[HN Gopher] Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)
___________________________________________________________________
Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)
Author : jxmorris12
Score : 126 points
Date : 2025-02-21 03:53 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jacobbuckman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jacobbuckman.com)
| nis0s wrote:
| > Proclaiming that your work is a "promising first step" in your
| introduction, despite being fully aware that nobody will ever
| build on it.
|
| Science produces discrete units which can be used in different
| ways, if not in their exact form from a preceding research. I am
| not sure it's reasonable to say that existing ideas, even if not
| cited, are not inspirational (to the researchers themselves).
| Peer-review isn't perfect, but I think that all accepted papers
| have something academically or scientifically relevant, even if
| there's no guarantee that the paper will generate hundreds of
| subsequent citations. I think improving your subsequent work is
| more important, which includes mentioning why you think some
| previous work may not be as relevant anymore. This last step is
| often missing from many research papers.
|
| I think the author is right that it doesn't quite make sense to
| publish anything you know isn't quite correct. But I can think of
| several papers in different fields which someone may think are
| "not quite correct", but the goal of such papers, I think, is to
| demonstrate the power of low probability scenarios, or edge
| cases. Edge cases are important because they break expected
| behavior, and are often the root cause of system fragility,
| system evolution, or poor generalization in other systems.
| gumbojuice wrote:
| For one of my first papers during PhD, I had a blatant bug in my
| implementation. Only realized while doing further research
| building on that previous paper.
|
| I think in any field it's natural to start out naive with an idea
| that may just be a few steps away from solving something
| important. Somewhere in the middle only to realize you're not,
| and then scramble with the ethical dilemma around your work, is
| it "good enough" or not. I was there anyway.
| boxed wrote:
| There shouldn't be an ethical dilemma. If you find out your
| previous paper was wrong, you can publish a new paper saying
| so. That's 2 papers for the price of one(ish). Everyone wins :P
| Peteragain wrote:
| I agree with the analysis completely, but the solution is
| depressing. I keep thinking that publications on arxiv might be a
| better source of knowledge given the motivation for publishing
| there is not a contribution to career progression. Keyword search
| over arxiv papers? But perhaps we should bring back the idea of
| anonymous publishing:-0
| smolder wrote:
| It's unfortunate that it's more work and less reward to shut down
| fraud that to perpetrate it. I think its more of a problem than
| ever before, even though grifting has always been a thing.
| GuestFAUniverse wrote:
| I am a co-author on a paper I never asked for, but my supervisor
| insisted, because the petty idea upgrading his desperate try to
| the point of "considerable at all" came from me. It was a chair
| which normally prouded itself of only publishing in the most
| highly regarded journals of its field (internally graded A, B,
| C). They had a few years without viable paper. Desperate to
| publish. From my POV this was a D. The paper is worthless crap,
| hastily put together within two weeks. It should have been
| obvious to the reviewers.
|
| I feel ashamed that my name is on it. I wish I could retract it.
|
| So, yes please: make it hard to impossible for paper mills and
| kill the whole publish or perish approach.
| cgcrob wrote:
| If it's any consolation I split up with an ex partner after she
| wanted to put me as a co-author on a pseudoscience bullshit
| paper that she was working on to try and hit her quota. Her
| entire field, in the social sciences, is inventing a wild idea
| and using meta analysis to give it credibility. Then flying to
| conferences and submitting expenses.
|
| I contributed nothing other than a statistical framework which
| was discarded when it broke their predefined conclusion.
| anoncow wrote:
| When research is just means to an end...
|
| I think as children if we are taught what earning a living
| means, people who only want to make ends meet would try to do
| it using other less damaging methods. For e.g., sales and
| marketing are not bad places for such people. When it comes
| to research people should know that perhaps money will not be
| great.
|
| It is because we aren't aware of the full picture as
| children, we follow our passions (or we follow cool passions)
| and then realise that money is also important and then resort
| to unethical means to get that money. Let's be transparent
| about hard fields with children so that when they enter such
| fields they know what they are getting into.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I suspect there's a lot of people that end up pursuing
| research because they enjoy college and learning with the
| idea of seeking out a job sounding rather less enjoyable,
| and more education will just equal more $$$ in said job
| anyhow, right?
|
| In the past this wasn't an issue because university was
| seen as optional, now in most places it's ostensibly
| required to obtain a sufficiently well paying job, and so
| much more of society ends up on a treadmill that they may
| not really want to hop off of.
| cgcrob wrote:
| Yeah that's about right.
|
| I think in some fields you walk into them with some kind of
| noble ideology, possibly driven by marketing but then you
| find out it's all bullshit and you're n-years into your
| educational investment then. Your options are to shrug and
| join in or write everything off and walk away.
|
| I don't blame people for taking advantage of it but in some
| areas, particularly health related, there are consequences
| to society past financial concerns.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > so that when they enter such fields they know what they
| are getting into
|
| I don't think this would help. IMO, it's a money vs. effort
| thing. Yes, real research is hard, but if someone learns
| early on that the system can be easily gamed, then the
| required effort is relatively low.
|
| Plus, there's the friction factor. Moving from undergrad to
| grad to post-grad to professor keeps you within an
| institution you know.
|
| The game is this: get hired at a research university and
| pump out phony papers which look legit enough to not raise
| any suspicions until you get tenure. Wrap the phoniness of
| each paper in a shroud of plausible deniability. If
| anything comes out after you're tenured, then just deny
| and/or deflect any wrongdoing.
| archi42 wrote:
| I treat all social science degrees as "likely bullshit" these
| days. Could as well be astrology.
|
| A few computer science friends of mine worked at a social
| science department during university. Their tasks included
| maintaining the computers, but also support the researchers
| with experiment design (if computers were involved) and
| statistical analysis. They got into trouble because they
| didn't want to use unsound or incorrect methods.
|
| The general train of thought was not "does the data confirm
| my hypothesis?" but "how can I make my data confirm my
| hypothesis?" instead. Often experiments were biased to
| achieve the desired results.
|
| As a result, these scientific misconduct was business as
| usual and the guys eventually quit.
| cess11 wrote:
| Sounds like economics.
|
| Research fraud is common pretty much everywhere in
| academia, especially where there's money, i.e. adjacent to
| industry.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| It does rather depend on the industry. Research in fields
| relevant to electrical engineering are much less likely
| to be fraudulent because the industry actually uses the
| results to make the products and the customers depend on
| those products working as specified.. If you discover a
| better and cheaper ceramic insulator you can be confident
| that transformer manufacturers will take it up but the
| big companies are well stocked with experts in the field
| so a fraudulent paper will quickly be spotted.
| cess11 wrote:
| Graphene in electrical engineering is a staple of every
| (dis)reputable papermill.
| genewitch wrote:
| "New battery tech promises 1.5x density, no fire risk, 20
| year lifespan"
| cgcrob wrote:
| Glad to know they quit. That's exactly what I observed,
| except it was probably worse if I think back at it. I'm a
| mathematician "by trade" so was sort of pulled into this by
| proxy because they were out of their depth in a tangle of
| SPSS. Not that I wasn't but at least I have conceptual
| framework in which to do the analysis. I had no interest or
| knowledge of the field but when you're with someone in it
| you have to toe the line a little bit.
|
| Observations: Firstly inventing a conclusion is a big
| problem. I'm not even talking about a hypothesis that needs
| to be tested but a conclusion. A vague ambiguous hypothesis
| which was likely true was invented to support the
| conclusion and the relationship inverted. Then data was
| selected and fitted until there was a level of confidence
| where it was worth publishing it. Secondly they were using
| very subjective data collection methods by extremely biased
| people then mangling and interpolating it to make it look
| like there was more observation data than there was.
| Thirdly when you do some honest research and not publish
| because it looks bad saying that the entire field is
| compromised for the conference coming up which everyone is
| really looking forward to and has booked flights and hotels
| already.
|
| If you want to read some of the hellish bullshit, look up
| critique of the Q methodology.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Let me introduce you to theoretical condensed matter
| physics, where no one cares if the data confirms the
| hypothesis, because they are writing papers about topics
| that very likely can _never_ be tested.
|
| At least in the social sciences there is an expectation of
| having _some_ data!
| araes wrote:
| That's actually the part about people constantly negging
| on social sciences [1] that I often find confusing.
|
| There's huge amounts of data available (geography, lots
| and lots of maps; history, huge amount of historical
| documentation; economics, vast amounts of public datasets
| produced every month by most governments; political
| science, censuses, voting records, driver registrations,
| political contest results all over the Earth - often for
| decades if not centuries).
|
| Most is relatively well verified, and often tells you how
| it was verified [2]. Often it's obtainable in publicly
| available datasets that numerous other researchers can
| verify was obtained from a legitimate source.
| [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]
|
| There's lots of data available. Much is also verifiable
| in a very personal way simply by walking somewhere and
| looking. In many ways, social sciences should be one of
| the most rigorous disciplines in most of academia.
|
| [1] Using Wikipedia's grouping on "social sciences"
| (anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography,
| history, linguistics, management, communication studies,
| psychology, culturology and political science):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science
|
| [2] Census 2020, Data Quality:
| https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-
| census/dec...
|
| [3] Economic Indicators by Country:
| https://tradingeconomics.com/indicators
|
| [4] Our World in Data (with Demographics, Health,
| Poverty, Education, Innovation, Community Wellbeing,
| Democracy): https://ourworldindata.org/
|
| [5] Observatory of Economic Complexity:
| https://oec.world/en
|
| [6] iNaturalist (at least from a biological history
| perspective): https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/43577-Pan-
| troglodytes
|
| [7] Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis, Data Sources:
| https://www.archsynth.org/resources/data-sources/
|
| [8] Language Goldmine (linguistics datasets):
| http://languagegoldmine.com/
|
| [9] Pew Research (regular surveys on economics, political
| science, religion, communication, psychology - usually
| 10,000 respondents United States, 1000 respondents
| international): https://www.pewresearch.org/
|
| [10] Marinetraffic (worldwide cargo shipping): https://ww
| w.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-12.0/cent...
|
| [11] Flightradar Aviation Data (people movement):
| https://www.flightradar24.com/data
|
| [12] Windy Worldwide Web Cameras:
| https://www.windy.com/?42.892,-104.326,5,p:cams
| BeetleB wrote:
| A lot of psychology research involves data not from these
| datasets, though.
|
| The complaint is that their data often doesn't strongly
| support the hypothesis, and dubious statistical
| techniques are performed to make it appear otherwise. And
| just poor statistics abilities (not malicious intent).
|
| Physicists get away with it because they often just don't
| do _any_ statistics. Often the data aligns so well with
| the hypothesis that you don 't need any sophisticated
| techniques, or their work doesn't involve _any_ data
| (like my example in my prior comment).
|
| Most US trained physicists have never taken a course in
| statistics. It's not in the curriculum in most
| universities. When I was in school and would point it
| out, the response was always "Why do we need a whole
| course in statistics? We learn it in quantum mechanics."
|
| No. That's probability you learn. Not statistics.
|
| In social sciences (and medicine) people take a lot more
| statistics courses because the systems are much more
| complex than typical physics systems. A lot more
| confounding variables, etc. They simply _need_ more
| statistics.
|
| (Yes, yes. I know. There's probably _some_ experimental
| branch in physics where people actually do use
| statistics. But most don 't).
| autoexec wrote:
| People who hate "social science" are surely targeting too
| wide, but there's plenty of terrible research hiding
| under that umbrella that relies exclusively on social
| media/internet surveys/self-reported data and absolutely
| deserves criticism.
| cgcrob wrote:
| I'm not ragging on the whole field. If I narrow it down
| too much they'll know who I am and you will know who they
| are.
|
| I'll reduce it to a part of psychology.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Luckily this made-up social science trash won't be used as
| evidence when shaping our policies, so it's pretty harmless!
| /s
| comfysocks wrote:
| To be fair, lobbyists will use phony science from any field
| to influence policy, not just the social sciences. Think of
| the tobacco industry.
| schnable wrote:
| The science is settled, bro.
| tovej wrote:
| I have a similar experience. We had a truly terrible paper
| written as a collaboration with a team from the US on a
| software project, integrating their "novel" and "innovative"
| component. The component took 1 hour to compile, the
| architecture made no sense, and the US professor constantly
| talked about nothing but high-flying marketing concepts. I
| managed to hack together a demo using their component, fixing
| build bugs and design flaws (the ones I could do something
| about).
|
| The proof of concept worked, but it wasn't doing anything new.
| We were just doing what we used to do, but now this terrible
| component was involved in it, making everything slower and more
| complicated.
|
| Somehow that became a paper, and somehow this paper passed
| review without a single comment (my feeling is it's because of
| the professor's name recognition). I'm ashamed to have my name
| on that paper.
| saagarjha wrote:
| As a co-author are you not able to do so?
| black_puppydog wrote:
| Technically being able isn't the same as your career
| surviving actually going through with it.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Damned if you do and damned if you don't
| psychoslave wrote:
| In theory $SYSTEM is the most excellent thing that humanity
| could ever hope and everyone knows they that by acting in
| accordance with the stated expected behaviors, they will act
| in the best way they can think of to achieve the best result
| for everybody.
|
| In practice people see that $SYSTEM is rotten and most likely
| to doom everyone on the long span, with increasingly absurd
| actions accepted silently on the road. But they also have the
| firm conviction that not bending the knee, be brave and say
| out loud what's in everyone mind, will only put them on the
| fast track to play the scapegoat and change nothing else on
| the overall.
|
| Think about it: over-reporting of grain production was a
| major factor of the great Chinese Famine.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
| wadadadad wrote:
| Thank you for providing the link for this- it's greatly
| interesting to see how such a failure could occur through
| human means and the significant impact it had, and how it
| can directly relate to academia (really, many topics,
| anywhere there is a '$SYSTEM').
|
| The cover ups in the article were also interesting- a
| deliberate staging to Mao to prevent uncovering the truth.
| I'm not sure how this compares directly (is there a
| centralized authority with power to fix the issue that is
| being lied to, compared to the decentralized "rotten"
| system, where the status quo is understood and 'accepted').
| osrec wrote:
| I can't make sense of your first sentence. Can you rephrase it
| please?
| lqet wrote:
| OP's supervisor wrote a paper without any merit. OP then
| provided a "petty idea" that made the paper "considerable at
| all". That's how he ended up as co-author.
| GuestFAUniverse wrote:
| Thanks, exactly as I wanted it to be understood.
| autoexec wrote:
| Maybe we need an "Alan Smithee"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee) for research
| papers.
| ein0p wrote:
| What's funny is that if you're well-read in your field, all such
| bullshit is plainly apparent. You know what the good baseline is,
| for example, and you know why the author didn't choose it. You
| know the deficiencies of the benchmarks and see how they were
| exploited to juice the results. You know their approach is
| infeasible IRL and can clearly articulate why. Etc, etc. You
| folks aren't fooling anyone but fools. It's sort of like e.g. a
| lazy employee thinks their manager doesn't know they're slacking
| off like mad. As a former manager I can tell you - that is most
| certainly not the case, and there's no way to hide.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| This was the major upside to taking a seminar class where we
| read papers and discuss them. The prof tried to highlight some
| of these points. Not just seeing the graphs that are there but
| also the graphs they could have added but didn't.
| wucke13 wrote:
| Tangentially relevant: Gernots list of benchmarking crimes.
|
| https://gernot-heiser.org/benchmarking-crimes.html
| bjackman wrote:
| Ha, I thought this would be a really useful resource but I
| think the people the author is complaining about do much better
| than most benchmarking I see in the industry
|
| Almost all the benchmarking results I see is just a percentage
| difference between two algebraic means, no statistical analysis
| whatsoever.
|
| Very common interaction: QA folks say "your change degraded
| some of our metrics and improved some others". I know they are
| full of shit because it's impossible that my change improved
| any perf metrics. I ask for statistical details, they don't
| have any, this meeting was a waste of time, it will be next
| time too.
|
| The fact that I get these reactions suggests that everyone else
| just lets each other get away with it.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Yep. The most recent example that's stuck in my head is
| actually much worse: they didn't even take the mean! One
| sample!
|
| https://github.com/denoland/pm-benchmark
|
| Check the run bench shell script (there's not much else in
| the repo anyways)
| genewitch wrote:
| Hey, that's perfectly valid for arguing with your friend
| about which one to deploy on our server, all things equal.
|
| I do this sort of thing to see what tools are faster all
| the time. ripgrep, ag(silver searcher), grep, MongoDB was
| one we were arguing about for a while recently.
| burntsushi wrote:
| Which one won? :)
|
| (I'm the author of ripgrep.)
| proto-n wrote:
| "For the first time, researchers reading conference proceedings
| will be forced to wonder: does this work truly merit my
| attention? Or is its publication simply the result of fraud?
| [...] But the mere possibility that any given paper was published
| through fraud forces people to engage more skeptically with all
| published work."
|
| Well... spending a few weeks reproducing a shiny conference paper
| that simply doesn't work and is easily beaten by any classical
| baseline will do that to you in the first few months of your PhD
| imo. I've become so skeptic over the years that I assume almost
| all papers to be lies until proven otherwise.
|
| "This surfaces the fundamental tension between good science and
| career progression buried deep at the heart of academia. Most
| researchers are to some extent "career researchers", motivated by
| the power and prestige that rewards those who excel in the
| academic system, rather than idealistic pursuit of scientific
| truth."
|
| For the first years of my PhD I simply refused to parttake in the
| subtle kinds of frauud listed in the second paragraph of the
| post. As a result, I barely had any publications worth
| mentioning. Mostly papers shared with others, where I couldn't
| stop the paper from happening by the time I realized that there
| is too little substance for me to be comfortable with it.
|
| As a result, my publication history looks sad and my carreer
| looks nothing like I wished it would.
|
| Now, a few years later, I've become much better at research and
| can now get my papers to the point where I'm comfortable
| submitting them with a straight face. I've also came to terms
| with overselling something that does have substance, just not as
| much as I wish it had.
| huijzer wrote:
| > I've become so skeptic over the years that I assume almost
| all papers to be lies until proven otherwise.
|
| I couldn't agree more. I have read a lot of psychology papers
| during my PhD and I think there is very little signal in the
| papers. Many empirical papers for example use basically the
| same "gold standard" analysis, which is fundamentally flawed in
| many ways. One problem for example is that if you would use
| another statistical model, then the conclusions would often be
| wildly different. Another being that the signal is often so
| weak that you can't use it to predict much (to be useful). If
| you try to select individuals for example, the only thing you
| can tell is that the group on average is less neurotic. But for
| individuals there is no better chance of picking the right one
| than average. The point of a good paper is to take these
| sketchy analyses and write a beautiful story around it with
| convincing speculation. It sounds absurd but take a random
| quantitative psychology paper and check which percentage of the
| claims made in the discussion are actually based on the actual
| data from the paper.
|
| But the worst part about this is that these problems exist for
| literally decades. Nobody cares. The funding agencies grade
| people not on correctness but on the number of citations. As a
| result, you see that many subcultures exist who's sole
| existence is about promoting the importance of their
| subculture. It is quite common in academia to cite someone in
| the introduction just to "prove" that some idea is worth
| pursuing. But does it work? Doesn't matter. Just keep writing
| papers.
|
| So I'm not saying that all research is bad. I'm saying that
| indeed most papers are not very useful or correct. Many
| researchers try, but the incentives are extremely crooked.
| pbronez wrote:
| How could this be corrected? The scientific community has
| lost a lot of credibility with the public, and the backlash
| is obvious in recent policy changes. Fast forward four years.
| Assume Trump and RFK jr have successfully destroyed the
| current system. What should replace it?
|
| How could the Federal government ensure that public monies
| only fund high quality research? Could policy re-shape the
| incentives and unlock a healthy scientific sector?
| iinnPP wrote:
| Consequences with the current system would suffice.
|
| Ignorance as a defense needs to go too. Ignorance as a
| defense is too powerful and we should balance it more
| towards hurting the supposedly ignorant rather than
| everyone else. Basically, a redefining of wilful ignorance
| so it's balanced as stated.
| huijzer wrote:
| I don't know but these are exactly the right questions to
| ask!
| bjackman wrote:
| > Submitting a paper to a conference because it's got a decent
| shot at acceptance and you don't want the time you spent on it go
| to waste, even though you've since realized that the core ideas
| aren't quite correct.
|
| I don't see a problem with this? If papers are the vehicle for
| conference entries why shouldn't authors submit it just because
| it's wrong? Conferences are for discussion. So go there and
| discuss it... "My paper says XYZ, but since I wrote it I realised
| ABC" - sounds like a good talk to me?
|
| (Naivety check: I am not an academic)
| lgeorget wrote:
| In other fields than computer science, that would be more the
| case I think because conferences are not given as much
| importance. Journals are what matter and since these
| publications take more time and are usually more selective (for
| the well-known journals at least), you tend to have better
| science in them. Computer science have few journals and the
| standard of publication is the conference.
| sideshowb wrote:
| Yes. As the saying goes, If we knew what we were doing it
| wouldn't be research. Finished papers often have flaws, if you
| try to write something perfect you may never finish it. They're
| called limitations and you list them in conclusions and suggest
| addressing in future work.
|
| (Experience check: I is one)
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| That's not what papers are for. But I can see how not being an
| academic would make you think that.
|
| What you're describing are workshops with what we would call
| non-archival proceedings. Places where you write whatever you
| want and then talk about it.
|
| Publications, conference or journal, are supposed to be what
| are called archival. They are a record of what we've discovered
| and want to share with the world. They are supposed to be sent
| into the world after we carefully complete a line of work.
|
| Publications are not supposed to spam the system with half-
| baked junk. Sadly, that's what a lot of people are doing these
| days.
| foldr wrote:
| Some fields do have the opposite problem, though, where
| standards for publication are so high that they prevent
| publication of useful ideas or results that could be built on
| by other researchers. I don't think a published paper should
| have to meet some kind of gold standard of completeness and
| correctness. It just has to report something new or
| interesting with any appropriate caveats attached.
| genewitch wrote:
| I don't know I'm sure Monsanto put out[0] a lot of papers
| about how effective glyphosate is but another team decided
| to test glyphosate against the "inert" ingredients in
| roundup and found glyphosate was actually the weakest
| pesticide of the group.
|
| Now, my pet theory is that they knew glyphosate wasn't that
| great, but talked it up in papers as a sacrificial anode
| sort of thing "gee shucks it looks like glyphosate based
| pesticides are harmful to humans (or bees, or fish, or) so
| we'll stop manufacturing that formulation."
|
| But, Possibly due to academia, they have fanboys and
| cheerleaders and I think that's why it's still around and
| in heavy use even though we're not sure it's a good idea.
|
| [0] Bayer Monsanto funds studies at agricultural
| universities.
|
| P. S. Just watch.
| userbinator wrote:
| (2021)
|
| _Together, we can force the community to reckon with its own
| shortcomings, and develop stronger, better, and more scientific
| norms. It is a harsh treatment, to be sure - a chemotherapy
| regimen that risks destroying us entirely. But this is our best
| shot at destroying the cancer that has infected our community._
|
| And now, nearly 4 years later, research funding gets DOGE'd...
| pbronez wrote:
| Yup. and MAHA'd. The question is: what comes next? Once the
| current administration executes their democratic mandate to
| destroy institutions, how should we rebuild those capabilities?
|
| In this case, how could the federal government ensure that
| academic funding flows to researchers and institutions that are
| doing genuinely high quality research? How can we remove
| funding from low-quality and fraudulent actors?
| tonyg wrote:
| > Undermining the credibility of computer science research is the
| best possible outcome for the field, since the institution in its
| current form does not deserve the credibility that it has.
|
| Horseshit. This might be true for AI research (and even there
| that's an awfully broad brush you're using, mate), but it's
| certainly not true for other areas of computer science.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| Maybe your lab is different (if you work in a research
| setting), but most of the researchers will readily admit that
| most of their research output is at least somewhat bull**. It's
| something that is trained in to people from high school
| research projects onwards - people judging your results usually
| do not have time or ability to research you work and even if
| they have they usually have much more importing things to do
| than check your mediocre results.
|
| As a society, we have far too much trust in science, however
| any time this argument is brought up, we focus on conspiracy
| theorists who struggle with 100+ years old theories as if the
| visage of the public trust in science will change their mind,
| ignoring that any member of the public, who accidentally
| discovers the Jenga tower the science is built on (but hidden)
| will become much more likely to believe those charlatans in the
| future.
| tensor wrote:
| Excuse me? Based on what? In my time in academia exactly zero
| researchers would claim that their work is somewhat bullshit.
|
| As a society, there is laughably little support for science,
| instead the majority of policy and business decisions are
| based on fairy tales and snake oil. We need more trust in
| science.
| genewitch wrote:
| As of this comment scroll location, there are at least
| three people that admitted to co-authiring a paper they
| knew was BS.
|
| So you don't know anyone, but I can counter with those
| three anecdotes.
|
| 3>1
|
| Qed I am right, statistically.
| CJefferson wrote:
| Is there a lot of good research in computer science, of course.
|
| Is there even more stuff which really shouldn't be published,
| and has experiments which are abused to show off how great new
| technique A is, while hiding that was attempt 72 at making an
| experiment that showed A was great? Also of course.
| vladms wrote:
| Sometimes it is good to make parallels with other things to check
| if proposals make sense. How would sound "go and try to steal
| every car out there, so that car manufacturers improve their car
| security" ?
|
| For me it sounds counter-productive. I have a feeling that lately
| (tens of years) many people try to focus on the negatives, rather
| than the positives. Should we focus on the 3 amazing papers this
| year, cited by hundreds, that resulted in clear progress or
| should we complain that 100 papers are useless? Let's focus on
| 100 because "someone is wrong on the internet".
|
| I did a PhD (so might have more experience) but papers are meant
| for dissemination. For me everybody that wants to have them
| "perfect"/"useful" papers imagines a system that does lots of
| work for them. The system could be improved, but if anything
| (just throwing an idea) maybe researchers should try to do
| research in the industry to prove themselves. Then come back
| after 10 year in academia (maybe with savings) so that they are
| more independent of "career progression". A lot of research was
| done (historically, >100 years ago) by rich people, not
| constrained by a career.
| anjc wrote:
| > Should we focus on the 3 amazing papers this year, cited by
| hundreds, that resulted in clear progress or should we complain
| that 100 papers are useless?
|
| Agree, and it seems that this is how fields naturally evolve
| anyway.
| bowsamic wrote:
| It's not an exaggeration to say I literally don't know a single
| person who doesn't engage in this kind of academic fraud to some
| degree
| lqet wrote:
| > * A group of colluding authors writes and submits papers to the
| conference.
|
| > * The colluders share, amongst themselves, the titles of each
| other's papers, violating the tenet of blind reviewing and
| creating a significant undisclosed conflict of interest.
|
| > * The colluders hide conflicts of interest, then bid to review
| these papers, sometimes from duplicate accounts, in an attempt to
| be assigned to these papers as reviewers.
|
| Is it that common that conference reviewers also submit papers to
| the conference? Wouldn't that alone already be a conflict of
| interest? (After all, you then have an interest in dismissing as
| many papers as possible to increase the likelihood of your own
| paper being accepted). And how do you create "duplicate
| accounts"? The conferences I have submitted to, and reviewed for,
| all had an invitation-like process for potential reviewers.
| proto-n wrote:
| Not only common, it's become a requirement to review papers if
| you submit one yourself. Yeah it's not ideal for multiple
| reasons (what you said + prompt engineering grad students
| dismissing proper papers without having the slighest idea about
| the field), but the amount of submissions is so incredibly huge
| that it's impossible to do it any other way.
| lqet wrote:
| Then I guess I should be grateful that my academic niche is
| so small.
| michaelt wrote:
| Many bodies that fund academic work will happily pay for you to
| fly to a conference and stay at a hotel if you're presenting a
| paper at the conference - but they'll be a lot less willing if
| you aren't presenting anything. So a decent % of attendees will
| be presenting papers.
|
| And finding reviewers who know their stuff, who'll work for
| free, and who'll review thoroughly in a short timescale isn't
| easy.
| twic wrote:
| Even if this reviewers weren't allowed to be submitters, if
| there is more than one conference, or the conference runs for
| more than one year, the same mechanism can be used.
| ploynog wrote:
| Double-blind review is a mirage that does not hold up. While I
| was in academia I reviewed a paper that turned out to be a
| blatant case of plagiarism. It was a clear Level 1 copy according
| to the IEEE plagiarism levels (Uncredited Verbatim Copy of more
| than 50% of a single paper). I submitted all of these findings
| with the original paper and what parts were copied (essentially
| all of it) as my review.
|
| A few days later I got an email from the author (some professor)
| who wanted to discuss this with me, claiming that the paper was
| written by some of his students who were not credited as authors.
| They were unexperienced, made a mistake, yaddah yaddah yaddah. I
| forwarded the mail to the editors and never heard from this case
| again. I don't expect that anything happened, the corrective
| actions for a level-1 violation are pretty harsh and would have
| been hard to miss.
|
| The fact that this person was able to obtain my name and contact
| info shattered any trust I had in the "blind" part of the double-
| blind review process.
|
| The other two reviewers had recommended to accept the paper
| without revisions, by the way.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| This seems like an issue of administration rather than an issue
| with the idea of a double-blind review. If you conduct a review
| that isn't properly blinded, and doesn't have an observable
| effect, can it really be called a double blind review?
| velcrovan wrote:
| Maybe more that a non-idealistic model of the real world, and
| common direct experience, show that incentives strongly favor
| an administrative approach that compromises the double blind.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| Unless there's a better way to do it, I this shows a need
| for better structures for governance and auditing of review
| boards... Information and science care not for our human
| folly, it's up to us to seek and execute them properly.
| rors wrote:
| I remember attending ACL one year, where the conference
| organisers ran an experiment to test the effectiveness of
| double blind reviews. They asked reviewers to identify the
| institution that submitted the anonymised paper. Roughly 50% of
| reviewers were able to correctly identify the institutions. I
| think there was a double digit percentage of being able to
| predict authors.
|
| The organisers then made the argument that double blind was
| working because 50% of papers were not identified correctly! I
| was amazed that even with strong evidence that double blind was
| not working, the organisers were still able to convince
| themselves to continue with business as usual.
| wtallis wrote:
| You're saying "not working" when you only have presented
| evidence for "not perfect".
|
| That experiment showed that even when asked to put effort
| into identifying the source of an anonymized paper--something
| that most reviewers probably _don 't_ put any conscious
| effort into normally--the anonymization was having a
| substantial effect compared to _not_ anonymizing the papers.
|
| Am I missing some obvious reason why double-blind reviews
| should only be attempted if the blinding can be achieved with
| a near-perfect success rate, or are you just setting the bar
| unreasonably high?
| gopher_space wrote:
| The subtext to this whole comment chain is that you need to
| have hands-on experience with qualitative to quantitative
| conversions if you want to reason about the scientific
| process.
|
| > Am I missing some obvious reason why double-blind reviews
| should only be attempted if the blinding can be achieved
| with a near-perfect success rate, or are you just setting
| the bar unreasonably high?
|
| OP thinks you are looking at either signal or noise,
| instead of determining where the signal begins for
| yourself.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| When we criticize without proposing a fix or alternative, we
| promote the implicit alternative of tearing something down
| without fixing it. This is often much worse than letting the
| imperfect thing stand. So here's a proposal: do what we do in
| software.
|
| No, really: we have the same problem in software. Software
| developers under high pressure to move tickets will often
| resort to the minor fraud of converting unfinished features
| into bugs by marking them complete when they are not in fact
| complete. This is very similar to the minor fraud of an
| academic publishing an overstated / incorrect result to stay
| competitive with others doing the same. Often it's more
| efficient in both cases to just ignore the problem, which will
| generally self-correct with time. If not, we have to think
| about intervention -- but in software this story has played out
| a thousand times in a thousand organizations, so we know what
| intervention looks like.
|
| Acceptance testing. That's the solution. Nobody likes it.
| Companies don't like to pay for the extra workers and
| developers don't like the added bureaucracy. But it works.
| Maybe it's time for some fraction of grant money to go to
| replication, and for replication to play a bigger role in
| gating the prestige indicators.
| ramblenode wrote:
| > This is very similar to the minor fraud of an academic
| publishing an overstated / incorrect result to stay
| competitive with others doing the same.
|
| I completely disagree.
|
| For one, academic standards of publishing are not at all the
| same as the standards for in-house software development. In
| academia, a published result is typically regarded as a
| finished product, even if the result is not exhaustive. You
| cannot push a fix to the paper later; an entirely new paper
| has to be written and accepted. And this is for good reason:
| the paper represents a time-stamp of progress in the field
| that others can build off of. In the sciences, projects can
| range from 6 months to years, so a literature polluted with
| half-baked results is a big impediment to planning and
| resource allocation.
|
| A better comparison for academic publishing would be a major
| collaborative open source project like the Linux kernel. Any
| change has to be thoroughly justified and vetted before it is
| merged because mistakes cause other people problems and
| wasted time/effort. Do whatever you like with your own
| hobbyist project, but if you plan for it to be adopted and
| integrated into the wider software ecosystem, your code
| quality needs to be higher and you need to have your
| interfaces speced out. That's the analogy for academic
| publishing.
|
| The problems in modern academic publishing are almost
| entirely caused by the perverse incentives of measuring
| academic status by publication record (number of publications
| and impact factor). Lowering publishing standards so
| academics can play this game better is solving the wrong
| problem. Standards should be _even higher_.
| buescher wrote:
| Yeah, the alternative to a double-blind review that isn't a
| double-blind review is a double blind review.
|
| The alternative to not enforcing existing rules against
| plagiarism is to enforce them.
|
| The alternative to ignoring integrity issues i.e."minor
| fraud" in the workplace is to apply ordinary workplace
| discipline on them.
| tensor wrote:
| Seems to me that the review worked, you caught the plagiarism,
| even though the other two missed it. It's disturbing that
| somehow the paper author found your contact information though!
| anjc wrote:
| Overly pessimistic, and doesn't acknowledge that heads of steam
| only build behind promising findings, while the deficient (or
| 'fraudulent') work die on the vine, published or not. In other
| words the system tends to work.
|
| Secondly, there are many ingredients required to successfully
| publish, communicate science, foster collaboration, etc., beyond
| technical brilliance. I'm sure we all know many technically
| brilliant people whose career never advanced because they lacked
| in some necessary area. People shouldn't be discouraged from
| improving in all areas because OP's delicate genius is offended
| by their technical ability.
|
| Speaking of discouragement, it's a shame and a disgrace that you
| publicly called your colleague's work bullshit, including a first
| author that isn't yourself.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Overly pessimistic, and doesn't acknowledge that heads of
| steam only build behind promising findings, while the deficient
| (or 'fraudulent') work die on the vine, published or not.
|
| This might be true in hard sciences where a "head of steam" can
| only build based on real, replicatable results
|
| But it's very common that public policy is proposed and adopted
| based on findings from soft sciences like psychology and
| sociology
|
| If policy is adopted based on a research paper, I would count
| that as a "head of steam" being built.
|
| And if that paper is fraudulent, then we are adopting well-
| intentioned policy on false pretenses
| anjc wrote:
| I did just mean AI and Computer Science per OP. By "head of
| steam" I mean to say that much research is built on it, think
| the likes of "Attention is All you Need". There isn't quite
| an equivalent of this in public policy in my experience.
|
| Conversely, computer science/AI doesn't have an equivalent of
| the rigor that public policy research tends to go through. CS
| has e.g., benchmark datasets, typical evaluation metrics, but
| these are more like norms rather than requirements, whereas
| in public policy, instruments for validations are far more
| rigorously tested and enforced. Depending on the area.
|
| I agree that outright fraud would be detrimental, but I think
| OP overblows this issue completely and should apologise to
| his co-authors.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The academic world is essentially the world's oldest social
| network. The way academic publishing works is through a
| convoluted reputation system of academics endorsing each other's
| works via various publications, giving each other a 'like' by
| referring work, debating work in public at conferences, hiring
| each other's students, protege's, etc.
|
| Fraud here basically means faking reputation. There are many ways
| to do this. And it's common because doing scientific work goes
| hand in hand with very generous funding. And money corrupts
| things. So attempts to fake reputation, plagiarize work,
| artificially boost relevance through low reputable referencing,
| bribes, etc. are as old as scientific publishing is.
|
| There are a few interesting dynamics here that counter this: high
| quality publications will want to defend their reputation. E.g.
| Nature retracting an article tends to be scandalous. They do it
| to preserve their reputation. And it tends to be bad for the
| reputation of affected authors. Their reputation is based on them
| having very high standards and a long history of important people
| publishing important things that changed the world. Every time
| they publish something, that's the reputation that is at stake.
| So, they are strict. And they should be.
|
| The problem is all the second and third rate researchers that
| make up most of the scientific community. We don't all get to
| have Einstein level reputations. And things are fiercely
| competitive at the bottom. And if you have no reputation,
| sacrificing it is a small price to pay. Also the prestigious
| publications are guarded by an elitist, highly political, in-
| crowd. We're talking big money here. And money corrupts. So, this
| works both ways.
|
| With AI thrown in the mix, the academic world has to up its game.
| And the tools it is going to have to use are essentially the same
| used in other social networks. Bluesky, Twitter, etc. have
| exactly the same problem as scientific publishers; but at a much
| larger scale. They want to surface reputable stuff and filter out
| all the AI generated misinformation and it's an arms race.
|
| One solution is using more AI or trying other clever tricks. A
| simpler solution is tying reputations to digital signatures.
| Scientific work is not anonymous. You literally stake your
| reputation by tying your (good) name to a publication and going
| on the record by "publishing" something. Digital signatures add
| some strength to that that AIs can't fake or forge. Either you
| said it and signed it; or you didn't. Easy to verify. And either
| you are reputable, by having your signature associated with a lot
| of reputable publications, or you are not. Also easy to verify.
|
| If disreputable stuff gets flagged, you simply scrutinize all the
| authors and publications involved and let them sort out their
| reputations by taking appropriate actions (firing people,
| withdrawing articles, publicly apologizing, etc.). They'll all be
| eager to restore their reputations so that should be
| uncontroversial. Or they don't and lose their reputation.
|
| Digital signatures are a severely underused tool currently. We've
| had access to those for half a century or so.
|
| The challenge isn't technical but institutional. Lots of
| disreputable people and institutions are currently making a lot
| of money by operating in the shadows. The tools are there to fix
| this. But people don't seem to necessarily want to.
| nicwilson wrote:
| Hmmm, I wonder if you could turn this into a sport and have like
| one paper per year per group of total BS, and shame on the
| reviewers/conference/journal if they don't catch it, and kudos to
| the submitters the more blatant it is.
|
| Come to think of it, is there a "Journal of Academic Fraud"?
| michaelt wrote:
| _> And we must ensure that explicit suggestions to modify one's
| science in the service of one's career - "you need to do X to be
| published", "you need to publish Y to graduate", "you need to
| avoid criticizing Z to get hired" - carry social penalties as
| severe as a suggestion of plagiarism or fraud._
|
| One of the pernicious things in this area is that, even as we
| teach young researchers how to avoid making mistakes and engage
| sceptically with the work of others and that scientific fraud is
| a nontrivial issue, we also tell them how to commit fraud
| themselves and that their competition is doing it.
|
| "Watch out for P-hacking, that's where the researcher uses a form
| of analysis that has a small chance of a false positive, and
| analyses loads of subsets of your dataset until a false positive
| arises and just publishes that one"
|
| "Watch out for over-fitting to benchmarks, like a car taking the
| speed crown by sacrificing the ability to corner"
|
| "Watch out for incomplete descriptions of test setups, like
| testing on a 'continent-scale map' but not mentioning how
| detailed a map it was"
|
| "Watch out for citations where the cited paper doesn't say what
| is claimed, some people will copy-and-paste citations without
| reading the source paper"
|
| "Watch out for papers using complicated notation, fancy equations
| and jargon to make you feel this looks like a 'proper' paper"
|
| "Watch out for deceptive choice of accurate numbers, like a study
| with a 25% completion rate including the drop-outs in the number
| of participants"
|
| "Watch out for simulations with inaccurate noise models, if the
| noise is gaussian in the simulation but a random walk in reality,
| great simulated results won't transfer to reality"
|
| I've made no suggestion at all that you should modify your
| science or commit fraud - but I've also just trained you in how
| to do it.
| proto-n wrote:
| It's really not that hard to come up with ways to commit fraud
| if you want to. On the other hand, it's very easy to make such
| mistakes if you don't know to avoid them. This characterization
| is very misguided IMO.
| michaelt wrote:
| Ah, perhaps I wasn't clear about what I'm trying to say. I
| don't think we should stop training researchers in common
| mistakes and fraudulent methods to watch out for.
|
| I'm just saying: I don't believe anyone actually _tells_
| budding researchers that they should commit fraud. Instead I
| think the process is probably more like this:
|
| Year 1: Statistics/research training. Here are a load of
| subtle mistakes to watch out for and avoid. Scientific fraud
| happens sometimes. Don't do it, it's very dishonest.
|
| Year 2: Starting research. Gee a lot of these papers I'm
| reading are hard to reproduce, or unclear. Maybe fraud is
| widespread - or maybe they're just smarter or better equipped
| than me.
|
| Year 3: "You really ought to have published some papers by
| now, the average student in your position has 3 papers. If
| you don't want to flunk out you really need to start showing
| some progress"
| proto-n wrote:
| I still disagree. It's more like "omg I should have
| published at least a few papers by now, what am I doing"
| and then you start frantically looking for provable things
| in the dataset. You find one that you can also support with
| a nice story. Now either a) You were not tought about how
| or why this is wrong and you publish the paper b) You were,
| and know that you should collect a separate dataset to test
| the hypothesis. But also, there is a huge existential
| pressure to just close your eyes and roll with it.
|
| It's not that you need to be tought how to cheat, it's that
| you need to be tought how to avoid unintentionally
| cheating.
| genewitch wrote:
| Maybe I'm misreading but you both seem to say the same
| thing.
|
| New student is shown how to read a paper, how to spot
| egregious errors and all the things listed above.
|
| Student, i guess feels forced to publish. And maybe uses
| murkier tactics to get the paper published.
|
| As Dr Frank Etscorn said, "I can show anything correlates
| to anything else." We were discussing vitamin D papers
| anf I was testing that paper funding AI mentioned on HN a
| few times last year.
| genewitch wrote:
| I can't edit from my phone, maybe the nuance is in your
| final sentence?
| ngriffiths wrote:
| I had two experiences at the polar opposites of the spectrum -
| one research team I worked on had very high standards and was
| comfortable being patient for material that had _value_. The
| other involved an approach that _obviously stood no chance_ to be
| useful to anyone.
|
| Some differences:
|
| - The first one was in a space with more low hanging fruit
|
| - The first one was after large effect sizes, not the kind where
| you can massage the statistical model
|
| - The second one was a topic with far higher public interest
|
| - The second one was primarily an analytic project, whereas the
| first one was primarily experimental
|
| I feel like bad science lives in the middle of a spectrum - you
| have young fields/subfields with boring but impressive
| experimental breakthroughs, and on the other end you have highly
| political questions that have been argued to death without
| resolution. Bad science is about borrowing some of the strategies
| used in politics because all the important experiments have
| already been done.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Unfortunately, I think this article is not pessimistic enough. If
| it were true that academic fraud is important for establishing
| the boundaries of respectable scholarship in a field, then
| behavioral economics wouldn't exist anymore. And evolutionary
| psychology would be a fraction of its current size.
|
| Trendiness trumps all notions of academic rigor, and as long as a
| field "feels like" it's on the cutting edge it can go pretty far
| before collapsing in on itself.
| daveguy wrote:
| I'm wondering how someone knows the size of the field of
| evolutionary psychology and what it should be instead of what
| it is so well that they feel no evidence is necessary. Are you
| in the field yourself? Or do you have questions about evolution
| in general? Or none of the above?
| tovej wrote:
| Evolutionary psychology is highly speculative and is widely
| known to be full of questionable results.
|
| So much so that there's a wikipedia page for how bad it is: h
| ttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_evolutionary_ps..
| .
| throw4847285 wrote:
| The SEP page is a slightly more rigorous take, though
| unlike Wikipedia it is clearly primarily authored by one
| person, a philosopher of biology who I don't know much
| about. Still, I think it's a fair and detailed overview of
| the field, from a methodological perspective.
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolutionary-psychology/
| throw4847285 wrote:
| Just cut out everybody who is studying "sexual selection" and
| I think the field is way healthier. Weird that so many evo
| psych scholars of a certain persuasion are fixated on that. I
| have a theory, but it veers into armchair non-evolutionary
| psychology, and it's not very nice.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > Most researchers are to some extent "career researchers",
| motivated by the power and prestige that rewards those who excel
| in the academic system, rather than idealistic pursuit of
| scientific truth.
|
| This is the funny part. There is little to no power and prestige
| to be had in the academic system. To a first approximation no one
| outside academia cares.
|
| I was just working as a staff programmer and taking grad courses
| with my tuition benefit, and found myself getting caught up in
| the mentality of needing a PhD to really be successful and
| valuable. Then got a job in industry making far more money and
| realized how academia is a small self contained world with status
| hierarchies irrelevant outside that small world.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| >This is the funny part. There is little to no power and
| prestige to be had in the academic system. To a first
| approximation no one outside academia cares.
|
| They have power over their students and relative power over
| other Professors. That's plenty enough incentive for most.
| There can also be fame and fortune for the most famous among
| them. See Francesa Gino, Dan Ariely, etc.
| BeetleB wrote:
| In the social sciences, there is a _lot_ of prestige to be had.
| Do some ground breaking work, engage with the public via
| bestselling books, and then get invited by the president to
| work on policy.
|
| Even if they don't work for the administration, there are
| plenty of other bodies that will value them and pay large sums
| of money (or let them have large influence).
|
| Very common amongst economists, and more and more common
| amongst disciplines like psychology.
|
| Even in technical fields, if you can manage to become a big
| name, you can do consulting work and get paid quite well.
|
| > Then got a job in industry making far more money
|
| This is not a healthy way to look at it.
|
| The average mechanical engineer isn't making tons of money in
| industry. A ME professor at a top university likely makes more.
| A biology major with just a BS degree will make less than the
| average biology associate professor.
|
| But more importantly, there's a simpler reason why money is a
| poor metric to measure: You can always get more money in
| finance or medicine than as a mechanical engineer. Does it make
| sense to denigrate a whole _profession_ just because one can
| make more money elsewhere?
| jarbus wrote:
| I don't have top-tier publications, and I haven't gotten any
| awards. I've seen people get awards for bullshit and farming
| prestigous publications. I only have one citation for work that
| is 100% mine. But every time I read something like this, I feel
| proud that I don't bullshit, and at least try to do real science.
| I truly believe in all my work and every sentence I write.
|
| That being said, the insane emphasis on venue is what's pushing
| me out of academia. I can't compete with people like this.
| tmaly wrote:
| I am just thinking about what will happen when these papers are
| used to train LLMs
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