[HN Gopher] Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of 6 Pape...
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Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of 6 Papers by Top
Researchers
Author : Jimmc414
Score : 59 points
Date : 2024-01-22 16:05 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think the Crimson article mentioned in this article has better
| info about the actual details of the alleged manipulation:
| https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/22/dana-farber-iss...
| kenjackson wrote:
| I do sometimes wonder if the same attributes that puts people
| at their top of their fields is the same atribute that makes
| them more willing to sacrifice their integrity for prestige...
| It seems like this just happens too frequently (or maybe it
| just appears that way because these are media reported).
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| >wonder if the same attributes that puts people at their top
| of their fields is the same atribute that makes them more
| willing to sacrifice their integrity for prestige
|
| I have a HLS lawyerbro that absolutely attests to this
| theory. "You hear that? That's `pride` fuckin'with'ya."
| 39838sjdjn wrote:
| I'm not sure what direction of causation you have in mind but
| as someone in academics (tenured professor etc) I think the
| answer is definitely yes.
|
| One thing that should be setting off alarm bells now is how
| often these scandals in the last couple of years have
| involved people who are in very high-level administrative
| positions at these institutions. Not only because of the
| values that might be instilled downward in the future, but
| also what it says about what has been valued already to reach
| those positions.
|
| I have seen and heard stuff like this routinely that never
| makes the press. Not everyone in academics is corrupt, but
| the rot is prevalent enough that it's pretty systemic at this
| point and affects everyone. I think sometimes people don't
| even realize what they're suggesting sometimes, it's so
| common.
|
| I have a theory that as some indicator of success deviates
| from a normal tail, there's more likely to be corruption or
| luck involved. The incentives just don't work the other way.
| But I'm biased based on my experiences, which reflect one
| domain of modern society.
| svnt wrote:
| > I have a theory that as some indicator of success
| deviates from a normal tail, there's more likely to be
| corruption or luck involved.
|
| And/or abuse, coercion, and exploitation of others.
| goalieca wrote:
| If you take incentivation to the extreme, look no further
| than the publishing criteria for academic positions in
| China. https://www.nature.com/articles/463142a
| breckenedge wrote:
| Anecdotally I've been doing a lot of research lately on
| recommended systems and it blows me away how many Chinese
| papers there are (papers written by researchers in China)
| and how many claim to beat the current "state-of-the-art"
| often without saying what that is.
| nsagent wrote:
| Academics with surprising results are rewarded with more
| fame, prestige, funding opportunities, etc. It's not a big
| surprise that people naturally cheat, in big or small ways.
|
| The general public often think that academia is merit-based
| with the smartest being rewarded, but as you know it's a
| more complicated picture than that. You're not alone in
| your thinking; I'm pretty sure everyone in academia
| recognizes the problems. It's just that enough people
| benefit from the current incentive structures that the
| occasional scandal isn't enough for academics to reassess
| the predominant paradigm.
| int_19h wrote:
| This is a broad issue with any kind of hierarchical power
| structure, no matter what it is ostensibly about. Once you
| have hierarchy, you have politics as a
| profession/lifestyle, and sociopaths always win that game
| in the long run.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Great people usually aren't good people...
|
| Or to put it differently, the unquenched desires of
| acquisition, rivalry, vanity, and power lead people to do
| things they oughtn't
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Great people usually aren 't good people..._
|
| The flip side of this is most societies' model citizens are
| highly compliant, possibly even supplicant. Entire
| categories of rudeness are, in essence, about not
| challenging authority and convention.
| itronitron wrote:
| I can think of three former colleagues that have had very
| successful careers and that are also gifted liars (one stands
| out as also being a pathological liar.) None of them are
| _ever_ going to be reported in the media.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Yes.
|
| For a sector/area/industry that deals with "hard facts" and
| Science, it's "surprising" how much of these groups and
| institutions run on prestige, greed and ego.
|
| We are talking about institutions run by these people who
| have annual budgets of BILLIONS of dollars, sometimes I feel
| most people view these schools and institutions like just one
| step above their local high-school, nothing is further from
| the truth.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I.e. people are human, regardless of their position,
| prestige, etc.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| It's confusing because some of the incidents had image
| manipulation, but apparently no evidence of deceit. Some others
| involved data collected at labs not belonging to the four
| authors accused. But there are six papers being retracted, but
| no real details in that article on who did what and what
| exactly happened there.
| svnt wrote:
| "No evidence of deceit" but the data show no effect while you
| accidentally published an image from some supposedly
| "early/exploratory" analysis that does show an effect.
|
| What would be the evidence of deceit you'd expect to find
| here? A video of a monologue by the evil villain disclosing
| their intention to deceive readers because they believe no
| one will reproduce their analysis before they get their
| promotion?
| jassyr wrote:
| I agree. You can infer that falsely creating positive
| results leads to funding leads to prestige, fancy dinners
| and fancy homes, fancy educations and large inflated egos.
| divbzero wrote:
| The original blog post alleging falsified data was published by
| Sholto David earlier this month:
| https://forbetterscience.com/2024/01/02/dana-farberications-...
| jassyr wrote:
| This is an incredible post, thanks for the link! The
| researches are quite literally photoshopping study images!
| How is this even legal? Plain vanilla fraud.
| Blahah wrote:
| https://archive.is/AWuWw
| asylteltine wrote:
| I don't trust anything coming out of academia anymore. First we
| had over 50% of psychology being nonsense, then sociology (not
| surprising), then the hard sciences too. But then we also have
| the rampant ideology problem where you are forbidden from even
| researching certain topics/questions and if you do, you are
| blacklisted. They need a hard reckoning. What happened to
| science? Who cares what the ideological implication is? The truth
| is the truth.
|
| The icing on the cake is when these frauds retract their papers,
| NOTHING happens to them. Nothing.
| tgv wrote:
| Academia publishes, because academics are forced to publish.
| Psychology has a subject that's harder than physics, both
| experimentally and theoretically, and bad research practices.
| Sociology we can politely ignore. So yes, it has turned into a
| mill that produces garbage.
|
| Still, some things are worth researching, but finding out
| what's true (or true-ish) will take a lot of time. Don't
| trusting findings that haven't been reproduced, stay skeptical
| of theories that hinge on a far-reaching interpretation of the
| data, and downright ignore publications with surprising claims.
| It's not nice, but it's realistic.
| kr0bat wrote:
| Hold on, I've heard of the replication crisis - though I don't
| know the scale - but are you saying that over 50% of "hard
| science" is bunk? I find that hard to swallow.
| asylteltine wrote:
| I don't think hard sciences are 50% but still too high. But
| that's just the data people looked at. There are so many
| papers and studies being submitted, who knows how many times
| a researcher fudged a few values to make the effect size
| bigger? I personally witnessed this in academia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
| livueta wrote:
| Not addressing the parent's specific claim, but there was
| recent discussion of a disturbingly high proportion of
| studies in one field being fake/flawed:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37572394
|
| > "For more than 150 trials, Carlisle got access to
| anonymized individual participant data (IPD). By studying the
| IPD spreadsheets, he judged that 44% of these trials
| contained at least some flawed data: impossible statistics,
| incorrect calculations or duplicated numbers or figures, for
| instance. And in 26% of the papers had problems that were so
| widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged
| -- either because the authors were incompetent, or because
| they had faked the data."
| mellosouls wrote:
| Original blog post claiming the flaws:
|
| https://forbetterscience.com/2024/01/02/dana-farberications-...
| newman8r wrote:
| I've been thinking about how with the rise of LLMs, we're going
| to uncover A LOT of "bad studies" over the next decade. Could be
| some sort of mass reckoning. Probably better to admit it all now
| than be uncovered in 5 years.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to
| face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I
| am known.
|
| Agreed that de-anonymizing will become trivial. This will be a
| problem not only for bad actors in research, journalism,
| creative writing, etc., but for internet commenters who
| believed they'd done due diligence to remain anonymous, and
| even for research _participants_ who 'd expected anonymity when
| signing their consent forms. We're rushing headlong into even
| stranger days!
| rickydroll wrote:
| I would prioritize looking for financial and corporate fraud.
| It would have a much bigger impact on society than looking for
| any problems with academic studies. If we can take down those
| people and bar them from ever having anything to do with
| finance in the future, I think that would have an important
| impact on the ethics and behavior of the next generation.
| jefe_ wrote:
| It seems to me that taking down fraudulent academic
| researchers and barring them from ever having anything to do
| with research in the future would also have a significant
| impact on the ethics and behavior of the next generation. If
| technology is lowering the barriers to fraud detection, why
| should it be applied to one sector over another?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I suspect the only way to fight this is to make the papers freely
| available so anyone can look at them for flaws and dishonesty.
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