very small and new field with
| promise of intellectually stimulating work and structural
| advantages for eliminating bullshit, adding more people and
| papers is likely going to be a net benefit. But
| realistically many established disciplines can only add
| people by lowering standards.
| Palomides wrote:
| DARPA is doing a relatively large scale effort to see if social
| sciences papers replicate, and how easy it is to look at a
| paper and guess if it will replicate
|
| the preliminary estimation phase predicts like 50% rates of
| replication
|
| let's be real, the average social science paper is not good
|
| edit: there are lots of garbage papers in every field, the
| culture of academia is deeply flawed, the low standards are
| just even lower in some fields
| p_l wrote:
| The problem is that replication studies aren't done hard
| enough.
|
| And by replication studies I mean "take this paper, try to
| replicate, write a paper on it".
|
| Every singular paper can be wrong, that's why you're supposed
| to replicate them - that's at least what was taught in
| psychology, which many consider "social science of less
| rigour" - well, it was probably the course most hardcore
| about experimental design in my education and ability to
| replicate a study...
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| Are they not done or are they done and nobody wants to
| publish them?
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| Yes there's a serious issue, but thrust of the previous
| comment was that it's not productive to criticize poor
| research using poor research.
|
| Conservatively 90%? Bullshit. The real numbers are already
| terrible so why use unintentional hyperbole to make the
| argument it just weakens it.
| onyxringer wrote:
| Relevant video ("Feynman on the social sciences"):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkFPCTwPlkU
| bertil wrote:
| I didn't look too deeply into the scandal about plagiarism
| (because seeing people I admire fight like kids makes me sad),
| but I saw one glimpse: one accusation was comparing the
| Literature section of two papers by a PI and their Ph.D. student,
| and finding the two first paragraphs matched.
|
| Dude, that's the "You must read this before taking the class"
| segment of the paper. It's a human-legible context for the
| Reference list (and occasionally, the opportunity for some minor
| pettiness against the competing lab). No one reads it (except
| Master's students trying to catch up), and of course, it's copy-
| pasted between two papers on the same topic.
|
| After that, I kind of skipped the topic.
| stdbrouw wrote:
| Actually, no, people don't generally copy-paste parts of each
| others' literature review sections.
| bertil wrote:
| I'm convinced it's not done in many areas of science. I have
| seen it done extensively in others.
|
| The point is: I'm not sure doing it should be qualified as
| plagiarism.
| stdbrouw wrote:
| I mean, I _guess_ you could call Claudine Gay a cargo culter
| because she used a particular method without fully understanding
| its assumptions, but if you set the bar that high then almost
| nothing is going to pass. If you 've ever been in academia, you
| know Jose Ortega y Gasset was right when he wrote: "it is
| necessary to insist upon this extraordinary but undeniable fact:
| experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the
| work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre.
| That is to say, modern science, the root and symbol of our actual
| civilization, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace
| man and allows him to work therein with success." Most of us,
| most of the time, work with "recipes" that we think will produce
| good science, and often that works, except when it doesn't.
|
| As for Neri Oxman, the kind of word salad she spit out is
| definitely reminiscent of cargo cult behavior, but the motivation
| is different: if you're in a cult, you're a believer, whereas
| it's not clear to me that Oxman believes her own nonsense, and in
| any event she seems to tend to borrow stuff from other fields and
| does not presume to contribute to those fields. Consequently, her
| research doesn't really qualify as the kind of mimicking without
| understanding that Feynmen was talking about.
|
| So I guess I must ask: is Sven Schnieders (the author) cargo
| culting about cargo cult science?
| sega_sai wrote:
| From Andrew Gelman: "Any sufficiently crappy research is
| indistinguishable from fraud"
| https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/06/20/clarkes-la...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That stuff about Voroni tesselations looks pretty orthodox to me.
| bertil wrote:
| I happen to tell people I'm a statistician--because it's true,
| and because I didn't learn from the first 10,000 times someone
| heard that, turned around, and left without a word. The always
| run away, except in _one_ case... If they stay, I know they are
|
| a. a Ph.D. Student and
|
| b. having a very bad time and therefore
|
| c. about to ask me pointed questions about their methodology
| section, what is a t-value and a p-score, why there are two xis,
| and whether it's too late to prevent Bonferonni, Hochberg,
| Holmes, Benjamini, and Sidak from ever publishing they terrible
| ideas. (Yes.)
|
| I've been confronted with utter confusion in every field of
| knowledge, including art history, and literature. It's a miracle
| we make any progress in science, but I wholeheartedly blame *how
| we teach statistics*. It's, at best, a dark cult that requires
| sacrifices to obscure gods, and most likely three cargo cults in
| a trench coat. Conditioning scientific discussion to passing
| under the Caudine forks of Greek letters incantations isn't
| helping us. We need a reform.
|
| There is no problem with people looking at black holes, counting
| cells in a Petri dish, or trying to define inflation. If it hurts
| when you touch your forehead, your thigh, your elbow, and your
| knee, it means your finger is broken. There is one thing in
| common between all those people: the three-hour elective on stats
| taught by someone who had the social skills of a door hinge, the
| clarity of VentaBlack, and the patience of a toddler on cocaine.
|
| There are amazing statisticians who explain things beautifully.
| Get _them_ to teach, and people will finally grok uncertainty.
| They'll see how clumsy are most of the methodologies pre-approved
| by reviewers because it was used in the same journal before. We
| ask the most critical minds of our generation to challenge the
| status-quo. They know how. They just need to know what the
| status-quo actually means.
| taeric wrote:
| I'd push that it isn't just statistics. It is finding a way to
| overcome any learned experience and expectations. I remember
| people having a hard time understanding that the reason things
| fall behind the car when you toss them out the window is 100%
| air friction. To the point that many in my college classes
| would get that basic question wrong. Or, for fun, show an image
| of someone spinning a rock on a string overhead, ask what
| happens when they let go of the string with an arrow for where
| the rock will go.
|
| Nevermind how many of us (myself included) have a hard time
| with the idea that .9999.. equals 1. Even more amusing when you
| consider few have trouble with .3333... * 3 doing so.
|
| Yes, statistics can be particularly difficult to really
| internalize. I'm not entirely convinced it is uniquely
| difficult.
| bertil wrote:
| Probably.
|
| I just happen to have had the most incredible physics
| teachers, and I know elite engineering schools do too:
| Feynman, that Eastern European lady who is way too loud and
| excited about science, the "let's see if conservation of
| movement works, or if that bowling ball will crush my skull"
| guy. Every school had more than one. Steve Mould is a gift
| from above, but not a unique one...
|
| On the other hand what Randal Monroe from xkcd and Grant
| Sanderson from 3blue1Brown have alluded to, that felt like
| witchcraft unlike anything I've seen in class.
|
| I went to what should be one of the most demanding schools
| for statistics and it took me years to make sense of it. Re-
| opening my notes after things clicked was earth-shaking.
|
| And it wasn't specific to the school: we also had economics
| teacher, and they were incredible: hilarious, terrifying,
| unforgettable. "Our task is to forecast inflation. We have
| tried many approach, mainly macroeconomics and bone reading.
| Bone reading was more accurate, but the minister didn't think
| it involved enough suffering." How do you forget that?
| burnished wrote:
| I think the .999 repeating thing has more to do with how we
| teach limits, people struggle to understand how two things
| that look definitionally different are the same because the
| rationale isn't well motivated. I had a professor that framed
| the whole process as an argument which was much easier to
| grasp, and I can easily imagine most people just getting a
| lecture or two on the equations and the implications.
|
| Plus phrasing it as 'equals' or 'are the same' sort of puts
| the challenging part right in the front. Focusing on the
| difference more naturally leads you to the same conclusion.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I would just say "cargo cult thinking" or "cargo cult
| scholarship" instead of cargo cult _science_ , as it's more
| accurate in general, and avoids addressing whether political
| science and media science (the fields of the people used as
| examples in the article) are considered science per se. Just as
| plagiarism cuts across disciplines, including non-science fields,
| so does cargo cult thinking. So, it's a better term.
| kens wrote:
| The article points out that Oxman's definition of Euclidean
| distance is jumbled nonsense. I took a quick look at a related
| Oxman paper [1] and it is a mess. I found a different and even
| more jumbled definition of distance:
|
| "Euclidean distance [?] (d = x2 + y2, also called the L2-norm)"
|
| I don't know how you'd get something this messed up if you
| understood it at all. The non-superscript 2 is an understandable
| typo, but the square root is in completely the wrong place. And
| is it supposed to be applied to all the text in parentheses?
|
| I also note that the definition of tesselation is also completely
| confused:
|
| "The breaking up of self-intersecting polygons into simple
| polygons is called tessellation, or more properly, polygon
| tessellation."
|
| This definition (most of the paragraph is cut-and-paste from
| Wolfram MathWorld [2]) is a very special case of tesselation
| since normally you're not dealing with self-intersecting
| polygons.
|
| (For completeness, I'll mention that the paper uses "ray" when it
| should use "line segment" but that is kind of quibbling.)
|
| [1]
| https://papers.cumincad.org/data/works/att/acadia09_122.cont...
|
| [2] https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Tessellation.html
| yowzadave wrote:
| Oxman's dissertation was submitted to the architecture
| department. It's likely that none of her reviewers were
| actually equipped or motivated to know which aspects of it were
| nonsense.
|
| Architecture as an academic discipline suffers from having
| practitioners with science-envy, but who don't have the
| training, the disposition, or the incentives to practice real
| science. The real end product of Oxman's labor is not a paper
| that advances science in some way: it's a beautiful piece of
| sculpture that will be acquired by MoMA. She's actually good at
| this part of the job! Unfortunately she (along with many others
| within the field) feels compelled to use science-y jargon to
| dress up what she's doing.
| tivert wrote:
| I think the OP did a poor job of explaining what he meant by
| "Cargo Cult Science," and the single quoted paragraph from the
| Feynman essay which supposedly coins the term is inadequate.
|
| The best I can tell, the issue is adopting some of the forms and
| jargon of the physical sciences, without fully understanding them
| in a couple of particular ways, such as failing to:
|
| > try to give all of the information to help others to judge the
| value of your contribution; not just the information that leads
| to judgment in one particular direction or another.
|
| ...or failing repeat previous experiments or to try to control
| for all variables.
|
| Here's the original essay:
| https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm.
|
| That essay mentions that the root cause of the problem is that
| many of these ideas are never explicitly taught (at least at the
| time its writing).
|
| I wonder how much of this is due to stuff like the (historically)
| excessive prestige of the physical sciences leading to stuff like
| "physics envy" forcing other areas of activity to contort
| themselves into a distorted shape to fit a physical-science-
| shaped hole.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| The definition I came away with is that Cargo Cult Science is
| anything that is trying to look like science while not
| embracing the core scientific principle of actively trying to
| _disprove_ the claims you are making.
|
| Science _can 't_ prove anything (deductive vs inductive), it
| can only fail to disprove. While no attempts to disprove can
| ever be 100% thorough, real science makes good faith attempts
| to disprove claims, and won't actively avoid obvious potential
| routes to such disproving.
|
| Cargo Cult Science does not do this. It makes claims, shows
| evidence for those claims, but makes zero (or at best token)
| effort to come up with alternate explanations or find ways in
| which the claims might be incorrect.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| "I estimate, conservatively, that about 90% of papers published
| outside the STEM fields can be categorized as Cargo Cult
| Science."
|
| Pot, meet kettle.
|
| How many times have we had room temperature semiconductors and
| cold fusion breakthroughs again?
| tomrod wrote:
| As someone who worked my tail off for my PhD dissertation for
| years, the notion that someone just copied and pasted random
| sections of random works irks me.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| These guys have a systematic methodology for doing meta-analysis
| in health
|
| https://www.cochrane.org/
|
| The process starts with doing a literature search and then
| culling low-quality results which is almost always most of them
| because most studies in health have too small of a sample size,
| lack controls, and have other basic flaws. I saw one the other
| day where they found 80 studies but could only include two in the
| analysis.
|
| Physics has its own hall of shame. It's quite likely that a large
| fraction of high energy physics is "not even wrong" in that
| there's not any evidence that the universe has 10 dimensions or
| that supersymmetry exist. In my field we used to make a plot on
| log-log paper, draw a line on it and say we'd discovered a power
| law so we published a lot of junk papers like this one
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9512055
|
| Mark Newman was at our institute at the time and after he finally
| got tenure a decade later he wrote a paper that put the smack
| down on it but it was in a statistics journal so for all I know
| people are still doing it wrong.
|
| One of the reasons why I never really found my voice as a
| scientist was that I never found reconciliation between the ideal
| of scientific truth and the reality that there is a lot of
| bullshit (e.g. if you don't publish some bullshit you'll perish)
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