[HN Gopher] The scientists fighting the epidemic of fraudulent s...
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The scientists fighting the epidemic of fraudulent science research
Author : chaisquared
Score : 54 points
Date : 2024-02-03 20:49 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.analystnews.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.analystnews.org)
| tomohawk wrote:
| I wish them luck. Even institutions like Harvard are richly
| rewarding frauds and resisting punishing them when they are
| caught.
|
| https://freebeacon.com/?post_type=post&p=1854123
|
| https://freebeacon.com/?post_type=post&p=1843758
|
| https://freebeacon.com/?post_type=post&p=1846914
| hnhg wrote:
| I feel the article needs to put forward more evidence that it is
| an epidemic. It looks just as likely that science has had
| systematic problems for a long time and abuses have always been
| rife.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > Last year, more than 10,000 research papers were retracted,
| marking an all-time high.
|
| They haven't even made a case that it is at an all-time high as
| a rate of anything. The article also says that output has
| spiked.
| renewiltord wrote:
| If you're not in it you don't see it but after seeing
| sufficiently faked fluorescence studies I believe nothing. On
| the Internet some expert HN user will tell you how "it's worth
| noting that there is some evidence" and it's probably some
| faked science on photoshopped fluorescence study. Useless crap
| in a worm. And it's not even real.
|
| But you can't tell anyone this because they'll circle the
| wagons. "Oh yeah, you think science is blah blah blah".
| coolhand2120 wrote:
| I really hope these people gain wider support. They seem so anti-
| establishment, which implies that the establishment is pro fraud.
| And that sounds about right to me.
|
| This is a huge problem. When fraud is rewarded over legitimate
| research we lose so many times. Once when we reward the fraud,
| again when the fraudulent research is propagated into the corpus,
| again when we recognize that this has squelched legitimate
| scientific research in exchange for resources being sent to the
| fraud. And finally when trust in science falters.
|
| There's every chance that the next great scientist is flipping
| burgers at McDonald's.
|
| The problem is much bigger than anyone wants to admit. In some
| domains a coin flip is just as good as relying on peer reviewed
| research.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
| jltsiren wrote:
| They seem anti-establishment, because you need an anti-
| establishment attitude to do investigative work like that. If
| you are the average conformist, you are happy to work within
| the system, focusing on your personal goals.
| kiba wrote:
| We also shouldn't confuse people who investigated scientific
| fraud with necessarily being ant-establishment.
|
| After all, being anti-establishment is often associated with
| scientific quackery.
| Frost1x wrote:
| >This is a huge problem. When fraud is rewarded over legitimate
| research we lose so many times.
|
| I'd generalize this further and say we have an underlying
| economy and society that rewards fraud over what should be
| happening widespread. It's happening everywhere and lying seems
| to be one of the best strategies to success. With competitive
| pressures increasing, it's often even worth the risk. This may
| have always been the case but the population at large seems to
| be more cognizant of it and taking action on it. Politics,
| business, everywhere deceit is rampant. It may in some cases be
| "allowed" forms of lying or skirting around the truth but
| underlying behavior is the same here: avoiding the truth for
| one's own self gain. There's few if any establishments I trust
| anymore. I just assume everyone everywhere is lying for their
| own goals.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| >> There's few if any establishments I trust anymore.
|
| Sorry, but that's tin foil hat territory. Everyday I trust my
| bank to handle my money fairly, the gas station to give the
| right amount of gas, the labels on food and medicine to be
| accurate, the weather report, etc. etc. I am sure there are
| problems with virtually every institution that need to be
| addressed. But I am surrounded by reliable information and
| trusted actors.
| dustingetz wrote:
| tragedy of the commons
| gremlinunderway wrote:
| lol what "commons" even exists nowadays? Everything is
| privatized or driven by small cliques/inner circles.
| There's no commons to exploit.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > They seem so anti-establishment, which implies that the
| establishment is pro fraud.
|
| What I'm getting from the article so far is that "the
| establishment" is actually a bunch of establishments (plural).
| And thus there are many systems to game, and many incentives to
| game them.
| kiba wrote:
| While the problem of fraud is real, exaggerating the extent of
| the problem is not a good idea either.
|
| Otherwise the fraud would be so pervasive that anybody with a
| PhD attached after name should be distrusted unless proven
| otherwise.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| In many of the disciplines with widespread reproducibility
| crises (e.g. economics) this is already the case.
| 666666666 wrote:
| everything is an 'epidemic' these days....
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| All scientists should sign on top of their papers that what they
| write is truthful.
|
| See also https://datacolada.org/98
| etrautmann wrote:
| That's so fundamentally core to the idea of authoring a paper
| that it would be fundamentally useless. Anyone knowingly
| publishing fraudulent data will not be deterred by a signature.
| It's already career ending if discovered.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| GP forgot the /s
|
| I had read GP's link prior to this. It's about a researcher
| claiming that signing a truthfulness statement beforehand
| reduced lying, but that very research was tampered with.
| pvaldes wrote:
| That would for sure deter the serial liars.
|
| It was assumed by default that scientists don't lie (and
| researchers are signing their articles since thousands of
| years). Innocent until proven guilty is a better system, but...
| lets add even more bureaucracy to publish, is not insulting
| enough yet.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| GP forgot the /s.
|
| If you haven't yet, GP's link is humorously topical.
| elashri wrote:
| There are two things that you should put into perspective when
| seeing these numbers.
|
| 1- The article give pure numbers and does not report ratios. So
| when they report
|
| > Last year, more than 10,000 research papers were retracted,
| marking an all-time high
|
| The source is nature publication and while it gives rate of
| retraction per year it doesn't show the ratios. So if this is
| 10,000 out of 5M or 10,000 out of 10M is huge different. Yes in
| both cases it will be a problem but also there are no information
| about re-traction cause. There is no statistics on cause of re-
| traction. Not every retraction is necessarily because of fraud.
|
| Actually in the nature paper they reported the retraction rate
| (without any other information) to be 0.2% in 2022 but again
| without more information.
|
| 2- calling it epidemic is clickbait title. Depending on
| retraction as a measurement of fraud problem in science is
| subjective. There are problems with citations, paper mills and
| many other things. But you can't put all of these things into one
| basket. Retraction is a standard process that even legitimate
| researchers are using sometimes to fix problems with the paper
| ranging from discovering malfunction device after publication to
| method not working. Associating retraction with fraudulent
| activity only would mean that a researcher wouldn't use it if the
| perception that if you do it yourself then you are trying to
| cover something or you have ethical problems.
| derbOac wrote:
| I love these people's work.
|
| At the same time I don't think any of this really addresses the
| root causes of the problems, which are career, university
| administrative, and field (i.e., recognition and attention)
| incentives. The whole paradigm we use, and the way we treat
| scientists and fund research, is broken. It feels a little bit
| like bailing water out of your boat with teacup on one side while
| ignoring the gaping hole letting rushing water in on the other
| side.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| The root cause it too many people for the funding available. If
| a single scientist can spend $250k per year it's obvious that
| even rich economies can only support so many of them.
|
| Whenever you have this situation you inevitably lead to
| selection criteria which can, and will, be gamed.
| buitreVirtual wrote:
| It's not just the funding but the jobs themselves.
| Universities and even the funding bodies want to show shiny
| easy-to-digest numbers to their stakeholders to justify
| tuition and government funds. Which means these institutions
| in turn expect those numbers from their researchers, who then
| are happy to comply and build their paper mills and citation
| cartels, solving no real problems at best and producing fake
| data at worst.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| But how do we "solve" those incentives? There will always be
| winners and losers, and since successful fraud is by definition
| indistinguishable from genuine success, there will always be
| people trying to game the system.
|
| The only effective solution I see is making fraud harder to
| hide. (There's also making the penalty for fraud higher and
| trying to instill integrity, but the problem is some people
| will still take the risk.)
| User23 wrote:
| > since successful fraud is by definition indistinguishable
| from genuine success
|
| This is absolutely false in real science and that you say it
| seriously is proof of just how far gone the academy is.
| Needless to say no matter how much you fake your data or
| results, nature is not so easily fooled.
| pvaldes wrote:
| What scientists? five? twenty?
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