[HN Gopher] Scientific fraud has become an 'industry,' analysis ...
___________________________________________________________________
Scientific fraud has become an 'industry,' analysis finds
Author : pseudolus
Score : 241 points
Date : 2025-08-05 10:56 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| questinthrow wrote:
| Its odd how I viewed academia as a beautiful place where people
| were judged by merit not by politics. Then I joined it and
| realized its even more cutthroat than corporate politics, I guess
| you cant escape human fallibility no matter the system since all
| systems are reflections of human nature.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| Sayre's Law: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter
| form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
| coderatlarge wrote:
| as it turns out an annuity for life in the form of a tenured
| position is not really low stakes...
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| The viscous politics is often carried out by those who
| already have tenure, probably even more so because they
| have that protection.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Well, I'm not sure I've seen that pattern quite so much,
| but if you're seeing it, I would speculate survivor bias.
| The people who stay around are the ones who were good
| enough at the game to stay around.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| the way i've generally understood the use of the word
| "vicious" in this context is in judging other academics'
| work quality. which is also typically where i think most
| people from the outside perceive the stakes to be low: as
| in who cares whether one more journal article that no one
| will read gets published? but from the inside it can mean
| the difference between tenure and no tenure (for the
| young academic vying for it), respect and abject failure,
| money or no money.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| There are so many more ways than that to starve and
| sabotage a burgeoning researcher, ensuring they never
| take root.
| philwelch wrote:
| Well sure but in this case the actual word was "viscous",
| not "vicious". Academic politics is thick, sticky, and
| insufficiently fluid and insufficiently solid at the same
| time. Okay it was probably a typo but it kind of works as
| an analogy.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| sure, maybe it was intended as a novel coinage, but i
| assumed the "vicious" interpretation which is the more
| common one since the comment explicitly references
| Sayre's Law.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| fair point - though it sometimes turns into a fight about
| how to remove others' tenure; which is their most prized
| and valuable possession.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Tenured people carry it out, but in my experience, the
| goal tends to be for their students/subordinates/group
| colleagues/etc. to achieve tenure instead of others.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| I've heard of an engineering faculty where there was
| basically a cold war between a few of the tenured profs.
| They would do everything they could to undercut or screw
| each other over. Pure spite-based politics. Toxic as hell
| and there was very little anyone could do about out.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| i know of prestigious departments where after literally
| decades of political stalemate with colleagues (over
| things as petty as who gets what office) prestigious
| faculty finally managed to finagle a high-dollar offer
| from a lower tier institution and de-camped over the
| politics.
| triceratops wrote:
| You probably mean "vicious" but "viscous" works too,
| funnily. Username checks out.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I was also wondering if it was a spelling mistake, a
| failure to know the difference between the two words, a
| legit description of academic politics as molasses-like,
| or a play on the user's own username. The layers of
| potential irony here are thick and viscous!
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| Especially when the position is filled by someone who
| couldn't earn half as much (in money, security, and
| prestige) if forced to compete on merit in the real world.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| The "real world" is far from meritorious.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| I think ideally academia needs to evolve to be open to
| everyone and worshiping of nobody. Pop in to publish your
| article, return to whatever else you had been doing after.
| Repeat. University professors are rarely that innovative or
| good in their teaching methods, so that part could be to be
| taken up by teaching faculty instead.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| in my experience, teaching quality does benefit from
| repetition (it is also harmed by it!).
| dagw wrote:
| The big problem is that universities basically never hire
| or promote based on a persons teaching ability. One of
| the best lecturers I had at university was a postdoc who
| didn't get hired and ended up teaching at a 'third rate'
| university. One of the worst lecturers I had got head
| hunted by MIT.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >The big problem is that universities basically never
| hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability.
|
| Because they aren't intended to be educational.
| Universities (as they are run today) are primarily grant-
| revenue capture organizations, secondarily research
| organizations (at least to the degree necessary that
| grant money doesn't dry up because of fraudulent spending
| accusations), and finally after that, a begrudged effort
| is made at education for optics. If they could ditch the
| education angle entirely, they'd send the students home
| tomorrow.
| nradov wrote:
| That's not necessarily a problem. There are different
| options in the marketplace. If you attend an R1 research
| university then of course hiring decisions will heavily
| weight research productivity. But many other smaller
| schools absolutely do look at teaching ability.
| dagw wrote:
| _Pop in to publish your article, return to whatever else
| you had been doing after._
|
| Nothing is stopping you. I've published papers and
| presented at academic conferences while working in
| industry. Both in collaboration with academics and
| without.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| many academics also seem willing to invite industry
| people to guest lecture in their classes
| analog31 wrote:
| Well over half of college teaching is already done by
| "adjuncts" who are non tenure track teaching staff. The
| teachers are effectively unsupervised and do their best
| but have no incentive to improve other than self
| motivation.
|
| Disclosure: I was an adjunct for a semester while I was
| between industry jobs.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| Tenure should be more widespread.
| ocschwar wrote:
| Once you get that annuity you wind up embroiled in the
| fighting to decide who gets tenure next. Your proteges or
| other people's.
| butlike wrote:
| It's really hard when there's no metrics beyond "perceived
| intelligence."
| gus_massa wrote:
| Citation numbers, weighted by impact factor, h-index,
| number of Ph.D. students... that are bad proxies for
| "perceived intelligence".
| the-mitr wrote:
| in academia many times it matters whom you know rather than
| what you know,
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Academia is a petty place.
|
| No "system" can ever overcome such problems. Sure, some
| political orders are better than others in various respects,
| but nothing will overcome the _basic_ origin of our problems,
| which is us! The "system" itself is made from the crooked
| timber of our humanity, and even if some perfect "system" could
| be made, its perfection could only be actualized by a perfect
| people.
|
| Hence the need to focus less on systems and more on personal
| virtue. You want to find your greatest enemy? Look within.
|
| To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil
| passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between
| political parties either - but right through every human
| heart."
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil
| passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between
| political parties either - but right through every human
| heart."
|
| This gets invoked way too often by bad people defending bad
| things that they were warned not to do/support at the time
| but did/supported anyway because there was something in it
| for them.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Perhaps my wording was misleading. I am not claiming that
| reform is not possible. I am only claiming that the
| impulse, especially when it is messianic, that drives some
| reformers and revolutionaries is delusional, a dead end,
| and worse, usually involves tyrannical measures and
| produces more bad than it does good.
|
| Of course, academia could absolutely benefit from certain
| changes and reforms - I have argued for this myself;
| education has been derailed by inferior goals - , but the
| primary place where the work has to happen isn't policy or
| institutional structure, but ourselves. Indeed, the
| counterpart to your criticism is that excessive talk of
| reform is a way of avoiding the difficult and unpleasant
| work of having to look in the mirror. This does not exclude
| the need for certain reforms, but unless you get your own
| house in order first, you will be in poor shape to know
| what to reform and how.
| avoutos wrote:
| I think it's more beneficial to think in terms of incentive
| structures. How we structure societies and industries can
| incentivize virtue, but it can also disincentivize fradulance
| and incentivize good clean work more directly.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Sure, incentives are important. I don't disagree. The law
| is a teacher, and it involves the use of incentives and
| disincentives.
|
| But there is a bootstrapping problem here. The first is
| that virtue is needed to know what and how to incentivize
| and disincentivize, and to be able to choose to do it.
| Corrupt men will tend to create incentives in their own
| image.
|
| Another problem is that even when incentives are properly
| aligned, this alone does not guarantee good behavior.
| Murderers know what awaits them for their crimes. So while
| incentives are important, a purely game theoretic
| construction is not enough. It does not do enough to secure
| rational behavior. So the problem is not merely political,
| but moral. We each have a personal duty here to demand
| moral action from ourselves and to grow in virtue.
| exceptione wrote:
| Your post being down voted is unjust. There is a tendency to
| expect salvation from the system and the rule, but they only
| have power if they are kept by and defended by the commons.
|
| This also applies to society as a whole. The role of the
| media as the fourth estate in the system is to inform the
| public when destruction is breaking the rules, to explain how
| it will bring down the house.
|
| But when in a Res Publica the media susses the common man
| instead, when the outlets prostitute them to the destructive
| powers that finally will kill their enablers, all is too
| late. The common man will have exchanged his virtues for hate
| towards imaginary enemies. Then it turned out that the rules
| did not save the public.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and
| competitive, it's just capitalism. If we could come up with an
| economic system centered first on the care we could see it
| differently. Because what you see in small, specially poor
| communities is that trust in each other is strong.
|
| You could argue that the church tried it and we had the
| inquisition, but I think it's different. We have way more
| benefit of hindsight and the population is way more educated
| than it was in the middle ages.
|
| Not advocating for a renaissance of the Christian kingdom, but
| for embedding care and charity as first class moral values in
| economics.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and
| competitive, it's just capitalism
|
| This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don't
| have capitalism, they're all getting along, right? Never
| competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for
| mates?
|
| Being competitive is human nature. People will always compete
| for things, even if you try to artificially remove or forbid
| financial incentives. There are always more incentives. There
| will always be social standing to pursue, a coveted position,
| or the recognition of having accomplished something.
|
| > If we could come up with an economic system centered first
| on the care we could see it differently.
|
| Alternate economic systems that forbid capitalism rely on
| heavy government enforcement to prevent people from doing
| capitalistic things: Running unapproved businesses, being
| entrepreneurial, selling goods and services at market rate.
|
| This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate
| economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade
| and then suddenly everyone's behaviors will change is also a
| fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is
| hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition
| over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even
| if they paid the same).
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| animals do frequently get along and cooperate, ironically
| what youre doing is a reflection of capitalism, youre
| projecting the current economic system onto the animal
| planet. Think of that famously wrong study from the 70s
| about alpha wolves, its been disproven but people still of
| it as true because it molds to the economic system they
| understand.
|
| But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live
| under an economic system that lets people sleep on the
| streets, and maybe more importantly: will commit full scale
| ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a
| small business someday?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > animals do frequently get along and cooperate
|
| And humans do, too. So what's your point? I'm drawing
| parallels between animals and humans and you are too! You
| seem to be supporting my point, not refuting it.
|
| Humans get along and cooperate at scales far beyond
| anything the animal kingdom can do. Capitalism has driven
| the advancements that enable it.
|
| > will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world
| because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
|
| The classic vacuous anti-capitalism rhetoric: Capitalism
| will destroy the world, but unspecified alternative which
| doesn't exist and isn't described is better. Anyone who
| doesn't believe in the non-existent superior non-
| capitalistic that solves everyone is the bad person,
| right?
| gchamonlive wrote:
| > Capitalism will destroy the world, but unspecified
| alternative which doesn't exist and isn't described is
| better. Anyone who doesn't believe in the non-existent
| superior non-capitalistic that solves everyone is the bad
| person, right?
|
| And this is the classic positivist rethoric that prevents
| self assertion and self criticism. Every doctrine that
| can't take criticism and take care of it's flaws while
| maintaining it's benefits is doomed to fail.
|
| Nobody is saying that you are bad in essence, that is the
| whole idea. There is no essence. You create the meaning
| you see in the world.
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| You've nailed it: this is exactly why Soviet socialism
| failed in the past, and also paradoxically the reason why
| neoliberal capitalism is failing today.
|
| Although I am a Marxist, I reject the idea that Communism
| is going to be the "final" form of human society. We may
| be able to get there someday, but only constant care and
| effort towards maintaining the system will be able to
| sustain it, and there is no "deterministic" answer to
| what the ultimate form of human society is.
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| If capitalism destroys the world that seems like a good
| reason to try an alternative, comrade!
| jack_h wrote:
| Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce
| resources which have alternative uses. Market economies,
| command economies, mercantile economies, and any other
| economic system must deal with these scarcities somehow.
| Even in the animal kingdom this must be contended with,
| albeit at a much lower level of abstraction. We deal with
| scarcity in a number of different ways, e.g. higher
| prices, waiting lines, by need, or some other metric or
| any combination thereof. Animals tend to deal with
| resource (food) scarcity through violence, abandonment,
| and a few other processes because not eating means death.
| That isn't to say cooperation doesn't happen, it
| absolutely does, but it is still constrained by resource
| scarcity.
|
| > But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live
| under an economic system that lets people sleep on the
| streets, and maybe more importantly
|
| All economic systems are a set of trade-offs and
| capitalism in general tends to outperform all other
| economic systems we know of. That isn't to say it's a
| perfect system, it isn't, but I've noticed people who
| profess your opinion implicitly assume the alternative is
| a utopia that which simply does not exist. We may find a
| better system in the future but it will still be
| constrained by the law of supply and demand, resource
| scarcity, and human nature and hence will have trade-
| offs.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| > This is why when we look at animals in nature, which
| don't have capitalism, they're all getting along, right?
| Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or
| battling for mates?
|
| Even if this was true, humans aren't subjective to their
| base instincts and can adapt and reinvent themselves.
|
| > Being competitive is human nature.
|
| I'm not and I'm human.
|
| > People will always compete for things
|
| Sometimes you want something, but you let others have it
| when they need it more than you. Otherwise if you always
| compete for things you are just a little kid.
|
| > This belief that we just need to come up with an
| alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying
| to do trade and then suddenly everyone's behaviors will
| change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where
| everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still
| see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted
| positions (even if they paid the same).
|
| This is a misunderstanding of what I said. If you read back
| I never said competition should be tossed out of the
| window, it's just that caring for the other as it is right
| now it's not a core value of the economic system. It's just
| best effort, if we can say that to the eventually
| charitable billionaire.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| I think one of the core failures of our current economic
| religion is that we can rely solely on anonymous
| transactions. But many transactions fail when everything is
| black boxes. We can't easily evaluate (1) if the thing we got
| is of good quality and (2) there wasn't any harmful side
| effects.
|
| Transactions need more trivially verifiable metadata. That
| could solve one of many issues.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Not only is it human, it's far more general than human.
|
| The world is not what you think it is. Social problems are
| almost never a result of improper social systems.
|
| The game you are playing by virtue of existing is just shit
| and no amount of "rules" you build on top of it will ever
| change that fact.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| It's not what I see. I go out and I see people helping each
| other, people having fun and taking care of the
| environment, social justice being discussed at the
| government level. I'm Brazilian though so I might be
| biased, but I think I prefer to be an idealist than a
| defeatist.
|
| If the world is like what you say it is, shouldn't you just
| drop dead? Thinking like this is like committing
| philosophical suicide anyways, if you can't imagine a
| better world that's worth fighting for, even if it's just
| in a thought experiment.
|
| This learned helplessness is by design, not by nature, so
| you don't question the status quo and keep working to make
| the elites richer without realising it's killing the world.
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| its funny how the tech community is so pro capitalism but
| also pro open source, which seem completely at odds.
| Aurornis wrote:
| In a free market system people can transact as they wish,
| including giving away something for free if they want.
|
| There is nothing at odds at all. If you don't see it, you
| might have a rather cartoonish, villainy view of a
| capitalism that gets promulgated by people who refuse to
| allow anything good or nice to be ascribed to capitalism.
|
| If you can't understand why capitalists can also like open
| source, have you considered that maybe it's your
| understanding of the system that is flawed, not theirs?
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I understand that capitalism is the doctrine that is
| based on economic growth and profit. This is invariably
| going to be at odds with the core tenets of open source,
| because given enough time ownership will have to give way
| to profit, hence the embrace, extend, extinguish and the
| various changes in licensing in major opensource
| projects.
|
| However that's not even the case because op wasn't
| criticizing capitalism as whole, just how absurd the
| ethos in HN is where we seem to defend contradictory
| values.
| code_for_monkey wrote:
| one of the core tenets of capitalism is the profit
| motive, its a central piece of it: the idea that people
| innovate and create and labor for the expected reward of
| a pile of money, but so much of tech actually bucks this
| idea between open source projects and public funded
| initiatives (maybe not as relevant for app based coding,
| but the space race was pretty important for technology
| overall.)
| eurekin wrote:
| Same here. I think it's one of those fields that feel polar
| opposite to, what they advertise to be.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| Funny, as someone who works in private sector, I always had the
| opposite view of academia:
|
| A zero-sum system based around a fixed pool of grants and
| positions that everyone competes for, and a terminal job ladder
| position where, once reached by successfully having competed
| for aforementioned grant $$, I become un-fireable.
|
| I would have to sleep with a gun under my pillow in such a
| world.
|
| There's already plenty of cheating in business, which is full
| of positive-sum win-win opportunities. I don't even want to
| imagine how badly I might behave in academia just in order to
| survive.
| physicsguy wrote:
| > I become un-fireable
|
| That's not been true in most countries for a long time
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Depends what you do. Yes you can get fired, but you have to
| do some really nasty things (embezzlement, sexual assault,
| etc) to get fired.
| storus wrote:
| Or when your department gets disbanded.
| labcomputer wrote:
| You are un-fireable for the usual reasons for which people
| outside academia worry about being fired.
|
| Layoffs aren't a thing in academia. Poor performance in the
| classroom isn't punishable. Failure to bring in grants
| isn't punishable. You can't be fired for disagreeing with
| your boss. You can (in most cases) publicly criticize the
| administration you work for, and advocate for many (yes,
| not all) controversial ideas.
| physicsguy wrote:
| This is totally not true in my country (UK). Staff are
| laid off. Tenure doesn't exist. Departments are not
| closed.
| aydyn wrote:
| But thats UK, a small backwater island
| jltsiren wrote:
| That's an American thing. By default, you can fire anyone
| at any time for no reason. Universities then
| overcompensate and give extensive protections for tenured
| faculty.
|
| In Europe, it's more common that a professor has roughly
| the same job security as a teenager in their first real
| job. There are some exceptions due to academic freedom,
| but they are mostly about the substance of the work
| rather than the performance in it. And other independent
| professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, and civil
| engineers, often have similar exceptions.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > Layoffs aren't a thing in academia
|
| May not "layoffs", but schools lose funding, get shut
| down, and fail to track sufficient students to justify
| continuing employment.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| Look up "rubber rooms". They sequester teachers and
| professors accused of sexual harassment of _children_ , and
| keep paying them, because they cannot be fired.
|
| Look up teachers' and academics' unions (e.g. AAUP), and
| the contracts they have in place to keep them from being
| fired.
|
| You have no idea what you're talking about.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Academia.
|
| Nowhere else do people fight so much and so dirty for so
| little.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Student politics, perhaps.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Why do people say "so little". How is an appointment to a
| high prestige job for life small stakes?
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| It's a slam on how petty many of the internal grudge
| matches are. But of course they don't seem at all petty
| to those engaged in them.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| At the state university in my smaller city, an actual
| professorship (not some adjunct) earns up towards
| $200k/year salary. Maybe pretty modest by FAANG
| standards, but for many people outside of tech that
| sounds like a lottery jackpot. So it's not just prestige,
| though that's on offer too.
| pohl wrote:
| Especially once you factor in the lower cost of living
| (relative to FAANG jobs) in that smaller city.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| Don't forget 3-4 months off in the summer too.
| Fomite wrote:
| Professors don't get the summer off. If you have a heavy
| teaching load, summers are your one window to get
| research work done. If you don't, like me, the difference
| between the summer and the rest of the year is its easier
| to find parking.
| davidgay wrote:
| The quote is referring to fights between people who
| already have tenure.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| in many countries the salaries are unbelievably low by US
| standards, but they generally do come with healthcare,
| benefits and a pension.
| mountainb wrote:
| There's a more transparent and straightforward pathway to
| a lifetime appointment as a federal judge (which actually
| pays OK and has many social perks) than there is to a
| tenured professorship in most fields. Judges have
| Solomon-like-life-and-death power, and the lawyers who
| argue before them (often successful, high-status people
| in their own right) are professionally obligated to suck
| up.
|
| By comparison almost all professorships are like becoming
| the most important hobo on a given street corner.
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| This is a really sharp take IMO.
|
| In all fairness though, it's very difficult to become a
| judge. At least in my country, you have to have been both
| a defense lawyer and a prosecutor in order to become a
| judge. It takes many years of experience that is not
| easily gained.
| wisty wrote:
| Yeah, it's mostly either students or academia who admire
| their hobo kings.
|
| It's kind of like a sport like tennis. If you're in the
| system, you think that the world number 150 tennis player
| is amazing, but they barely make enough to afford travel
| to the matches.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| maybe those who fight for it have better information.
|
| for example they realize that once they achieve tenure, the
| amount of work truly required to retain the for-life
| annuity is risibly low so they can go on to do just about
| whatever else they want or "consult" for extra dollars as
| needed.
| Fomite wrote:
| My workload has only steadily increased once I got
| tenure. The nature of the work changed, but the "Kick
| back, relax and enjoy your zero effort forever job" is a
| fantasy of people who don't actually know what they're
| talking about.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| i've personally known a number of tenured professors
| who've systematically shirked all responsibility after
| their tenure event. they've been willing to live as semi-
| pariahs within their peer group though.
|
| even when required to teach they simply repeat classes
| they've taught many times before making no effort to
| optimize for reviews.
|
| i don't doubt your experience but i wonder how much it
| has to do with not wanting to endure your colleagues' and
| departments's disapproval vs actual threat to employment.
|
| and fwiw, i'm not saying it _has_ to be this way just
| that it _can_ be this way due to the structure of the
| system. similarly there are many corporate situations in
| which one can scrape by for extended periods of time, but
| there is rarely a "for life" clause. even so, it hasn't
| prevented the university system from helping to catalyze
| all the amazing discoveries we all benefit from in
| society every day.
| ocschwar wrote:
| From 1945 to about 2000, academia in the western world was
| slowly growing. That made the pool of positions not-quite-
| zero-sum, and way too many people went into it expecting a
| much more genial environment.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| If the pool grows at the same rate as the academics who
| need money from the pool, it's zero-sum. If the pool were
| ever to grow more slowly, then it's a negative-sum game.
| That's when all hell breaks loose -- by many accounts, this
| is unfolding now.
|
| In other words, the academics do not grow the pool through
| their own actions, as in private business. They are forever
| reliant on the kindness of strangers.
| whatshisface wrote:
| That's not quite right. Academics do grow the pool
| through public outreach and demonstrating value to
| companies which lobby the government to fund them, but
| since there is usually one big pool (such as the NSF
| budget), it is impossible for people to grow their own
| pool directly. It's closer to working at a large company,
| where your impact on earnings is next to nonexistent and
| your career is determined by the beliefs of the people
| around you about your impacts on them.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| Those whose parents stressed nothing but academics hit a
| dead end if the parents can't keep paying the kid to get
| high grades.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > Its odd how I viewed academia as a beautiful place where
| people were judged by merit not by politics.
|
| If there's more than one human, you have politics.
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| One thing that really needs to be unbundled is assessments for
| credentials, teaching, and research. As it is now you want to
| be assessed for credentials at a top institution, you have to
| pay to take classes and learn at that institution. Which often
| leaves you in a class being "taught" by a researcher who's
| uninterested in teaching and unresponsive, and who hands off
| the actual job of teaching to an inexperienced graduate student
| making minimum wage. And for this privilege, you're charged a
| massive amount of money.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Part of the problem is many academic institutions, even
| prestigious ones, simply don't prioritize teaching. They
| don't even really prioritize challenging education. They
| prioritize prestige and opportunity hoarding. The hardest
| part about many of these schools is _getting in_. Once you
| 're in, then grade inflation and the desire for the
| institution to retain it's prestige brand means the classes
| aren't particularly hard --- graduating is particularly easy
| and most students actually barely put in effort. Getting in
| is the golden ticket more than graduating.
|
| One solution, is for an institution to prioritize
| accessibility (easier to get in) but also prioritize
| difficulty (actually hard to graduate). This would reorient
| incentives around challenging education that pushes students
| to excel rather than coast after striving just to get in.
| Unfortunately, the priorities are the exact opposite today.
| nick486 wrote:
| I had the same view until I went to do a small internship in a
| research lab. There, I realized that my research group's boss
| was spending most of his time submitting grant requests, that
| in my view distilled to 'Give use money and we will find X'.
| Which was absolutely antithetical to what I thought research
| was like(wait, aren't we supposed to not know what we will find
| ?). Then came the publishing part where you get reviews saying
| your paper isn't good enough because it didn't cite
| ${completely not relevant to the topic} paper (which sort of
| narrows down who the "anonymous reviewer" was). Then there's
| the quasi-feudal approach of putting the lab head in the
| authors. I mean, come on, I'm not sure the guy even knows the
| paper exists...
|
| It just wasn't my thing.
| Fomite wrote:
| Two notes:
|
| - Not all labs run this way. Mine doesn't.
|
| - Very few successful grants, in my experience, are "Give
| money and we'll find X". Rather, they tend to be "We're
| reasonably sure X is over here for $reasons, but we'd need
| money to actually confirm that."
| nick486 wrote:
| I'm open to the idea that i somehow caught an outlier. then
| again, its a lab integrated to the general eu funding
| schemes, so it can't be that much of an outlier.
|
| your summary of a grant request doesn't really sound all
| that different from mine tbh, just more charitable. Its
| just that i naively came in with the expectation that it
| would be something like "we need X$ to explore domain $Y"
| "sure. here you go", then 2 years later "we found x y and
| z, see $papers, now we'd like $x2 to explore $y2". and back
| to square 1/2.
|
| a full broadcast over all available and unavailable
| channels of "please, master grant officer, just a few coins
| to explore $X a bit further, we'll very certainly find $Y",
| i was not ready for.
|
| Im overdoing the tone a bit to highlight that it had to be
| tuned to the grant officer, way more than it had to be
| tuned to reality. to promise to find whatever was popular
| in the field at the time. regardless of the practical facts
| of the field. because the people evaluating the proposal
| didnt know shit about the field.
|
| so when you were in the trench every day, it just sounded
| like absolute parody of what we were actually doing,
| explained to a kindergartener.
|
| i realize this comes off as a knock on my boss way more
| than I'd like. i absolutely don't mean to. he did what had
| to be done, so that his team can keep working, within the
| system he had to work with to move our field forward. and
| the money we got was well spent, no doubt here.
|
| but my view was : if I work my ass off for 10 years, I can
| be this guy. Do I want this? and the answer was a
| resounding, definitive "hell no".
|
| all the paper publishing shenanigans were just extra
| irritants that sealed my decision.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > Then there's the quasi-feudal approach of putting the lab
| head in the authors
|
| Changes from field to field but yes, very common.
|
| And many times, like you wrote, they have no idea about what
| was even done.
|
| Then you have the gigantic collaborations, where everyone
| gets a citation and it counts as much as a paper with one or
| two authors.
|
| And of course, everyone will cite it because there's no real
| alternative.
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculu...
|
| Academia/Science has always been quarrelsome.
| gmd63 wrote:
| Not all humans are practitioners of the terminal gamesmanship
| that is infecting our economy and government. It's about
| electing, promoting, and buying from the right people, and
| having the courage to properly punish those who have betrayed
| the good faith that powers successful societies.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Academia these days is a lot like industry, but with worse pay,
| better schedule, and low consequences/verification if the data
| that is published is "wrong", intentionally or unintentionally.
| moregrist wrote:
| The schedule is not better. My quality of life increased
| dramatically when I left academia and realized that I had
| time for things like hobbies.
|
| Even in startups, there's a tacit understanding that you're
| exchanging your time for money and that this exchange has
| limits. This is simply not true in academics where the need
| to publish to keep funding (and often your job) is incredibly
| intense.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| I was planning on going into academia in the early aughts and
| this was also around the time that there was a groundswell to
| take away tenure from professors. "They" wanted to set out a
| quota for how many times you needed to have your research
| published on a yearly basis to show you were still doing your
| job.
|
| I opted out when all three of my advisors during my first year
| of graduate work told to get out and that the whole field of
| academia was not the romantic vision I had aspired to be. It
| was quickly becoming toxic. One of my advisors had stopped
| taking money from universities, and was leaving to go work for
| a large pharmaceutical company doing research out in Siberian
| Russia. Another was quietly working on a degree in statistics
| to go work for the government.
|
| These were people who I admired and fashioned myself after.
| It's quite a shock when people you respect suddenly warn you
| academia is not where you want to be. I was lucky, the other
| two guys I was in grad school with went ahead anyways. Years
| later, I found out neither lasted more than a few years for
| exactly what you described and what I was warned of.
| neilv wrote:
| I viewed academia as altruistic and relatively enlightened. And
| I've certainly met many who live up to that.
|
| I've also occasionally heard of entire academic departments who
| should be in jail, for being pieces of crud.
|
| Then there's what I'm guessing is the bulk of academia:
| care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try
| to do their jobs competently, look out for their students,
| maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate
| within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of,
| without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be.
|
| That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better
| than the tech industry overall.
| daymanstep wrote:
| How is it better than the tech industry?
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Well, the amount of money being wasted is generally
| smaller, and often the results are not harming hundreds of
| millions of people around the world. (But it depends on the
| field.)
| timkam wrote:
| > That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot
| better than the tech industry overall.
|
| I regularly see both worlds. What I find more troubling in
| academia is that it is difficult to openly talk about how
| flawed the system is, that people make mistakes, that papers
| have mistakes (the own ones as well as others'). We know all
| software has bugs; but the code that a PhD student hacks
| together over night is assumed to be flawless (the more
| senior people rarely even glance at it), otherwise the paper
| is all wrong, and papers are set in stone... So I genuinely
| struggle with the lack of a proper failure culture in
| academia, as it is designed as a system that is fundamentally
| geared against openly discussing failure.
| neilv wrote:
| I suspect there's many reasons for the field/department
| cultures.
|
| One of them, which was surprising to me (which I first
| heard from a friend in a hard STEM field), was what happens
| when student A's thesis result is found to be wrong due to
| flawed experiment... but only after student B is well into
| their own dissertation building upon A's result.
| Reportedly, everyone involved (A, B, their PI, the
| department, the university) has incentive to keep quiet
| about student A's bad result. B has an academic career to
| move forward, within funding and timeframes, and everyone
| else cares about reputation and money. And there is only
| downside for bystanders to complain, especially if it's
| other students especially vulnerable to
| retaliation/disfavor.
|
| Another one I've seen, which is less surprising, is when
| there seems to be a culture of alliance or truce among
| faculty. So, if someone is misbehaving, or makes a mistake,
| it's understood that no one is going to call them out or
| interfere, and no one wants to even know about it more than
| they have to. In general, no selfish benefit can come from
| that, but a whole lot of negative feedback can. Mind your
| own business, glass houses, etc.
| busyant wrote:
| > care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent,
| try to do their jobs competently, look out for their
| students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and
| operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy
| of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be.
| That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better
| than the tech industry overall.
|
| That's pretty much my experience from 20+ years ago.
|
| One thing that I didn't appreciate when I left the ivory
| tower was the extent of the replication "crisis."
|
| If other academics can't replicate your work in some esoteric
| corner of bio research, it's no big deal--some people get
| burned wasting time, but the research just atrophies in the
| end.
|
| But in the biotech / pharma industry, we in-licensed a lot of
| un-replicatable garbage from academia.
|
| And replication was important to us because we actually had
| to make a drug that was effective (which loosely translates
| to ... "clinicians must be able to replicate your drug's
| efficacy.").*
|
| * I'm not sure how true this is anymore, given politicization
| of regulatory bodies, but it was an eye-opener to me years
| ago.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| Yeah, I would say that my time in academia disillusioned me
| somewhat, but not to the level that some people here are
| expressing. I never got the sense that people were falsifying
| data, directly (but covertly) backstabbing one another, or
| anything really awful like that.
|
| But there are plenty of disheartening things that don't rise
| to that level of actual malfeasance. People get so
| comfortable in their tenured positions that they can lose
| touch with reality (e.g., the reality of how difficult their
| grad students' lives are). Even if they don't engage in
| actual research misconduct, there's a tendency for people to
| put their thumb on the scale in various ways (often, I think,
| without being aware of it), many of them connected to a sort
| of confirmation bias, in terms of who they think is a "good
| fit" for a job, what kind of work they want to support, etc.
| In my experience they are at best dismissive and at worst
| offended by the idea that maybe the current
| financial/employment model of higher education isn't the best
| (e.g., that maybe you shouldn't have a two-tiered system of
| tenure-track and non-ladder faculty with wildly differing
| payscales, but rather should just have a larger number of
| people doing varying amounts of teaching and research for
| varying but roughly comparable levels of pay).
|
| I felt like virtually everyone I met was in some sense
| committed to the truth, but often they were committed to
| their own view of the truth, which was usually a defensible
| and reasonable view but not the only view, and not as clearly
| distinct from other reasonable views as they felt it was. And
| they varied considerably in how much they felt it was
| acceptable or necessary to engage in minor shenanigans in
| order to keep moving forward (e.g., to what extent they'd
| compromise their actual beliefs in order to placate journal
| editors and get something published).
|
| Also, there is often something endearing about how academics
| can be genuinely emotionally invested, sometimes to the point
| of rage or ecstasy, in matters so obscure that the average
| person wouldn't give them a second thought. It's sort of like
| finding someone who's a fan of some TV show that ran for 12
| episodes in 1983 and is adorably gushy about it. Even the
| people I met who were quite cognizant of making strategic
| career moves and other such practical stuff still had a lot
| of this geeky obsession about them.
|
| A lot of this may vary from one field to another. But on the
| whole there are many worse people in the world than
| academics.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| As an US undergrad decades ago, at a major (non-elite)
| research school, I was already discovering these criticisms
| of the current academic system, in action, way back then. So
| I don't think we can blame much of any 'fraud' increase going
| on today on that system. Today, _perception of fraud_ may be
| on the increase.
|
| (I started to become alert to what that program was really
| about when I took one of the classes -critical- to my major.
| It involved a lot of heavy math, and was being taught by a TA
| with a -very poor- command of the English language. When I
| complained, my Princeton-grad advisor's reply was 'this
| course is to separate the men from the boys'. Yeah, thanks
| pal.
|
| So far as I know, he published _very few_ cited papers.)
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| It seems to me that the "elephant in the room" no one has
| mentioned yet w.r.t. academia is the model of modern academic
| administration, where universities are run like cruise ships
| (look at the perks kids are paying for these days!) with hedge
| funds attached, and have no "skin in the game" with regard to
| the incredibly high financial risks that students take when
| they pay for tuition.
|
| If: (a) students paid 1/10 of what they pay today[0], (b) all
| the on-campus expensive perks were ended (new buildings sold,
| etc.) and the administration headcount dropped to 1 per every
| 50 students, (c) tuition went _directly_ to professors,
| research, and basic groundskeeping, (d) some kind of financial
| arrangement were put in place so universities had skin in the
| game with regard to the success of their graduates[0]
|
| then I'm positive the academic system would become far more
| effective at educating students and preparing them for life,
| and there would be a positive trickle-down effect to scientific
| research and the politics there.
|
| [0] State-funded secondary education in European countries
| costs _far_ less than university education in the US. There 's
| a reason for that - unlike students with easy access to debt,
| the government won't pay such exorbitant fees.
|
| [1] A _very_ rough stab at an idea for making universities have
| skin in the game: make tuition for degrees conferred refundable
| by some percentage (50%?) if more than a certain fraction
| (10%?) of graduates with B- or higher GPA in their majors are
| collectively unable to find a job in their field within 2 years
| of graduation. If a university needed to withhold that
| guarantee for some majors, that would be a _very_ helpful
| signal for prospective students.
|
| But the point isn't the specifics, it's that just the
| _presence_ of such a lever (and its absence at some
| universities or majors) would be a powerful signal to
| prospective students, better align the university 's
| incentives, and cause a lot of necessary changes.
| Fomite wrote:
| Most universities do not have "hedge fund" class endowments.
|
| It should also be noted that there are reasons tuition is the
| way it is. State allocations for higher ed were slashed in
| 2008, and didn't really get put back even when the economy
| was doing well. Similarly, federal research dollars (which
| fund the vast bulk of research, not tuition) has been pretty
| flat for decades (the amount of a non-modular NIH R01, for
| example, hasn't changed since the Clinton administration).
|
| Tuition is the only lever left to most institutions.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > Tuition is the only lever left to most institutions.
|
| No, cutting costs (especially slashing the administration
| and facility budget) is another lever that few institutions
| use. The other really important levers are professor hiring
| and pay, and admissions standards.
|
| Build a reputation for hiring a great faculty, paying them
| well, keeping a minimal administration, and cultivating a
| student body that is hungry to learn, and the right people
| will come. Everything else is mostly fluff with regard to a
| quality education.
| epolanski wrote:
| Former solar researcher here, had the same experience.
|
| I'll summarize it like this:
|
| - join one of the most prestigious laboratories for my master's
| thesis in the world
|
| - be assigned work based on a paper published in the same lab
| by a previous researcher
|
| - can't replicate the results for s*t for months, put in insane
| overtime hours getting ridiculously good at all the processes,
| still nothing
|
| - randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab
| (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which
| quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by
| the system in the publication is literally impossible, but by
| raising the voltage you can easily fake out the amount of
| electricity generated by the system. Nobody really caught it
| before because you need some very intimate experience with
| those systems, and it's just one random (albeit important)
| point.
|
| - ask why this happens
|
| - she explains that only high impact numbers get citations,
| only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia
| pyramid
|
| - she explains that only professors that run labs with a huge
| number of citations can find good funding
|
| - only good funding can allow you to get the material,
| equipment and countless number of bodies (phds) to run as many
| experiments as possible and thus grow your position in the
| scientific world
|
| Essentially there's way too many incentives to cheat and ignore
| the cheating for all the people involved.
|
| And due to the fact that as soon as you enter a niche (and
| literally everything is a niche in science) everybody knows
| each other toxic things happen all around.
|
| I wanted to be a researcher, but having wasted ultimately 7
| months of my life trying to get numbers that were impossible to
| get, and having understood it was ALL about money (no funds ->
| no researchers/equipment -> papers -> citations -> funds) and
| politics I called it quits.
|
| I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and
| their education ministries making a joined effort to have
| scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly
| reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't
| see other ways.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| And this encourages the people with integrity to quit.
| epolanski wrote:
| I wouldn't say they all quit, but they ultimately have to
| settle in less prestigious and less funded
| labs/universities.
|
| I've met countless great scientists in Italy which were
| ultimately wasted as professors and achieved little as
| scientists.
|
| I'm not saying that teaching isn't important, but it's a
| skill completely unrelated to being a good scientist,
| there's no overlap at all.
| mountainb wrote:
| There are so many other ways to make money that don't
| involve crime. And there are even many crimes that make
| more money that are far less harmful to society.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I don't know how to fix it other than several governments
| and their education ministries making a joined effort to have
| scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly
| reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't
| see other ways.
|
| This is just aggravating the problem. Science is mostly fraud
| because it's mostly done on behalf of a funder who doesn't
| want it. It's easier to write a paper describing the results
| you'd like to get than to actually get those results. And the
| funding agency is indifferent between those two things. So
| mostly you just get the papers.
| epolanski wrote:
| How would that be aggravating the problem?
|
| The current system has essentially no requirement of
| reproducibility.
|
| Having a paper that only allows reproducible experiments
| (where there's funding for random labs to reproduce
| results) may be difficult, or an utopia, or whatever, but
| not aggravating for sure.
| julienb_sea wrote:
| This is likely a generalized problem with basic science. In
| applied science you need to be very careful about fraud
| because ultimately the application of research findings will
| end up in customers hands who can and will pursue legal
| action if the original claims turn out to be false.
| foxglacier wrote:
| Great story and it shows what everybody knows but won't say -
| normal academics are the frauds. Not just mysterious
| strangers in foreign countries, paper mills, etc. but normal
| medium or high status academics in prestigious universities
| in western countries doing the fraud themselves.
|
| You can say it's not their fault - they're forced into it
| because it's the only way to succeed. But it's still their
| fault. I remember a case of a politician in China being
| arrested for corruption and he said that the only way to
| reach his position was with corruption. Yea he was probably
| right but he was still corrupt.
| chrisBob wrote:
| One thing that helps to counter this somewhat is that if your
| paper is proven to be wrong, the journal can force a
| retraction. A retraction isn't exactly career ending, but it
| is a huge deal and will have an impact on future jobs and
| funding.
| msteffen wrote:
| > randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab
| (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which
| quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by
| the system in the publication is literally impossible
|
| I'm interested in the apparent contradiction between the
| "tens of thousands of citations" credential for your
| evidently competent labmate who caught the fraud, and the
| "only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get
| you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid" indictment
| of the evidently mediocre fraudster.
|
| How much of the science that happens do you think is due to
| people like your labmate, who seems to have earned her
| citations organically with talent, and how much is due to the
| fraud? Are most citations still going to talented people?
|
| My parents were both academics who built their careers in the
| 70s and 80s. I don't know that they had a perspective on
| fraud per se, but they did say that science used to be
| totally different--lots of money going into a smaller
| research community. But because each PI trains many PhDs, the
| research community has grown unsustainably and now funding is
| highly competitive. For the system to be sustainable, the
| vast majority of PhDs need to leave science, and there need
| to better exits for those people (or else there need to be
| many fewer PhD candidates and researchers need to stop
| relying on PhD candidates for labor). I wonder if the fraud
| is a consequence of this problem.
| zevon wrote:
| Another ex-researcher here. Similar experience. I went in with
| hopes of a lot of rationality and intense cooperation between
| people who would be there mostly for a shared curiosity. Fast
| forward years and... Good grief - so, so many people publicly
| being shouted down, shamed, bullied, insulted. So many serious
| abuses of power - up to sexual and bodily - essentially without
| consequences for the abusers (often with way more negative
| consequences for the victims if they complained). So many
| tears, so many ends to academic careers of people who were
| really smart and really cared - in quite a few cases
| accompanied by burn-outs and other long-term health
| consequences. So much tax money down the drain with
| questionable accounting up to outright lies. So, so many
| utterly absurd intrigues and wars between mini-kingdoms based
| on nothing but the feelings of the biggest, loudest and most
| vicious narcissists. So many publications of questionable
| methodology that are sliced as thinly as they possibly can be
| and are hyper-targeted towards all-important journals or
| conferences. And so much more soul-destroying nonsense.
|
| I'm still mostly in academia but nowadays, I focus on teaching
| and infrastructure. Especially with teaching, I feel that I can
| make more of a long-term impact that I ever could as a
| researcher - not least because I have way more freedom for
| discussions and interesting projects with students (I still
| have to deal with way more hostile, petty and sometimes
| outright dangerous BS than I feel comfortable with - but it's
| better than in the even-higher-pressure parts of the system).
| newsclues wrote:
| Lots of industries these days seem to be rife with fraud and
| corruption.
|
| In Canada the education system was abused as a immigration path,
| in part because the schools were greedy and corrupt.
| avoutos wrote:
| Yeah, it's there in every industry, though it seems more
| prevalent in those that are heavily reliant on taxpayer money.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Maybe it seems relevant because those are the ones getting
| caught?
|
| Or maybe the corporate owned news doesn't like to publish
| corporate corruption?
| FredPret wrote:
| This only makes sense if the corruption is in the same corp
| that's doing the reporting.
|
| Corporations have an incentive to undercut one another and
| compete. They'll only band together when something affects
| them all at the same time, which is basically only economy-
| wide events.
| newsclues wrote:
| Taxpayers have the most money, and aren't as interested in
| protecting the money, unlike people that have ownership.
|
| If your goal is to extract a percentage, find the biggest
| cashflow to maximize profits.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| It's just a lot harder to hide things nowadays.
|
| It has probably been like this for centuries.
| samrus wrote:
| I dont know if this is just rose tinted glasses, but i feel
| like the west used to be a higher trust society
| neonnoodle wrote:
| Go read about the rates of simony in early modern Europe.
| lelanthran wrote:
| It's gonna get worse as LLMs enable "scientists" to publish with
| a higher frequency and less work.
| agentultra wrote:
| How are they generating a profit?
|
| The article hints that medical residents are a large source and
| it could be effects like competition and visas... does that
| account for the rate of growth?
|
| Are these unscrupulous editors making "payola" or something?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, all I could gather from the article is that published-
| paper probably translates into padding out your resume. I don't
| doubt this could translate to one's likelihood of landing a
| prestigious job, a better salary, hiring bonus, etc.
| Fomite wrote:
| There are countries where academic jobs have very firm
| "Publish X papers for promotion" thresholds, but where the
| venue for the paper doesn't really matter. This is one of the
| major markets for paper mills.
| fHr wrote:
| Look what happens in biotech constantly they prop up studies
| and results in papers and then they hedge with buying puts as
| they know it's all bs and they have raised enough exit
| liquidity to make huge profits on the drop.
| fabian2k wrote:
| This is more concerning than the usual paper mills as the crap
| papers are published in otherwise legitimate journals. The pure
| paper mills are less destructive as people are much less likely
| to read and use those papers. But if you have ever growing
| numbers of crap papers mixed in regular journals that will be a
| problem.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Careerism and obsession with "status", especially when tied to
| superficial things like publication count.
|
| The loftier aims that academia is supposed to enable are
| crushed by lesser appetites.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| If a journal is publishing "crap" then the term "otherwise
| legitimate" isn't helpful. The journal becomes illegitimate
| because you cannot trust what it has published any longer.
|
| Unless there's some way to discriminate between the failed and
| successful review processes it has failed in its purpose.
| aaa_aaa wrote:
| Nobody cares. State pays the salaries, BS conferences, BS
| journals, BS patents. Everybody is happy, no one can be fired. As
| long as stats look good (R&D per capita, publication, science
| indexes etc. ) gravy train will move on.
| avoutos wrote:
| And even minus the BS, researchers seem more comfortable with
| making minor incremental improvements in established science
| rather than taking risks.
| intended wrote:
| People care. The state isn't the only source of funds, and
| researchers are in it to do research. PHDs make little money,
| and getting into academia is not generally considered a good
| career path.
|
| The only people who can't get fired are the few people with
| tenure. Most people struggle to get that.
|
| Perhaps we just need institutions set up to do replication of
| papers?
| quantummagic wrote:
| This really undermines the "trust the science" narrative. It has
| become much more about cushy white collar jobs, than the
| brightest minds being laser focused on understanding and
| bettering mankind.
| hardanonymity wrote:
| It's complicated. There is a whole lot of corruption and fraud
| in science. But this kind of fraud doesn't end up leading to
| dominating narratives. The fraud remains part of the 99% of
| science that is invisible to the general population and that is
| precisely why the fraud isn't so easily uncovered in the first
| place.
| sickofparadox wrote:
| What percentage of papers even reproduce these days? Is it
| more than 50%?
| ktallett wrote:
| The bigger issue is what percentage of papers contain
| enough details to even attempt to reproduce.
| gus_massa wrote:
| It depends a lot on the area. I'd not be so pessimistic.
| The problem is how many of the papers that reach newspapers
| are reproducible? I guess less than the average. And also
| strange results that are misinterpreted to get a amazing
| but wrong layman explanation.
| Fomite wrote:
| Everyone wants reproduction, nobody wants to fund
| reproduction studies.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| According to the article, bad papers are getting criticized and
| retracted. It appears "science" is robust enough to work as
| intended, even with some bad actors involved.
| bdisl wrote:
| All of them? That worked well for Alzheimer research, didn't
| it
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Obviously not all of them. And obviously there is
| corruption and mistakes with anything involving humans.
| What's so funny is that when people make criticisms like
| this, they always leave out the alternative. What's the
| alternative? Trusting mostly uneducated influencers and
| quacks who do even less research and don't even attempt
| peer review?
| bdisl wrote:
| The alternative is not trusting the science or the
| quacks.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| Most people cannot tell those apart...
| bdisl wrote:
| And those who are not supposed to be quacks will commit
| fraud anyway. Which is why you shouldn't trust anyone.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Good idea, trust no one, get nothing.
|
| Why not move back into a cave and stab your own meat with
| a sharpened stick next.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I'm sure if, god forbid, you were diagnosed with a
| curable cancer you wouldn't go "trust the science" and go
| get treatment. I'm really sure you would do that.
| searine wrote:
| Except it did? Fraud was identified. Science moved forward.
| Literally working as intended.
| missedthecue wrote:
| There is evidence to suggest that corrections and retractions
| do not even effect citations.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > This really undermines the "trust the science" narrative.
|
| Not really, but it does mean you shouldn't trust individual
| papers blindly.
|
| Anyone who follows research already knows this. Individual
| papers appear all the time with remarkable findings which seem
| revolutionary, but then nobody can replicate or commercialize
| it.
|
| Some communities eat these isolated results up, like supplement
| and health podcasters (Rhonda Patrick, Huberman). They should
| know better than to take some random mouse study at face value,
| but it's too good of a story to pass up.
|
| In medicine and the industry, anyone experienced knows not to
| get excited about singular results unless it's from a trusted
| source or until it's replicated.
| jart wrote:
| The more this kind of thing happens, the more it's going to
| blow back on you. The hacks, ideologues, and frauds have done
| a lot to destroy trust in science and the image of science.
| When the public backlash comes, muggles aren't going to be
| able to tell the difference between someone like you and the
| hucksters you've trained yourself to ignore. They are
| ruthless, and nothing of science will remain unless you are
| as ruthless, to the people who abuse your good name.
| smeeger wrote:
| i think what people are talking about is that infomercial-
| level quackery and double-think and dishonesty has now
| breached the levy into mainstream science. now, instead of
| seeing papers claiming breakthroughs you will also see papers
| that are fraudulent but claim to prove or reinforce a
| hypothesis or model that everyone already agrees is true.
| obviously most fraudulent papers are like this because the
| point of fraudulent papers is to avoid detection and create
| an appearance of legitimacy. now we have a billions dollar
| drug for alzheimers that literally does nothing. thats what
| people are talking about. but you refuse to acknowledge it
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| The brightest minds are often paid to optimize ad revenue and
| move money around.
| Fomite wrote:
| I have been thinking through all of these comments that it's
| somewhat rich that a very SV heavy site is so critical of
| smart, driven people not applying themselves to important
| problems.
| Levitz wrote:
| "Trust the science" will work as long as science works, which
| even to this day is pretty nicely, this practice is given a bad
| name by the "Trust the science*" crowd, which activity is based
| on having a position then attempting to legitimize it by
| quoting the abstract of a paper they have never read,
| prioritizing pushing ideas above factual matters.
|
| This in turn allows certain people in institutions to trade
| legitimacy for agenda pushing, creating the current crisis of
| institutional trust, which the legitimate "Trust the science"
| crowd suffers from.
|
| Science itself is all about testable hypotheses and facts. If
| we can't rely on it, chances are we are doing something wrong
| and science itself is perfectly fine.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Maybe it's a naive outlook but maybe "science" can continue
| to work... with, without, or despite all the politics, waste,
| cruft, and scaffolding that academia erects all around it.
| bananalychee wrote:
| The incentive structure in academia exacerbates that by
| encouraging authors to hype up their findings and obfuscate
| any deficiency in their models. Withholding information and
| making results difficult to reproduce is a symptom of that,
| as are academic jargon disconnected from terminology used in
| the private sector, and obtuse presentation. Those practices
| make it easier for bad data, bad methodologies, and
| misrepresentations of findings to slip past reviewers and
| readers and harder for other researchers to dispute, and
| undermine the scientific process itself as we get flooded
| with junk.
| resource_waste wrote:
| If the findings are replicated, thats fine, you can begin to
| trust.
|
| But the findings are often not replicated.
| dimal wrote:
| "Trust the science" is a terrible slogan. It almost turns
| science into a religion. Most people that use it seem to think
| that science is whatever a scientist says. We should be saying
| "Trust the scientific method".
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I haven't seen the "trust the science" narrative since covid
| honestly.
|
| Junk science has been around since, well, even before we coined
| the word science really. In some ways I think the situation has
| improved. People seem far more aware of misconduct, and willing
| to make retractions than they used to.
| Fomite wrote:
| Compared to my colleagues who went into industry, I wouldn't
| describe academic jobs as "cushy".
| lazystar wrote:
| ya know... i wonder if this is how a religion is formed. at the
| start, science was about identifying and explaining the things
| that were true, observable, and agreed upon by all. anyone who
| was present at the birth of an event that caused a religion would
| have had that same mentality. over time, generations pass and the
| concept that held the group together has shifted - it now
| attempts to explain new concepts, and the scientists/priests that
| make up the governing body decide tge truth based on opinion,
| rather than fact.
|
| the point is, we're on a dangerous path. if left unchecked, the
| term scientist will eventually have the same meaning as the word
| priest.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| Not at all. Research that appears useful is going to be picked
| up by others, and if it's really a fraud it will be exposed
| eventually.
|
| That is the check you are looking for and indeed how we
| realized there's some fraud and reproducibility issues, btw.
| I'll be waiting for the day actual religions gets the same
| level of scrutiny.
| shazbotter wrote:
| Hasn't scientific fraud always been an industry and we rely on
| signal to noise ratios to be good enough to get by?
|
| Alternatively, in times of high wealth inequality are we putting
| a higher burden on our academics to survive, and forcing them to
| do more and more, thereby increasing the likelihood they will
| turn to cheating to survive?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The whole "publish or perish" paradigm has commodified
| scientific research. My theory is that the pre-WWI paradigm of
| academia being mainly for rich kids who could afford to devote
| their life to science did not scale, but it also had fewer
| issues with "making stuff up" since scientists were in it for
| the love of the game rather than making a living. I don't think
| we should go back to that model, but the MBA-inspired approach
| of treating "scientist" as a fungible role in a system and
| trying to apply metrics like citations to measure "impact" is
| doomed to fail in my opinion.
| d0odk wrote:
| I directionally agree with you. But there are plenty of
| examples of scientists being extremely petty, political or
| egotistical further back in history. Newton and Leibniz.
| Gauss withholding publication of non-Euclidean geometry
| presumably due to fear of Kant.
|
| I wonder if there is any empirical analysis of what has
| historically funded/supported scientific work (private
| funding vs. academic systems).
|
| I also wonder whether a lone genius in it for the "love of
| the game" could make much progress in cutting edge science
| nowadays, given the cost of experiments and the
| specialization of fields.
|
| Really interesting food for thought.
| Hilift wrote:
| A cool new indicator is "tortured phrases". These are turning
| out to be a gold mine for detecting fraudulent papers.
|
| "In December 2023, a PubPeer user commented on 13 tortured
| phrases the Problematic Paper Screener had flagged in the
| article, such as the use of "Parkinson's illness," "Parkinson's
| infection," and "Parkinson's sickness" rather than Parkinson's
| disease.
|
| ""These typically result from an attempt to avoid plagiarism
| detection using a paraphrasing software," the commenter wrote
| about the phases. "How come these incorrect wordings survived
| proofreading by the coauthors, editors, referees, copy editors,
| and typesetters?""
|
| https://retractionwatch.com/2024/11/11/all-the-red-flags-sci...
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| We live in the age of grifting. Too much winner takes all
| incentives in the society, I suppose.
| brbcompiling wrote:
| So academic politics is like Game of Thrones... but with
| footnotes?
| booleandilemma wrote:
| It's all about what we measure for, right? Publish or perish is
| like telling programmers they need to output 1,000 lines of code
| per week. What do you think will happen?
| gtmitchell wrote:
| Unsurprising. It's the natural byproduct of overproduction of
| scientists, brutally competitive job markets, and the
| shortsighted decisions to use publications as the primary metric
| for hiring and promotion decisions.
|
| Anyone who is alarmed by this hasn't been paying attention to the
| perverse incentives scientists have been facing for decades.
| mos87 wrote:
| Wonder why's that...
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10894160.2025.24...
| nialse wrote:
| Well, maybe we should not trust authors that make vauge
| unsubstantiated claims?
|
| The ingress: "Some suggest that the ease of communication
| provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created
| the conditions for the emergence of entities..."
|
| The article: _nothing_
|
| The ingress overreaches, oversimplifies and mixes hypotheses with
| results. Is this a test?
|
| EDIT: Refers to the paper referenced by the article.
| pks016 wrote:
| Another problem: Publishing in good journals is for the rich.
| Open science is a paradox. They require such huge amount of money
| to publish.
|
| My next manuscript is still going to Plos One ( :(given the
| reputation) bc it's free to publish. It's such a messed up system
| that prevents me from even trying to publish in good journals.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| Government subsidies enable fraud and largess. Individuals and
| organizations are inherently less careful and results-oriented
| with Other People's Money. That is starting to be rectified, for
| better or worse.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| This logic applies equally to non-government investment.
| resource_waste wrote:
| I am so happy I learned about Philosophical Pragmatism. If its
| useful use it, if its not useful don't use it.
|
| Replicated studies can likely be replicated under the same
| conditions.
|
| N=1 means you might be able to believe it, but if the results
| contradict reality, toss it out.
|
| I no longer feel like I need to 'trust science'. No need to
| trust. Use it if its useful, don't if its not.
|
| This has eliminated those grandiose happy papers that propose a
| pretty popular fair world that contradict what we actually see.
| tornikeo wrote:
| > First-author paper published at a top conference
|
| I now find that requirement in most AI-related high-tech jobs.
| Starter salary for these jobs is often $150k+. When someone is
| willing to pay you $150k+ for having published a paper, fraud
| definitely makes (financial) sense. Basically, the problem is the
| demand, and the demand corrupts the metrics (h-index).
|
| I think that having a paper published would become less and less
| significant in the future. With time, businesses will also move
| onto other signals of success.
| epistasis wrote:
| The papers published at top conferences are not the papers that
| is coming from this "industry" as the paper calls it.
|
| These fraudulent papers are identified like this:
|
| > For instance, of the 79 papers that one editor had handled at
| PLOS ONE, 49 have been retracted.
|
| That's not what's happen at top conferences.
| timkam wrote:
| It is well-known that top-conferences had and still have many
| problems. Some examples: There used to be the problem with
| authors adding new co-authors after acceptance, aka "selling
| seats". There is a debate about how many papers one should be
| allowed to submit, as some people with money and influence
| are heavily franchising. It is unclear to what extent there
| is implicit and explicit reviewer collusion. Even double-
| blind reviews don't really solve the problem.
|
| If we don't admit that there are fundamental problems that
| affect all of us (academics) and instead pretend it is only
| the lesser people who f things up, we'll all be screwed
| sooner or later.
| azan_ wrote:
| > There used to be the problem with authors adding new co-
| authors after acceptance, aka "selling seats".
|
| Top AI conferences allow that? That's insane.
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| The particular type of fraud described here (paper mills etc.) is
| less common in the U.S. (different types of fraud may exist but
| that's more subtle and complex). There tend to be specific
| geographic clusters associated with this behavior that have to do
| with how university expansions have been done in many countries.
|
| Oddly enough, pre-LLMs, I would have said most of these crap
| paper mill papers didn't really affect the actual fields. Yes,
| they cited each other but outside the citation ring didn't really
| alter the field in a knowledge sense. But now.. if these get
| picked up in Deep Research it's a problem.
| ivanstepanovftw wrote:
| For U.S. it is common to write a paper about some small change
| to widely adopted structure and present it like a novelty.
| captainkrtek wrote:
| This presentation from Defcon in 2018 on "Fake Science Factory"
| was fantastic and pretty funny as well:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ras_VYgA77Q
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Again, at what level of fraud do we consider defunding if not
| now? When 90% is irreproducible crap? 95%? 98%? Yes, you will
| lose out on 'healthy tissue'. That damage is necessary when the
| cancer is spreading.
| alphazard wrote:
| Most of the opinions you hear online about the importance of
| funding science come from science fanatics who don't have any
| idea how the sausage is made, and are not themselves
| scientifically minded. It's part of their self constructed
| identity as a "smart person" who "believes in evidence".
|
| Press your face against the glass, and it's much more
| complicated. The institutions that we have made for funding
| science don't reliably channel money towards the best ideas.
| All the experts in the field have figured out how to work the
| system well enough to build lives for themselves, and this
| leads to the tautology that "experts" support the status quo.
| We don't consider someone an expert if they aren't thriving in
| the current institutions.
|
| Anytime someone mentions new institutions e.g. prediction
| markets that might better allocate funding, or even enrich the
| best scientists, there is a visceral backlash.
| Fomite wrote:
| Every scientist I've talked to about my pie-in-the-sky
| funding mechanism - getting past a "top 50%" triage and then
| a lottery has met said idea with "Yeah, that would probably
| work. better."
|
| I'd also suggest that lower scientific funding levels
| exacerbate the problems with the current system - risky
| research is less likely to be funded, as are new
| investigators, etc. Large, established labs are also better
| able to weather the storm.
| bsoles wrote:
| I remember "fondly" when a professor in China stole my paper from
| my PhD thesis; equations, pictures, and everything. I only found
| about it because a Chinese student in another lab came across
| both papers and was puzzled by the extreme similarities. I tried
| to contact his/her university to let them know about the fraud
| and never got a reply. Good times ...
| firefax wrote:
| comedy option: visit as a tourist and show up in their office.
|
| I did this to someone who ripped off my master's thesis, word
| for word, as a side trek on holiday and it was like steam came
| out their ears when they realized if they call the campus
| authorities to escort me out they'd generate an incident report
| of why I was there.
|
| Edit: This was not in China btw -- ironically despite the
| stereotypes all the folks I've collaborated with from there
| have been pretty ethical and hardworking, it's a shame some
| ruin things for everyone.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I had a similar experience. I was visiting the UK doing
| research and a Chinese post-doc was there. Apparently he was
| taking our methods and results and sending them to someone in
| China. They published in some journals we'd never heard of, at
| the same time we realized there was almost nothing we could do
| about it. Shaming had no impact on them. But their actual
| impact on us was negligible.
| dimal wrote:
| With the dynamics of publish or perish being what they are,
| what's the way out? As long as there is high demand for papers
| (not knowledge) then some market will pop up to feed that demand.
|
| I hate to say it, but cutting off the money spigot of government
| funding for papers seems like a good start.
|
| It feels like our society has been optimized to game a few
| metrics like this (government wants to raise GDP, CEOs want to
| increase shareholder value, university deans want to increase
| funding to write papers), and all of them have toxic second order
| effects that make society worse.
| speedylight wrote:
| Whoever is profiting from this shit needs to be sanctioned by the
| Treasury, make their money useless.
| currymj wrote:
| there are many separate problems of scientific fraud. I think
| these issues sometimes get confused which is unhelpful.
|
| 1. apparently-legitimate papers in prestigious journals with
| fraudulent data. extremely bad.
|
| 2. legitimate papers in legitimate journals which, innocently or
| not, just used bad methods and have wrong conclusions. this is
| "the replication crisis".
|
| 3. totally fake papers in paper mills with no meaningful peer
| review. it's really easy to spot these, no one is individually
| getting taken in by the results, but...
|
| 3a. sometimes they wind up in a meta-analysis, which is really
| bad because people might trust the meta analysis.
|
| Problem 1 is morally worst and much more common than one would
| hope. Outright fabricated data in a Nature or NEJM publication
| (as has happened) is a disaster.
|
| Problem 2 is amenable to reform for the most part (fields are
| already doing this).
|
| Problem 3 isn't a problem at all for scientific knowledge per se,
| although universities and funding bodies might not be pleased
| their scientists are buying fake papers. You can just ignore the
| paper mills.
|
| But Problem 3a can actually alter policy, which is pretty
| serious.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| Is 3/3a about to be more serious with LLMs in the mix?
| Fomite wrote:
| "about to" it _is_.
|
| In a recent conversation with the editor-in-chief of a
| journal I am on the editorial board of, a substantial bulk of
| the submissions we get are LLM written papers that
| essentially randomly look for associations in accessible
| data, which are then sold to faculty (primarily in China).
| IronyMan100 wrote:
| No, probably Not. Nobody is reading these Journals anyway.
| It's only good one resumes. i think even 3a is Not a problem
| because fake papers will follow a specific pattern in Meta
| Analysis. Should be catched in one of the "filter" stages
| during Meta Analysis.
| currymj wrote:
| probably not. the writing quality will improve but LLM-
| generated papers will still be ignored.
|
| to the extent they aren't ignored, but seem so plausible that
| they are taken seriously, eventually people will want to talk
| to the researchers about their results, invite them to give
| talks, and so on. at which point it becomes problem 1.
| spookie wrote:
| About 3a: Never touch MDPI, the amount of fake data I've seen
| is ridiculous
| zdw wrote:
| Would you consider the Reinhart-Rogoff paper:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...
|
| Where a mistake in the Excel spreadsheet was used by many
| politicians to justify austerity measures to be a #2 or #3a
| problem (or both)?
| flobosg wrote:
| 4. Plagiarism
| geodel wrote:
| Finally, fraudsters are waking up to scientific methods and
| tools. Hoping soon unscientific frauds will be a thing of past.
| rob_c wrote:
| Really the reproducibility crisis might have had a financial
| motivation... Well I never... </sarcasm>
| higgins wrote:
| make money, do science
| hughw wrote:
| Is anyone else receiving crap like this? "Lucky"?
|
| _Dear Dr. [myname],
|
| I hope this email finds you well.
|
| My name is lucky,and I am a receiving editor currently handling
| submissions for multiple SCOPUS-indexed journals. These journals
| are dedicated to fostering high-quality research and advancing
| scholarly discourse across various disciplines. At present, they
| are actively seeking innovative and impactful research
| contributions, and I would like to extend a sincere invitation
| for you to submit your valuable work for consideration.
|
| We recognize the significance of your expertise and the effort
| that goes into producing meaningful research. If you have a
| manuscript ready or are in the process of developing a research
| project, I would be happy to provide further details on the
| submission process, journal options, and any other relevant
| information. Our editorial team is committed to ensuring a smooth
| and transparent review process, providing constructive feedback,
| and facilitating the timely dissemination of quality research.
|
| If you are interested, please feel free to reach out with any
| questions or for guidance on submission requirements. I would be
| delighted to assist you in any way possible. I look forward to
| your response and the opportunity to collaborate with you in
| bringing valuable research to a wider audience.
|
| Best regards, Lucky Receiving Editor_
| Animats wrote:
| Look what happened to _Nature_ , which used to be good. It was
| once the definitive journal of the life sciences. They became
| "Nature Portfolio", and now publish all these titles:
| Nature Nature Africa Nature Aging Nature
| Astronomy Nature Biomedical Engineering Nature
| Biotechnology Nature Cancer Nature Cardiovascular
| Research Nature Catalysis Nature Cell Biology
| Nature Chemical Biology Nature Chemical Engineering
| Nature Chemistry Nature Cities Nature Climate
| Change Nature Communications Nature Computational
| Science Nature Digest Nature Ecology & Evolution
| Nature Electronics Nature Energy Nature Food
| Nature Genetics Nature Geoscience Nature Health
| Nature Human Behaviour Nature Immunology Nature
| India Nature Italy Nature Machine Intelligence
| Nature Materials Nature Medicine Nature Mental
| Health Nature Metabolism Nature Methods
| Nature Microbiology Nature Nanotechnology Nature
| Neuroscience Nature Photonics Nature Physics
| Nature Plants Nature Protocols Nature Reviews
| Biodiversity Nature Reviews Bioengineering Nature
| Reviews Cancer Nature Reviews Cardiology Nature
| Reviews Chemistry Nature Reviews Clean Technology
| Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology Nature Reviews Disease
| Primers Nature Reviews Drug Discovery Nature
| Reviews Earth & Environment Nature Reviews Electrical
| Engineering Nature Reviews Endocrinology Nature
| Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology Nature Reviews
| Genetics Nature Reviews Immunology Nature Reviews
| Materials Nature Reviews Methods Primers Nature
| Reviews Microbiology Nature Reviews Molecular Cell
| Biology Nature Reviews Nephrology Nature Reviews
| Neurology Nature Reviews Neuroscience Nature
| Reviews Physics Nature Reviews Psychology Nature
| Reviews Rheumatology Nature Reviews Urology
| Nature Sensors Nature Structural & Molecular Biology
| Nature Sustainability Nature Synthesis Nature
| Water
|
| _Nature Energy_ is notorious for battery hype articles. _Nature
| Materials_ is notorious for surface chemistry hype (
| "nanotechnology") articles. I suspect some of the others have
| similar problems.
| firefax wrote:
| Not only an industry, it can make you isolated an even drop out
| of a PhD if you're not part of it. I found myself subject to
| demonstrably false claims in paper reviews because I stood up for
| academic integrity. Because I am kind, I have chosen not to out
| those reviewers, but I was pretty goddamn offended since my work
| involved vulnerable populations and censorship circumvention, so
| by silencing my research folks were not simply stymieing my ego,
| but harming vulnerable populations in the name of... of what?
|
| Being a professor/researcher is not lucrative. I get the drive to
| "get funding" but... my impression was that narcissistic cheaters
| from undergrad couldn't get industry jobs and doubled down on
| their unethical behavior at the expense of those of us trying to
| _actually_ do useful work for civil society.
|
| I might not have had a 4.0 GPA or been the guy always getting
| into top tier venues, but at least my work was _my own work_ ,
| and it was _solid_.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Anytime one has a system with lots of money sloshing around, and
| dependent on altruism with few checks and balances, this is the
| inevitable result.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| It's absolutely insane to me that medical students need to
| publish research in order to not be disadvantaged at securing a
| residency.
| nudgeOrnurture wrote:
| the biggest problem is the foreseeable timing.
|
| there were scientists and engineers everywhere who warned the
| world.
|
| who didn't listen?
| willmadden wrote:
| I'm still waiting for the investigation into "Surgisphere".
| Atlas667 wrote:
| Anything that you do as a career will lead to this.
|
| - Split a paper into three
|
| - Waste efforts by running the same research with a slight change
|
| - Plagiarism
|
| - Inter-peer favors (corruption, dishonesty)
|
| Funding/grants, journals, publishers, paper count requirements,
| are the true source of these behaviors.
|
| This is what markets are when left to develop. Academia made
| itself game-able. You can't have truth and profits sit in the
| same room.
|
| Capitalism has made a very nice chair for careerism to sit in.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-08-05 23:00 UTC)