[HN Gopher] Fraud, so much fraud
___________________________________________________________________
Fraud, so much fraud
Author : nabla9
Score : 702 points
Date : 2024-09-27 16:33 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| hprotagonist wrote:
| > It seems like a strange thing to take someone with a long and
| respected career and subject them to what would essentially be a
| Western blot and photomicrograph audit before offering them a big
| position.
|
| This is absolutely something that we should routinely be doing,
| though.
| majormajor wrote:
| It's pretty similar to the level of distrust in the software
| engineering job interview process.
|
| Pick your poison, to some extent. Better would be to not have
| to do it after-the-fact, but to vet better at every
| intermediate step, but it's hard. Just a very difficult people
| problem.
| BigGreenJorts wrote:
| yeah it sounds a little bit absurd to me. It's just basic due
| diligence. You don't not run a background check on a potential
| employee just bc their resume looks good and they got a
| reference. In those cases you still go, "Annoying we have to
| wait because we want this person on board NOW and it's a fairly
| shallow investigation that 99% of the time doesn't reveal
| anything even if there is something, but it's the standard
| procedure."
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| I agree. To their defense, he had a few hundred papers
| published before joining, according to PubMed, and was a leader
| in his field:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Masliah%20E&filter=dat...
|
| My concern is that with AI getting better and easier to use
| (e.g., in Photoshop) fraud will be extremely hard to detect.
|
| We might need to re-think how research is done and results
| verified.
| tux3 wrote:
| There are unfortunately very rarely consequences for academic
| fraud. It's not just that we only catch a small fraction --
| mostly the most brazen image manipulation -- but these cases of
| blatant fraud happen again and again, to resounding silence.
|
| Ever so rarely, there may be an opaque, internal investigation.
| Mostly, it seems that academia has a desire to not make any
| waves, keep up appearances, and let the problem quiet down on its
| own.
| IshKebab wrote:
| The people doing the investigation have a vested interest in
| keeping it quiet.
|
| It's like the old quote... "If you commit fraud as an RA that's
| your problem. If you commit fraud as the head of department
| that's the university's problem."
| neilv wrote:
| And occasionally a grad student who discovers academic
| dishonesty, and complains internally (naively trusting
| administrators to have humility and integrity), has their
| career ended.
|
| I suppose a silver lining to all the academic fraud exposes of
| the last few years is that more grad students and faculty now
| know that this is a thing, and one that many will try to cover
| up, so trust no one.
|
| Another silver lining might be that fellow faculty are more
| likely to believe an accusation, and (if they are one of the
| awful people) less likely to think they can save
| funding/embarrassment/friend by neutralizing the witness.
|
| (ProTip: If the success of your dishonesty-reporting approach
| is predicated on an internal administrator having humility and
| integrity, realize that those qualities are the _opposite_ of
| what has advanced a lot of academic careers.)
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| The amazing part about this to me is that the only reason the
| authors were caught is image manipulation. The fraud in numbers
| and text? Not so easy to uncover.
|
| Prediction: papers stop using pictures entirely
| slashdave wrote:
| GenAI will make faking western blots fantastically easy
| mbreese wrote:
| Many journals now require _all_ versions of a gel image that
| is used in a figure. So, you'd have to fake the full image
| that is cropped down to the lanes used in the figure. I think
| there aren't as many of those raw images around to train AI
| on... yet.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| I predict it will get even worse than that, in the next
| couple of decades I expect any document or work that has a
| substantial reward associated with it, either financially
| or in terms of career advancement or a grade for critical
| course work in one's major, or penalty such as indictment
| or conviction, to be backed by a time stamped stack of
| developing documentation, drafts, revisions, with these
| time stamp validated against a trusted custodial clock and
| a seed random string marking the start of work, recorded in
| some immutable public form.
|
| Accompanying to finish document will be a hash of all of
| these works along with their associated timestamps,
| originals of can be verified if necessary to prove a
| custodial chain of development over a plausible period of
| time and across multiple iterations of the development of
| the work - a kind of signed time-lapse slideshow of its
| genesis from blank page to finished product as if it had a
| mandatory and global "track changes" flag enabled from the
| very beginning - by which the entire process can be proved
| an original human-collaborated work and not an insta-
| generated AI fiction.
| mbreese wrote:
| I actually thought that digital timestamps would have
| been a great use-case for blockchains. They are publicly
| available and auditable. If you're working from hashes,
| you don't necessarily need to make the raw data public,
| just the hash. It is a use-case that has an intrinsic
| value to the data generator and the future auditor (so
| you could charge something for it). I know there was some
| work done on this, but I think it lost momentum due to
| trying to generate crypto as a value storage medium.
| slashdave wrote:
| Sounds complicated. You could just demand the lab log
| books. They are supposed to be dated and countersigned.
| Standard practice is to counter sign outside your group.
| Lionga wrote:
| The YC company that wanted to sell fake survey results (yes
| they really had a launch HN with that idea) will surely be
| the first to sell fake science results next. YC disrupting
| sciences
| Lerc wrote:
| Eventually AI will also be able to reliably audit papers and
| report on fraud.
|
| There may be newer AI methods of fraud, but it will only buy
| you time. As both progress, committing to record a fraud
| generated by technology will almost certainly be detected by
| a later technology.
|
| I would guess that we're within 10 years of being able to
| automatically audit the majority of papers currently
| published. That thought must give the authors of fraudulent
| papers the heebee jeebies.
| roca wrote:
| The problem is that detecting fraud is fundamentally harder
| than generating plausible fraud. This is because ultimately
| a very good fraud producer can simply produce output that
| is identically distributed to non-fraud.
|
| For the same reason, tools that try to detect AI-generated
| text are ultimately going to lose the arm's race.
| 5mk wrote:
| Yep! Even at the moment you don't even need GenAI, you can
| just run a dummy gel with X, Y, and Z proteins that will give
| you desired band patterns.
| hello_computer wrote:
| Yes, pin it all on Masliah; turn him into a sort of _bizzaro-
| jesus_ , who takes on the sins of the entire self-seeking,
| publish-or-perish, p-hacking, pharma-grifting, meta-meta-meta-
| analyzing, only-verify--at-gunpoint "profession".
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Unfortunately, sometimes someone becomes a bad example. That
| doesn't make them a "scapegoat", the favored defense of people
| like that.
|
| A scapegoat is something that _takes on_ all the sins of a lot
| of others who skate free. If Masliah is the only one who ever
| suffers, then he IS a scapegoat, but if this article serves to
| uncover a lot of other bad actors, then he 's not. And if his
| example serves to warn a lot of other scientists to clean up
| their acts, then his suffering is a benefit.
| hello_computer wrote:
| The language of the article is as low as it is loaded. This
| is just Derek Lowe covering for the fact that " _Science_ "
| magazine and the like have let this scoundrel (and many more
| like him) carry on, without hindrance, for an entire career;
| pointing the finger anywhere and everywhere but at the
| journals themselves. None of this is an isolated incident. It
| is widespread! There is a new scapegoat every month.
| dimgl wrote:
| > But if the NIH had done that in 2016, they wouldn't be in the
| position they're in now, would they? How many people do we need
| to check? How many figures do we have to scrutinize?
|
| All of them
| chasum wrote:
| [flagged]
| georgeecollins wrote:
| It's wrong to think that because there is reports of fraud or
| systematic error in science you shouldn't trust it. I'm sure
| all those things exist. But they also exist in every other
| institution with a lot less self-reflection and self-
| correction.
|
| Nassim Taleb said that people think weathermen are terrible
| predictors of the future. He says meteorology is among the most
| accurate sources of predictions in our lives. But we can easily
| validate it and we see the mistakes. If we had as much first
| hand experience with other types of predictions we'd appreciate
| the accuracy of weatherman. My point is: just because you know
| the flaws in a system don't assume it isn't better than
| another.
| ubj wrote:
| The Retraction Watch website does a good job of reporting on
| various cases of retractions and scientific misconduct [1].
|
| Like many others, I hope that a greater focus on reproducibility
| in academic journals and conferences will help reduce the spread
| of scientific misconduct and inaccuracy.
|
| [1]: https://retractionwatch.com/
| neom wrote:
| I'm the furthest thing from a scientist unless you count 3,000
| hours of PBS spacetime, but I love science and so
| science/academia fraud to me, feels kinda like the worst kinda
| fraud you can commit. Financial fraud can cause suicides and ruin
| in lives, sure, but I feel like academic fraud just sets the
| whole of humanity back? I also feel that through my life I've
| (maybe wrongly) placed a great deal of respect and trust in
| scientists, mostly that they understand that their work is of the
| upmost importance and so the downstream consequences of mucking
| around are just too grave. Stuff like this seems to bother me
| more than it rationally should. Are people who commit this type
| of science fraud just really evil humans? Am I over thinking
| this? Do scientists go to jail for academic fraud?
| madmask wrote:
| I agree with you, science fraud is terrible. It pollutes and
| breaks the scientific method. Enormous resources are wasted,
| not just by the fraudster but also by all the other well
| meaning scientists who base their work on that.
|
| In my experience no, most fraudsters are not evil people, they
| just follow the incentives and almost non-existent
| disincentives. Scientist has become just a job, you find all
| kinds of people there.
|
| As far as I know no-one goes to jail, worst thing possible (and
| very rare) is losing the job, most likely just the reputation.
| mden wrote:
| "most fraudsters are not evil people, they just follow the
| incentives and almost non-existent disincentives"
|
| Maybe I'm too idealistic but why does following incentives
| with no regard for secondary consequences not evil?
| layer8 wrote:
| IMO "evil" is a misconception. People have different
| beliefs and psychological needs, and placed in certain
| incentive structures that has the outcomes that we see. You
| can call certain behaviors "evil", but that doesn't explain
| anything about why the behaviors occur.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| If someone raped your wife and set your children on fire,
| you would probably rethink your stance on evil.
| layer8 wrote:
| Nope. "Evil" still provides no explanation and no
| understanding of why and how things happen there. It's
| the same thing as believing in miracles created by a god.
| badpun wrote:
| Callng someone "evil" isn't meant to have some
| explanatory power. It's merely a label saying that they
| are, well, evil.
| layer8 wrote:
| The context here is from the root comment: "Are people
| who commit this type of science fraud just really evil
| humans?". "Just really evil" implies that that there is
| no other explanation, and that the fraud is committed as
| a function of them being "really evil".
|
| I don't actually know what people mean when they label
| someone as "evil", other than "is doing/saying/thinking
| stuff I find very reprehensible". Which doesn't make
| sense when you insert it into the above statement: "Are
| people who commit this type of science fraud just humans
| who do stuff I find really reprehensible?" Well, I guess
| it sounds like they are.
|
| It seems like people want to assign a character trait
| when they say "person X is evil", but I don't believe
| such a generic character trait exists (and what exactly
| it is supposed to mean if it existed). What's worse, it
| obfuscates and prevents understanding the actual
| character traits and circumstances that lead to the
| respective behavior.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Physical pain is objective. Someone inflecting physical
| pain is evil unless it's in self defense or common sense
| situations like a doctor performing surgery.
| layer8 wrote:
| What is a general definition of "evil" that one could
| derive this from? And how does this relate to the actual
| reasons why someone would inflect physical pain? Are
| soldiers in a war evil when they happen to inflict
| physical pain outside of self defense? Or is that another
| "common-sense" exception?
|
| The concept is emotionally laden and ill-defined, and has
| little relation to why the designated behaviors actually
| happen. It's an incoherent concept that has no
| explanatory power.
| lupire wrote:
| Physical pain is one of the most subjective concepts in
| the Universe.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Exactly. In fact, all things in the universe are
| subjective except exactly one thing, which is that all
| other things are subjective. This is epistemological
| monism, and it's the only coherent view.
|
| Socrates got it. "I know that I know nothing" (else)
| ta_1138 wrote:
| I have the displeasure of having acquaintances that have
| done some pretty bad things, of the fraud and bribery
| persuasion. They did so because they had no regard of the
| secondary cosequences. However, this didn't mean 'I
| understand this horrible secondary consequence is going to
| happen, but I don't care'. That would be evil. Instead,
| it's more common to not dedicate an iota of time at
| thinking of possible negative effects at all.
|
| You'll see this all over risky startups. What starts as
| hopeful optimism only becomes fraud over time, when the
| consequences of not committing fraud also seem horrible.
| It's easy to follow the road until all your choices are
| horrible in different ways, and they pick the one better
| for the people around them, yet worse for everyone else.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| It is the same flavor of fraud as financial fraud. It is about
| personal gain, and avoiding loss.
|
| This kind of fraud happens because scientists are rewarded
| greatly for coming up with new, publishable, interesting
| results. They are punished severely for failing to do that.
|
| You could be the department's best professor in terms of
| teaching, but if you aren't publishing, your job is at risk at
| many universities.
|
| Scientists in Academia are incentivized to publish papers. If
| they can take shortcuts, and get away with it, they will.
| That's the whole problem, that's human nature.
|
| This is why you don't nearly as many industry scientists coming
| out with fraudulent papers. If Shell's scientists publish a
| paper, they aren't rewarded for that, if they come up with some
| efficient new way to refine oil they are rewarded, and they
| also might publish a paper if they feel like it.
| janice1999 wrote:
| > If Shell's scientists publish a paper
|
| A lot of companies reward employees for publications. Mine
| certainly does. Also an oil company may not be such a great
| example since they directly and covertly rewarded scientists
| for publishing papers undermining climate change research.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Ok. Bad example using Shell, but the point is that Industry
| scientists do not have publication in journals as a primary
| incentive.
|
| A scientist can work in industry research and NEVER
| publish, and still have a career where they make money, and
| don't worry about losing their job.
| Electricniko wrote:
| It seems like this could ultimately fall under the category of
| financial fraud, since the allegations are that he may have
| favorably misrepresented the results of drug trials where he
| was credited as an inventor of the drug that's now worth
| hundreds of millions of dollars.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| There was a period of time when science was advanced by the
| aristocrats who were self funded and self motivated.
|
| Once it became a distinguished profession the incentives
| changed.
|
| "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure"
| hilux wrote:
| Goodhart's Law!
| biorach wrote:
| > There was a period of time when science was advanced by the
| aristocrats who were self funded and self motivated.
|
| From a distance the practice of science in early modern and
| Enlightenment times might look like the disinterested pursuit
| of knowledge for its own sake. If you read the detailed
| history of the times you'll see that the reality was much
| more messy.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Do you have any examples you know of or can share? I am
| curious this
| biorach wrote:
| Today we only remember the great thinkers of these times,
| and tend to see a linear accumulation of knowledge. If
| you look at the history of the times you realise that at
| the time there was a vast and confusing babble, it was
| very hard at the time to distinguish the valid science
| from the superstition, the blind regurgitation of
| classical authority, the soothsayers and yes, the
| fraudsters.
|
| For example Kepler considered his work on the Music of
| the Spheres (google it) to be more important than, and
| the ultimate goal of, his research on the mechanics of
| planetary motion. Newton dabbled in alchemy, and his
| dispute with Leibnitz was very very bitchy with some
| dubious jostling for priority. And there was no end of
| dubious research and outright fraud going on at the time.
| So no, it was not a golden era of disinterested research.
|
| See for example the wikipedia articles on Phlogiston, The
| Music of the Spheres, the long and hard fought battle
| over Epicycles etc
| ljosifov wrote:
| Not the OP, but I remember reading about many twists and
| turns on the road to various inventions described in Matt
| Ridley's "How Innovation Works". I personally like "Happy
| Accidents. Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in
| the Twentieth Century" by Morton Meyers.
| vasco wrote:
| Pick up an old engineering book at some point, something from
| mid 1800's or early 1900's and you'll quickly realize that the
| trust people put on science isn't what it should be. The
| scientific method works over a long period of time, but to
| blindly trust a peer review study that just came out, any
| study, is almost as much faith as religion, specially if you're
| not a high level researcher in the same field and have spent a
| good amount of time reading their methodology yourself. If you
| go to the social sciences then the amount of crock that gets
| published is incredible.
|
| As a quick example, any book about electricity from the early
| 1900's will include quite serious sections about the positive
| effects of electromagnetic radiation (or "EM field therapies"),
| teach you about different frequencies and modulations for
| different illnesses and how doctors are applying them. Today
| these devices are peddled by scammers of the same ilk as the
| ones that align your shakras with the right stone on your
| forehead.
| momoschili wrote:
| Going to need some citations here since the texts that I'm
| familiar with from that time period are "A Treatise on
| Electricity and Magnetism" by Maxwell (mid-late 1800s) and "A
| History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity" by E. T.
| Whittaker, neither of which mentions anything of the sort. I
| suspect you are choosing from texts that at the time likely
| would not have been considered academic or standard.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Your points of memory are not counterpoints. Those are the
| ones that lived - and are not indicative of the general
| quality of science during those times. Obvious survivor
| bias.
|
| The fact that you can recall those _reinforces_ the point
| that the value is determined by how long it is useful and
| remembered, not the fact that it was published.
| momoschili wrote:
| Indeed, but you are clearly missing the historical
| context as these were two highly celebrated and
| referenced texts of the time period by leading
| scientists. However, it appears that the leading
| scientific minds (of which Maxwell and Whittaker are) did
| not include these uses in their texts. I do not dispute
| that science can be wrong (in fact it is almost always
| 'wrong' in the end) nor do I dispute that there could
| have been published research in those applications. I
| would argue that these applications were likely fringe at
| best within the scientific community by the mid 1800s.
|
| There are of course incredible scientists that went down
| disappointing paths (eg Shockley, Dyson, Pauling) in
| terms of their research output later on, though one must
| remember that typically this occurs outside their
| original field of expertise.
|
| If you read my comment you will see that I am asking for
| the references to the claims the previous author made. I
| simply provided my own references which werew written at
| the time and are representative of the times that do not
| corroborate the tall tale of the previous author. If you
| have any references to support their claim I would be
| interested in perusing them.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| And what's to say that other highly celebrated and highly
| referenced texts from that time were not based on bad
| science or were outright frauds? Your memory of them?
|
| Picking the winners as examples is not good sampling.
| momoschili wrote:
| The originator explicitly said that 'any engineering
| book' would contain these references, thus it would seem
| that this was at least a widespread belief among
| physicists and engineers at the time. Do you have any
| example?
|
| Again, you and the original poster seem to have this
| understanding that scientists and engineers from the mid
| 1800s to early 1900s are not to be trusted. I think that
| this assertion should be backed by considerable evidence,
| and that burden is of course mostly on you
|
| I don't dispute that there were doctors applying
| electricity and/or magnetism to the body in an
| "un"-rigorous manner, but is there documentation that
| suggests that the scientists at the time had come to the
| conclusion that it worked?
|
| Also notably, Whittaker's work was a 'loser'. I chose it
| specifically for this purpose. I had read parts of it
| previously because it was a 'loser' as he chose to
| dispute Einstein's contributions to special relativity.
| Maxatar wrote:
| Because those two texts are the two among literally
| thousands of scientific publications that have survived the
| test of time, which is exactly the point being made.
|
| This might seem crazy to hear now, but when Maxwell first
| published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field
| in 1865, no one cared, it received very little attention at
| the time.
|
| It was decades later in 1888 with the work of Hertz that
| Maxwell's equations started to gain significance within the
| scientific community.
| momoschili wrote:
| It seems convenient that the evidence to corroborate the
| claim can't be found yes?
|
| I think you will also find that the publications of the
| 1800-1900s are quite well preserved.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| Here's a more recent (1950) example that I think makes
| parent's point quite well:
|
| > I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of
| extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items
| of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and
| psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all
| our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit
| them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for
| telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to
| rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once
| one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to
| believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move
| simply according to the known laws of physics, together
| with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar,
| would be one of the first to go.
|
| Anyone on this site who doesn't know what this is from
| should feel a bit of shame in the current era of hype
| around machine intelligence, so I'll leave it as an
| exercise to the reader if you aren't already familiar with
| this paper.
| mmooss wrote:
| What is the source?
| momoschili wrote:
| Alan Turing was an incredible computer scientist and
| mathematician.
|
| Unfortunately he is out of his area of expertise in
| physics and human biology/neuroscience (? not sure where
| telepathy would be if it was to be rigorously studied).
| This is akin to Freeman Dyson on global warming.
|
| That scientists can have strange ideas is something
| nobody can dispute. That those strange ideas enter into
| scientific legitimacy is another story entirely.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| The point is that I don't believe Turing's ideas were
| widely considered strange _at the time_. The point is
| more that, even under conditions of honest actions, it 's
| very easy for educated, smart, and sincere thinkers to
| take for fact something that with time we believe is
| wildly not fact.
|
| Science even at it's most sincere should always be
| approached with thoughtful skepticism. The phrase that I
| hear touted often these days "trust the science", is in
| essence _not how science should be thought of_.
| momoschili wrote:
| There is a difference between "not considered strange at
| the time" and "science" via scientific publication and
| subsequent consensus validating the idea. I have
| mentioned that luminaries can have odd ideas multiple
| times in this thread, it's not something I seek to deny.
| However, as I continue to reiterate, these ideas are
| generally:
|
| 1. outside their areas of expertise
|
| 2. not validated by independent scientific research
|
| I completely agree that science should be approached with
| thoughtful skepticism, and I agree that 'trust the
| science' might not necessarily be the best semantics to
| use. However, it is not clear that skepticism by all
| parties should be considered with equal weight. Most of
| the times, people should "trust the science" because they
| are not equipped to be skeptical.
| dekhn wrote:
| We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them.
| It's one of the most important diagnostic and treatment
| options we have. I think what you're referring to is invalid
| therapies ("woo" or snake oil or just plain ignorance/greed)
| but it's hard to distinguish those from legitimate therapies
| at times.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them.
|
| Do you have examples of usage as a treatment? I can only
| think of rTMS (whose effectiveness is contentious).
| momoschili wrote:
| The most boring example is x-rays. Slightly less boring
| are the radiation therapies for cancer.
|
| What is maybe the most applicable that is widely accepted
| is electric therapy for people recovering from ACL
| surgeries.
| dekhn wrote:
| Gamma knife? Basically the entire field of radiotherapy?
| TMS is magnetic, not EM (the coil generates a magnetic
| field, which induces localized currents in the body being
| treated)
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _TMS is magnetic, not EM (the coil generates a magnetic
| field, which induces localized currents in the body_
|
| ME? the coil generates an M which induces localized E in
| the body as shown by localized currents? (which produce
| some more M, but only just enough)
| dekhn wrote:
| I can't parse what you are saying, but there's a
| difference between EM radiation and a magnetic field (and
| the resulting locally induced currents). Think in terms
| of an MRI machine: it puts you in a giant magnet (causing
| the various nuclear spins to align with the field) and
| then sends a bunch of EM radiation (radiofrequency). The
| former is a magnetic field, not EM radiation.
| neutronicus wrote:
| OP is making a distinction between "EM Radiation" (i.e.
| "light") and "Quasistatic fields".
|
| This is warranted because they are pretty different -
| light has a frequency distribution, diffracts, etc, and
| can be focused to propagate energy over distances large
| compared to its source, whereas quasistatic fields (by
| definition) have no frequency distribution, and die as
| 1/r^2 or faster
| nkrisc wrote:
| Jaundice in babies is treated with EM radiation in the
| 420-470 nm range.
| luckydata wrote:
| the best example is psychology. the entire field needs to be
| scrapped and started over, nothing you read on any of those
| papers can be trusted, it's just heaping piles of bad
| research dressed with a thin veil of statistical
| respectability.
| NemoNobody wrote:
| This will be the second time it's been entirely scrapped
| and restarted ;)
| NemoNobody wrote:
| Is absolutely as much faith as religion. Just the basic
| assumption that the universe didn't come from anything is as
| baseless as that it does.
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Science is eventually consistent. Scientists, individual
| papers, and the dogma at any given time may not be. It just
| takes a long time.
| mmooss wrote:
| Why do you need to go back 100-170 years, if it's an issue?
| Aren't there more recent examples?
| jimbokun wrote:
| I think the error is putting trust in scientists as people,
| instead of putting trust in science as a methodology. The
| methodology is designed to rely on trusting a process, not
| trusting individuals, to arrive at the truth.
|
| I guess it also reinforces the supreme importance of
| reproducibility. Seems like no research result should be taken
| seriously until at least one other scientist or group of
| scientists are able to reproduce the result.
|
| And if the work isn't sufficiently defined to the point of
| being reproducible, it should be considered a garbage study.
| drpossum wrote:
| There is no way to do any kind of science without putting
| trust in people. Science is not the universe as it is
| presented. Science is the human interpretation of
| observation. People are who carry out and interpret
| experiments. There is no set of methodology you can adopt
| that will ever change that. "Reproducibility" is important,
| but it is not a silver bullet. You cannot run any experiment
| exactly in the same way ever.
|
| If you have independent measurements you cannot rule out bias
| from prior results. Look at the error bars here on published
| values of the electron charge and tell me that methodology or
| reproducibility shored up the result.
| https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/264/timeline-of-
| meas...
| sesm wrote:
| What you can do is separate interpretation from observation
| as much as possible.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| TFA is about a person who literally faked the
| observations. Everyone on this sub is trying to shoehorn
| in their preferred view of "how to fix science" when the
| problem here has nothing to do with any of it.
| wordsinaline wrote:
| This error really went viral during the pandemic and
| continues to this day. We're in for an Orwellian future if
| the public does not cultivate some skeptic impulse.
| tensor wrote:
| I'd say the public needs to develop some rational impulse,
| it already has plenty of skepitism to the point where
| people no longer trust science the methodology. Instead,
| they genuinely believe there is some alternative to finding
| the truth, and now simply believe the same old
| superstitions and bunk that people have prior to the
| scientific revolution.
|
| Speaking of Orwell, I don't think science comes into it.
| Rather, when people stop believing in democracy, things
| will degenerate into authoritarianism. It's generally
| pretty hard to use science the methodology to implement an
| authoritarian government as the scientific method by
| definition will follow the evidence, not the will of a
| dictator.
|
| However, something that _looks_ like science but isn 't
| could be used, especially if the public doesn't understand
| science and thus can't spot things that claim to be science
| but don't actually follow the scientific method.
| mistermann wrote:
| > I'd say the public needs to develop some rational
| impulse, it already has plenty of skepitism to the point
| where people no longer trust science the methodology.
|
| Methodologies are inanimate - I may trust that a
| methodology is fine, but once Humans become involved I do
| not trust.
|
| > Instead, they genuinely believe there is some
| alternative to finding the truth
|
| There are several alternate means, the field of
| philosophy (that birthed science) has been working on
| such problems for ages, and has all sorts of utility,
| _just sitting there waiting to be used by Humanity_.
|
| > and now simply believe the same old superstitions and
| bunk that people have prior to the scientific revolution.
|
| Not possible for you to know, unless there are indeed
| forms of supernatural (beyond current scientific
| knowledge) forms of perception.
|
| > Rather, when people stop believing in democracy, things
| will degenerate into authoritarianism.
|
| Once again, not possible for you to know.
|
| > It's generally pretty hard to use science the
| methodology to implement an authoritarian government
|
| COVID demonstrated that to be incorrect.
|
| > as the scientific method by definition will follow the
| evidence, not the will of a dictator.
|
| Incorrect. Something defined to be true _necessarily
| being true_ only works in metaphysics, such as
| linguistics.
|
| And again, the scientific method is inanimate.
|
| > However, something that looks like science but isn't
| could be used, especially if the public doesn't
| understand science and thus can't spot things that claim
| to be science but don't actually follow the scientific
| method.
|
| On a scale of 1 to 10, how comprehensively and accurately
| do you believe you understand science?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Critical thinking = the ability to be skeptical,
| literally it is the ability to criticize.
|
| Great critical thinkers become lawyers, post modernist
| intellectuals, and other parts of the "talking" class of
| intellectuals. Unfortunately, it's far easier to talk
| shit than it is to build things. We've massively over-
| valued critical thinking over constructive thinking.
|
| Most people want to dunk on science. Few people want to
| submit their own papers to conferences. Many people act
| like submitting papers is impossible for non-Ph.D's. We
| have a lack of constructive oriented thinking.
| ricksunny wrote:
| >Many people act like submitting papers is impossible for
| non-Ph.D's.
|
| I agree. But academia reinforces this perception. I feel
| like PhD's only give serious consideration to the
| utterances of other PhD's. The rest of the public
| consists of the unwashed masses, and at best gets the
| smiling-nod treatment from teh PhD.
|
| PS I (a non-PhD) managed to publish a paper during the
| pandemic (doi: 10.3389/fphar.2022.909945 ). One of the
| biggest barriers was the item you mentioned quoted above,
| and the bogeyman of "epistemic trespass" in general, as
| operating in my own psychology. I've since become noisy
| in advocating for the #DeSci movement.
| yunwal wrote:
| How does this work for things like COVID vaccines, where
| waiting for a reproduction study would leave hundreds of
| thousands dead? Ultimately there needs to be some level of
| trust in scientific institutions as well. I do think placing
| higher value on reproducibility studies might help the issue
| somewhat, but I think there also needs to be a larger culture
| shift of accountability and a higher purpose than profit.
| mistermann wrote:
| I believe if we taught philosophy in school to a non-
| trivial level we wouldn't have to rely on trust/faith.
|
| I wonder if it's possible to get people to wonder why the
| one discipline that has the tools to deal with all of these
| epistemic, logical, etc issues isn't taught in school.
| You'd think it would be something that people would
| naturally wonder about, but maybe our fundamentalist (and
| false) focus on science as the one and only source of
| knowledge has damaged our ability to wonder independently.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Suppose you need to make a decision on a topic that's
| contingent on P being true, which someone has already
| tested. How would you go about making the decision
| without testing P yourself (because that would mean that
| you would have to do the same for every decision in your
| life)?
| doitLP wrote:
| The way I sum it up is: science is a method, which is not
| equivalent to the institution of science, and because that
| institution is run by humans it will contain and perpetrate
| all the ills of any human group.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I think it is fine to put some trust into concrete individual
| scientists who have proven themselves reliable.
|
| It is not fine to put trust into scientists in general just
| because they walk around in a lab coat with a PhD label on
| its front.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Science is an anarchic enterprise. There is no "one
| scientific method", and anyone telling you there is has
| something to sell to you (likely academic careerism).
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| You're far from a scientist, so it's easy for you to put
| scientists/academia on a pedestal.
|
| For most of the people who end up in these scandals, this is
| just the day job that their various choices and random chance
| led up to. they're just ordinary humans responding to ordinary
| incentives in light of whatever consequences and risks they may
| or may not have considered.
|
| Other careers, like teaching, medicine, and engineering have
| similar problems.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| It's complicated. Historically scientific fraud could be
| construed as 'good-intentioned' - typically a researcher in a
| cutting edge field might think they understood how a system
| worked, and wanting to be first to publish for reasons of
| career advancement, would cook up data so they could get their
| paper into print before anyone else.
|
| Indeed, I believe many academic careers were kicked off in this
| manner. Where it all goes wrong is when other more diligent
| researchers fail to reproduce said fraudulent research - this
| is what brought down famous fraudster Jan Hendrik Schon in the
| field of plastic-based organic electronics, which involved
| something like 9 papers in Science and Nature. There are good
| books and documentaries on that one. This will only be getting
| worse with AI data generation, as most of those frauds were
| detected by banal data replication, obvious cuts and pastes,
| etc.
|
| However, when you add a big financial driver, things really go
| off the rails. A new pharmaceutical brings investors sniffing
| for a big payout, and cooking data to make the patentable
| 'discovery' look better than it is is a strong incentive to
| commit egregious fraud. Bug-eyed greed makes people do foolish
| things.
| transcranial wrote:
| As a collective endeavor to seek out higher truth, maybe some
| amount of fraud is necessary to train the immune system of the
| collective body, so to speak, so that it's more resilient in
| the long-term. But too much fraud, I agree, could tip into
| mistrust of the entire system. My fear is that AI further
| exacerbates this problem, and only AI itself can handle wading
| through the resulting volume of junk science output.
| kzz102 wrote:
| In my view, prosecuting the bad actors alone will not fix
| science. Science is by its own nature a community because only
| a small number of people have the expertise (and university
| positions) to participate. A healthy scientific discipline and
| a healthy community are the same thing. Just like the "tough on
| crime" initiative alone often does not help a problematic
| community, just punish scientific fraud harshly will not fix
| the problem. Because the community is small, to catch the bad
| actors, you will either have insiders policing themselves, or
| have an non-expert outsiders rendering judgements. It's easy
| for well-intention-ed policing effort to turn into power
| struggles.
|
| This is why I think the most effective way is to empower good
| actors. Ensure open debate, limit the power of individuals, and
| prevent over concentration of power in a small group. These
| efforts are harder to implement than you think because they run
| against our desire to have scientific superstars and
| celebrities, but I think they will go a long way towards
| building a healthy community.
| edem wrote:
| I also watched almost all episodes of PBS Spacetime. Some of
| them multiple times. I'm so happy that Spacetime exists and
| also that Matt was recruited as a host (in place of Gabe).
| Highly recommended channel, superb content!
| mistercheph wrote:
| Evil is a much simpler explanation than recognizing that if you
| were in the same position with the same incentives, you would
| do the same thing. It's not just one event, it's a whole career
| of normalizing deviation from your values. Maybe you think
| you'd have morals that would have stopped you, maybe those same
| morals would have ensured you were never in a position to PI
| research like that.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Scientific fraud can also compound really badly because people
| will try to replicate it, and the easiest results to fake are
| usually the most expensive...
| regus wrote:
| This is pretty funny. I usually hear this kind of language when
| a religious person is so devastated when their priest or pastor
| does something wrong that it causes them to leave their
| religion altogether. Are you going to do the same thing for
| scientism?
| Balgair wrote:
| Generally, the fields that have a Nobel in them attract the
| glory hounds and therefore the fraudsters. The ones that don't,
| like geology or archeology for example, don't get the glory
| hounds.
|
| Anytime you see champagne bottles up on a professor's top shelf
| with little tags for Nature publications (or something like
| that), then you know they are a glory hound.
|
| When you see beer bottles in the trash, then you know they're
| in it for more than themselves.
| jessriedel wrote:
| As a scientist, I agree, although for not quite the reason you
| gave. Scientists are given tremendous freedom and resources by
| society (public dollars, but also private dollars like at my
| industry research lab). I think scientists have a corresponding
| higher duty for honesty.
|
| Jobs at top institutions are worth _much_ more than their
| nominal salary, as evidenced by how much those people could be
| making in the private sector. (They are compensated mostly in
| freedom and intellectual stimulation.) Unambiguously faking
| data, which is the sort of thing a bad actor might do to get a
| top job, should be considered at _least_ as bad a moral
| transgression as stealing hundreds of thousands or perhaps a
| few million dollars.
|
| (What is the downside? I have never _once_ heard a researcher
| express feeling threatened or wary of being falsely /unjustly
| accused of fraud.)
| wredue wrote:
| Can you go to jail for knowingly defrauding another entity out
| of money (such as grants). Yes. Absolutely.
|
| Are you going to go to jail for fudging some numbers on your
| paper, not likely.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| > Stuff like this seems to bother me more than it rationally
| should.
|
| It's bothering you a rational amount, actually. These people
| have done serious damage to lots of lives and humanity in
| general. Society as a whole has at least as much interest in
| punishing them as it does for financial fraudsters. They should
| burn.
| nabla9 wrote:
| In the future those who commit fraud are not likely leave trace
| in Western blot and photomicrograph audit.
|
| When the experiments are significant, double blind is not enough.
| You need external auditors when conducting experiments.
| Preferably separate team making experiments from those who design
| them.
| themanmaran wrote:
| For all the complaints about AI generated content showing up in
| scientific journals, I'm exited for the flip side, where an LLM
| can review massive quantities of scientific publications for
| inaccuracies/fraud.
|
| Ex: Finding when the exact same image appears in multiple
| publications, but with different captions/conclusions.
|
| The evidence in this case came from one individual willing to
| volunteer hundreds of hours producing a side by side of all the
| reports. But clearly that doesn't scale.
| lkrubner wrote:
| How would that be possible? Novelty is a known weakness of the
| LLMs and ideally the only things published in peer-reviewed
| journals are novel.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Detecting images and data that's reused in different places
| has nothing to do with novelty.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Wouldn't it be cool if people got credit for reproducing
| other people's work instead of only novel things. It's like
| having someone on your team that loves maintaining but not
| feature building.
| brink wrote:
| > For all the complaints about AI generated content showing up
| in scientific journals, I'm exited for the flip side, where an
| LLM can review massive quantities of scientific publications
| for inaccuracies/fraud.
|
| How would this work? AI can't even detect AI generated content
| reliably.
| themanmaran wrote:
| Not in a zero shot approach. But LLMs are more than capable
| of solving a similar scenario to the one presented:
|
| - Parse all papers you want to audit
|
| - Extract images (non AI)
|
| - Diff images (non AI)
|
| - Pull captions / related text near each image (LLM)
|
| - For each image > 99% similarity, use LLM to classify if
| conclusions are different (i.e. highly_similar, similar,
| highly_dissimilar).
|
| Then aggregate the results. It wouldn't prove fraud, but
| could definitely highlight areas for review. i.e. "This chart
| was used in 5 different papers with dissimilar conclusions"
| layer8 wrote:
| LLMs might find some specific indications of _possible_ fraud,
| but then fraudsters would just learn to avoid those. LLMs won't
| be able to detect when a study or experiment isn't
| reproducible.
| themanmaran wrote:
| Of course, but increasing the difficulty of committing fraud
| is still good. Fraudsters learn to bypass captchas as well,
| but they still block a ton of bad traffic.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I'm hoping it won't have the same results as AI Detectors for
| schoolwork, which have marked many legitimate papers as fraud,
| ruining several students' lives in the process. One even marked
| the U.S. Constitution as written by AI [1].
|
| It's fraud all the way down, where even the fraud detectors are
| fraudulent. Similar story to the anti-malware industry, where
| software bugs in security software like CrowdStrike, Sophos, or
| Norton cause more damage than the threats they prevent against.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/11ha4qo/gptzero_an...
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| Interestingly this and other cases like it suggest that one of
| the most valuable skill some scientists have is photoshop.
| woliveirajr wrote:
| Why worry about fraud, deception and misleadings using AI when we
| have the old kind of fraud?
|
| Or, in the other hand, now you don't have to manipulate images,
| you can just generate the ones you need.
| CarpaDorada wrote:
| If you are familiar with academia you'll realize the academic
| dishonesty policy is essentially the playbook by which academics
| behave. The author is surprised that Eliezer Masliah purportedly
| had instances of fraud spanning 25 years. I bet the author would
| be even more surprised to find out that most academics are like
| that for the entire duration of their career. My favorite
| instance is Shing-Tung Yau, who is still a Harvard professor, who
| attempted to steal Grigori Perelman's proof of Poincare's
| conjecture (a millenium prize problem
| <https://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems/> that comes with a
| $1MM prize and $10k/mo for the rest of one's life; Perelman
| rejected all of it.)
|
| I mean, get this: an extremely gifted Mathematician living on a
| measly salary in Russia had had his millenium prize almost stolen
| by a Harvard professor. What more evidence do you need?
| slashdave wrote:
| You've given two examples. Please explain why you can
| extrapolate to all of academia.
| mistercheph wrote:
| Sounds like someone should write a paper that makes
| fraudulent claims about the extent of fraud in all of
| academia!
| CarpaDorada wrote:
| From personal experience, it is all I've seen. Could anyone
| be in a position to extrapolate to all of academia without
| speaking from personal experience? I'm not speaking of all
| academics (hence 'most'). It's a statement similar to
| "Hollywood has a drug problem" or something of that sort.
|
| My advice to anyone going into Hollywood would be to stay
| away from drugs; my advice to anyone going into academia is
| to treat every interaction as if you've just sat at a poker
| table in Las Vegas.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I work in Hollywood. I am not sure it has more of a drug
| problem more than say tech or finance. Maybe it does-- I
| don't know. The point is when a celebrity is a drug addict
| you hear about it. When a banker or a lawyer is you don't.
|
| Our experience of things has a lot of bias toward what we
| want to hear. Generalization plays into sterotypes and
| ideology.
| CarpaDorada wrote:
| I believe that tech and finance also have a drug problem.
| Those that sell expensive drugs like cocaine go after
| rich clients. You work in Hollywood, but have you been
| attending wild private parties? I've worked in academia
| and I was in the thick of it, I've experienced first hand
| the fraud I'm talking about, and it was a large part of
| my experience, not some side note. Perhaps it's an
| uncomfortable truth that academia is in the state it is
| in, but again, it is of utmost importance to warn younger
| people to its perils. (Act as if you're at a poker table
| at all times.) In any case, how do you know that it isn't
| your biases that prevent you from considering what I
| describe? What is so surprising with the claim that
| people who are very incentivized to steal and commit
| fraud do so if they are not punished for it?
|
| edit: and it's not things I've heard, instead it is
| direct experiences, i.e. people stole my work, and things
| like that. As a graduate student to watch professors come
| to you with problem X, take what you've said (an actual
| solution) and publish a paper without attribute, that
| sort of thing; to report it and have nothing be done
| about it, et cetera, and on it goes, it's just instance
| after instance of such behavior, or the million ways in
| which they are careful to trick you into working on their
| problems without receiving attribute. One such trick for
| example, that again happened to me, is that after a
| conference talk I got into an e-mail discussion where I
| explained my approach; I was told that "they already have
| these results" (the trick here was to divulge less in the
| talk than what was currently known in order to be able to
| avoid "significant progress by another person" in the
| case another person does share new progress that they
| have already established, and hence not having to share
| attribution.) It turned out that our discussion was
| enough for them to go from n=3,4 to a general formula
| involving primes, because I pointed out a certain
| property they had not noticed. This is just a single
| example of the sorts of tricks, aside from total fraud,
| that happen, and one of the milder incidents I had happen
| to me.
| slashdave wrote:
| > you'll realize the academic dishonesty policy is
| essentially the playbook by which academics behave
|
| If you are unable to "extrapolate to all of academia" then
| I suggest you be more selective in your statements.
| CarpaDorada wrote:
| I extrapolate to all of academia, but not to all
| academics (persons working in academia). My methodology
| is based on my intuition and my experiences. Already in
| this YC article the comments appear to be akin to the
| first meeting between battered housewives. You don't have
| to believe me or others, I'm just issuing a warning to
| anyone thinking of getting into academia: be alarmed and
| alert, and always careful. It's nothing like the movies
| portray academia to be, instead it's a thieves den, or a
| poker table, etc, you get the point.
| DigitalPaladin wrote:
| I'm a recovering academic, and have not published since not long
| after defending my dissertation.
|
| I blame this behavior entirely on "publish or perish". The
| demands for novel, thoughtful and statistically-significant
| findings is tremendous in academe, and this is the result:
| cheating.
|
| I left professional academia because I resented the grind, and
| the push to publish ANYTHING (even reframing and recombining the
| same data umpteen times in different publications) in an effort
| to earn grants or attain tenure.
|
| The academia system is broken, and it cannot be repaired with
| minor edits, in my opinion. This is a tear out and do over
| scenario for the academic culture, I'm afraid.
| joelignaatius wrote:
| So one of the things you could do (if you were psychotic) is find
| poor people and replicate neurodegenerative diseases and then
| feed them the drug to see if the cure works. And then when they
| go to take MRIs you smuggle out the imaging from the Sutter
| Health clinic on Van Ness in San Francisco California.
|
| Is that why my head hurts?
|
| Because then it becomes attempted murder and torture overseas
| which is all sorts of jail time. Neat.
|
| Why does Peter Teller Weyand at 555 Beule Street have a headache?
| My head hurts. So I just emailed a couple hundred academics
| across the country the same question.
|
| I don't like having my head hurt.
| mistercheph wrote:
| If there's this much overt, deliberate fraud and dishonesty in
| _all_ of our research institutions, the quantities of soft lying
| and fudging are inconceivable.
|
| We need to seriously rethink our approaching to stewarding these
| institutions and ideas, public trust is rightfully plummeting.
| daedrdev wrote:
| Is there no liability for the author? There are billions of
| dollars wasted in drug trials and research that can be tied to
| this fraud. Surely they can face some legal issues due to this?
| hansonkd wrote:
| Like all things in life that have risks of fraud, negligence or
| potential failure, insurance could be the answer.
|
| Want to publish in a peer reviewed paper? Well then your
| institution or you should take out a bond or insurance policy
| that guarantees your work is accurate. The insurance amount
| would fluctuate based on how big of impact this study could
| have. Is it a drug that will be consumed by millions? Big
| insurance policy. Is it a behavioral study without much risk...
| small insurance policy.
|
| Is a a person in an institution found caught committing fraud,
| well now then all papers from that institution now have higher
| premiums.
|
| Did you sign off on a peer reviewed paper that was fraud? Well
| now your premiums are going up also.
|
| Insurance costs too high to publish? Well then keep doing
| research until the underwriters are satisfied that your work
| isn't fraud and adjust the premiums down.
|
| It adds a direct near-term economic incentive to publish
| honestly and punishes those that abuse the system.
| jltsiren wrote:
| In other words, you are suggesting more stringent peer review
| conducted by insurance companies. And because insurance
| companies are too small to have sufficient in-house expertise
| on every topic, the reviews will be usually done by external
| consultants. The costs might be from $10k for simple papers
| to hundreds of thousands for large complex papers.
|
| The insurance model does not really work when the cost of
| evaluating the risks far outweighs the expected risks.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| That is like saying my insurance company has to follow me
| around for a week while I drive before they can underwrite
| a policy. If there is money to be made, and money to be
| lost, the actuaries will find a way.
|
| The problem could be, that it may become impossible to
| publish certain kinds of papers that are very well
| supported and valuable because no institution can afford
| the insurance.
| hansonkd wrote:
| > that it may become impossible to publish certain kinds
| of papers that are very well supported and valuable
| because no institution can afford the insurance.
|
| What type of research would that be? Just publish it
| online without insurance and everyone will treat it as it
| unverified and uninsured... separate from other research
| that is.
|
| Once the risk of the publishing research has gone down
| (i.e. reputable peers approve, or the findings were
| replicated), the cost of the insurance goes down also.
|
| if something is so costly to insure, there would be a
| reason and thus the system works.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| If it is possible to advance your career by publishing
| uninsured research then we've just renamed the problem,
| although I do like the idea of adding this structure.
| Eventually there could be so much of it that it would
| become an accepted norm that your research isn't actually
| published in a journal until five years after you
| informally publish it. Other scientists in the field have
| to be abreast of the latest findings, so now these
| informal publications are the true journals.
| hansonkd wrote:
| I see your point, the success of this would have to align
| with a change in the broader academia to only cite
| research from insured researchers.
|
| The "organic" way this would happen is if there was a
| shift so that journals with insured research are far more
| valuable than uninsured research. Or perhaps if companies
| started suing researchers for negligence and fraud and
| recuperate costs if they used research that was later
| proved to be fraud.
|
| In the literary world, anyone can publish a book, but a
| book from o'reilly caries with it a different level of
| authority and diligence then a self published book or
| blog post.
|
| So the shift would have to be that your career can't
| advance without publishing a bonded and insured paper.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| But that is not how research works in Academia. They have
| to follow the bleeding edge of the field, or they may be
| doing work of their own that is already irrelevant. They
| will not wait until a consortium of insurance companies
| and underwriters have done the actuarial analysis and
| come up with an underwriting product that the institution
| has funded (and what is the institution's business model
| for recovering this cost in a field of pure research,
| anyway?)
| jltsiren wrote:
| You are not the first person in the world to own a home
| or drive a car. Insurance companies can offer you cost-
| effective insurance, because you are doing effectively
| the same things as many other people.
|
| Science is largely about doing novel things and often
| being the first person in the world to try something. In
| order to understand the risks, you have to understand the
| actual research, as well as the personalities and
| personal lives of the people doing it.
|
| Then there is the question of perverse incentives.
| Research fraud is not a random event but an intentional
| action by the people who take the insurance. If they
| manage to convince you to underwrite their research, they
| know that the consequences of getting caught will be less
| severe than without the insurance, making fraud more
| likely. Normally intentional fraud would not be covered
| by the policy, but here covering it would be the explicit
| purpose of the insurance.
| hansonkd wrote:
| Insurance companies insure one off events all the time.
| You can literally insure anything, its just a matter if
| the premiums outweigh what you perceive as the risk.
| "Uninsurable" just means the price is too high to be
| considered practical.
|
| The research might be novel, but the procedures for
| research and publication are very similar. So insurance
| companies would just make sure that you followed a
| protocol which minimizes their risk.
|
| perverse incentives are taken into account by insurance.
| Insuring someone is always a adversarial back and forth
| to determine if they are being truthful or not. Which is
| why Life insurance companies require a physical. They
| don't just have you self report and then accept it as
| fact.
|
| Industry professionals like lawyers and doctors carry
| malpractice insurance. A lawyer can still commit fraud.
| Insurance isn't a black and white thing. It is a sliding
| scale that ties risk to a monetary value.
|
| Its not rocket science. Just actuarial science. ;)
| jltsiren wrote:
| > The research might be novel, but the procedures for
| research and publication are very similar.
|
| This is wrong.
|
| Some time ago, I completed the checklists for publishing
| a paper in a somewhat prestigious multidisciplinary
| journal. Large parts of the lists were about complying
| with various best practices and formal requirements in
| different fields. I often didn't even understand the
| questions outside my field. And the questions nominally
| within my field were often category errors. They assumed
| a mode of doing research that was far from universal.
| Overall, the process was more frustrating than (let's
| say) applying for a US visa.
| hansonkd wrote:
| I think you are desperately trying to fit something black
| and white rather than thinking critically that there is a
| spectrum of research, some of which is similar to others
| which can easily have procedures for insuring and others
| that are more complex that require more diligence from
| the insurance company. Just like nearly every single
| thing an insurance company does.
|
| Yes there is novel research that has never been done
| before? So what? That doesn't change if you can get
| insurance or not. Thats a failed argument from the
| beginning.
|
| Anyways you don't seem to be having a discussion in
| earnest and instead you seem to be intentionally
| disregarding large pieces of the above arguments and
| trying to shoehorn in your idea that if there is unique
| research being done that it means that it is impossible
| to tell the risk of anything. Kinda silly.
| jltsiren wrote:
| The cases that would require more diligence from the
| insurance company are the kind of research that should be
| encouraged. Breakthroughs are more likely to happen when
| people take risks and try something fundamentally new,
| instead of adhering to the established forms. Your
| insurance model would discourage such research by making
| it more expensive.
|
| Additionally, even if we assume that the insurance model
| is a good idea, it should be tied to individual
| researchers, not universities. The entire model of
| university research is based on loose networks of
| independent professionals nominally employed by various
| organizations. Universities don't do research, they don't
| own or control the projects, and they don't have the
| expertise to evaluate research. They are just teaching /
| administrative organizations that provide services in
| exchange for grant overheads.
| hansonkd wrote:
| > you are suggesting more stringent peer review conducted
| by insurance companies
|
| Absolutely not. Underwriters are smart. They use other
| variables and methods for determining risk. They don't need
| to directly recreate and peer review the research
| themselves.
| cj wrote:
| Here's a deterrent:
|
| 1) revoke all of their academic accreditations and degrees
|
| 2) put them on a public "do not publish" list permanently
| banning them from being named on any paper in a journal
| abigail95 wrote:
| any lawyers know if it's wire fraud to get paid to do academic
| research and lie about the results?
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Not only are there billions of dollars wasted, there are many,
| many lives wasted. If the billions had gone in a direction that
| was actually promising, maybe there would be treatments that
| would have saved millions of person-years of quality lifetime.
| This person is basically a mass-murderer.
| mmooss wrote:
| I was thinking about it: If I come across someone seriously
| injured, try to help them, and accidentally hurt them, I'm
| protected (in many places) by Good Samaritan laws.
|
| But if a health care professional does the same thing, and does
| something negligent, then they are usually liable. They are
| professionals and are held to a different standard. Similarly,
| that's why lawyers keep writing: this is not legal advice and
| you are not my client.
|
| Perhaps a professional in science should have higher standards.
| Obviously they shouldn't be sued for being wrong - that would
| destroy science, disregard the scientific method's means to
| address inaccuracy, and go against science's nature as the
| means to develop new knowledge. But intentionally deceiving
| people perhaps should be illegal and/or create liability: When
| you publish something, people depend on its fundamental honesty
| and will act on it.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| The US has the Office for Research Integrity which can
| prosecute scientific fraud cases, but it only does a handful of
| cases per year.
|
| To put the scale of this problem in perspective, the ORI was
| set up in the 1970s after Congress became concerned at
| widespread reports of scientific fraud. It clearly didn't work,
| but hangs around regardless.
|
| It's ultimately a culture problem. Until academics have the
| same level of respect as ordinary corporate employees, you're
| going to get judges and juries who let them off scott free.
| ls612 wrote:
| The line between outright fraud, bad methods correctly
| implemented, messy data, and implementation bugs is fuzzy.
| Trying to criminalize anything not very very clearly #1 quickly
| turns into a case of "show me the man and I'll show you the
| crime". You think groupthink in academia is bad just wait until
| professional disputes lead to jail time for the loser.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Once, at 3Com, Bob Metcalfe introduced a talk by one of his MIT
| professors with the little joke, "The reason academic politics is
| so vicious is that nothing's at stake."
|
| The guy said, "That depends on whether you consider reputation
| 'nothing.' "
|
| I guess what that shows is, you can always negotiate and
| compromise over money, but reputation is more of a binary. An
| academic can fake some work, and as long as he's never called on
| it, his reputation is set.
|
| So yeah, a little more fear of having one's reputation ruined
| would go a long way towards fixing science.
| abnry wrote:
| I have always said that while professors get paid less money
| than in industry, they are compensated in reputation to make up
| for it. Status and reputation are the currency of academia.
| masswerk wrote:
| But this is really a societal/political issue: since we decided
| that economic capital is king and symbolic capital not that
| much... (This is really the story of the last four decades or
| so.)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| There are some people who think _everything_ is "a
| societal/political issue."
|
| But that one-dimensional view is boring. Life is more than
| politics.
| masswerk wrote:
| Well, this is about Pierre Bourdieu, and he had a few
| things to say about academia, as in _Homo Academicus_.
|
| And I'm not sure what example could illustrate the problem
| with the lopsided valuation of economic capital and the
| general devaluation of symbolic capital (as compared to
| pre-1980s, we have since undergone a social revolution of
| considerable dimensions, which is also why there isn't an
| easy fix) better than this one.
| consteval wrote:
| Socio-economic issues aren't one-dimensional, in fact
| they're very complex. Most of our systems and beliefs are
| socially constructed.
|
| Humans are, by our biology, social creatures. Modern
| humanity more than ever before. If you're not considering
| the social effects, then IMO you're not addressing anything
| of value.
| NemoNobody wrote:
| Life may be more than politics but all of life is
| inherently political.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >But this is really a societal/political issue
|
| Bang on.
|
| Not many people in the academic/technical people realize
| this, often for their entire lives. In their naive worldview,
| they cannot even imagine that people can stoop that low.
|
| (embarrassingly and shamefully I used to be one of those
| naive people)
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| The person who did this fraud decided that symbolic capital >
| economic capital (by being in academia/govt).
| mncharity wrote:
| > reputation
|
| A caveat that "reputation", like competence, is more variagated
| and localized than is often appreciated. As with someone who is
| highly competent and well regarded in their own subfield, while
| simultaneously rather nutter about some nearby subfield where
| they don't actually work.
|
| One can have a reputation like "good, but beware they have a
| thing for <mechanism X>". Or "ignore their results using
| <technique> - they see what they want to see". Subtext that
| gets passed among professors chatting at conferences, and to
| some extent to their students, but otherwise isn't highly
| accessible.
|
| When people speak of creating research AI's using just
| papers... that's missing seemingly important backchannels. And
| corresponding with authors. Attempting research AI as
| developing-world professionally-isolated professor.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Universities became tax funded and the consequences is warm
| bodies filling chairs. I have experience with a number of big
| name unis in the U.S. they are all about office and national
| politics. It's not about the work and hasn't been for a while
| now.
|
| Defund universities. No more student loans, make them have to
| earn their place in the market or we will continue to suffer
| under the manipulated system that is actually killing students.
| lordfrito wrote:
| > Defund universities. No more student loans, make them have to
| earn their place in the market or we will continue to suffer
| under the manipulated system that is actually killing students.
|
| This... it's no longer about value its about optics... Problem
| exists in most industries now. The pendulum needs to swing back
| the other way before it's too late to stop the decay...
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| I had a feeling academia was just run a ran by people letting
| blatant fraud, exploitation and abuse of phd students, stealing
| during peer-review, and just other forms of plagiarism, fraud,
| and exploitation slide by. They let it slide by because
| correcting these things would lead to massive changes in academia
| that might put them out of jobs.
|
| Every year that feeling becomes more certain. Glad I quit the
| track in grad school.
|
| I feel terribly for all the incredibly smart and hard working
| academics that remain honest and try to make it work. They do
| what they love, otherwise they wouldn't do such intensive work
| with so much sacrifice.
|
| It is really disheartening too because academia only turns on the
| "honesty filter" when it comes to minor grad students that pissed
| off the wrong people. But you can do all this fraud constantly
| and become president of harvard if you know the right politics.
|
| Dishonest lot. I hope karma is real so they get what is coming to
| them for taking advantage of people that just love to increase
| humanity's knowledge.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| alright, am i being downvoted because of my perniciousness to
| those leading academia, or because I was too sympathetic to the
| people being exploited?
| infamouscow wrote:
| They would be out of jobs.
|
| You're being downvoted because you're correct--HN is an eco
| chamber for zealous regurgitation of opinions of the academy
| and media--institutions that have decayed. It's been
| happening slowly for awhile, but now things are starting to
| come apart at the seams.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| It is really annoying because a common response is
|
| "We know academia is bad. But this is the best we have and
| it is hard to improve"
|
| when that is false on two counts.
|
| 1. If you had said the same thing before 2016 or covid,
| people would not agree that academia is rife with fraud or
| worthy of skepticism. 2. The same people saying the system
| dismiss how can it be improved are the same ones that would
| suffer from disruption as you say. They have the power to
| dismiss these arguments to begin with.
| searine wrote:
| You are being downvoted because you extrapolating from one
| fraud case to call all scientists dishonest.
|
| I can do it too. Person named SpaceManNabs made a bad post.
| There for all posts by SpaceManNabs, and probably all posts
| on HackerNews are bad. A dishonest lot.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| > from one fraud case to call all scientists dishonest
|
| I specifically mention that the majority of scientists are
| not dishonest. The majority of scientists are not running
| academia. The majority of scientists are suffering from
| this system, to differing degrees.
|
| If I were as rude as you, I'd extrapolate on reading
| ability, especially since it is not just one fraud case.
|
| Regardless, even if I was wrong on that, all my other
| criticisms of academia still stand, like exploitation of
| the phd students. I really hope the grad student unions get
| what they want.
|
| I appreciate your response though. Makes me feel confident
| that it is just salty people on HN that hate truth, because
| otherwise, why would you mischaracterize what I said?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Anecdotally, during my (fairly short-lived) academic career, in
| which I did research with three different groups, 2/3 of them
| were engaging in fraudulent research practices. Unfortunately the
| one solid researcher I worked for was in a field I wasn't all
| that interested in continuing in, and as a naive young person who
| believed in the myth of academic freedom and didn't really
| understand the funding issue, I jumped ship to another field, and
| found myself in a cesspool of data manipulation, inflated claims,
| and all manner of dishonest skullduggery.
|
| It all comes down to lab notebooks and data policies. If there is
| no system for archiving detailed records of experimental work, if
| data is recorded with pencils so it can later be erased and
| changed, if the PI isn't in the habit of regularly auditing the
| world of grad students and postdocs with an eye on rigor and
| reproduciblity, then you should turn around and walk out the door
| immediately.
|
| As to why this situation has arisen, I think the corporatization
| of American academics is at fault. If a biomedical researcher can
| float a false claim for a few years, they can spin their research
| off to a startup and then sell that startup to a big
| pharmaceutical conglomerate. If it fails to pan out in further
| clinical trials, well, that's life. Cooking the data to make it
| look attractive to an investor - in the almost completely
| unregulated academic environment - is a game that many bright-
| eyed eager beavers are currently playing.
|
| As supporting evidence, look at mathematical and astronomical
| research, the most fraud-free areas of academics. There's no
| money to be made in studying things like galactic collisions or
| exoplanets, the data is all in the public domain (eventually),
| and with mathematics, you can't really cook up fraudulent proofs
| that will stand the test of time.
| mmooss wrote:
| > As supporting evidence, look at mathematical and astronomical
| research
|
| Is there evidence of the fraud levels in those fields?
| mncharity wrote:
| > mathematical and astronomical research, the most fraud-free
| areas of academics. There's no money to be made
|
| So we're systemically safeguarding the quality of astronomy
| research, by setting up a gradient (at MIT: restaurant catering
| for business talks, pizza for CS, stale cookies for astronomy)
| to draw off some flavors of participants and thus concentrate
| others?
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > ...[bio people make money by] spin their research off to a
| startup... ...mathematical and astronomical research [is]
| fraud-free...
|
| You are talking about a part of the academy that relative to
| medicine, so few people do.
|
| Show up to a bank _looking_ like someone who knows math, and
| they 'll cut you a huge check. Is that not fraud?
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| As a scientist who has published in the neuroscience space, I
| don't what to say other than the incentives in academia are all
| messed up. Back in the late 90s, NIH made a big push on
| 'translational research", that is, researchers were strongly
| encouraged to demonstrate their research had immediate, real
| world benefits or applications. Basic research and the careful,
| plodding research needed to nail down and really answer a narrow
| question was discouraged as academic navel-gazing.
|
| On one hand, it seems the push for immediate real world relevance
| is a good thing. We fund research in order that society will
| benefit, correct? On the other hand, since publications and
| ultimately funding decisions are based on demonstrating real
| world relevance, it's little surprise scientists are now highly
| incentivized to hype their research, p-hack their results, or in
| rare cases, commit outright fraud in an attempt to demonstrate
| this relevance.
|
| Doing research that has immediate translational benefits is a
| tall order. As a scientist you might accomplish this feat a few
| times in your career if you're lucky. The rest of the corpus of
| your work should consist of the careful, mundane research the
| actual translational research will be based upon. Unfortunately
| it's hard to get that foundational, basic, research published and
| funded nowadays, hence the messed-up incentives.
| derbOac wrote:
| There's evidence that the turning point was in the 90s but I
| suspect the real underlying problem is indirect funds as a
| revenue stream for universities, combined with the imposition
| of a for-profit business model expectation from politicians at
| the state and other levels. The expectation changed from "we
| fund universities to teach and do research" to "universities
| should generate their own income", which isn't really possible
| with research, so federal funding filled the gap. This lead to
| the indirect fund firehose of cash, pyramid scheme labs, and so
| forth and so on. It sort of became a feedback loop, and now we
| are where we are today.
|
| Translational research is probably part of it but I think it's
| part of a broader hype and fad machine tied to medicine, which
| has its own problems related to rent-seeking, regulatory
| capture, and monopolies, among other things. It's one giant
| behemoth of corruption fed by systemic malstructurings, like a
| biomedical-academic complex of problematic intertwined feedback
| loops.
|
| I say this as someone whose entire career has very much been
| part of all of it at some level.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Good points, thanks. As I'm sure you're aware, the indirect
| rates at some universities are above 90%. That is, for every
| dollar that directly supports the research, almost another
| dollar goes to the university for overhead. Much of this
| overhead is legitimate: facilities and equipment expenses,
| safety training, etc... but I suspect a decent portion of it
| goes to administrative bloat, just as much as the education-
| only part of the university has greatly increased
| administrative bloat over the last 30-40 years.
|
| Another commentator made a separate point about how
| professors don't always get paid a lot, but they make it up
| in reputation. Ego is a huge motivator for many people,
| especially academics in my observation. Hubris plays no small
| part in the hype machine surrounding too many labs.
| dang wrote:
| Here's the article:
| https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-...
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Humans being humans
| eig wrote:
| This sort of behavior is only going to worsen in the coming
| decades as academics become more desperate. It's a prisoner's
| dilemma: if everyone is exaggerating their results you have to as
| well or you will be fired. It's even more dire for the thousands
| of visa students.
|
| The situation is similar to the "Market for lemons" in cars: if
| the market is polluted with lemons (fake papers), you are
| disincentivized to publish a plum (real results), since no one
| can tell it's not faked. You are instead incentivized to take a
| plum straight to industry and not disseminate it at all. Pharma
| companies are already known to closely guard their most promising
| data/results.
|
| Similar to the lemon market in cars, I think the only solution is
| government regulation. In fact, it would be a lot easier than
| passing lemon laws since most labs already get their funding from
| the government! Prior retractions should have significant
| negative impact on grant scores. This would not only incentivize
| labs, but would also incentivize institutions to hire clean
| scientists since they have higher grant earning potential.
| jimbokun wrote:
| My recommendation is for journals to place at least equal
| importance to publishing replications as for the original
| studies.
|
| Studies that have not been replicated should be published
| clearly marked as preliminary results. And then other
| scientists can pick those up and try to replicate them.
|
| And institutions need to give near equal weight to replications
| as to original research when deciding on promotions. Should be
| considered every researchers responsibility to contribute to
| the overall field.
| eig wrote:
| The problem with putting the onus on the journals is there is
| no incentive for them to reward replications. Journals don't
| make money on replicated results. Customers don't buy the
| replication paper they just read the abstract to see if it
| worked or not.
|
| I do like the idea of institutions giving tenure to people
| with results that have stood the test of time, but again,
| there is no incentive to do so. Institutions want superstar
| faculty, they care less about whether the results are true.
|
| The only real incentive that I think can be targeted is still
| grant money, but I would love to be proved wrong.
| jimbokun wrote:
| If all that's true, we should just shut down all the
| science institutions across the board. They're worth
| nothing if they are not vigorously pursuing the truth about
| the world.
| scarmig wrote:
| You should be able to build an entire career out of
| replications: hired at the best universities, published in
| the top journals, social prestige and respect. To the point
| where every novel study is replicated and published at least
| once. Until we get to that point, there will be far fewer
| replications than needed for a healthy scientific system.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > social prestige and respect
|
| This one is the showstopper. No matter what you do with
| rules and regulations, if people aren't impressed by it at
| a watercooler conversation, or when chatting at a cocktail
| party at a conference, or when showing a politician around
| in your lab then nothing else matters.
|
| How prestigious something is is not a lever you control.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| There absolutely exist skilled scientists that would
| happily make a living unglamorously replicating studies,
| if the money was there.
|
| Prestige is a nice motivator, but making a living at all
| is always the baseline, and is often sufficient.
| jimbokun wrote:
| There needs to be a new norm where prestige and respect
| is conveyed by having a replicated result. Not just the
| initial paper.
| m_fayer wrote:
| Similarly, ambitious and difficult experiments that don't
| pan out should also be richly rewarded. You just did all of
| science the service of clearly marking that tempting path
| with a big "don't bother" sign, thus saving resources and
| pointing the ship a little closer to the direction of
| truth.
| mlsu wrote:
| We can solve this at the grant level. Stipulate that for
| every new paper a group publishes from a grant, that group
| must also publish a replication of an existing finding.
| Publication would happen in pairs, so that every novel thing
| would be matched with a replication.
|
| Replications could be matched with grants: if you receive
| $100,000 grant, you'd get the $100,000 you need, plus another
| $100,000 which you could use to publish a replication of a
| previous $100,000 grant. Researchers can choose which
| findings they replicate, but with restrictions, e.g. you
| can't just choose your group's previous thing.
|
| I think if we did this, researchers would naturally be
| incentivized to publish experiments that are easier to
| replicate and of course fraud like this would be caught
| eventually.
|
| I bet we could throw away half of publications tomorrow and
| see no effect on the actual pace of progress in science.
| scarmig wrote:
| > I bet we could throw away half of publications tomorrow
| and see no effect on the actual pace of progress in
| science.
|
| It might actually improve the pace of science, if the half
| eliminated were not replicable and the remaining half were
| written by researchers knowing that they would likely face
| a replication attempt.
| breuleux wrote:
| There would still be incentives for collusion (I
| "reproduce" your research, you "reproduce" mine), and
| researchers pretending to reproduce papers but actually not
| bothering (especially if they believe that the original
| research was done properly).
|
| Ultimately, I'm not sure how to incentivize reproduction of
| research: it's very easy to fake a successful reproduction
| (you already know the results, and the original researcher
| will not challenge you), so you don't want to reward that
| too much. Whereas incentivizing failed reproductions might
| lead some scientists to sabotage their own reproduction
| efforts in ways that are subtle enough to have plausible
| deniability.
|
| Proceeding by pairs is probably not enough. You probably
| need 5-6 replications per paper to make sure that at least
| one attempt is honest and competent, and make the others
| afraid to do the wrong thing and stand out.
| jimbokun wrote:
| It is much much harder to sustain a conspiracy among many
| distributed people over time, than it is to fake your own
| research results.
|
| Making fraud much less convenient will greatly reduce the
| amount of it.
| mlsu wrote:
| You could randomize replications a bit, take away the
| choice. Or make it so that if you replicated one group's
| result, you can't replicate them again next time. The key
| is a bit of distance, a bit of neutrality. Enough jitter
| to break up cliques.
|
| I don't work in academia but in my experience professors
| are basically all intellectually arrogant and ego-driven,
| and would relish having time and space to beat each other
| at the brain game. A failed replication is their chance
| to be "the smarter guy in the room" and crack open some
| long-held belief. A successful replication would probably
| happen most of the time and be far more boring.
|
| I could imagine, if such a thing were mandated and in
| place for a while, one could build her career on
| replications, as a prosecutor or defense. She would
| publish new research solely to convince her colleagues
| that she is sharp enough to play prosecutor or defense.
|
| Anything has got to be better than what we have now,
| where apparently you can cheat and defraud your way
| through an entire decades-spanning career.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| That doesn't fix the incentives, people will just commit
| fraud when replicating results so they can perform more
| original research.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Don't require the replication to be successful. Failure
| to replicate a result is just as valuable as successfully
| replicating a result.
| jltsiren wrote:
| I think it would be better to have separate grants for
| replication studies. If something becomes a mandatory
| administrative burden, people will see it as low-prestige
| work and try to avoid it. And the kind of people who are
| good at novel research are often also good at ignoring
| duties they don't like, or completing them with a minimal
| effort if forced to.
|
| But if there is separate funding for replication studies,
| it will become something people compete for. Some people
| will specialize on replicating others' work, and
| universities will pay attention, as they care about grant
| overheads.
| ubj wrote:
| > But if there is separate funding for replication
| studies, it will become something people compete for.
|
| It would need to be very good funding on par with what's
| offered for "novel research".
|
| In addition, we would need increased prestige (e.g.
| awards, citations) for replicated studies as well for
| this to be effective. For many academics funding is
| merely a means to that end.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Replication is over-emphasised. Attempts to organise mass
| replications have struggled with basic problems like papers
| making numerous claims (which one do you replicate?), the
| question of whether you try to replicate the original
| methodology exactly or whether you try to answer the same
| question as the original paper (matters in cases where the
| methodology was bad), many papers making obvious low value
| findings (e.g. poor children do worse at school) and so on.
|
| But the biggest problem is actually that large swathes of
| 'scientists' don't do experiments at all. You can't even
| replicate such papers because they exist purely in the
| realm of the theoretical. The theory often isn't even
| properly written down! They will tell you that the paper is
| just a summary of the real model, which is (at best) found
| in a giant pile of C or R on some github repo that contains
| a single commit. Try to replicate their model from the
| paper, there isn't enough detail to do so. Try to replicate
| from the code, all you're doing is pointlessly rewriting
| code that already exists (proves nothing). Try to re-derive
| their methodology from the original question and if you
| can't, they'll just reject your paper as illegitimate
| criticism and say it wasn't a real replication.
|
| Having reviewed quite a lot of scientific papers in the
| past six years or so, the ones that were really problematic
| couldn't have been fixed with incentivized replication.
| waveBidder wrote:
| journals have zero incentives to care about any of this.
| calebh wrote:
| This stuff happens in Computer Science too. Back around 2018
| or so I was working on a problem that required graph matching
| (a relaxed/fuzzy version of the graph isomorphism problem)
| and was trying algorithms from many different papers.
|
| Many of the algorithms I tried to implement didn't work at
| all, despite considerable effort to get them to behave. In
| one particularly egregious (and highly cited) example, the
| algorithm in the paper differed from the provided code on
| GitHub. I emailed the authors trying to figure out what was
| going wrong, and they tried to get funding from me for
| support.
|
| My manager wanted me to right a literature review paper which
| skewered all of these bad papers, but I refused since I
| thought it would hurt my career. Ironically the algorithm
| that ended up working the best was from one of the more
| unknown papers, with few citations.
| ammbauer wrote:
| Name and shame :)
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I think it's a great idea. It would also give the army of
| phds an endless stream of real tangible work and a way to
| quickly make a name for themselves by disproving results.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Replications are not very scientifically useful. If there
| were flaws in the design of the original experiment,
| replicating the experiment will also replicate the flaws.
|
| What we should aim for is _confirmation_ : a different
| experiment that tests the underlying phenomenon that was the
| subject of the first paper.
| projektfu wrote:
| Replications don't frequently get published but they do get
| attempted, because any decent researcher is going to
| replicate a result they rely on to build the next step.
| Unfortunately, you can get stuck in the mud as I did and be
| unable to replicate the prior findings. Is it technique or
| were the original results in error? We'll never know.
|
| Building more results without replications is what caused
| the psychology crisis. Apparently every lab accepted the
| p<0.05 results or stated correlations of prior studies and
| just ran more studies until they got their own that was
| publishable. Since everyone "knew" that the prior result
| was true, like priming or whatever, they could conclude
| anything they wanted, because ex absurdum quodlibet.
| breuleux wrote:
| I'd be careful about that. Faking replications is even easier
| than faking research, so if you place a lot of importance on
| them, expect the rate of fraud in replication studies to
| explode.
|
| This is a very difficult problem to solve.
| jimbokun wrote:
| To elaborate, you need to give equal value to well
| implemented studies failing to replicate a result, as you
| do to studies replicating a result.
| breuleux wrote:
| Well of course, but I don't think that would necessarily
| help much. The point is that you don't really need to
| _do_ anything: you know what the results should be, and
| you know you are unlikely to get pushback, so there 's
| only an incentive to do the strict minimum to create
| plausibility that you ran the experiments.
|
| Basically, I think there is a sizable risk that a large
| number of replications would be fraudulent or half-assed,
| which dilutes their value. Paradoxically, the more this
| policy suppresses fraud or mistakes in original research,
| the less people will perform replication in good faith.
|
| I could be wrong, but people are endlessly creative at
| subverting systems when the stakes are high, so I'm wary
| of simple solutions. To be fair, it's probably better
| than the current system, just not as much as we'd like.
| hilux wrote:
| > ... as academics become more desperate.
|
| Yes and ... we're already there.
| Lionga wrote:
| BS governmental desperation to show any "result" (even if it is
| fake) is what brought us here. As scientist have to show more
| fake results to get more grants.
|
| Removing the government from science could help, not the other
| way around.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Good luck with that sentiment here.
|
| People just went through the last five years and will go to
| their graves defending what they saw first hand. To admit
| that maybe those moves and omissions weren't helpful would be
| to admit their ideology was wrong. And that can not be.
| Me000 wrote:
| You know you wrote this on the Internet? The thing the
| government created to do science?
| abigail95 wrote:
| you don't need regulation for a stable durable goods market.
| income and credit shocks cause turnover of good quality stock
| in the secondary market.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| I wonder if there are any studies on whether fraud increased
| after the Bayh-Dole Act. There's certainly fraud for prestige,
| that's pretty expected. But mixing in financial benefits
| increases the reward and brings administrators into play.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| It could also have a chilling effect on a lot of breakthrough
| research. If people are willing to put out what they mostly
| think is right, it might set back progress decades as well.
| wk0 wrote:
| Seems to be censored from the NIH staff directory now
| https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/staff/masliah-eliezer
| Lionga wrote:
| woopsies
| abrichr wrote:
| Most recent working archive.org snapshot:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240303093209/https://www.nia.n...
| stevenseb wrote:
| Test comment
| dekhn wrote:
| These sorts of articles raise so many thoughts and emotions in
| me. I was trained as a computational biologist with a little lab
| work and ran gels from time to time. Personally, I hated gels-
| they're finicky, messy, ugly, and don't really tell you very
| much. But molecular biology as a field runs on gels- it's the
| priimary source of results for almost everything in molbio. I
| have seen more talks and papers that rested entirely a single
| image of a gel which is really just some dark bands.
|
| At the same time, I was a failed scientist: my gels weren't as
| interesting, or convincing compared to the ones done by the folks
| who went on to be more successful. At the time (20+ years ago) it
| didn't occur to me that anybody would _intentionally_ modify
| images of gels to promote the results they claimed, although I
| did assume that folks didn 't do a good job of organizing their
| data, and occasionally published papers that were wrong simply
| because they confused two images.
|
| Would I have been more successful if fewer people (and I now
| believe this is a common occurrence) published fraudulent images
| of gels? Maybe, maybe not. But the more important thing is that
| everybody just went along with this. I participated in many
| journal clubs where folks would just flip to Figure 3, assume the
| gel was what the authors claimed, and proceed to agree with (or
| disagree with) the results and conclusions uncritically. Whereas
| I would spend a lot of time trying to understand what experiment
| was actually run, and what th e data showed.
| Lionga wrote:
| Don't hate the player hate the game. Governments made scientist
| only survive if they show results and specifically the results
| they want to see. Otherwise no anymore grants and you are done.
| Whether the results are fake or true does not matter
|
| "Science" nowadays is mostly BS, while the scientific method
| (hardly ever used in "science" nowadays) is still gold.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| Do hate the player. People are taught ethics for a reason: no
| set of rules and laws are sufficient to ensure integrity of
| the system. We rely on personal integrity. This is why we
| teach it to our children.
| dhruvkar wrote:
| When everything is a commodity (nothing runs outside of the
| market economy), the incentives are skewed to this type of
| behavior.
|
| 'Hate' the player' and 'hate' the game.
|
| Some things shouldn't be part of the market economy -
| education, health and food.
| hacksoi wrote:
| If people can get away with it, they will do it. Rules and
| punishments for breaking them exist for a reason.
| pmarreck wrote:
| My sole rational argument for Christianity is that it has
| made the societies that it is, or was, infused with, more
| honest than the ones that were not.
| Lionga wrote:
| We should really do some more honest crusades to export
| our honest values to the non believers to make the world
| a better, more honest place.
| ksenzee wrote:
| I'm not sure there are any rational arguments for
| Christianity. I say that as a practicing Christian.
| Either it meets a spiritual need in you, or it's not very
| valuable. I imagine that belief in a God who punishes
| evildoers has kept some people honest throughout history,
| but the value of that is surely outweighed by the evil
| done in the name of that God.
|
| I also don't believe Christian societies are more honest
| than others. Every religion I know of teaches honesty, as
| does every non-religious ethical framework I can think
| of.
| projektfu wrote:
| That sounds like it is loaded with a lot of "no true
| Scotsman" caveats including, perhaps, Scotland, which has
| crime like any other country.
| regus wrote:
| People doing bad things, including Christians, is
| completely in line with the Christian teachings of
| original sin, the fall and concupiscence. It is human
| nature to do bad things and it is very difficult to over
| come this behavior.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| If I read pagan Roman observations about life and people,
| they strike me as way, way more honest (sometimes
| brutally honest) than anything that we are used to for
| the last 1000 years, perhaps with exceptions like
| Machiavelli and some verbal jokes of the "unprintable"
| character.
|
| In Christian theory, everyone is a sinner, but in a real
| Christian society, people try to cover up their
| particular sins all the time, at least against other
| laypeople (not the priest), which leads to the opposite
| of honesty - hypocrisy.
| throwawayofcour wrote:
| > If people can get away with it, they will do it.
|
| This isn't true of everyone, but assuming it is increases
| the likelihood that it will become so. Because if
| everyone is trying to get away with it, why shouldn't I?
| That sort of breakdown in trust is high up on my list of
| worrying societal failure modes.
| thfuran wrote:
| If they can get away with it, _some_ people will do it.
| testfoobar wrote:
| > If people can get away with it, they will do it.
|
| This is not universally true and individuals and
| societies don't have to be organized this way.
|
| Why are streets in some countries filled with trash when
| others are clean? My community does not have anyone
| policing littering - yet our streets, parks and public
| areas are litter free.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| How did those teachings work out for the fraudsters?
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| Most of them become distinguished in academia, and only a
| few get punished if they are too blatant or piss off too
| many people (see recent ivys losing their presidents over
| academic fraud).
| indymike wrote:
| Their parents taught them different ethics.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| This is exactly what personal integrity is about. You
| make the right choices specifically and only because they
| are right. And they are hard choices because you are
| _forgoing immediate gain_.
|
| Time favors integrity, and a lack of integrity is usually
| punished. Sometimes at the individual level, as you age
| and see the error of your ways. Sometimes at the group
| level, as you watch your community suffer.
|
| "You reap what you sow."
| Spivak wrote:
| You are clearly deeply disconnected from the actual practice
| of research.
|
| The best you can really say is that the statistics chops of
| most researchers is lacking and that someone researching say
| caterpillars is likely to not really understand the maths
| behind the tests they're performing. It's not an ideal
| solution by any means but universities are starting to hire
| stats and cs department grads to handle that part.
| ljosifov wrote:
| You have agency. Yes - the system provides incentives.
| However, you are not some pass-through nothingness to just
| accept any incentives. You can chose to not accept the
| incentives. You can leave the system. You're lucky - it's not
| a totalitarian system. There will be another area of life and
| work where the incentives align with your personal morals.
|
| Once you bend your spine and kneel to bad incentives - you
| can never walk completely upright again. You may think and
| convince yourself that you can stay in the system with bad
| incentives, play the game, but still somehow you the player
| remain platonically unaffected. This is a delusion, and at
| some level you know it too.
|
| Who knows? If everyone left the system with bad incentives,
| it maybe that the bad system collapses even. It's a problem
| of collective action. The chances are against a collapse,
| that it will continue to go on for some time. So don't count
| on collapse. And even if one was to happen in your time, it
| will be scorched earth post collapse for some time. Think as
| an individual - it's best to leave if you possibly can.
| greenavocado wrote:
| A true scientist never says, "trust me" or even worse, "trust
| the science."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnPFL0Dr34c
| vostrocity wrote:
| Reminds me of this tweet that calls out the problem of the
| popular position "science is real"
|
| "Science isn't real - that's terrible epistemology. It's a
| process or method to generate and verify hypotheses and
| provisional knowledge, using replicable experiments and
| measurements. We don't really know the real - we just have
| some current non-falsified theories and explanations that
| fit data decently, till we get better ones. The "science is
| real" crowd generally haven't done much science and take it
| on faith."
|
| [1] https://x.com/rao_hacker_one/status/1811295722760982939
| dekhn wrote:
| It's probably better to say that engineering based on
| science is usually real. Engineering cares a lot less
| about falsifying theories and more on what existing
| theories seem to have general predictive value, and can
| be used to do stuff, including things where human lives
| are at risk (tall buildings, fire reduction materials,
| airplanes). And if there are failures out in the field,
| they're inspected, and those results are fed back to
| update both the practices, and the theories.
|
| Personally I believe we live in an objective universe
| that can be understood by human brains (possibly using AI
| augmentation) and that our currently most advanced
| experimentally verified theories correspond to some
| actual true aspect of our universe. In that sense,
| science is real when the current theories match those
| aspects well enough to make generalizable predictions
| (general relativity and quantum mechanics).
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| "Nobody is ever responsible for their own actions. Economics
| predicting the existence of bad actors makes them not
| actually bad."
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _Don 't hate the player hate the game._
|
| When the game is designed by the most succesful players you
| absolutely should hate the players for creating a shitty
| game.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > Would I have been more successful
|
| What are you talking about? You _are_ successful. You're not a
| fraud like all those other tossers.
| dekhn wrote:
| To me, at the time, successful would have been getting a
| tenure-track position at a Tier 1 university, discovering
| something important, and never publishing anything that was
| intentional fraud (I'm OK with making some level of
| legitimate errors that could need to be retracted).
|
| Of those three, I certainly didn't achieve #1 or #2, but did
| achieve #3, mainly because I didn't write very much and
| obsessed over what was sent to the editor. Merely being a
| non-fraud is only part of success.
|
| (note: I've changed my definition of success, I now realize
| that I never ever really wanted to be a tenured professor at
| a Tier 1 university, because that role is far less fulfilling
| that I thought it would be).
| epistasis wrote:
| Most often #1 is sought after as the prerequisite for
| achieving #2. And due to the structural factors on the
| number of positions available, funding available, and
| supply of new PhDs and postdocs, it's most often a really
| good idea to avoid #1 these days.
| circus1540 wrote:
| PhDs and postdocs aren't fungible. The ones worth working
| with go to the same top 20-40 programs in their field.
| Even finding PhDs that have the bare minimum
| qualification of "caring about the field" can be tough as
| there are all sorts of weird incentives pushing people
| towards PhDs. Applies for most other things in science as
| well. Number of papers has greatly increased. Number of
| papers worth reading has not increased nearly as much.
| SamPatt wrote:
| The older I get the more sympathy I have for people who
| claim they didn't become traditionally successful due to
| adhering to ethical principles.
|
| I used to think that was just cope. But now I've been in a
| few situations where there's fairly clear opportunities to
| profit from shady behavior, and seen colleagues that I
| formerly respected jump at the chance.
|
| Thanks for not being a fraud.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| That is not enough to most people. And if it is enough for
| others, then it is probably because they were fortunate
| enough to fall back on something better.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > That is not enough to most people.
|
| You absolutely nail the most profound pathology of our
| time. Being a decent, honest, smart, hardworking person is
| just "not enough" any more. We've created a normatively
| criminal society.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Was it ever? Ancient texts are full of complaints that
| people have become immoral, unlike in the Golden Age,
| which was conveniently long ago.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Of course. We've always had criminals. And as you say,
| throughout history people have complained about it. All
| I'm saying is that today people positively celebrate it,
| and - according to the parent poster - we now demand
| criminality as a necessity for "success".
| vladms wrote:
| Just looking at capitals of many countries, lots of
| monuments (statues, etc.) are dedicated to conquerors
| that were basically celebrated for successfully killing,
| subjugating and stealling from the others.
|
| There are still people that have success without anything
| criminal.
| otikik wrote:
| Indeed! You would also been more "successful" selling drugs
| to teens, or trafficking with human organs. But you did not
| and that's a good thing.
| testfoobar wrote:
| Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that
| a scientist was committing fraud.
|
| As I've gotten older, I understand that Charlie Munger's
| observation ""Show me the incentive and I will show you the
| outcome." is applicable everywhere - including science.
|
| Academic scientists' careers are driven by publishing,
| citations and impact. Arguably some have figured how to game
| the system to advance their careers. Science be damned.
| nextos wrote:
| Lots of people doing research find this depressing to the
| point of quitting. Many of my peers left research as they
| couldn't stomach all this nonsense. In experimental fields,
| the current academic system rewards dishonesty so much that
| ugly things have become really common.
|
| In my relatively short career, I have been asked to
| manipulate results several times. I refused, but this took an
| immense toll, especially on two occasions. Some people
| working with me wanted to support me fighting dishonesty. But
| guess what, they all had families and careers and were
| ultimately not willing to do anything as this could
| jeopardize their position.
|
| I've also witnessed first-hand how people that manage to
| publish well adopt monopolistic strategies, sabotaging
| interesting grant proposals from other groups or stalling
| their article submissions while they copy them. This is a
| problem that seldomly gets discussed. The current review
| system favors mono-cultures and winner-takes-it-all
| scenarios.
|
| For these reasons, I think industrial labs will be doing much
| better. Incentives there are not that perverse.
| mmooss wrote:
| So do you believe the author of the OP could honestly omit
| from their article the things you (and many others here)
| talk about? Could they be naive?
| nextos wrote:
| Nah, I think the article has good intentions. And rampant
| fraud is important to address.
|
| But as others said, addressing smaller shenanigans is
| also crucial to steer things in the right direction.
| svara wrote:
| > I've also witnessed first-hand how people that manage to
| publish well adopt monopolistic strategies, sabotaging
| interesting grant proposals from other groups or stalling
| their article submissions while they copy them. This is a
| problem that seldomly gets discussed.
|
| Agree. Everyone has heard about the extreme fraud cases,
| but the casual toxicity that the pressure cooker
| environment elicits is rarely discussed and probably a far
| larger problem. I say that as someone who has spent too
| much time in this environment and never witnessed outright
| fraud - that I know of.
| infamouscow wrote:
| The Manhattan project was a government project that was run
| like a startup.
|
| If such a project happened today, academic scientists would
| be trying to figure out ways to bend their existing research
| to match the grants. Then it would take another 30 years
| before people started to ask why nothing has been delivered
| yet.
| ricksunny wrote:
| Sounds like Eric Weinstein'a take (which I appreciate) on
| theoretical physics research.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Nuclear physics had just "cracked open" and there were lots
| of highly promising prospects to pursue. You can't recreate
| that historical situation by switching from agile to scrum,
| or from scrum to agile.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| Run like a startup in what respect?
|
| It was a massive government-directed military project in
| wartime that was able to recruit all the top theoretical
| physicists at the time around a common aim in an urgent
| technological arms race to build the bomb. It included a
| vast effort of army engineers to build the facilities to
| process the fuel and so on. I'm not seeing the parallels
| with startups.
| soganess wrote:
| I just want to echo this!
|
| They built a gosh darned city... oh wait, I was wrong,
| they built three. It was run like an extremely high-value
| military project, which is exactly what it was. Sure it
| was more theoretical than other military projects(at the
| time), but that is the game sometimes.
|
| I get the sense that some folks just think "faster then
| we would do it now" is the same as startup. Which, to put
| it politely, I strongly disagree with. Startups are great
| and I am grateful for the daily value adds to my life,
| but pretending everything "fast" has startup mentality is
| just missing the mark.
| neura wrote:
| Even your description sounds like a startup, to me.
|
| There was a hook to get the funding (easy to get weapons
| funding in wartime). Recruiting the top talent. Urgency
| (beat everybody else to the punch). Outsourcing the
| building of infrastructure while you focus on the
| unique/hard part.
|
| I'm not seeing how you can't see the parallels with
| startups.
| sitkack wrote:
| If humanity is to mature, we should be an open book when it
| comes to incentives and build a world purposefully with all
| incentives aligned to the outcomes we collectively agree
| upon.
|
| https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/
|
| Charlie Munger's Misjudgment #1: Incentive-caused Bias
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-2yIO8cnvw
|
| https://fs.blog/bias-incentives-reinforcement/
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >outcomes we collectively agree upon.
|
| lol, what are the chances?
|
| The average Joe is interested in Dem vs Rep or what the
| latest show on Netflix.
|
| The average researcher is worried about his livelihood,
| tenure etc.
| mmooss wrote:
| We do achieve some things, though usually not by spending
| time pondering questions like,
|
| > lol, what are the chances?
| mym1990 wrote:
| This is a weird take, assuming the average researcher
| cannot be an average Joe, and also that average people
| aren't also worried about their livelihood...you might
| want to revisit your view of the world.
| talideon wrote:
| No, it's not. _A_ researcher might an average Joe, but
| that doesn 't mean that the average researcher is the
| same as the average Joe.
| acchow wrote:
| "Average joe". Humanity evolves slowly over long periods.
| The average joe today is far more educated than one from
| 200 years ago.
| jfengel wrote:
| Far more educated. But certainly not smarter.
|
| And it's not at all clear if that education does anything
| other than magnify their intellectual predispositions.
| The smart people can make great strides, but the stupid
| will be stupid louder and harder. And the average may
| well just be... more average.
| ipaddr wrote:
| IQ levels has risen on average because of nutrients, not
| using lead and education.
|
| An increase in blood lead from 10 to 20 micrograms/dl was
| associated with a decrease of 2.6 IQ
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Average Joe does not care about politics...
| bboygravity wrote:
| If one only cares about democrats vs dems (or left vs
| "far right" in Europe) one also doesn't REALLY care about
| politics.
|
| Caring = caring to understand how the system works and
| how the incentives work for participants in it.
|
| If I'm super generous I would guess maybe 0,1 percent of
| the population cares by that definition.
| jfengel wrote:
| I think you're a little too harsh in that judgement. I'd
| say it's at least 1%. Possibly even 5%.
|
| It still means that they are massively, massively
| outweighed by loud tribalism.
| tim333 wrote:
| There's a problem that if you care, as an average person,
| it's hard to do much with it. Every few years you can
| vote left or right, which unless you happen to live in a
| marginal constituency or swing state, has no effect.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Every few years you can vote left or right,
|
| If you're talking about the US, you can vote center-right
| (Democratic) or far right (Republican). There is no
| _viable_ left wing party in the US.
| illuminant wrote:
| If humanity is to mature, we must be critical and take
| responsibility for ourselves, particularly when the
| alignment of others are concerned. Such as starting by
| disagreeing with everything, and validate for one's own.
| NemoNobody wrote:
| Sounds like regulation to me ;)
|
| I totally agree with you
| justonenote wrote:
| What something bottom up, transparent in rules and reward
| structure and able to iterate quickly instead of
| something top down?
|
| Also agree with the GP.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected
| that a scientist was committing fraud.
|
| Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this
| as "never trust science", when in reality science is _still_
| the best way to push humanity forward and alleviate human
| suffering, _despite_ all the fraud and misaligned incentives
| that may influence it.
| momoschili wrote:
| Agree. The fact that we are seeing this kind of discourse
| within the scientific community is in my opinion a great
| argument for the scientific method.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| How's this for scientific method. The response to "not
| trust science" is the inductive step of a model that is
| validated by the fucking evidence.
| momoschili wrote:
| not sure what you're getting at
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Why? Some guy writing an op-ed saying how frustrating it
| is that science is full of fraud is a great argument for
| the scientific method? There have been people writing
| articles like this for over 20 years if not much longer
| about all kinds of fields. Nothing ever happens, nothing
| ever improves, it never goes beyond people saying "tut
| tut how terrible". This sort of thing is entirely
| predictable and will keep happening, over and over again.
| On the current course, there will be articles just like
| this one being discussed in another twenty years from
| now.
| momoschili wrote:
| I don't think Derek Lowe is frustrated that "science is
| full of fraud", this is likely editorialization on your
| part. It seems that it stems specifically from Masliah,
| who is common across all papers in the dossier. Granted,
| Masliah appears to be prolific, so this is admittedly a
| large issue in the peer review and verification structure
| in this field.
|
| To put this into context though:
|
| Let's begin by supposing that fraud exists in all
| ventures where people stand to gain, which I don't think
| is controversial at all, especially not in this comment
| section.
|
| In light of this assumption the fact that this all came
| out in the first place is proof that being a luminary
| does not make you immune from investigation. That this
| happens 'over and over again' simply means that
| eventually we catching this fraud. The fact that the
| scientific community is constantly trying to reproduce
| and verify is why these become public in the first place.
|
| So on the contrary, it's not that nothing ever happens or
| nothing ever improves. There will be articles like this
| one in twenty years because there will still be
| fraudsters in twenty years, and there will still be
| scientists working to verify their work.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| I don't think it's true that eventually we are catching
| this fraud :( This keeps happening because so much is out
| there, it doesn't follow that all or even most of it is
| being caught. Even a tiny fraction of a fraction of a
| percent being caught would yield a constant stream of
| such stories. I have a collection of articles on my blog
| dating back years that cover various fraudulent papers in
| different fields, and even whole fields in which the bulk
| of all papers are based on fraud (e.g. the literature
| dealing with misinformation bots on Twitter). None of
| them have ever been retracted or even had any of the
| problems be acknowledged outside of the blogosphere.
|
| It's really hard to understand the scale of the problem
| until you wade through it yourself. Fraud is absolutely
| endemic in science. Dig in and you can easily uncover
| bogus papers, and none of them will ever be acknowledged
| or retracted. In particular there's a nasty attitude
| problem in which reports of fraud from outside the
| academic institutions will frequently be written off as
| "right wing" and thus inherently illegitimate. This can
| happen regardless of the nature of the criticism or
| whether it's in any way political. Literally, things like
| bug reports or reports of numbers that don't add up can
| be discarded this way. Thus they implement an unwritten
| rule that only academics are allowed to report fraud by
| academics, and of course, they are strongly incentivized
| not to do so. So Lowe is correct. It's really a mess.
| djfobbz wrote:
| Also science: There are more new cases of cancer in the
| United States now than there have ever been before.
| ksplicer wrote:
| I try to distinguish between "the scientific process" and
| building scientific consensus. As rigorous as the
| scientific process may be, building consensus is always a
| messy and human thing.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| > Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret
| this as "never trust science"
|
| Unfortunately many "smart" people insist on telling "dumb"
| people how to think instead of having the introspection and
| humility to examine where we've gone wrong and spending a
| lot of time and effort on fixing it.
|
| No, easier to gaslight the idiots
| heironimus wrote:
| Exactly. "This is bad because dumb people won't believe
| us."
|
| Not "This is bad because it undermines science, is lying,
| and unethical, regardless of what people think."
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| A lot of people are working to fix the K-12+ educational
| system which is the root cause of many stupid people, but
| beyond that, it's objectively hard to fix stupid.
|
| Most people, stupid or otherwise, wouldn't take a
| critical thinking course, for example. Many would have no
| time for it, to say little of motivation. Fewer are proud
| of being stupid and will shun anything they consider
| "intellectual".
| drevil-v2 wrote:
| In defence of the "less bright people" or deplorables as
| others have called them - they are deeply suspicious of
| Science(tm) used as a cudgel.
|
| They intuit that some parasitic entity or entities has
| latched on to Science and is co-opting it for it's own gain
| to achieve it's own purposes which run counter to the
| interests of the people.
|
| The heavy handed Covid response and censorship is a prime
| example of that.
|
| The whole system has been corrupted and therefore it is not
| possible to have a de-facto assumption of good faith of the
| actors.
| lupire wrote:
| You're not wrong, but people who oppose "science as a
| cudgel" tend to support "religion as a cudgel", and don't
| see a difference between science and religion, except
| that one is the Yellow team and one is the Purple team,
| and they have a preferred color.
| jonhohle wrote:
| When the public is told to "trust the science", it is no
| longer science and is now religion.
| momoschili wrote:
| How are "heavy handed covid response and censorship" a
| prime example of that?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| A decent chunk of the pandemic response was politicians
| power tripping in the name of The Science and later
| having to roll things back, either because of public
| backlash (eg hotlines to encourage snitching on their
| neighbors), because it was actually illegal (requiring
| all large businesses to have their employees vaccinated
| or tested weekly), or because of politics (initially
| telling the public that masks were ineffective, then
| tripling down on mask mandates, Harris saying the vaccine
| could not be trusted based on Trump talking about its
| efficacy).
|
| There was also dumb stuff like social media suppressing
| mention of covid, even to this day youtubers use
| euphemisms to refer to that period.
|
| To me it seems perfectly understandable how people who
| aren't actually involved in science might mix up The
| Science and actual science after all the political
| nastiness of those years, especially when we add on top
| all of the awful pop science reporting from the past
| decades.
| tim333 wrote:
| Preventing people from working if they didn't get a covid
| vaccine was a bit heavy handed.
|
| And saying it was likely made in a lab in China is kind
| of censored to this day. I think partly because the
| science community doesn't want to take flack for doing
| risky stuff and killing millions.
| dynamite-ready wrote:
| I think this comment comes across as slightly ignorant.
|
| Many examples exist where a misguided belief in
| scientific 'facts' (usually a ropey hypothesis, with
| seemingly 'damning' evidence), or a straight up abuse of
| the scientific method, causes direct harm.
|
| Suspicion is often based on facts or experience.
|
| People have been infected with diseases without their
| knowledge.
|
| People have been forced to undergo surgical procedures on
| the basis of spurious claims.
|
| People have been burnt alive in buildings judged to be
| safe.
|
| And look at Boeing.
|
| No one has a problem with science itself per se. Everyone
| accepts the scientific method to be one of our greatest
| cultural achievements.
|
| But whether one is "less bright", or super smart, we all
| know we as humans, are prone to mistakes, and are just as
| prone to bend the truth, to cover up those mistakes.
|
| There's nothing plebeian about this form of suspicion. In
| fact, the scientific method relies on it (peer review).
| concordDance wrote:
| I'm not sure the two uses of "science" in your post are
| using the same meanings of the word.
|
| Science is the name given to a few different processes, a
| body of knowledge and statements by designated
| spokespersons. Each of these have different flaws and
| failure modes in different environments and domains.
| lupire wrote:
| Appositive comma, or missing Harvard comma?
| gjs4786 wrote:
| All science does is show us how to move a whole bunch of
| piles of shit over into one big pile of shit, off in the
| corner. Or perhaps on to an unsuspecting group of poor
| people because, the burden demands to be he held and
| somebody has to hold the bag of shit. Right?
|
| We may interpret this as convenience... But the tragedy of
| the commons says that we can't even have science if someone
| isn't holding what it is we don't want to be holding... I'm
| not saying I didn't love science or not think it's super
| interesting or anything... Can we really say it alleviates
| suffering or does it displace it for one group of people
| until a new problem comes in and takes that one's place?
| How many people here will be holding the bag of shit
| tonight? USA numba 1!!!
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Already done: https://imagetwin.ai/
| jknoepfler wrote:
| I believe the phrase is "trust but verify."
| huijzer wrote:
| > Academic scientists' careers are driven by publishing,
| citations and impact. Arguably some have figured how to game
| the system to advance their careers. Science be damned.
|
| I've talked to multiple professors about this and I think
| it's not because they don't care about science. They just
| care more about their career. And I don't blame them. It's a
| slippery slope and once you notice other people who start
| beating you, then it's very hard to stay on the righteous
| pad[note]. Heck I even myself in the PhD have written things
| I don't agree with. But at some point you have to pick your
| battles. You cannot fight every point.
|
| In the end I also don't think they care that much about
| science. Political parties often push certain ideas more or
| less depending on their beliefs. And scientist know this
| since they will often write their own ideas such that it
| sounds like it solves a problem for the government. If you
| think about it, it's kind of a miracle that sometimes
| something good is produced from all this mess. There is some
| beauty to that.
|
| [note] I'm not talking about blatant fraud here but about the
| smaller things like accepting comments from a reviewer which
| you know are incorrect, or using a methodology that is the
| status quo but you know is highly problematic.
| sally_glance wrote:
| Citizen science may be a direct response to these
| circumstances. When you think about it, it's basically just
| people who love science but _don't_ depend on it for
| income.
| jonas21 wrote:
| > _They just care more about their career._
|
| It's not even that.
|
| In most fields, you need lab space and equipment and grad
| students to get stuff done. And to pay for that, you need
| funding. And to get funding, you need to publish and apply
| for grants.
|
| You have to pay attention to the "career" side of things --
| otherwise, you won't get to do the science at all.
| _heimdall wrote:
| The fact that it can still be considered science when
| intentional fraud is involved is a huge problem itself.
| klenwell wrote:
| I think my favorite Simpsons gag is the episode where Lisa
| enlists a scientist (voiced by Stephen Jay Gould) to run
| tests to debunk some angel bones that were found at a
| construction site.
|
| In the middle of the episode, the scientist bicycles up to
| report, dramatically, that the tests "were inconclusive".
|
| In the end, it's revealed that the bones were a fraud
| concocted by some mall developers to promote their new mall.
|
| After this is revealed, Lisa asks the scientist about the
| tests. He shrugs:
|
| "I'm not going to lie to you, Lisa. I never ran the tests."
|
| It's funny on a few levels but what I find most amusing is
| that his incentive is left a mystery.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Well, the incentive is that he didn't want to run the tests
| out of laziness (i.e. he lacked an incentive to run them).
| He ran to Lisa to give his anticlimactic report not to be
| deceptive, but rather he just happened to be cycling
| through that part of town and just needed to use the
| bathroom really badly.
| tedk-42 wrote:
| The writers of these episodes were really on another
| level considering it was a cartoon.
|
| Lisa's first word is still a personal favourite of mine,
| especially now as a father.
| garrettgarcia wrote:
| I thought his incentive was to defend the idea of
| miracles/faith/angels/God.
| jongjong wrote:
| That's a good one. In my experience, corruption is almost
| always disguised as neglect and incompetence.
|
| IMO, Hanlon's razor "Never attribute to malice that which
| can be adequately explained by stupidity" is a narrative
| which was created to condition the masses into accepting
| being conned repeatedly.
|
| On the topic, I subscribe to Grey's law "Any sufficiently
| advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice" so
| I see idiots as malicious. In the very best case, idiots in
| positions of power are malicious for accepting the position
| and thus preventing someone more competent from getting it.
| It really doesn't matter what their intent is. Deep down,
| stupid people know that they're stupid but they let their
| emotions get in the way, same emotions which prevent them
| from getting smarter.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> Academic scientists ' careers are driven by publishing,
| citations and impact._
|
| Publishing and citations can and are gamed, but is impact
| also gamed on a wide scale? That one seems harder to fake.
| Either a result is true and useful, or it's not.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Oh you sweet summer child. Let me introduce you to the
| world of ML reviewer/citation cartels!
| DigitalPaladin wrote:
| Oh, yes. Repackaging and reframing of data - as mentioned
| in the OP article too - is a common practice for farming
| impact and article numbers too.
|
| Why do novel research when you can just partner up with
| your friends, bring your data and combine with theirs for
| the umpteenth paper on the same thing, then wade into
| spamming down the submissions in every academic journal
| with impact in your field! If it published once in this
| journal, surely the 3rd recombination will too (and more
| often than not... it does.)
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Actual real world impact? Hard to game. But, nobody
| measures that. Everything that's tracked is a circularly
| defined success metric (you're successful if other
| academics consider you successful).
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| The article mentions that there are two drugs that
| resulted from this research. One of them failed a trial
| recently. Nobody knows if this fraud means that the drug
| never could have worked, or if this was just bad luck. So
| yes: people do measure real-world impact. It's just that
| it takes a very long time and there are plenty of
| confounding factors, since even non-fraudulent drug
| research can fail.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Convince (lobby) a politician that your research will
| save the trees/whales/global warming/end starvation/any
| other fear inducing thing and get funding to bribe
| (lobby) more politicians to further your "research" until
| anyone would be a fool to question the science.
|
| I feel like this same story happens every year and people
| are surprised. I often wonder how many "academic" or
| "scientific" quotes to not conflate valid research and
| study) need to happen before it becomes as distrusted as
| politicians.
| frickinLasers wrote:
| [delayed]
| tokai wrote:
| Impact here actually means citations. They clumsily say
| citations twice. Underlining the field of bibliometrics is
| the idea that citations correlates with the _impact_ the a
| paper has on scientific discourse. It 's intentionally
| vague because its hard to say what even highly cited papers
| objectively achieve.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_impact
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| > Arguably some have figured how to game the system to
| advance their careers
|
| lol arguably? i would bet my generous, non-academia, industry
| salary for the next 10 years, that there's not a single
| academic with a citation count over say ... 50k (ostensibly
| the most successful academic) that isn't gaming the system.
|
| - signed someone who got their phd at "prestigous" uni under
| a guy with >100k citations
| jonhohle wrote:
| Username checks out.
| Upvoter33 wrote:
| There clearly are single examples here and you would lose
| this bet.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Similar story: computational biologist, my presentations
| involved statistics so people would come to me for help, and it
| often ended in the disappointing news of a null result. I
| noticed that it always got published anyway at whichever stage
| of analysis showed "promise." The day I saw someone P-hack
| their way to the front page of Nature was the day I decided to
| quit biology.
|
| I still feel that my bio work was far more important than
| anything I've done since, but over here the work is easier, the
| wages are much better, and fraud isn't table stakes. Frankly in
| exchange for those things I'm OK with the work being less
| important (EDIT: that's not a swipe at software engineering or
| my niche in it, it's a swipe at a system that is bad at
| incentives).
|
| Oh, and it turns out that software orgs have exactly the same
| problem, but they know that the solution is to pay for
| verification work. Science has to move through a few more
| stages of grief before it accepts this.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| > At the time (20+ years ago) it didn't occur to me that
| anybody would intentionally modify images of gels to promote
| the results they claimed
|
| Fraud I suspect is only tip of the iceberg, worse still is
| delusion that what is taught is factually correct. A large
| portion of mainstream knowledge that we call 'science' is
| incorrect.
|
| While fraudulent claims are relatively easy to detect, claims
| that are backed up by ignorance/delusion are harder to detect
| and challenge because often there is collective ignorance.
|
| Quote 1: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately
| explained by incompetence"
|
| Quote 2:"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts"
|
| Side note: I will not offer to back up my above statements,
| since these are things that an individual has to learn it on
| their own, through healthy skepticism, intellectual integrity
| and inquiry.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| > A large portion of mainstream knowledge that we call
| 'science' is incorrect.
|
| How do you know that? Can you prove it scientifically?
|
| > claims that are backed up by ignorance/delusion
|
| In that case, they are not "backed up"
|
| > I will not offer to back up my above statements
|
| > an individual has to learn it on their own, through ...
| inquiry
|
| May I "inquire" about your reasoning?
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| owenpalmer, as I stated in my side note I will not be
| explaining myself, my sincere apologies for this.
|
| You see there are some things that cannot be taught, or it
| cannot be easily taught more so for adults i.e healthy
| skepticism and questioning of statements/facts that come
| from authority figures ( example:science/religion etc). A
| person will have to make his or her own effort. External
| influences especially debates from the heretics will
| generally only delay that progress.
|
| Now, if you're already open to the possibility that
| mainstream science could be very wrong, I can possibly
| nudge you in the correct direction. I have explored certain
| areas of biology (especially nutrition) but not all, each
| sub area of biology (or any of the sciences really) is
| vast, I have to rely on heretics who are 'experts' in their
| areas of specialization.
| timeon wrote:
| Sorry but this seems like bit longer version of 'do your
| own research'.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| No quite, It really depend on what you mean by
| 'research'. For most people 'research' is just consensus
| of the experts. On the other hand if by research you mean
| "test it out yourself" I agree with you. ( not always
| practical though, so you have to choose a middle ground)
| bashfulpup wrote:
| I love this, do tell the direction to be nudged in.
|
| I wish to experience this new level of understanding.
| mistercheph wrote:
| There's two approaches here:
|
| Pick one phenomenon in the world that you observe and
| don't have an account for, and try to come up with an
| account, assuming nothing except for your own observation
| and experimentation, of the causes of the phenomenon.
| Once you're done, follow the trail, reading only original
| or translated original documents, of the history of human
| descriptions of the phenomenon, do the "science" of
| "science" by observing the phenomena of observing and
| describing phenomena.
|
| Go in the woods and read Plato and Aristotle and
| Sophocles for a year.
|
| :D
| wredue wrote:
| Science sent us to the moon. "Do your own research" sent
| millions to their graves.
|
| "Do your own research" is a movement that is fraught with
| grifting and basically foundationally just fraud to the core.
|
| "Science" definitely has some fraudsters, but remains the
| best institution we have in the search for truth.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It becomes a survival bias: if people can cheat at a
| competitive game (or research field) and get away with it, then
| at the end you'll wind up with only cheaters left (everyone
| else stops playing).
| inglor_cz wrote:
| You could improve the situation by incentivizing people to
| identify cheaters and prove their cheating. If being a
| successful cheater-hunter was a good career, the field would
| become self-policing.
|
| This approach opens its own can of worms (you don't want to
| overdo it and create a paranoid police-state-like structure),
| but so far, we have way too little self-policing in science,
| and the first attempts (like Data Colada) are very
| controversial among their peers.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| As they say: the scum rises to the top, true for academia,
| politics etc, any organization really.
|
| Quote: "The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is
| that Good Men Do Nothing"
|
| My own nuanced take on it:
|
| Incompetent people are quick to grab authority and power. On
| the other hand principled, competent people are reluctant to
| take on positions of authority and power even when offered.
| For these people positions of power a)have connotations of a
| tyrant b) are uninteresting. (i.e technical problems are more
| interesting) . Also the reluctance of principled people to
| form coalitions to keep out the cheaters, because they are a
| divided bunch themselves exacerbates the problem, where as
| the cheaters often can collude together (temporarily) to
| achieve their nefarious goals.
| atmavatar wrote:
| Those you'd _want_ to lead recognize leadership is a
| responsibility often times marked by personal sacrifice.
|
| Those you'd never want to lead mostly regard leadership as
| a privilege used for personal gain.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| I would add c) often entail incalculable risk for any who
| aren't already corrupt enough to be climbing into bed with
| other evil powers or blackmailing, extorting, or exploiting
| their way into a safe haven and a golden parachute.
|
| Who willingly remains vulnerable before the Sword of
| Damocles?
| lupire wrote:
| Anything not Forbidden is Compulsory.
| araes wrote:
| And thus we have the Earth. Where all looks like a broken MMO
| in every direction. Everybody refuses to participate, because
| it's 100% griefers, yet nobody can leave.
|
| Business: Can you get a law written to command the economy to
| give you money or never suffer punishments? Intel fabs
| (https://reason.com/2024/03/20/federal-handout-to-intel-
| will-...), Tesla dealers
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_US_dealership_disputes),
| Uber taxis
| (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-files-
| leak...), ect... Are you wealthy enough there's nothing
| "normals" can really do? EBay intimidation scandal
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal).
|
| Economic Academia: Harvard Prof. Gino
| (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/11/harvard-
| busines...)
|
| Politics: Was Santos ever actually punished?
|
| Military: The saga of the Navy, Pacific Fleet, and Fat
| Leonard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal)
| "exploited the intelligence for illicit profit, brazenly
| ordering his moles to redirect aircraft carriers, ships and
| subs to ports he controlled in Southeast Asia so he could
| more easily bilk the Navy for fuel, tugboats, barges, food,
| water and sewage removal."
|
| Work: "Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted
| for exploitation" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti
| cle/abs/pii/S00221...)
|
| There's others, that's just already so many...
| asdf123qweasd wrote:
| At some point, the good scientists leave and the fraudsters
| start to filter for more fraudsters. If that goes on, its over-
| the academia has gone. Entirely. It can not grow back. Its just
| a building with conman in labcoats.
|
| My suggestion stands: Give true scientists the ability to hunt
| fraudsters for budgets. If you hunt and nail down a fraudster,
| you get his funding for your research.
| Balgair wrote:
| I mean, the replication crisis had come and gone, about 5
| years now. The fraudsters are running the place and have been
| for at least the last half decade, full stop.
| searine wrote:
| That is a ridiculous exaggeration. Yes, like in every walk
| of life, fraud happens. However, the extreme success of
| academic science shows that most of it is real, honest,
| work.
| lupire wrote:
| How so? The fraction of academic science that is applied
| to anything, anywhere, with clearly identifiable impact
| is both a tiny fraction of academic science, and also
| often detrimental quality of impact.
| asdf123qweasd wrote:
| Thats not true entirely. There is research, with huge
| impacts and the money leveraging- keeps it brutally
| honest. Nothing makes it out of a lab and into a fab,
| without certainty of the method working at least in lab
| conditions reproduceable. There are many billions, but
| not that many billions.
| searine wrote:
| Pretty much every industry functions on a foundation of
| basic scientific knowledge discovered in academic labs,
| run by honest people trying to understand the natural
| world.
|
| Fraud happens. Bad theories happen. The slow turn of
| scientific wheels takes centuries to crush them but it
| will always win. Profit doesn't turn those wheels. Our
| entire modern lifestyle is the impact.
| mistercheph wrote:
| Is it possible that society is the thing with turning
| wheels and knowledge is the thing getting crushed
| underneath it?
| godelski wrote:
| It is field dependent but I'm not entirely against what
| the parent said. I work in ML and I am positive that all
| this is going on[0]. There's lots of true believers
| though and that's what makes things extra hard. Sometimes
| the fraudsters take over by making the system become
| incompetent and everyone is in good company. In this was
| fraud isn't committed with intent, weirdly enough.
|
| Just look at all the ML reasoning papers. Wither you
| believe LLMs reason or not, an important factor you have
| to disentangle when trying to prove this is what data the
| models were trained on. To distinguish memorization from
| reasoning. You won't find this analysis because it's
| almost impossible given that the data is a trade secret,
| even by Meta.
|
| This year at ACL a paper (mission impossible language
| models) won best poste paper despite their results
| running contrary to their claim, and very obviously so
| too.
|
| Or there is the HumanEval paper which proposed that they
| created a data set which was not spoiled because they
| "hand wrote" over a hundred "Leetcode style problems". 60
| authors and they didn't bother to check... But why would
| you check when the questions are things like "calculate
| the mean". What fucking programmer thinks there isn't
| python code on GitHub pre 2021 that: calculates the mean,
| takes the floor, checks if a string is a palindrome,
| calculates greatest common devisor, or any similar
| question. How did this become an influential dataset!?
|
| [0] the big reason I'm upset is because I love the field.
| I'm not in it for money. I'm in it because I grew up on
| Asimov books and because I want our community to work
| towards AGI. But now every person that can do
| print("hello world") feels that they can lecture me, a
| published researcher about what these machines do while
| they talk about the Turing test (lol, what is this, the
| 60's?) and how they're black boxes (opaque, but certainly
| not black). I'm fine with armchair experts, but not when
| they come in swinging with a baseball bat
| azan_ wrote:
| It's really easy to verify that this claim is pure nonsense
| - we still have very real, astonishing scientific progress.
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| All the fraudsters will nail the honest ones before they know
| what hit them.
| pbreit wrote:
| As long as it's all peer reviewed!!
| DigitalPaladin wrote:
| I'm assuming /s above.
|
| Because the amount of pencil-whipped "peer review" feedback
| I've received could fit in a shoe box, because many
| "reviewers" are looking for the CV credit for their role and
| not so much the actual effort of reviewing.
|
| And there's no way to call them out on their laziness except
| maybe to not submit to their publication again and warn
| others against it too.
|
| And, to defend their lack of review, all they need to say to
| the editor anyway is: "I didn't see it that way."
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > raise so many... emotions in me... and I now believe [faking
| gels] is a common occurrence
|
| On the other hand, shysters always project, and this thread is
| full of cringe vindications about cheating or faking or
| whatever. As your "emotions" are probably telling you, that
| kind of generalization does not feel good, when it is pointed
| at you, so IMO, you can go and bash your colleagues all you
| want, but odds are the ones who found results did so
| legitimately.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| This is why institutions break down in the long run in any
| civilization. People like you, people of principle are drown
| out my agents acting exclusively in their own interest without
| ethics.
|
| It happens everywhere.
|
| The only solution to this is skin in the game. Without skin in
| the game the fraudsters fraud, the audience just naively goes
| along with it, and the institution collapses under the weight
| of lies.
| Balgair wrote:
| The iron laws of bureaucracy are:
|
| 1) Nothing else matters but the budget
|
| 2) Over the long run, the people invested in the bureaucracy
| always win out over the people invested in the mission/point
|
| Science is just as susceptible to 2) as anything else.
| j-wags wrote:
| I'm mostly out now, but I would love to return to a more
| accountable academia. Often in these discussions it's hard to
| say "we need radical changes to publicly funded research and
| many PIs should be held accountable for dishonest work" without
| people hearing "I want to get rid of publicly funded research
| altogether and destroy the careers of a generation of trainees
| who were in the wrong place at the wrong time".
|
| Even in my immediate circles, I know many industry scientists
| who do scientific work beyond the level required by their
| company, fight to publish it in journals, mentor junior
| colleagues in a very similar manner to a PhD advisor, and would
| in every way make excellent professors. There would be a
| stampede if these people were offered a return to a more
| accountable academia. Even with lower pay, longer hours, and
| department duties, MORE than enough highly qualified people
| would rush in.
|
| A hypothetical transition to this world should be tapered. But
| even at the limit where academia switched overnight, trainees
| caught in such a transition could be guaranteed their spots in
| their program, given direct fellowships to make them
| independent of their advisor's grants, given the option to
| switch advisor, and have their graduation requirements relaxed
| if appropriate.
|
| It's easy to hem and haw about the institutional knowledge and
| ongoing projects that would invariably be lost in such a
| transition, even if very carefully executed. But we have to
| consider the ongoing damage being done when, for example,
| biogen spends thousands of scientist-years and billions of
| dollars failing to make an alzheimers drug because the work was
| dishonest to begin with, or when generations of trainees learn
| that bending the truth is a little more OK each year.
| itronitron wrote:
| I used to work with someone up until the point I realized they
| were so distant from any form of reality that they couldn't
| distinguish between fact or fiction.
|
| Naturally, they are now the head of AI where they work.
| wredue wrote:
| Hacker news is completely flooded with "AI learns just like
| humans do" and "AI models the human brain" despite neither of
| these things having any concrete evidence at all.
|
| Unfortunately it isn't just bosses being fooled by this.
| Scores of people push this crap.
|
| I am not saying AI has no value. I am saying that these
| idiots are idiots.
| echoangle wrote:
| What evidence for ,,AI models the human brain" do you want?
| Isn't a neural network pretty clearly a simplified model of
| the working of the human brain? What is there to prove?
| benlivengood wrote:
| One clear piece of evidence would be ruling out "AI
| models the corvid brain" or "AI models the cephalopod
| brain" which might narrow it toward the human brain.
|
| That it's functionally impossible to do either leads me
| to believe that "it models some form of intelligence" is
| about the best we can prove.
| echoangle wrote:
| I don't understand the standard of modeling you seem to
| assume.
|
| Modeling a human brain, a cephalopod brain and a corvid
| brain aren't even mutually exclusive if your model is
| abstract enough.
|
| When I say ,,a neural network models a human brain", I'm
| talking about the high level concept, not the specific
| structure of a human brain compared to other brains. You
| could also say that it models a dogs brain if you wanted
| to. It's just the general working principle that is kind
| of similar. Does that not count as a model to you?
|
| Edit: Here's a simple example: I would say that a simple
| SIR model ,,models COVID infection in humans". But that
| doesn't mean it can't also model Pig Flu in Pigs. It's a
| very abstract model so it applies to a lot of situations,
| just like a neural network basically models the brain of
| every reasonably advanced animal.
| jknoepfler wrote:
| The reality on the ground (for me) has been refreshingly
| sane.
|
| I work at a company with a substantial BI/ML footprint. Our
| head of research was tasked with evaluating the
| applicability of LLMs to either our product or our daily
| workflows.
|
| To date the consensus is that there isn't much there for
| our product, that integrating LLMs into our models would
| introduce more problems than it would solve, and that we
| should cautiously experiment with allowing engineers to use
| tools like co-pilot, provided we take adequate steps to
| protect our IP.
|
| It was a reasonable exercise carried out by a reasonable
| person for reasonable reasons (from my POV). I imagine this
| isn't an uncommon story? Color me pessimistically
| optimistic?
|
| For practical reasons we need to have an answer to the
| buzzword bingo when communicating with customers/company
| ownership, and now we do. Now we don't talk much about it
| because there isn't much to talk about.
| eichin wrote:
| Refreshing but rare; usually this kind of eval gets done
| by someone excited to do it because they've already been
| "intellectually captured" by the hype.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| Then hiring the uninteresting gel seems preferable.
| RunSet wrote:
| Calls to mind Isaac Asimov's "shotgun curve".
|
| https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v056n06_...
| mfld wrote:
| Re: the role of (gel) images as the key aspect of a
| publication. To me this is very understandable, as they convey
| the information in the most succinct way and also constitute
| the main data & evidence. Faking this is so bold that it seemed
| unlikely.
|
| The good news IMO: more recent MolBio methods produce data that
| can be checked more rigorously than a gel image. A recent
| example where the evidence in form of DNA sequencing data is
| contested: https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.01607-23
| nordsieck wrote:
| What's amazing to me is that journals don't require researchers
| to submit their raw data. At least, as far as I know.
|
| The only option for someone who wants to double check research
| is to completely replicate a study, which is quite a bit more
| expensive than double checking the researcher's work.
| ta8645 wrote:
| Everyone seems to acknowledge this is a problem, but refuse to
| believe it actually affects anything when it comes time to "trust
| the science". Yes, science is corrupted, but all the results can
| be trusted, and the correct answer is always reached in the end.
| So, is it really a problem? Or not?
| eig wrote:
| A key skill for any scientist is to differentiate quality work
| and science that can be easily faked.
|
| The Alzheimer's and Parkinson's fields are too easy to fake,
| and too difficult to replicate. The new ideas are only ~20
| years old. Big pharma companies are understandably wary of
| published papers.
|
| When people say "trust the science", they often refer to things
| like masks, and antibiotics, and vaccines. That science is
| hundreds of years old and have been replicated thousands of
| times.
|
| TL;DR: Some science should absolutely be trusted, some
| shouldn't. It's not surprising that you can't make blanket
| statements on a superfield ranging from germ theory to cold
| fusion.
| yunwal wrote:
| > When people say "trust the science", they often refer to
| things like masks, and antibiotics, and vaccines. That
| science is hundreds of years old and have been replicated
| thousands of times.
|
| When people say "trust the science" they're usually referring
| to fairly recent developments. Covid vaccines were in
| development and testing for just over 18 months before being
| mandated and were certainly not replicated on a large scale
| by disinterested 3rd parties before being mandated. The idea
| that we can have effective scientific policy without trust in
| scientific institutions is just... not accurate.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| Exactly. Nobody needs to be told to "trust the science" on
| gravity and electricity, nobody asks to consult scientific
| consensus. The argument only arises for the more suspicious
| niches.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Yeah, we can trust that Ozempic works, because faking or
| fudging weight loss is close to impossible.
|
| Maybe this indicates the need for better metric.
| consteval wrote:
| It's a matter of how established the science actually is.
|
| Questioning novel science is one thing but questioning if the
| Earth is flat or Germ Theory is another thing all together. The
| problem with skeptics is that they sometimes hang around
| conspiracists.
|
| It's hard to not discount these people when the person next to
| them thinks black people are biologically inferior. Then when
| those skeptics don't distance themselves or don't explicitly
| condemn those bad actors, it brings to question if their
| positions are born of skepticism or some strange prejudice, and
| that they merely constructed the cover of skepticism to hide
| their strange prejudices.
|
| For example, during the Covid pandemic there was a lot of
| questioning around masks. In hindsight, the answer is obvious:
| it doesn't really matter if masks were or were not effective,
| because they're essentially free to wear. Even in the worst
| case, nobody is actually hurt.
|
| But there were many, maybe millions, of mask deniers who would
| simply refuse to wear them. They were doing this because of
| institutional distrust and political motivations, not because
| they truly believed the masks were dangerous. And this is the
| trouble: these people are skeptics, but they're skeptics with
| an end-goal of political destabilization, i.e. they're
| dangerous.
|
| When you mix it all together, which people often do to
| themselves, it's discredits the very thought process.
| mistermann wrote:
| Your mind reading and soothsaying are perfectly rational
| though I suppose, it is only us conspiracy theorists who
| suffer from delusional cognition?
| mistermann wrote:
| Another example of the phenomenon where people can realize
| something when considering it from an abstract perspective but
| not at a realtime object level is psychological bias and
| imperfect rationality. If the topic of discussion is an article
| about bias, rare is the person who will deny the phenomenon,
| and many enthusiastically admit to suffering from the problem
| themselves. But if the topic of discussion is something else
| and one was to suggest the phenomenon may be in play: opposite
| reaction. During realtime cognition, that knowledge is
| inaccessible.
|
| I honestly think if some serious attention was paid to this and
| various other real world paradoxes around us, we could actually
| make some forward progress on these problems for a change.
| tempodox wrote:
| I can't manage to be really surprised. We already know many
| people will cheat when the incentives are right. And when the law
| of the land is "publish or perish", then some will publish by any
| means necessary. Thinking "this subsegment of society is so
| honorable, they won't cheat" would be incredibly naive.
| hilux wrote:
| This stuff just ENRAGES me.
|
| With that off my moobs ... for those interested in the broader
| topic, I highly recommend _Science Fictions_ , by Stuart Ritchie.
| The audiobook is also excellent.
|
| I'm not a working scientist, and I found it completely engaging.
| Worth it just for the explanation of p-hacking.
| breck wrote:
| If you're an academic and want to use the fastest publishing
| stack ever created that also helps guide you to building the most
| honest, true thing you could create, I have built Scroll and
| ScrollHub specifically for you.
|
| https://hub.scroll.pub/?template=paper
|
| Happy to provide personal help onboarding those who want to use
| this to publish their scientific work. breck7@gmail.com
| breck wrote:
| Youtube of porting a paper to Scroll:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJBBAR-F2s
| ljsprague wrote:
| Where is Eliezer Masliah from?
| trallnag wrote:
| What kind of "from"? For example, ethnically, due to his Hebrew
| name, he's seems to be from Israel or at least the Levant.
| coding123 wrote:
| > and others appear to be running for cover.
|
| In every industry right now there appear to be a lot of people
| running cover. I have a personal belief, with the exception of a
| few industries, 50% of managers are simply running cover. This is
| easy to explain:
|
| 1/ Nothing follows people
|
| 2/ Jobs were easy to get in the last 3 years (this is changing
| FAST)
|
| 3/ Rinse and repeat and stay low until you're caught.
| ceroxylon wrote:
| NIH page for Eliezer Masliah is returning access denied:
|
| https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/staff/masliah-eliezer
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Reminder that these people are only caught because they
| photoshopped Western blots.
|
| Even more widespread is when PIs just throw out data that don't
| agree with their hypothesis, and make you _do it again until the
| numbers start making sense_.
|
| It's atrocious, but so common that if you're not doing this,
| you're considered dumb or weak and not going to make it.
|
| Many PIs end up mentally justify this kind of behavior (need to
| publish / grant deadline / whatever) -- even at the protest of
| most of the lab members.
|
| Those who refuse to re-roll their results -- those who want to be
| on the right side of science -- get fired and black balled from
| the field.
|
| And this is at the big famous universities you've all heard of
| GeekyBear wrote:
| I've said so many times, but we need to go back to a system where
| it is possible to make a career in science and get funding for
| replicating other people's work to verify the results.
| mchannon wrote:
| This leads to a tragedy of the commons. Say a random nation,
| say, Sweden, devotes 100% of their governmental and university
| research budgets toward replication.
|
| 70% of the studies they attempt are successfully replicated.
| 20% are inconclusive or equivocal. 10% are clearly debunked.
|
| Now the world is richer, but Sweden? No return on investment
| for the Swedes, other than perhaps a little advanced notice on
| what hot new technologies their sovereign funds and investors
| ought _not_ to invest in.
|
| A bloc of nations, say NAFTA/CAFTA-DR, or the European Union,
| might be more practical.
|
| That's the carrot. As for the stick, bad lawyers can get
| disbarred, bad doctors can get "unboarded". Some similar sort
| of international funding ban/blacklist for bad researchers
| would be useful.
| mmooss wrote:
| Could it be part of the training for young researchers -
| replicate existing experiments?
| mchannon wrote:
| I applaud that approach. The first year of a Ph.D. program
| could be reformulated to become 75% replicating the
| research of others, preferably that of unaffiliated
| research organizations.
|
| A lot of this research is very involved and esoteric,
| requiring specialized equipment found only in one place, so
| some would be very hard to replicate. If what Theranos was
| doing (or claiming to do) was easy to replicate, it
| would've imploded years prior to when it did. So not all
| fraud could be detected, but a lot of the low-hanging
| fraud, especially in the psychological and pharmacological
| fields, could be quickly identified. Such a system would be
| a substantial upgrade and I applaud your suggestion. A
| smaller country could blaze the trail, because "big boys",
| like the U.S., are too set in their ways.
| echoangle wrote:
| Wouldn't science in total be impossible to fund if this
| argument were true? What advantage does Sweden have from
| doing science and publishing if everyone else gets to use it
| and they could just wait for someone else to do it? If this
| was how it worked, wouldn't every scientist work in secret
| and never publish anything?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| This is terribly terribly frustrating. For every one of these
| cheats there are hundreds of honest, extremely hard-working
| ETHICAL scientists who toil 60 hours a week doing the thing they
| love. It is also terribly frustrating that, being human after
| all, smooth talkers with a confident stride, an easy smile, eager
| to shake hands can and do quickly climb the academic ladder,
| especially the administrative latter. This makes me terribly sad.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > For every one of these cheats there are hundreds of honest,
| extremely hard-working ETHICAL scientists
|
| Every one of these /discovered/ cheats.
|
| Remember this particular cheat was one of your ethicals until a
| few moments ago.
| hilux wrote:
| I shared this article with an MD/PhD friend who has done research
| at two of the three most famous science universities in America
| ... and she said "this [not this guy, this phenomenon] is why I
| left science."
|
| Maybe it's like elite running - everyone who stays competitive
| above a certain level is cheating, and if you want to enjoy
| watching the sport, you just learn to look the other way. Except
| that the stakes for humanity are much higher in science than in
| sport.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| This shit should be a crime. Imagine how many person-hours and
| how much money has been wasted.
| Centigonal wrote:
| I hate the thought that researchers and drug developers may have
| wasted their effort and dollars developing drugs based on one
| extremely selfish person's bogus results.
| mistercheph wrote:
| Don't worry, a lot of them are fudging their numbers too, it's
| no biggie
| jboggan wrote:
| When I was in my doctoral program I had some pretty promising
| early results applying network analysis to metabolic networks. My
| lab boss/PI was happy to advertise my work and scheduled a cross-
| departmental talk to present my research in front of ~100
| professors or so. While I was making a last-minute slide for my
| presentation I realized one chart looked a little off and I
| started looking into the raw data. I soon realized that I had a
| bug in my code that invalidated the last 12 months of
| calculations run on our HPC cluster. My conclusions were flat out
| wrong and there was nothing to salvage from the data. I went to
| my lab boss the night before the talk and told him to cancel it
| and he just told me to lie and present it anyways. I didn't think
| that was moral or scientifically sound and I refused. It
| permanently damaged my professional relationship with him.
|
| No one else I talked to seemed particularly concerned about this,
| and I realized that a lot of people around me were bowing to
| pressure to fudge results here and there to keep up the cycle of
| publicity, results, and funding that the entire academic
| enterprise relied upon. It broke a lot of the faith I had been
| carrying in science as an institution, at least as far as it is
| practiced in major American research universities.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Coding errors are a really common source of fraud
| unfortunately. You did the right thing but the vast majority
| don't. Given a choice between admitting the grant money was
| wasted, the exciting finding isn't real, everyone who cited
| your work should retract their papers or just covering it up,
| the pressure to do the latter is enormous.
|
| During COVID I talked to a guy who used to do computational
| epidemiology. He came to me because I'd written about the fraud
| that's endemic in that field and wanted to get stuff off his
| chest. He was a research programmer, assisting scientists. One
| of the stories he told involved checking the code for a model
| written in FORTRAN. He discovered it was mis-using an FFI and
| using pointer values in equations instead of the dereferenced
| values. Everything the program had ever calculated was garbage.
| He checked and it had been used in hundreds of papers. After
| emailing the authors with a bug report, he got a reply half an
| hour later saying the papers had been checked and the results
| didn't change so nothing needed to be done.
|
| Little known fact: the COVID model that drove lockdowns in the
| UK and USA was nothing but bugs. None of the numbers it
| produced can be replicated. When people pointed out that this
| was a problem academics went on the attack, claimed none of the
| criticism was legitimate because it didn't come from experts,
| and of course simp journalists went along with all of it. They
| got away with it completely and will probably do it again in
| future. Even in this thread you can see people defending COVID
| science as the good stuff! It was all riddled with fraud.
|
| Part of the issue is that scientists are mostly self taught
| coders who aren't interested in coding. They frequently use a
| standard of: if it looks right, it is right. The whole thing
| becomes a circular exercise in reinforcing their priors.
| qudat wrote:
| While I agree this is a big problem, science should never be
| defined by a single article.
|
| I was always taught that science is a tree of knowledge where you
| build off previous positive results, all of which collapse when
| an ancestor turns out to be false.
| a1445c8b wrote:
| In this particular case, the person of interest published 800
| widely cited papers. That seems like a considerable collapse.
| qudat wrote:
| I see this as a pruning process and an inevitable part of
| science.
|
| But I would further argue against what others were saying
| about personal ethics. Science must remove the human as much
| as possible from the process.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| Duplication of the same image with different captions about armed
| conflicts is a technique mainstream news likes too.
| clpm4j wrote:
| I'm not a researcher or academic, but when I think of roughly how
| long it takes me to do meaningful deep work and produce a project
| of any significance, I'm struck by the fact that his _800_ papers
| isn 't a red flag? Even if you allocate ~3 months per paper,
| that's over 200 years of work. Is it common for academics to
| produce research papers in a matter of days?
|
| From the article: _Masliah appeared an ideal selection. The
| physician and neuropathologist conducted research at the
| University of California San Diego (UCSD) for decades, and his
| drive, curiosity, and productivity propelled him into the top
| ranks of scholars on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. His
| roughly 800 research papers, many on how those conditions damage
| synapses, the junctions between neurons, have made him one of the
| most cited scientists in his field._
| stephenbez wrote:
| People are listed as authors if they advised or contributed to
| the papers of their grad students or other people in their lab.
| benrapscallion wrote:
| They still need to read the science and agree with it.
| DevX101 wrote:
| It's kind of like, when reporters say a CEO built [insert
| ridiculously complex product here], ex: ascribing the success
| of OpenAI to Sam Altman, or Apple to Steve Jobs. Sure there
| were important in setting the direction, and allocating
| resources but they didn't actually do the work.
|
| Similarly, the heads of famous science labs have lots of
| talented scientists who want to work with them. The involvement
| of a lab director varies wildly, but for the hyper productive,
| famous ones, it's largely the director curating great people,
| providing scientific advice, and setting a general research
| direction. The lab director gets named on all these papers that
| get generated from this process.
|
| So 800 papers isn't necessarily a red flag if the director is
| great at fundraising and has lots of graduate students/post
| docs doing the heavy lifting.
| benrapscallion wrote:
| 800 papers is still a red flag, even if throughout those
| years he had 30 postdocs at any given time (which is only
| true for large labs).
| leephillips wrote:
| Among other things my physics career taught me: anyone who is
| listed as an author on more than 200 papers is almost
| definitely a plagiarist, in the sense of a manager who adds his
| or her name to the papers of the underlings in his or her lab.
| When I was still bothering to go to conferences I would
| sometimes have fun with them (the male variety is easy to spot:
| look for the necktie) by asking detailed questions about the
| methodology of the research. They never have any idea how the
| work was actually done.
| dakiol wrote:
| Similar to
|
| > Founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX. CEO and product
| architect of Tesla, Inc. Owner, CTO and Executive Chairman of X
| (formerly Twitter). Founder of The Boring Company, X Corp., and
| xAI. Co-founder of Neuralink, OpenAI, Zip2, and X.com (part of
| PayPal)
|
| It can only be a fraud.
| echoangle wrote:
| Depends on your definition of fraud. Musk is obviously not
| chief engineer of SpaceX while actively working at Twitter,
| Tesla, and Neuralink. The founding claims aren't that
| unbelievable though, founding 10 companies in 30 years isn't
| that hard. I would call it heavy exaggeration.
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| _But if the NIH had done that in 2016, they wouldn 't be in the
| position they're in now, would they? How many people do we need
| to check? How many figures do we have to scrutinize? What a
| mess._
|
| This is the core problem with science today. Everyone is trying
| desperately to publish as much, and as fast, as they can.
| Quantity over quality. That quantity dictates jobs, fellowships,
| grants, and careers. Dare I saw we have a "doping" problem in
| science and not enough controls. Especially when it comes to
| "some" countries feverish output of papers that have little to no
| scientific value, cannot be replicated, full of errors, but at
| least it's published and they can get a job.
|
| For a long time the numbers have been manipulated and continue to
| be so, seemingly due to national pride.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/china-rises-first-pl...
|
| _Scholars disagree about the best methodology for measuring
| publications' impact, however, and other metrics suggest the
| United States is still ahead--but barely._
| datavirtue wrote:
| Doctored neuroscience papers. I'm shocked.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| > But at the same time I have a lot of sympathy for the honest
| scientists who have worked with Masliah over the years and who
| now have to deal with this explosion of mud over parts of their
| records.
|
| This really is quite unfortunate.
| mmooss wrote:
| Is it? Is it possible that none of them knew? Should they have
| responsibilities to go with the benefits of putting their names
| on major discoveries?
| hilux wrote:
| It's definitely possible that _some_ of them didn 't know.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| Ah, I see how you could misunderstand. In context, this
| sentence was contrasting between those who knew, and those
| who didn't know about the fraud. To make my point more clear:
|
| It's _impossible_ that _none_ of them knew.
|
| It's _possible_ that _some_ of them didn 't know.
| bradley13 wrote:
| Perhaps the root of all evil is "publish or perish". I am long
| out of research, working at a teaching college, and yet I am
| _still_ expected to publish. Idiocy.
|
| Academic fraud is also enabled by lack of replication. No one
| gets published by replicating someone else's work. If one could
| incentivize quality replication, that could help.
| moralestapia wrote:
| I've been saying this for years and have been punished for that.
| Even here.
|
| I've done Biology and CS for almost 20 years now, I've worked at
| four of the top ten research institutions in the world. The ratio
| of honest to bullshit academics is alarmingly low.
|
| Most of these people should be in jail. Not only do they commit
| academic fraud, many of them commit other types of crimes as
| well. When I was a PhD student, my 4 year old daughter was
| kidnapped by staff at KAUST. Mental and physical abuse is quite
| common and somewhat "accepted" in these institutions. Sexual
| harassment and sexual abuse is through the roof.
|
| I am very glad that, slowly, these things are starting to vent
| out. This is one real swamp that needs to be drained.
|
| Some smartass could come up and say "where is your evidence for
| this?". This is what allows this abhorrent behavior to thrive. Do
| you think these people are not smart enough to commit these
| crimes in covert ways? The reason why they do it is because they
| know no one will find out and they will get away with it.
|
| What's the solution? I've thought about this a lot, _a lot_. I
| think a combination of policies and transparency could go a long
| way.
|
| Because of what they did to me, I am fully committed to
| completely destroy and expunge people who do these things from
| academia. If you, for whatever reason, would like to help me on
| this mission, shoot me an email, there's a few ideas already
| taking shape towards that goal.
| mmooss wrote:
| I hope your daughter is ok?!
| moralestapia wrote:
| We are fine now. That was four years ago. Our embassy
| intervened and eventually she was released and we were able
| to fly back home.
|
| I'm not 100% satisfied with how they handled the situation
| (they took _a while_ to react to the issue) but in the end we
| were able to leave that place and I 'm happy with that.
| bartathe wrote:
| "Four of the top ten" research institutions is probably part of
| the reason for your experiences. I went to an elite private
| undergrad as a scholarship student and was sexually abused by
| the son of high powered lawyers, probably awful people
| themselves, who targeted scholarship students, international
| students, etc. because we were vulnerable with no recourse. I
| then went to a highly ranked but not super sexy public school
| for my PhD and my experience has been significantly better.
|
| Bad actors are attracted to glamor and prestige because they're
| part of the cloaks and levers they use to escape consequences.
| Bad actors are far less attracted to, just as an example,
| living in Wisconsin, Michigan, or Indiana and telling people at
| conferences that they work at UW rather than Cambridge. UCs are
| also vastly more welcoming and supportive of working and middle
| class students than HYPSM even at the graduate level. That
| doesn't mean that you won't find any assholes at these places,
| and go too low in the rankings and you'll see ugly competition
| over scarce resources, but there's a sweet spot where more
| honorable people who aren't chasing prestige cluster and you'll
| find more support and recourse. Public schools ranked 5-15 are
| best for students without significant, significant social savvy
| and other forms of protection, IMO.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I am thinking if some type bounty program which would take
| sufficient proof on fraud would work. Sadly I don't think anyone
| will fund it. And those participating likely won't be taken well
| in the circles...
| pdfernhout wrote:
| From "The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein" (1994)
| https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
| "The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and
| research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the
| beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the
| scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One
| of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical
| behavior among scientists. The public and the scientific
| community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing
| number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little
| doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under
| intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by
| cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of
| dishonesty is almost sure to become more common. Other
| kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example,
| peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is
| in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to
| decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as
| the National Science Foundation to decide what research to
| support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases
| operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees
| who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question,
| and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the
| papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research
| should be supported and what results should be published are
| crucial to the proper functioning of science. Peer review
| is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course,
| a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary
| or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty
| well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake.
| However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense
| competition for research funds or for editorial space in
| prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the
| least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict
| of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same
| resources. This point seems to be another one of those
| relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but
| invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It
| would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to
| avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance
| their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees
| have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having
| themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were
| authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices
| that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but
| will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we
| face. We must find a radically different social structure
| to organize research and education in science after The Big
| Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant
| simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with
| mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new
| structure will come about by evolution rather than design,
| because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the
| faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another,
| even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists
| have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this
| much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced
| by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the
| transition is likely to be messy and painful for the
| participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. ..."
| BoxFour wrote:
| Just a lark, not to be taken too seriously:
|
| I wonder if a market-driven approach could work here, where hedge
| funds hire external labs to attempt to reproduce the research
| underlying new pharmaceutical companies or trials and then short
| the companies whose results they can't replicate before results
| get reported.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Wait until image diffusion is used to fake blots and panels. :(
| fsndz wrote:
| there is so much junk science these days and the problem is the
| incentives are wrongly set (quantity over quality)
| mmooss wrote:
| Intrinsic to the article is, arguably, a significant cause of
| fraud in this field: The article talks about fraud as if it's
| done by the 'other' - by someone else, other than the article's
| author (or their audience).
|
| The solution starts when you say, 'we committed fraud - our
| field, our publication, the scientific enterprise. What are we
| going to do?'
|
| Does the author really have no idea about these things? That they
| occur?
| ramoz wrote:
| Verifiable computing and data lineage are important mitigation to
| be developed here.
| pphysch wrote:
| Not clear whether it would be a net benefit, adding constraints
| and complexity to the scientific process which will be skipped
| whenever possible by underpaid labrats. Also, GIGO.
|
| Need to tackle the incentives directly.
| PKop wrote:
| Trust the science.
| honksillet wrote:
| Don't worry. The next generation will use generative algorithms
| to make fake images that are indistinguishable from the real
| deal.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Glad the title here is "Fraud, so much fraud" and not "Research
| misconduct". I hope that Masliah is charged with federal wire
| fraud.
|
| In cases like this where the fraud is so blatant and solely done
| for the purposes of aggrandizing Masliah's reputation (and
| getting more money), and where it caused real harm, we need to
| treat these as the serious crimes that they are.
| Optimal_Persona wrote:
| I'm surprised that people are surprised by science being done in
| non-scientific ways.
|
| I got a taste of this in my high school honors biology class. I
| decided to do a survey of redwing blackbirds in my town. I had a
| great time, there was a cemetery across the street from my house
| with a big pond, where 6-8 males hung out. I was excited when
| later in the season several females also arrived and took up
| residence.
|
| I eagerly wrote up my results in a paper. I thought I did "A"
| level work but was distressed when the teacher gave me B- or C+.
| She said "My husband and I are birdwatchers who have published
| papers on redwing mating habits in the area, and we haven't seen
| any females this year. Neither did one of your classmates who
| watched redwings in her neighborhood." While she did not directly
| in writing accuse me of fraud, she strongly implied it.
|
| I told her to grab her binoculars and hang out at the cemetery
| one morning. She declined, as she was a published authority and
| didn't need to actually observe with her own eyes. IIRC I had
| photos but they were from faraway with a Kodak Instamatic (this
| was the mid-'80s), so she didn't accept those as evidence.
|
| I often wonder if my life would have gone in a different
| direction if I had a science teacher who actually followed the
| scientific method of direct observation! It didn't come easy to
| me, but I was very interested in science before this showed me
| clearly that science is just another human endeavor, replete with
| bias, ego, horseshit, perverse incentives, and gatekeeping.
| mistercheph wrote:
| Scale this experience out to tens of thousands of young people.
| These kinds of people should not be teaching! A good teacher is
| capable of fearlessly admitting to a room of children that they
| were wrong and the students were right, or better yet that they
| have _no idea_ what the answer is!
|
| We have done a great disservice to human intellect to have
| mistaken the gift that empiricism gives of predicting the
| world, with knowledge of the world itself of which we possess
| almost nil.
| sva_ wrote:
| > There's also a proposed Alzheimer's therapy called
| cerebrolysin, a peptide mixture derived from porcine brain
| tissue. An Austrian company (Ever) has run some small
| inconclusive trials on it in human patients and distributes it to
| Russia and other countries (it's not approved in the US or the
| EU). But the eight Masliah papers that make the case for its
| therapeutic effects are all full of doctored images, too.
|
| > cerebrolysin
|
| This was discussed here recently:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41239161
| wredue wrote:
| So I guess it's time for the hourly Hackernews propaganda push
| about "science bad".
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| We need a checksum for institutions:
|
| https://youtu.be/PbAVTEbGF3c?si=nAivVaZEI0gMRzX9
|
| (Such a good discussion!)
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| If I have learned anything over 40 years, is that the number of
| people who actually live in a way consistent with hypothesis
| testing, data collection, evidence evaluation framework required
| to have scientific confidence in future action or even claims is
| effectively zero
|
| That includes people who consider themselves professional
| scientists, PhD's authors, leaders etc.
|
| The only people I know who live "scientifically" consistently are
| people considered "neurodivergent", along the autism-adhd-odd
| spectrum, which forces them into creating the type of mechanisms
| that are actually scientific and as required by their conditions.
|
| Nevertheless, we should expect better from people; and on average
| need to do better in aligning how they think to how science, when
| robustly demonstrated, demonstrates with staggering
| predictability how the world works, compared to all other methods
| of understanding the universe.
|
| The fact that the people carrying the torch of science don't live
| up to the standard is expected - hence peer review.
|
| This is an indictment of the incentives and pace at which bad
| science is revealed (like in this case) is always too slow, but
| science is the one place where eventually you're going to either
| get exposed as a fraud or never followed in the first place.
|
| There's no other philosophy that has a higher bar of having to
| conform with all versions of reality forever.
| molave wrote:
| It's disheartening to think that the virtues you are told to
| have as a kid are considered "weak sauce" once you are an
| adult.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| But what virtues were rewarded when you were a kid?
|
| My parents and grandparents would say I should be charitable,
| helpful, and share, but what actually made them happy?
| Beating other kids.
| mkhattab wrote:
| Does anyone know of an up-to-date or live visualization of the
| amount of scientific fraud? And perhaps also measuring the second
| order effects? i.e. poisoning of the well via citations to the
| fraudulent papers.
|
| It's hard to tell at this point if it's just selection bias or if
| the scientific fraud problem has outgrown the scope of self-
| correction.
| themagician wrote:
| Why we would expect academia to be different from anything else
| these days? Fraud is how you get ahead. It is how you gain
| competitive advantage. When everyone is cheating, the only way to
| win is to cheat smarter. Fraud is the end result of the dreams
| that motivate people to be better than they. are.
| gmd63 wrote:
| I would rather die than deliberately cause a humongous speed bump
| in the history of human understanding of the universe like this
| guy did. And the choice is never that stark. It's usually "id
| rather work in a less highly paid role".
|
| To selfishly discard the collective attention of scientific
| experts for undue gain is despicable and should disqualify a
| person from all professional status indefinitely in addition to
| any legal charges.
|
| I deeply respect anyone whose desires align with winning the
| collective game of understanding that science should be. I
| respect even more those folks who speak up when their colleagues
| or even friends seek to hack academia like this guy did.
| fasteo wrote:
| What about all the authors citing these papers ? Didn't they find
| any incongruences in their own research?
| drawkward wrote:
| At what point does scientific fraud become criminal?
| aliasxneo wrote:
| I wonder if there's evidence of fraud _increasing_ or if the
| detection methods are just improving.
|
| In my last workplace, self-evaluation (and, therefore, self-
| promotion) was mandatory on a semi-annual cycle and heavily tied
| to compensation. It's not surprising that it became a breeding
| ground for fraud. Outside of a strong moral conviction (which I
| would argue is in declining), these sorts of systems will likely
| always be targets for fraudulent behavior.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| I've hacked even peer reviews. Nobody wants to really write
| yours, so offer to do it for them.
|
| Obviously making it mindlessly laudatory.
| tokai wrote:
| Only fix I can see is making scientific fraud criminal. But it
| has to be straight fraud and not just bad science.
|
| I can't imagine any other vocation where you can take public and
| private money, then cheat the stakeholders into thinking they got
| what they payed for, only to just walk away from it all when you
| are found out. Picture a contractor claiming to have build a
| high-rise for a developer, doctored photos of it, and then just
| go _oops moneys all gone_ with no consequences when the empty lot
| is discovered years later.
| grog454 wrote:
| I'm not a scientist because of fraud and other reason related to
| academia, but I thought one of the tennets of an experiment was
| reproducibility. Were his experiments reproduced independently?
| Why not?
| jfengel wrote:
| _It seems like a strange thing to take someone with a long and
| respected career and subject them to what would essentially be a
| Western blot and photomicrograph audit before offering them a big
| position_
|
| I really feel stupid asking experienced developers to do
| FizzBuzz. Not one has ever failed. But I have heard tons of
| anecdotes of utterly incompetent developers being weeded out by
| it.
| tedk-42 wrote:
| Straight to jail.
|
| Same as white collar crime, except in academia.
| mrangle wrote:
| I don't know why this would be surprising. There's nothing more
| obvious than the fact that research is riddled with both fraud
| and laughably shoddy work.
| mbowcut2 wrote:
| I guess we need to find a way to incentivize good practice rather
| than interesting results? Turns out that science is so hard that
| people cheat.
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