Fraud, so much fraud | Hacker News

At the same time, I was a failed scientist: my gels weren’t as interesting, or convincing compared to the ones done by the folks who went on to be more successful. At the time (20+ years ago) it didn’t occur to me that anybody would intentionally modify images of gels to promote the results they claimed, although I did assume that folks didn’t do a good job of organizing their data, and occasionally published papers that were wrong simply because they confused two images.

Would I have been more successful if fewer people (and I now believe this is a common occurrence) published fraudulent images of gels? Maybe, maybe not. But the more important thing is that everybody just went along with this. I participated in many journal clubs where folks would just flip to Figure 3, assume the gel was what the authors claimed, and proceed to agree with (or disagree with) the results and conclusions uncritically. Whereas I would spend a lot of time trying to understand what experiment was actually run, and what th e data showed.

As I’ve gotten older, I understand that Charlie Munger’s observation ““Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” is applicable everywhere – including science.

Academic scientists’ careers are driven by publishing, citations and impact. Arguably some have figured how to game the system to advance their careers. Science be damned.

In the middle of the episode, the scientist bicycles up to report, dramatically, that the tests “were inconclusive”.

In the end, it’s revealed that the bones were a fraud concocted by some mall developers to promote their new mall.

After this is revealed, Lisa asks the scientist about the tests. He shrugs:

“I’m not going to lie to you, Lisa. I never ran the tests.”

It’s funny on a few levels but what I find most amusing is that his incentive is left a mystery.

Lisa’s first word is still a personal favourite of mine, especially now as a father.

IMO, Hanlon’s razor “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity” is a narrative which was created to condition the masses into accepting being conned repeatedly.

On the topic, I subscribe to Grey’s law “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice” so I see idiots as malicious. In the very best case, idiots in positions of power are malicious for accepting the position and thus preventing someone more competent from getting it. It really doesn’t matter what their intent is. Deep down, stupid people know that they’re stupid but they let their emotions get in the way, same emotions which prevent them from getting smarter.

lol, what are the chances?

The average Joe is interested in Dem vs Rep or what the latest show on Netflix.

The average researcher is worried about his livelihood, tenure etc.

And it’s not at all clear if that education does anything other than magnify their intellectual predispositions. The smart people can make great strides, but the stupid will be stupid louder and harder. And the average may well just be… more average.

An increase in blood lead from 10 to 20 micrograms/dl was associated with a decrease of 2.6 IQ

Caring = caring to understand how the system works and how the incentives work for participants in it.

If I’m super generous I would guess maybe 0,1 percent of the population cares by that definition.

It still means that they are massively, massively outweighed by loud tribalism.

If you’re talking about the US, you can vote center-right (Democratic) or far right (Republican). There is no viable left wing party in the US.

I’ve talked to multiple professors about this and I think it’s not because they don’t care about science. They just care more about their career. And I don’t blame them. It’s a slippery slope and once you notice other people who start beating you, then it’s very hard to stay on the righteous pad(note). Heck I even myself in the PhD have written things I don’t agree with. But at some point you have to pick your battles. You cannot fight every point.

In the end I also don’t think they care that much about science. Political parties often push certain ideas more or less depending on their beliefs. And scientist know this since they will often write their own ideas such that it sounds like it solves a problem for the government. If you think about it, it’s kind of a miracle that sometimes something good is produced from all this mess. There is some beauty to that.

(note) I’m not talking about blatant fraud here but about the smaller things like accepting comments from a reviewer which you know are incorrect, or using a methodology that is the status quo but you know is highly problematic.

It’s not even that.

In most fields, you need lab space and equipment and grad students to get stuff done. And to pay for that, you need funding. And to get funding, you need to publish and apply for grants.

You have to pay attention to the “career” side of things — otherwise, you won’t get to do the science at all.

Publishing and citations can and are gamed, but is impact also gamed on a wide scale? That one seems harder to fake. Either a result is true and useful, or it’s not.

I feel like this same story happens every year and people are surprised. I often wonder how many “academic” or “scientific” quotes to not conflate valid research and study) need to happen before it becomes as distrusted as politicians.

Why do novel research when you can just partner up with your friends, bring your data and combine with theirs for the umpteenth paper on the same thing, then wade into spamming down the submissions in every academic journal with impact in your field! If it published once in this journal, surely the 3rd recombination will too (and more often than not… it does.)

In my relatively short career, I have been asked to manipulate results several times. I refused, but this took an immense toll, especially on two occasions. Some people working with me wanted to support me fighting dishonesty. But guess what, they all had families and careers and were ultimately not willing to do anything as this could jeopardize their position.

I’ve also witnessed first-hand how people that manage to publish well adopt monopolistic strategies, sabotaging interesting grant proposals from other groups or stalling their article submissions while they copy them. This is a problem that seldomly gets discussed. The current review system favors mono-cultures and winner-takes-it-all scenarios.

For these reasons, I think industrial labs will be doing much better. Incentives there are not that perverse.

Agree. Everyone has heard about the extreme fraud cases, but the casual toxicity that the pressure cooker environment elicits is rarely discussed and probably a far larger problem. I say that as someone who has spent too much time in this environment and never witnessed outright fraud – that I know of.

But as others said, addressing smaller shenanigans is also crucial to steer things in the right direction.

Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as “never trust science”, when in reality science is still the best way to push humanity forward and alleviate human suffering, _despite_ all the fraud and misaligned incentives that may influence it.

They intuit that some parasitic entity or entities has latched on to Science and is co-opting it for it’s own gain to achieve it’s own purposes which run counter to the interests of the people.

The heavy handed Covid response and censorship is a prime example of that.

The whole system has been corrupted and therefore it is not possible to have a de-facto assumption of good faith of the actors.

Many examples exist where a misguided belief in scientific ‘facts’ (usually a ropey hypothesis, with seemingly ‘damning’ evidence), or a straight up abuse of the scientific method, causes direct harm.

Suspicion is often based on facts or experience.

People have been infected with diseases without their knowledge.

People have been forced to undergo surgical procedures on the basis of spurious claims.

People have been burnt alive in buildings judged to be safe.

And look at Boeing.

No one has a problem with science itself per se. Everyone accepts the scientific method to be one of our greatest cultural achievements.

But whether one is “less bright”, or super smart, we all know we as humans, are prone to mistakes, and are just as prone to bend the truth, to cover up those mistakes.

There’s nothing plebeian about this form of suspicion. In fact, the scientific method relies on it (peer review).

And saying it was likely made in a lab in China is kind of censored to this day. I think partly because the science community doesn’t want to take flack for doing risky stuff and killing millions.

Nobody did that. They prevented you from working with me

Nobody here or there was forced to get a vaccine. But if you refused it was right to shun you

Freedom is about more than the individual. We as a group should be free from the consequences of individual actions

There was also dumb stuff like social media suppressing mention of covid, even to this day youtubers use euphemisms to refer to that period.

To me it seems perfectly understandable how people who aren’t actually involved in science might mix up The Science and actual science after all the political nastiness of those years, especially when we add on top all of the awful pop science reporting from the past decades.

For example here restaurants were open, but they had to close at 19. So instead of spreading the clientele over more hours, they were always 100% full.

Also, they CUT ⅔ of public transport rides, so they were incredibly overcrowded. People with real jobs that can’t be done from home still had to go to work. BUT they put stickers on the floor telling people to keep distance. Also hired people to be at crowded stops to spray hand sanitizers on who wanted it, and tell people to keep distance (while seeing them having to push their way in).

In general all the restrictions were about the “having fun” stuff, but not about the “go to work” stuff. Even companies had no obligation to let people who could work from home stay at home. Some companies kept having their offices full.

Oh and let’s not forget the recommendations of staying home if you so much as sneezed. But you wouldn’t get paid. How did they expect people to pay their rent?

I could go on for hours with this. The bullshit measures that were marketed as “what the scientists are telling us to do” did a lot of harm to the trust that the general population puts into science.

The speaker was a psychology researcher from UK who flew here for that, and the talk was about conspiracy theories. When they introduced her they stated that she wouldn’t accept any questions from the audience.

This was received with boos and shouts that it was not real science.

She then proceeded to bundle all the conspiracy theories together. Going from “the government is doing something bad” to “earth is flat”.

After that talk I can really believe that the bullshit conspiracy theories are made up and spread artificially so that anyone that comes up with any conspiracy theory can be shushed as a crazy person.

But… in reality conspiracies do exist. One can make a theory and then test if it’s true (or get killed/imprisoned by the government while trying).

To put this into context though:

Let’s begin by supposing that fraud exists in all ventures where people stand to gain, which I don’t think is controversial at all, especially not in this comment section.

In light of this assumption the fact that this all came out in the first place is proof that being a luminary does not make you immune from investigation. That this happens ‘over and over again’ simply means that eventually we catching this fraud. The fact that the scientific community is constantly trying to reproduce and verify is why these become public in the first place.

So on the contrary, it’s not that nothing ever happens or nothing ever improves. There will be articles like this one in twenty years because there will still be fraudsters in twenty years, and there will still be scientists working to verify their work.

It’s really hard to understand the scale of the problem until you wade through it yourself. Fraud is absolutely endemic in science. Dig in and you can easily uncover bogus papers, and none of them will ever be acknowledged or retracted. In particular there’s a nasty attitude problem in which reports of fraud from outside the academic institutions will frequently be written off as “right wing” and thus inherently illegitimate. This can happen regardless of the nature of the criticism or whether it’s in any way political. Literally, things like bug reports or reports of numbers that don’t add up can be discarded this way. Thus they implement an unwritten rule that only academics are allowed to report fraud by academics, and of course, they are strongly incentivized not to do so. So Lowe is correct. It’s really a mess.

Unfortunately many “smart” people insist on telling “dumb” people how to think instead of having the introspection and humility to examine where we’ve gone wrong and spending a lot of time and effort on fixing it.

No, easier to gaslight the idiots

Not “This is bad because it undermines science, is lying, and unethical, regardless of what people think.”

Most people, stupid or otherwise, wouldn’t take a critical thinking course, for example. Many would have no time for it, to say little of motivation. Fewer are proud of being stupid and will shun anything they consider “intellectual”.

Sigh

That is because antibiotics, essentially

The mechanism by which antibiotics cause cancer is they stop you dying from bacterial infection, once a huge (biggest?) killer.

You still have to die of something….

Science is the name given to a few different processes, a body of knowledge and statements by designated spokespersons. Each of these have different flaws and failure modes in different environments and domains.

We may interpret this as convenience… But the tragedy of the commons says that we can’t even have science if someone isn’t holding what it is we don’t want to be holding… I’m not saying I didn’t love science or not think it’s super interesting or anything… Can we really say it alleviates suffering or does it displace it for one group of people until a new problem comes in and takes that one’s place? How many people here will be holding the bag of shit tonight? USA numba 1!!!

If such a project happened today, academic scientists would be trying to figure out ways to bend their existing research to match the grants. Then it would take another 30 years before people started to ask why nothing has been delivered yet.

It was a massive government-directed military project in wartime that was able to recruit all the top theoretical physicists at the time around a common aim in an urgent technological arms race to build the bomb. It included a vast effort of army engineers to build the facilities to process the fuel and so on. I’m not seeing the parallels with startups.

There was a hook to get the funding (easy to get weapons funding in wartime).
Recruiting the top talent.
Urgency (beat everybody else to the punch).
Outsourcing the building of infrastructure while you focus on the unique/hard part.

I’m not seeing how you can’t see the parallels with startups.

The GP suggested that a reason for the success of the Manhattan project was that it was run like a startup, whereas it seems more illuminating to point out that it was a massively funded military project in wartime. I was curious if there was some more specific rationale for the startup comparison

They built a gosh darned city… oh wait, I was wrong, they built three. It was run like an extremely high-value military project, which is exactly what it was. Sure it was more theoretical than other military projects(at the time), but that is the game sometimes.

I get the sense that some folks just think “faster then we would do it now” is the same as startup. Which, to put it politely, I strongly disagree with. Startups are great and I am grateful for the daily value adds to my life, but pretending everything “fast” has startup mentality is just missing the mark.

lol arguably? i would bet my generous, non-academia, industry salary for the next 10 years, that there’s not a single academic with a citation count over say … 50k (ostensibly the most successful academic) that isn’t gaming the system.

– signed someone who got their phd at “prestigous” uni under a guy with >100k citations

A broken system that incentivizes fraud over knowledge is a real problem.

An assertion that scientists chase the money by nature is a dangerous one that will set us back to the stone age when instead we should be traversing the space as a whole.

My suggestion stands: Give true scientists the ability to hunt fraudsters for budgets. If you hunt and nail down a fraudster, you get his funding for your research.

Just look at all the ML reasoning papers. Wither you believe LLMs reason or not, an important factor you have to disentangle when trying to prove this is what data the models were trained on. To distinguish memorization from reasoning. You won’t find this analysis because it’s almost impossible given that the data is a trade secret, even by Meta.

This year at ACL a paper (mission impossible language models) won best poste paper despite their results running contrary to their claim, and very obviously so too.

Or there is the HumanEval paper which proposed that they created a data set which was not spoiled because they “hand wrote” over a hundred “Leetcode style problems”. 60 authors and they didn’t bother to check… But why would you check when the questions are things like “calculate the mean”. What fucking programmer thinks there isn’t python code on GitHub pre 2021 that: calculates the mean, takes the floor, checks if a string is a palindrome, calculates greatest common devisor, or any similar question. How did this become an influential dataset‽

(0) the big reason I’m upset is because I love the field. I’m not in it for money. I’m in it because I grew up on Asimov books and because I want our community to work towards AGI. But now every person that can do print(“hello world”) feels that they can lecture me, a published researcher about what these machines do while they talk about the Turing test (lol, what is this, the 60’s?) and how they’re black boxes (opaque, but certainly not black). I’m fine with armchair experts, but not when they come in swinging with a baseball bat

Fraud happens. Bad theories happen. The slow turn of scientific wheels takes centuries to crush them but it will always win. Profit doesn’t turn those wheels. Our entire modern lifestyle is the impact.

Quote: “The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing”

My own nuanced take on it:

Incompetent people are quick to grab authority and power. On the other hand principled, competent people are reluctant to take on positions of authority and power even when offered. For these people positions of power a)have connotations of a tyrant b) are uninteresting. (i.e technical problems are more interesting) . Also the reluctance of principled people to form coalitions to keep out the cheaters, because they are a divided bunch themselves exacerbates the problem, where as the cheaters often can collude together (temporarily) to achieve their nefarious goals.

Those you’d never want to lead mostly regard leadership as a privilege used for personal gain.

Who willingly remains vulnerable before the Sword of Damocles?

This approach opens its own can of worms (you don’t want to overdo it and create a paranoid police-state-like structure), but so far, we have way too little self-policing in science, and the first attempts (like Data Colada) are very controversial among their peers.

Business: Can you get a law written to command the economy to give you money or never suffer punishments? Intel fabs (https://reason.com/2024/03/20/federal-handout-to-intel-will-…), Tesla dealers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_US_dealership_disputes), Uber taxis (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-files-leak…), ect… Are you wealthy enough there’s nothing “normals” can really do? EBay intimidation scandal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal).

Economic Academia: Harvard Prof. Gino (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/11/harvard-busines…)

Materials Academica: Doping + Graphene = feces papers (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acsnano.9b00184) “Will Any Crap We Put into Graphene Increase Its Electrocatalytic Effect?” (Bonus joke! Crap is actually a better dopant material.)

Gaming: Roblox double cut on sales (that people mostly just argue about how enormous it is, because the math’s purposely confusing) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247034)

Politics: Was Santos ever actually punished?

Military: The saga of the Navy, Pacific Fleet, and Fat Leonard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal) “exploited the intelligence for illicit profit, brazenly ordering his moles to redirect aircraft carriers, ships and subs to ports he controlled in Southeast Asia so he could more easily bilk the Navy for fuel, tugboats, barges, food, water and sewage removal.”

Work: “Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation” (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221…)

There’s others, that’s just already so many…

???

I think this statement is either meaningless or incorrect. At the very least your conclusion is context dependent.

That being said, I ran gels back in the stone ages when you didn’t just buy a stack of pre-made gels that slotted into a tank.

I had to clean my glass plates, make the polyacrylamide solution, clamp the plates together with office binder clips and make sure that the rubber gasket was water tight. So many times, the gasket seal was poor and my polyacrylamide leaked all over the bench top.

I hated running them. But when they worked, they were remarkably informative.

Naturally, they are now the head of AI where they work.

Unfortunately it isn’t just bosses being fooled by this. Scores of people push this crap.

I am not saying AI has no value. I am saying that these idiots are idiots.

That it’s functionally impossible to do either leads me to believe that “it models some form of intelligence” is about the best we can prove.

Modeling a human brain, a cephalopod brain and a corvid brain aren’t even mutually exclusive if your model is abstract enough.

When I say „a neural network models a human brain“, I’m talking about the high level concept, not the specific structure of a human brain compared to other brains. You could also say that it models a dogs brain if you wanted to. It’s just the general working principle that is kind of similar. Does that not count as a model to you?

Edit: Here’s a simple example:
I would say that a simple SIR model „models COVID infection in humans“. But that doesn’t mean it can’t also model Pig Flu in Pigs. It’s a very abstract model so it applies to a lot of situations, just like a neural network basically models the brain of every reasonably advanced animal.

Biological brains don’t use gradient descent and don’t seem to use 1-hot encoding/decoding for the most part.

I work at a company with a substantial BI/ML footprint. Our head of research was tasked with evaluating the applicability of LLMs to either our product or our daily workflows.

To date the consensus is that there isn’t much there for our product, that integrating LLMs into our models would introduce more problems than it would solve, and that we should cautiously experiment with allowing engineers to use tools like co-pilot, provided we take adequate steps to protect our IP.

It was a reasonable exercise carried out by a reasonable person for reasonable reasons (from my POV). I imagine this isn’t an uncommon story? Color me pessimistically optimistic?

For practical reasons we need to have an answer to the buzzword bingo when communicating with customers/company ownership, and now we do. Now we don’t talk much about it because there isn’t much to talk about.

On the other hand, shysters always project, and this thread is full of cringe vindications about cheating or faking or whatever. As your “emotions” are probably telling you, that kind of generalization does not feel good, when it is pointed at you, so IMO, you can go and bash your colleagues all you want, but odds are the ones who found results did so legitimately.

The good news IMO: more recent MolBio methods produce data that can be checked more rigorously than a gel image. A recent example where the evidence in form of DNA sequencing data is contested: https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.01607-23

I still feel that my bio work was far more important than anything I’ve done since, but over here the work is easier, the wages are much better, and fraud isn’t table stakes. Frankly in exchange for those things I’m OK with the work being less important (EDIT: that’s not a swipe at software engineering or my niche in it, it’s a swipe at a system that is bad at incentives).

Oh, and it turns out that software orgs have exactly the same problem, but they know that the solution is to pay for verification work. Science has to move through a few more stages of grief before it accepts this.

The only option for someone who wants to double check research is to completely replicate a study, which is quite a bit more expensive than double checking the researcher’s work.

The organizations who fund the research are (finally) beginning to require it (0)(1), and some journals encourage it, but a massive cultural shift is required and there will be growing pains.

You could also try emailing the corresponding authors. Any good-faith scientist should be happy to share what they have, assuming it’s well organized/legible.

(0) https://new.nsf.gov/public-access
(1) https://sharing.nih.gov/

Even in my immediate circles, I know many industry scientists who do scientific work beyond the level required by their company, fight to publish it in journals, mentor junior colleagues in a very similar manner to a PhD advisor, and would in every way make excellent professors. There would be a stampede if these people were offered a return to a more accountable academia. Even with lower pay, longer hours, and department duties, MORE than enough highly qualified people would rush in.

A hypothetical transition to this world should be tapered. But even at the limit where academia switched overnight, trainees caught in such a transition could be guaranteed their spots in their program, given direct fellowships to make them independent of their advisor’s grants, given the option to switch advisor, and have their graduation requirements relaxed if appropriate.

It’s easy to hem and haw about the institutional knowledge and ongoing projects that would invariably be lost in such a transition, even if very carefully executed. But we have to consider the ongoing damage being done when, for example, biogen spends thousands of scientist-years and billions of dollars failing to make an alzheimers drug because the work was dishonest to begin with, or when generations of trainees learn that bending the truth is a little more OK each year.

Because the amount of pencil-whipped “peer review” feedback I’ve received could fit in a shoe box, because many “reviewers” are looking for the CV credit for their role and not so much the actual effort of reviewing.

And there’s no way to call them out on their laziness except maybe to not submit to their publication again and warn others against it too.

And, to defend their lack of review, all they need to say to the editor anyway is: “I didn’t see it that way.”

Of those three, I certainly didn’t achieve #1 or #2, but did achieve #3, mainly because I didn’t write very much and obsessed over what was sent to the editor. Merely being a non-fraud is only part of success.

(note: I’ve changed my definition of success, I now realize that I never ever really wanted to be a tenured professor at a Tier 1 university, because that role is far less fulfilling that I thought it would be).

I used to think that was just cope. But now I’ve been in a few situations where there’s fairly clear opportunities to profit from shady behavior, and seen colleagues that I formerly respected jump at the chance.

Thanks for not being a fraud.

You absolutely nail the most profound pathology of our time. Being a
decent, honest, smart, hardworking person is just “not enough” any
more. We’ve created a normatively criminal society.

There are still people that have success without anything criminal.

It happens everywhere.

The only solution to this is skin in the game. Without skin in the game the fraudsters fraud, the audience just naively goes along with it, and the institution collapses under the weight of lies.

1) Nothing else matters but the budget

2) Over the long run, the people invested in the bureaucracy always win out over the people invested in the mission/point

Science is just as susceptible to 2) as anything else.

‘Hate’ the player’ and ‘hate’ the game.

Some things shouldn’t be part of the market economy – education, health and food.

Time favors integrity, and a lack of integrity is usually punished. Sometimes at the individual level, as you age and see the error of your ways. Sometimes at the group level, as you watch your community suffer.

“You reap what you sow.”

This is not universally true and individuals and societies don’t have to be organized this way.

Why are streets in some countries filled with trash when others are clean? My community does not have anyone policing littering – yet our streets, parks and public areas are litter free.

This isn’t true of everyone, but assuming it is increases the likelihood that it will become so. Because if everyone is trying to get away with it, why shouldn’t I? That sort of breakdown in trust is high up on my list of worrying societal failure modes.

I also don’t believe Christian societies are more honest than others. Every religion I know of teaches honesty, as does every non-religious ethical framework I can think of.

In Christian theory, everyone is a sinner, but in a real Christian society, people try to cover up their particular sins all the time, at least against other laypeople (not the priest), which leads to the opposite of honesty – hypocrisy.

“Science isn’t real – that’s terrible epistemology. It’s a process or method to generate and verify hypotheses and provisional knowledge, using replicable experiments and measurements. We don’t really know the real – we just have some current non-falsified theories and explanations that fit data decently, till we get better ones. The “science is real” crowd generally haven’t done much science and take it on faith.”

(1) https://x.com/rao_hacker_one/status/1811295722760982939

Personally I believe we live in an objective universe that can be understood by human brains (possibly using AI augmentation) and that our currently most advanced experimentally verified theories correspond to some actual true aspect of our universe. In that sense, science is real when the current theories match those aspects well enough to make generalizable predictions (general relativity and quantum mechanics).

Once you bend your spine and kneel to bad incentives – you can never walk completely upright again. You may think and convince yourself that you can stay in the system with bad incentives, play the game, but still somehow you the player remain platonically unaffected. This is a delusion, and at some level you know it too.

Who knows? If everyone left the system with bad incentives, it maybe that the bad system collapses even. It’s a problem of collective action. The chances are against a collapse, that it will continue to go on for some time. So don’t count on collapse. And even if one was to happen in your time, it will be scorched earth post collapse for some time. Think as an individual – it’s best to leave if you possibly can.

The best you can really say is that the statistics chops of most researchers is lacking and that someone researching say caterpillars is likely to not really understand the maths behind the tests they’re performing. It’s not an ideal solution by any means but universities are starting to hire stats and cs department grads to handle that part.

You see there are some things that cannot be taught, or it cannot be easily taught more so for adults i.e healthy skepticism and questioning of statements/facts that come from authority figures ( example:science/religion etc). A person will have to make his or her own effort. External influences especially debates from the heretics will generally only delay that progress.

Now, if you’re already open to the possibility that mainstream science could be very wrong, I can possibly nudge you in the correct direction. I have explored certain areas of biology (especially nutrition) but not all, each sub area of biology (or any of the sciences really) is vast, I have to rely on heretics who are ‘experts’ in their areas of specialization.

Pick one phenomenon in the world that you observe and don’t have an account for, and try to come up with an account, assuming nothing except for your own observation and experimentation, of the causes of the phenomenon. Once you’re done, follow the trail, reading only original or translated original documents, of the history of human descriptions of the phenomenon, do the “science” of “science” by observing the phenomena of observing and describing phenomena.

Go in the woods and read Plato and Aristotle and Sophocles for a year.

😀

As a quick example, any book about electricity from the early 1900’s will include quite serious sections about the positive effects of electromagnetic radiation (or “EM field therapies”), teach you about different frequencies and modulations for different illnesses and how doctors are applying them. Today these devices are peddled by scammers of the same ilk as the ones that align your shakras with the right stone on your forehead.

The fact that you can recall those reinforces the point that the value is determined by how long it is useful and remembered, not the fact that it was published.

There are of course incredible scientists that went down disappointing paths (eg Shockley, Dyson, Pauling) in terms of their research output later on, though one must remember that typically this occurs outside their original field of expertise.

If you read my comment you will see that I am asking for the references to the claims the previous author made. I simply provided my own references which werew written at the time and are representative of the times that do not corroborate the tall tale of the previous author. If you have any references to support their claim I would be interested in perusing them.

Picking the winners as examples is not good sampling.

Again, you and the original poster seem to have this understanding that scientists and engineers from the mid 1800s to early 1900s are not to be trusted. I think that this assertion should be backed by considerable evidence, and that burden is of course mostly on you

I don’t dispute that there were doctors applying electricity and/or magnetism to the body in an “un”-rigorous manner, but is there documentation that suggests that the scientists at the time had come to the conclusion that it worked?

Also notably, Whittaker’s work was a ‘loser’. I chose it specifically for this purpose. I had read parts of it previously because it was a ‘loser’ as he chose to dispute Einstein’s contributions to special relativity.

This might seem crazy to hear now, but when Maxwell first published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865, no one cared, it received very little attention at the time.

It was decades later in 1888 with the work of Hertz that Maxwell’s equations started to gain significance within the scientific community.

I think you will also find that the publications of the 1800-1900s are quite well preserved.

> I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.

Anyone on this site who doesn’t know what this is from should feel a bit of shame in the current era of hype around machine intelligence, so I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader if you aren’t already familiar with this paper.

Unfortunately he is out of his area of expertise in physics and human biology/neuroscience (? not sure where telepathy would be if it was to be rigorously studied). This is akin to Freeman Dyson on global warming.

That scientists can have strange ideas is something nobody can dispute. That those strange ideas enter into scientific legitimacy is another story entirely.

Science even at it’s most sincere should always be approached with thoughtful skepticism. The phrase that I hear touted often these days “trust the science”, is in essence not how science should be thought of.

1. outside their areas of expertise

2. not validated by independent scientific research

I completely agree that science should be approached with thoughtful skepticism, and I agree that ‘trust the science’ might not necessarily be the best semantics to use. However, it is not clear that skepticism by all parties should be considered with equal weight. Most of the times, people should “trust the science” because they are not equipped to be skeptical.

Do you have examples of usage as a treatment? I can only think of rTMS (whose effectiveness is contentious).

What is maybe the most applicable that is widely accepted is electric therapy for people recovering from ACL surgeries.

ME? the coil generates an M which induces localized E in the body as shown by localized currents? (which produce some more M, but only just enough)

This is warranted because they are pretty different – light has a frequency distribution, diffracts, etc, and can be focused to propagate energy over distances large compared to its source, whereas quasistatic fields (by definition) have no frequency distribution, and die as 1/r^2 or faster

I guess it also reinforces the supreme importance of reproducibility. Seems like no research result should be taken seriously until at least one other scientist or group of scientists are able to reproduce the result.

And if the work isn’t sufficiently defined to the point of being reproducible, it should be considered a garbage study.

If you have independent measurements you cannot rule out bias from prior results. Look at the error bars here on published values of the electron charge and tell me that methodology or reproducibility shored up the result. https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/264/timeline-of-meas…

Speaking of Orwell, I don’t think science comes into it. Rather, when people stop believing in democracy, things will degenerate into authoritarianism. It’s generally pretty hard to use science the methodology to implement an authoritarian government as the scientific method by definition will follow the evidence, not the will of a dictator.

However, something that looks like science but isn’t could be used, especially if the public doesn’t understand science and thus can’t spot things that claim to be science but don’t actually follow the scientific method.

Great critical thinkers become lawyers, post modernist intellectuals, and other parts of the “talking” class of intellectuals. Unfortunately, it’s far easier to talk shit than it is to build things. We’ve massively over-valued critical thinking over constructive thinking.

Most people want to dunk on science. Few people want to submit their own papers to conferences. Many people act like submitting papers is impossible for non-Ph.D’s. We have a lack of constructive oriented thinking.

I agree. But academia reinforces this perception. I feel like PhD’s only give serious consideration to the utterances of other PhD’s. The rest of the public consists of the unwashed masses, and at best gets the smiling-nod treatment from teh PhD.

PS I (a non-PhD) managed to publish a paper during the pandemic (doi: 10.3389/fphar.2022.909945 ). One of the biggest barriers was the item you mentioned quoted above, and the bogeyman of “epistemic trespass” in general, as operating in my own psychology. I’ve since become noisy in advocating for the #DeSci movement.

I wonder if it’s possible to get people to wonder why the one discipline that has the tools to deal with all of these epistemic, logical, etc issues isn’t taught in school. You’d think it would be something that people would naturally wonder about, but maybe our fundamentalist (and false) focus on science as the one and only source of knowledge has damaged our ability to wonder independently.

It is not fine to put trust into scientists in general just because they walk around in a lab coat with a PhD label on its front.

For most of the people who end up in these scandals, this is just the day job that their various choices and random chance led up to. they’re just ordinary humans responding to ordinary incentives in light of whatever consequences and risks they may or may not have considered.

Other careers, like teaching, medicine, and engineering have similar problems.

This is why I think the most effective way is to empower good actors. Ensure open debate, limit the power of individuals, and prevent over concentration of power in a small group. These efforts are harder to implement than you think because they run against our desire to have scientific superstars and celebrities, but I think they will go a long way towards building a healthy community.

In my experience no, most fraudsters are not evil people, they just follow the incentives and almost non-existent disincentives.
Scientist has become just a job, you find all kinds of people there.

As far as I know no-one goes to jail, worst thing possible (and very rare) is losing the job, most likely just the reputation.

Maybe I’m too idealistic but why does following incentives with no regard for secondary consequences not evil?

You’ll see this all over risky startups. What starts as hopeful optimism only becomes fraud over time, when the consequences of not committing fraud also seem horrible. It’s easy to follow the road until all your choices are horrible in different ways, and they pick the one better for the people around them, yet worse for everyone else.

I don’t actually know what people mean when they label someone as “evil”, other than “is doing/saying/thinking stuff I find very reprehensible”. Which doesn’t make sense when you insert it into the above statement: “Are people who commit this type of science fraud just humans who do stuff I find really reprehensible?” Well, I guess it sounds like they are.

It seems like people want to assign a character trait when they say “person X is evil”, but I don’t believe such a generic character trait exists (and what exactly it is supposed to mean if it existed). What’s worse, it obfuscates and prevents understanding the actual character traits and circumstances that lead to the respective behavior.

The concept is emotionally laden and ill-defined, and has little relation to why the designated behaviors actually happen. It’s an incoherent concept that has no explanatory power.

Socrates got it. “I know that I know nothing” (else)

It’s bothering you a rational amount, actually. These people have done serious damage to lots of lives and humanity in general. Society as a whole has at least as much interest in punishing them as it does for financial fraudsters. They should burn.

Jobs at top institutions are worth much more than their nominal salary, as evidenced by how much those people could be making in the private sector. (They are compensated mostly in freedom and intellectual stimulation.) Unambiguously faking data, which is the sort of thing a bad actor might do to get a top job, should be considered at least as bad a moral transgression as stealing hundreds of thousands or perhaps a few million dollars.

(What is the downside? I have never once heard a researcher express feeling threatened or wary of being falsely/unjustly accused of fraud.)

Once it became a distinguished profession the incentives changed.

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”

From a distance the practice of science in early modern and Enlightenment times might look like the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. If you read the detailed history of the times you’ll see that the reality was much more messy.

For example Kepler considered his work on the Music of the Spheres (google it) to be more important than, and the ultimate goal of, his research on the mechanics of planetary motion. Newton dabbled in alchemy, and his dispute with Leibnitz was very very bitchy with some dubious jostling for priority. And there was no end of dubious research and outright fraud going on at the time. So no, it was not a golden era of disinterested research.

See for example the wikipedia articles on Phlogiston, The Music of the Spheres, the long and hard fought battle over Epicycles etc

Anytime you see champagne bottles up on a professor’s top shelf with little tags for Nature publications (or something like that), then you know they are a glory hound.

When you see beer bottles in the trash, then you know they’re in it for more than themselves.

This kind of fraud happens because scientists are rewarded greatly for coming up with new, publishable, interesting results. They are punished severely for failing to do that.

You could be the department’s best professor in terms of teaching, but if you aren’t publishing, your job is at risk at many universities.

Scientists in Academia are incentivized to publish papers. If they can take shortcuts, and get away with it, they will. That’s the whole problem, that’s human nature.

This is why you don’t nearly as many industry scientists coming out with fraudulent papers. If Shell’s scientists publish a paper, they aren’t rewarded for that, if they come up with some efficient new way to refine oil they are rewarded, and they also might publish a paper if they feel like it.

A lot of companies reward employees for publications. Mine certainly does. Also an oil company may not be such a great example since they directly and covertly rewarded scientists for publishing papers undermining climate change research.

A scientist can work in industry research and NEVER publish, and still have a career where they make money, and don’t worry about losing their job.

Are you going to go to jail for fudging some numbers on your paper, not likely.

Indeed, I believe many academic careers were kicked off in this manner. Where it all goes wrong is when other more diligent researchers fail to reproduce said fraudulent research – this is what brought down famous fraudster Jan Hendrik Schön in the field of plastic-based organic electronics, which involved something like 9 papers in Science and Nature. There are good books and documentaries on that one. This will only be getting worse with AI data generation, as most of those frauds were detected by banal data replication, obvious cuts and pastes, etc.

However, when you add a big financial driver, things really go off the rails. A new pharmaceutical brings investors sniffing for a big payout, and cooking data to make the patentable ‘discovery’ look better than it is is a strong incentive to commit egregious fraud. Bug-eyed greed makes people do foolish things.

The situation is similar to the “Market for lemons” in cars: if the market is polluted with lemons (fake papers), you are disincentivized to publish a plum (real results), since no one can tell it’s not faked. You are instead incentivized to take a plum straight to industry and not disseminate it at all. Pharma companies are already known to closely guard their most promising data/results.

Similar to the lemon market in cars, I think the only solution is government regulation. In fact, it would be a lot easier than passing lemon laws since most labs already get their funding from the government! Prior retractions should have significant negative impact on grant scores. This would not only incentivize labs, but would also incentivize institutions to hire clean scientists since they have higher grant earning potential.

Studies that have not been replicated should be published clearly marked as preliminary results. And then other scientists can pick those up and try to replicate them.

And institutions need to give near equal weight to replications as to original research when deciding on promotions. Should be considered every researchers responsibility to contribute to the overall field.

Replications could be matched with grants: if you receive $100,000 grant, you’d get the $100,000 you need, plus another $100,000 which you could use to publish a replication of a previous $100,000 grant. Researchers can choose which findings they replicate, but with restrictions, e.g. you can’t just choose your group’s previous thing.

I think if we did this, researchers would naturally be incentivized to publish experiments that are easier to replicate and of course fraud like this would be caught eventually.

I bet we could throw away half of publications tomorrow and see no effect on the actual pace of progress in science.

But the biggest problem is actually that large swathes of ‘scientists’ don’t do experiments at all. You can’t even replicate such papers because they exist purely in the realm of the theoretical. The theory often isn’t even properly written down! They will tell you that the paper is just a summary of the real model, which is (at best) found in a giant pile of C or R on some github repo that contains a single commit. Try to replicate their model from the paper, there isn’t enough detail to do so. Try to replicate from the code, all you’re doing is pointlessly rewriting code that already exists (proves nothing). Try to re-derive their methodology from the original question and if you can’t, they’ll just reject your paper as illegitimate criticism and say it wasn’t a real replication.

Having reviewed quite a lot of scientific papers in the past six years or so, the ones that were really problematic couldn’t have been fixed with incentivized replication.

If a finding either cannot be communicated enough for someone else to replicate it, or cannot be replicated because the method is shoddy, can we even call that science?

At some level I know that what I’m proposing isn’t realistic because the majority of science is sloppy. P-hacking, lack of detail, bad writing, bad methods, code that doesn’t compile, fraud. But maybe if we tried some version of this, it would cause a course correction. Reviewers, knowing that someone actually would attempt to replicate a paper at some point down the road, would be far more critical of ambiguity and lack of detail.

Papers that are not fit to be replicated in the future, whose claims cannot be tested independently, are actually not science at all. They are worth less than nothing because they take up air in the room, choking out actual progress.

Undoubtedly this is true. The problem, like with advertising, is identifying _which_ half to cut.

Ultimately, I’m not sure how to incentivize reproduction of research: it’s very easy to fake a successful reproduction (you already know the results, and the original researcher will not challenge you), so you don’t want to reward that too much. Whereas incentivizing failed reproductions might lead some scientists to sabotage their own reproduction efforts in ways that are subtle enough to have plausible deniability.

Proceeding by pairs is probably not enough. You probably need 5-6 replications per paper to make sure that at least one attempt is honest and competent, and make the others afraid to do the wrong thing and stand out.

I don’t work in academia but in my experience professors are basically all intellectually arrogant and ego-driven, and would relish having time and space to beat each other at the brain game. A failed replication is their chance to be “the smarter guy in the room” and crack open some long-held belief. A successful replication would probably happen most of the time and be far more boring.

I could imagine, if such a thing were mandated and in place for a while, one could build her career on replications, as a prosecutor or defense. She would publish new research solely to convince her colleagues that she is sharp enough to play prosecutor or defense.

Anything has got to be better than what we have now, where apparently you can cheat and defraud your way through an entire decades-spanning career.

Making fraud much less convenient will greatly reduce the amount of it.

But if there is separate funding for replication studies, it will become something people compete for. Some people will specialize on replicating others’ work, and universities will pay attention, as they care about grant overheads.

It would need to be very good funding on par with what’s offered for “novel research”.

In addition, we would need increased prestige (e.g. awards, citations) for replicated studies as well for this to be effective. For many academics funding is merely a means to that end.

It might actually improve the pace of science, if the half eliminated were not replicable and the remaining half were written by researchers knowing that they would likely face a replication attempt.

Why go through all the work of actually proving/disproving the experiment when you can just change tweak the numbers of the original experiment, say you actually reproduced the experiment, and then move on?

Many of the algorithms I tried to implement didn’t work at all, despite considerable effort to get them to behave. In one particularly egregious (and highly cited) example, the algorithm in the paper differed from the provided code on GitHub. I emailed the authors trying to figure out what was going wrong, and they tried to get funding from me for support.

My manager wanted me to right a literature review paper which skewered all of these bad papers, but I refused since I thought it would hurt my career. Ironically the algorithm that ended up working the best was from one of the more unknown papers, with few citations.

This one is the showstopper. No matter what you do with rules and regulations, if people aren’t impressed by it at a watercooler conversation, or when chatting at a cocktail party at a conference, or when showing a politician around in your lab then nothing else matters.

How prestigious something is is not a lever you control.

Prestige is a nice motivator, but making a living at all is always the baseline, and is often sufficient.

I do like the idea of institutions giving tenure to people with results that have stood the test of time, but again, there is no incentive to do so. Institutions want superstar faculty, they care less about whether the results are true.

The only real incentive that I think can be targeted is still grant money, but I would love to be proved wrong.

What we should aim for is confirmation: a different experiment that tests the underlying phenomenon that was the subject of the first paper.

Building more results without replications is what caused the psychology crisis. Apparently every lab accepted the p<0.05 results or stated correlations of prior studies and just ran more studies until they got their own that was publishable. Since everyone “knew” that the prior result was true, like priming or whatever, they could conclude anything they wanted, because ex absurdum quodlibet.

This is a very difficult problem to solve.

Basically, I think there is a sizable risk that a large number of replications would be fraudulent or half-assed, which dilutes their value. Paradoxically, the more this policy suppresses fraud or mistakes in original research, the less people will perform replication in good faith.

I could be wrong, but people are endlessly creative at subverting systems when the stakes are high, so I’m wary of simple solutions. To be fair, it’s probably better than the current system, just not as much as we’d like.

But there was no golden era of science to look back on. It has always been a wonderful productive mess—much like the rest of life. As least it moves forward—and now exceedingly rapidly.

Almost unbelievably, there are far worse crimes than fraud that we completely ignore.

There are crimes associated with social convention in science of the type discussed by Karl Herrup with respect to 20 years of misguided focus on APP and abeta fragments in Alzheimer’s disease:

Book Details

This could be called the “misdemeanors of scientific social inertia”. Or the “old boys network”.

There is also an invisible but insidious crime of data evaporation. Almost no funders will fund data preservation. Even genomics struggles but is way ahead in biomedical research. Neuroscience is pathetic in this regard (and I chaired the Society for Neuroscience’s Neuroinformatics Committee).

I have a talk on this socio-political crime of data evaporation.

Removing the government from science could help, not the other way around.

People just went through the last five years and will go to their graves defending what they saw first hand. To admit that maybe those moves and omissions weren’t helpful would be to admit their ideology was wrong. And that can not be.

That includes people who consider themselves professional scientists, PhD‘s authors, leaders etc.

The only people I know who live “scientifically” consistently are people considered “neurodivergent”, along the autism-adhd-odd spectrum, which forces them into creating the type of mechanisms that are actually scientific and as required by their conditions.

Nevertheless, we should expect better from people; and on average need to do better in aligning how they think to how science, when robustly demonstrated, demonstrates with staggering predictability how the world works, compared to all other methods of understanding the universe.

The fact that the people carrying the torch of science don’t live up to the standard is expected – hence peer review.

This is an indictment of the incentives and pace at which bad science is revealed (like in this case) is always too slow, but science is the one place where eventually you’re going to either get exposed as a fraud or never followed in the first place.

There’s no other philosophy that has a higher bar of having to conform with all versions of reality forever.

Hence why institutional pedagogy is so often rote and has nothing to do with understanding – when we know science of learning says that every human craves understanding (montessori, piaget etc…)

In fact, the shortest way to break the majority of people’s brains is to ask them one of the following questions:

– Can you Explain the reasoning behind your behavior?

– How would you test your hypothesis?

– What led you to the conclusion you just stated?

– Can you clarify the assumptions embedded in your claim?

-Have you evaluated the alternatives to your position?

Maybe it’s like elite running – everyone who stays competitive above a certain level is cheating, and if you want to enjoy watching the sport, you just learn to look the other way. Except that the stakes for humanity are much higher in science than in sport.

Like many others, I hope that a greater focus on reproducibility in academic journals and conferences will help reduce the spread of scientific misconduct and inaccuracy.

(1): https://retractionwatch.com/

This is absolutely something that we should routinely be doing, though.

Pick your poison, to some extent. Better would be to not have to do it after-the-fact, but to vet better at every intermediate step, but it’s hard. Just a very difficult people problem.

Prediction: papers stop using pictures entirely

Accompanying to finish document will be a hash of all of these works along with their associated timestamps, originals of can be verified if necessary to prove a custodial chain of development over a plausible period of time and across multiple iterations of the development of the work – a kind of signed time-lapse slideshow of its genesis from blank page to finished product as if it had a mandatory and global “track changes” flag enabled from the very beginning – by which the entire process can be proved an original human-collaborated work and not an insta-generated AI fiction.

For example, imagine if university libraries ran storage systems based on Merkle trees with PKI signatures and researchers used those for their papers, code, data inventory (maybe not petabytes of data but the hashes of that data), etc. If there were allegations of misconduct you’d be able to see that whole history establishing that when things were changed and by whom, and someone couldn’t fudge the data without multiple compromised/complicit people in a completely different department (a senior figure can pressure a grad student in their field but they have far less leverage over staff at the library), and since you’re not sharing a database with the entire world you have a much easier time scaling with periodic cross checks (e.g. MIT and Caltech could cross-sign each other’s indexes periodically so you could have confidence that nobody had altered the inventory without storing the actual collection).

For the same reason, tools that try to detect AI-generated text are ultimately going to lose the arm’s race.

In my last workplace, self-evaluation (and, therefore, self-promotion) was mandatory on a semi-annual cycle and heavily tied to compensation. It’s not surprising that it became a breeding ground for fraud. Outside of a strong moral conviction (which I would argue is in declining), these sorts of systems will likely always be targets for fraudulent behavior.

The expose article writes:

> “UCSD neuroscientist Edward Rockenstein, who worked under Masliah for years, co-authored 91 papers that contain questioned images, including 11 as first author. He died in 2022 at age 57.”

They say nothing else about this. But looking at Rockenstein’s obituary, indications are that it was suicide. (It was apparently sudden, at quite a young age, and there are many commenters on his memorial page “hoping that his soul finds peace,” and expressing similar sentiments.)

Want to publish in a peer reviewed paper? Well then your institution or you should take out a bond or insurance policy that guarantees your work is accurate. The insurance amount would fluctuate based on how big of impact this study could have. Is it a drug that will be consumed by millions? Big insurance policy. Is it a behavioral study without much risk… small insurance policy.

Is a a person in an institution found caught committing fraud, well now then all papers from that institution now have higher premiums.

Did you sign off on a peer reviewed paper that was fraud? Well now your premiums are going up also.

Insurance costs too high to publish? Well then keep doing research until the underwriters are satisfied that your work isn’t fraud and adjust the premiums down.

It adds a direct near-term economic incentive to publish honestly and punishes those that abuse the system.

The insurance model does not really work when the cost of evaluating the risks far outweighs the expected risks.

The problem could be, that it may become impossible to publish certain kinds of papers that are very well supported and valuable because no institution can afford the insurance.

Science is largely about doing novel things and often being the first person in the world to try something. In order to understand the risks, you have to understand the actual research, as well as the personalities and personal lives of the people doing it.

Then there is the question of perverse incentives. Research fraud is not a random event but an intentional action by the people who take the insurance. If they manage to convince you to underwrite their research, they know that the consequences of getting caught will be less severe than without the insurance, making fraud more likely. Normally intentional fraud would not be covered by the policy, but here covering it would be the explicit purpose of the insurance.

The research might be novel, but the procedures for research and publication are very similar. So insurance companies would just make sure that you followed a protocol which minimizes their risk.

perverse incentives are taken into account by insurance. Insuring someone is always a adversarial back and forth to determine if they are being truthful or not. Which is why Life insurance companies require a physical. They don’t just have you self report and then accept it as fact.

Industry professionals like lawyers and doctors carry malpractice insurance. A lawyer can still commit fraud. Insurance isn’t a black and white thing. It is a sliding scale that ties risk to a monetary value.

Its not rocket science. Just actuarial science. 😉

This is wrong.

Some time ago, I completed the checklists for publishing a paper in a somewhat prestigious multidisciplinary journal. Large parts of the lists were about complying with various best practices and formal requirements in different fields. I often didn’t even understand the questions outside my field. And the questions nominally within my field were often category errors. They assumed a mode of doing research that was far from universal. Overall, the process was more frustrating than (let’s say) applying for a US visa.

Yes there is novel research that has never been done before? So what? That doesn’t change if you can get insurance or not. Thats a failed argument from the beginning.

Anyways you don’t seem to be having a discussion in earnest and instead you seem to be intentionally disregarding large pieces of the above arguments and trying to shoehorn in your idea that if there is unique research being done that it means that it is impossible to tell the risk of anything. Kinda silly.

Additionally, even if we assume that the insurance model is a good idea, it should be tied to individual researchers, not universities. The entire model of university research is based on loose networks of independent professionals nominally employed by various organizations. Universities don’t do research, they don’t own or control the projects, and they don’t have the expertise to evaluate research. They are just teaching / administrative organizations that provide services in exchange for grant overheads.

What type of research would that be? Just publish it online without insurance and everyone will treat it as it unverified and uninsured… separate from other research that is.

Once the risk of the publishing research has gone down (i.e. reputable peers approve, or the findings were replicated), the cost of the insurance goes down also.

if something is so costly to insure, there would be a reason and thus the system works.

The “organic” way this would happen is if there was a shift so that journals with insured research are far more valuable than uninsured research. Or perhaps if companies started suing researchers for negligence and fraud and recuperate costs if they used research that was later proved to be fraud.

In the literary world, anyone can publish a book, but a book from o’reilly caries with it a different level of authority and diligence then a self published book or blog post.

So the shift would have to be that your career can’t advance without publishing a bonded and insured paper.

Absolutely not. Underwriters are smart. They use other variables and methods for determining risk. They don’t need to directly recreate and peer review the research themselves.

But if a health care professional does the same thing, and does something negligent, then they are usually liable. They are professionals and are held to a different standard. Similarly, that’s why lawyers keep writing: this is not legal advice and you are not my client.

Perhaps a professional in science should have higher standards. Obviously they shouldn’t be sued for being wrong – that would destroy science, disregard the scientific method’s means to address inaccuracy, and go against science’s nature as the means to develop new knowledge. But intentionally deceiving people perhaps should be illegal and/or create liability: When you publish something, people depend on its fundamental honesty and will act on it.

To put the scale of this problem in perspective, the ORI was set up in the 1970s after Congress became concerned at widespread reports of scientific fraud. It clearly didn’t work, but hangs around regardless.

It’s ultimately a culture problem. Until academics have the same level of respect as ordinary corporate employees, you’re going to get judges and juries who let them off scott free.

1) revoke all of their academic accreditations and degrees

2) put them on a public “do not publish” list permanently banning them from being named on any paper in a journal

The Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s fields are too easy to fake, and too difficult to replicate. The new ideas are only ~20 years old. Big pharma companies are understandably wary of published papers.

When people say “trust the science”, they often refer to things like masks, and antibiotics, and vaccines. That science is hundreds of years old and have been replicated thousands of times.

TL;DR: Some science should absolutely be trusted, some shouldn’t. It’s not surprising that you can’t make blanket statements on a superfield ranging from germ theory to cold fusion.

When people say “trust the science” they’re usually referring to fairly recent developments. Covid vaccines were in development and testing for just over 18 months before being mandated and were certainly not replicated on a large scale by disinterested 3rd parties before being mandated. The idea that we can have effective scientific policy without trust in scientific institutions is just… not accurate.

Questioning novel science is one thing but questioning if the Earth is flat or Germ Theory is another thing all together. The problem with skeptics is that they sometimes hang around conspiracists.

It’s hard to not discount these people when the person next to them thinks black people are biologically inferior. Then when those skeptics don’t distance themselves or don’t explicitly condemn those bad actors, it brings to question if their positions are born of skepticism or some strange prejudice, and that they merely constructed the cover of skepticism to hide their strange prejudices.

For example, during the Covid pandemic there was a lot of questioning around masks. In hindsight, the answer is obvious: it doesn’t really matter if masks were or were not effective, because they’re essentially free to wear. Even in the worst case, nobody is actually hurt.

But there were many, maybe millions, of mask deniers who would simply refuse to wear them. They were doing this because of institutional distrust and political motivations, not because they truly believed the masks were dangerous. And this is the trouble: these people are skeptics, but they’re skeptics with an end-goal of political destabilization, i.e. they’re dangerous.

When you mix it all together, which people often do to themselves, it’s discredits the very thought process.

I honestly think if some serious attention was paid to this and various other real world paradoxes around us, we could actually make some forward progress on these problems for a change.

I can’t imagine any other vocation where you can take public and private money, then cheat the stakeholders into thinking they got what they payed for, only to just walk away from it all when you are found out. Picture a contractor claiming to have build a high-rise for a developer, doctored photos of it, and then just go oops moneys all gone with no consequences when the empty lot is discovered years later.

Ever so rarely, there may be an opaque, internal investigation. Mostly, it seems that academia has a desire to not make any waves, keep up appearances, and let the problem quiet down on its own.

I suppose a silver lining to all the academic fraud exposés of the last few years is that more grad students and faculty now know that this is a thing, and one that many will try to cover up, so trust no one.

Another silver lining might be that fellow faculty are more likely to believe an accusation, and (if they are one of the awful people) less likely to think they can save funding/embarrassment/friend by neutralizing the witness.

(ProTip: If the success of your dishonesty-reporting approach is predicated on an internal administrator having humility and integrity, realize that those qualities are the opposite of what has advanced a lot of academic careers.)

It’s like the old quote… “If you commit fraud as an RA that’s your problem. If you commit fraud as the head of department that’s the university’s problem.”

I really feel stupid asking experienced developers to do FizzBuzz. Not one has ever failed. But I have heard tons of anecdotes of utterly incompetent developers being weeded out by it.

From the article:
Masliah appeared an ideal selection. The physician and neuropathologist conducted research at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) for decades, and his drive, curiosity, and productivity propelled him into the top ranks of scholars on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. His roughly 800 research papers, many on how those conditions damage synapses, the junctions between neurons, have made him one of the most cited scientists in his field.

Similarly, the heads of famous science labs have lots of talented scientists who want to work with them. The involvement of a lab director varies wildly, but for the hyper productive, famous ones, it’s largely the director curating great people, providing scientific advice, and setting a general research direction. The lab director gets named on all these papers that get generated from this process.

So 800 papers isn’t necessarily a red flag if the director is great at fundraising and has lots of graduate students/post docs doing the heavy lifting.

> Founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX.
CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.
Owner, CTO and Executive Chairman of X (formerly Twitter).
Founder of The Boring Company, X Corp., and xAI.
Co-founder of Neuralink, OpenAI, Zip2, and X.com (part of PayPal)

It can only be a fraud.

70% of the studies they attempt are successfully replicated.
20% are inconclusive or equivocal.
10% are clearly debunked.

Now the world is richer, but Sweden? No return on investment for the Swedes, other than perhaps a little advanced notice on what hot new technologies their sovereign funds and investors ought not to invest in.

A bloc of nations, say NAFTA/CAFTA-DR, or the European Union, might be more practical.

That’s the carrot. As for the stick, bad lawyers can get disbarred, bad doctors can get “unboarded”. Some similar sort of international funding ban/blacklist for bad researchers would be useful.

A lot of this research is very involved and esoteric, requiring specialized equipment found only in one place, so some would be very hard to replicate. If what Theranos was doing (or claiming to do) was easy to replicate, it would’ve imploded years prior to when it did. So not all fraud could be detected, but a lot of the low-hanging fraud, especially in the psychological and pharmacological fields, could be quickly identified. Such a system would be a substantial upgrade and I applaud your suggestion. A smaller country could blaze the trail, because “big boys”, like the U.S., are too set in their ways.

No one else I talked to seemed particularly concerned about this, and I realized that a lot of people around me were bowing to pressure to fudge results here and there to keep up the cycle of publicity, results, and funding that the entire academic enterprise relied upon. It broke a lot of the faith I had been carrying in science as an institution, at least as far as it is practiced in major American research universities.

During COVID I talked to a guy who used to do computational epidemiology. He came to me because I’d written about the fraud that’s endemic in that field and wanted to get stuff off his chest. He was a research programmer, assisting scientists. One of the stories he told involved checking the code for a model written in FORTRAN. He discovered it was mis-using an FFI and using pointer values in equations instead of the dereferenced values. Everything the program had ever calculated was garbage. He checked and it had been used in hundreds of papers. After emailing the authors with a bug report, he got a reply half an hour later saying the papers had been checked and the results didn’t change so nothing needed to be done.

Little known fact: the COVID model that drove lockdowns in the UK and USA was nothing but bugs. None of the numbers it produced can be replicated. When people pointed out that this was a problem academics went on the attack, claimed none of the criticism was legitimate because it didn’t come from experts, and of course simp journalists went along with all of it. They got away with it completely and will probably do it again in future. Even in this thread you can see people defending COVID science as the good stuff! It was all riddled with fraud.

Part of the issue is that scientists are mostly self taught coders who aren’t interested in coding. They frequently use a standard of: if it looks right, it is right. The whole thing becomes a circular exercise in reinforcing their priors.

I got a taste of this in my high school honors biology class. I decided to do a survey of redwing blackbirds in my town. I had a great time, there was a cemetery across the street from my house with a big pond, where 6-8 males hung out. I was excited when later in the season several females also arrived and took up residence.

I eagerly wrote up my results in a paper. I thought I did “A” level work but was distressed when the teacher gave me B- or C+. She said “My husband and I are birdwatchers who have published papers on redwing mating habits in the area, and we haven’t seen any females this year. Neither did one of your classmates who watched redwings in her neighborhood.” While she did not directly in writing accuse me of fraud, she strongly implied it.

I told her to grab her binoculars and hang out at the cemetery one morning. She declined, as she was a published authority and didn’t need to actually observe with her own eyes. IIRC I had photos but they were from faraway with a Kodak Instamatic (this was the mid-’80s), so she didn’t accept those as evidence.

I often wonder if my life would have gone in a different direction if I had a science teacher who actually followed the scientific method of direct observation! It didn’t come easy to me, but I was very interested in science before this showed me clearly that science is just another human endeavor, replete with bias, ego, horseshit, perverse incentives, and gatekeeping.

We have done a great disservice to human intellect to have mistaken the gift that empiricism gives of predicting the world, with knowledge of the world itself of which we possess almost nil.

When the experiments are significant, double blind is not enough. You need external auditors when conducting experiments. Preferably separate team making experiments from those who design them.

> cerebrolysin

This was discussed here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41239161

All of them

Ex: Finding when the exact same image appears in multiple publications, but with different captions/conclusions.

The evidence in this case came from one individual willing to volunteer hundreds of hours producing a side by side of all the reports. But clearly that doesn’t scale.

It’s fraud all the way down, where even the fraud detectors are fraudulent. Similar story to the anti-malware industry, where software bugs in security software like CrowdStrike, Sophos, or Norton cause more damage than the threats they prevent against.

(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/11ha4qo/gptzero_an…

How would this work? AI can’t even detect AI generated content reliably.

– Parse all papers you want to audit

– Extract images (non AI)

– Diff images (non AI)

– Pull captions / related text near each image (LLM)

– For each image > 99% similarity, use LLM to classify if conclusions are different (i.e. highly_similar, similar, highly_dissimilar).

Then aggregate the results. It wouldn’t prove fraud, but could definitely highlight areas for review. i.e. “This chart was used in 5 different papers with dissimilar conclusions”

It’s hard to tell at this point if it’s just selection bias or if the scientific fraud problem has outgrown the scope of self-correction.

This really is quite unfortunate.

It’s impossible that none of them knew.

It’s possible that some of them didn’t know.

The solution starts when you say, ‘we committed fraud – our field, our publication, the scientific enterprise. What are we going to do?’

Does the author really have no idea about these things? That they occur?

Even more widespread is when PIs just throw out data that don’t agree with their hypothesis, and make you do it again until the numbers start making sense.

It’s atrocious, but so common that if you’re not doing this, you’re considered dumb or weak and not going to make it.

Many PIs end up mentally justify this kind of behavior (need to publish / grant deadline / whatever) — even at the protest of most of the lab members.

Those who refuse to re-roll their results — those who want to be on the right side of science — get fired and black balled from the field.

And this is at the big famous universities you’ve all heard of

On one hand, it seems the push for immediate real world relevance is a good thing. We fund research in order that society will benefit, correct? On the other hand, since publications and ultimately funding decisions are based on demonstrating real world relevance, it’s little surprise scientists are now highly incentivized to hype their research, p-hack their results, or in rare cases, commit outright fraud in an attempt to demonstrate this relevance.

Doing research that has immediate translational benefits is a tall order. As a scientist you might accomplish this feat a few times in your career if you’re lucky. The rest of the corpus of your work should consist of the careful, mundane research the actual translational research will be based upon. Unfortunately it’s hard to get that foundational, basic, research published and funded nowadays, hence the messed-up incentives.

Translational research is probably part of it but I think it’s part of a broader hype and fad machine tied to medicine, which has its own problems related to rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and monopolies, among other things. It’s one giant behemoth of corruption fed by systemic malstructurings, like a biomedical-academic complex of problematic intertwined feedback loops.

I say this as someone whose entire career has very much been part of all of it at some level.

Another commentator made a separate point about how professors don’t always get paid a lot, but they make it up in reputation. Ego is a huge motivator for many people, especially academics in my observation. Hubris plays no small part in the hype machine surrounding too many labs.

Academic fraud is also enabled by lack of replication. No one gets published by replicating someone else’s work. If one could incentivize quality replication, that could help.

Or, in the other hand, now you don’t have to manipulate images, you can just generate the ones you need.

To selfishly discard the collective attention of scientific experts for undue gain is despicable and should disqualify a person from all professional status indefinitely in addition to any legal charges.

I deeply respect anyone whose desires align with winning the collective game of understanding that science should be. I respect even more those folks who speak up when their colleagues or even friends seek to hack academia like this guy did.

This is the core problem with science today. Everyone is trying desperately to publish as much, and as fast, as they can. Quantity over quality. That quantity dictates jobs, fellowships, grants, and careers. Dare I saw we have a “doping” problem in science and not enough controls. Especially when it comes to “some” countries feverish output of papers that have little to no scientific value, cannot be replicated, full of errors, but at least it’s published and they can get a job.

For a long time the numbers have been manipulated and continue to be so, seemingly due to national pride.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of…

https://www.science.org/content/article/china-rises-first-pl…

Scholars disagree about the best methodology for measuring publications’ impact, however, and other metrics suggest the United States is still ahead—but barely.

I was always taught that science is a tree of knowledge where you build off previous positive results, all of which collapse when an ancestor turns out to be false.

But I would further argue against what others were saying about personal ethics. Science must remove the human as much as possible from the process.

With that off my moobs … for those interested in the broader topic, I highly recommend Science Fictions, by Stuart Ritchie. The audiobook is also excellent.

I’m not a working scientist, and I found it completely engaging. Worth it just for the explanation of p-hacking.

Need to tackle the incentives directly.

It all comes down to lab notebooks and data policies. If there is no system for archiving detailed records of experimental work, if data is recorded with pencils so it can later be erased and changed, if the PI isn’t in the habit of regularly auditing the world of grad students and postdocs with an eye on rigor and reproduciblity, then you should turn around and walk out the door immediately.

As to why this situation has arisen, I think the corporatization of American academics is at fault. If a biomedical researcher can float a false claim for a few years, they can spin their research off to a startup and then sell that startup to a big pharmaceutical conglomerate. If it fails to pan out in further clinical trials, well, that’s life. Cooking the data to make it look attractive to an investor – in the almost completely unregulated academic environment – is a game that many bright-eyed eager beavers are currently playing.

As supporting evidence, look at mathematical and astronomical research, the most fraud-free areas of academics. There’s no money to be made in studying things like galactic collisions or exoplanets, the data is all in the public domain (eventually), and with mathematics, you can’t really cook up fraudulent proofs that will stand the test of time.

Sure money could be a factor, but the desire for prestige can motivate people just as easily.

You are talking about a part of the academy that relative to medicine, so few people do.

Show up to a bank looking like someone who knows math, and they’ll cut you a huge check. Is that not fraud?

In cases like this where the fraud is so blatant and solely done for the purposes of aggrandizing Masliah’s reputation (and getting more money), and where it caused real harm, we need to treat these as the serious crimes that they are.

I blame this behavior entirely on “publish or perish”. The demands for novel, thoughtful and statistically-significant findings is tremendous in academe, and this is the result: cheating.

I left professional academia because I resented the grind, and the push to publish ANYTHING (even reframing and recombining the same data umpteen times in different publications) in an effort to earn grants or attain tenure.

The academia system is broken, and it cannot be repaired with minor edits, in my opinion. This is a tear out and do over scenario for the academic culture, I’m afraid.

I wonder if a market-driven approach could work here, where hedge funds hire external labs to attempt to reproduce the research underlying new pharmaceutical companies or trials and then short the companies whose results they can’t replicate before results get reported.

The guy said, “That depends on whether you consider reputation ‘nothing.’ “

I guess what that shows is, you can always negotiate and compromise over money, but reputation is more of a binary. An academic can fake some work, and as long as he’s never called on it, his reputation is set.

So yeah, a little more fear of having one’s reputation ruined would go a long way towards fixing science.

A caveat that “reputation”, like competence, is more variagated and localized than is often appreciated. As with someone who is highly competent and well regarded in their own subfield, while simultaneously rather nutter about some nearby subfield where they don’t actually work.

One can have a reputation like “good, but beware they have a thing for <mechanism X>”. Or “ignore their results using <technique> – they see what they want to see”. Subtext that gets passed among professors chatting at conferences, and to some extent to their students, but otherwise isn’t highly accessible.

When people speak of creating research AI’s using just papers… that’s missing seemingly important backchannels. And corresponding with authors. Attempting research AI as developing-world professionally-isolated professor.

Bang on.

Not many people in the academic/technical people realize this, often for their entire lives. In their naive worldview, they cannot even imagine that people can stoop that low.

(embarrassingly and shamefully I used to be one of those naive people)

And I’m not sure what example could illustrate the problem with the lopsided valuation of economic capital and the general devaluation of symbolic capital (as compared to pre-1980s, we have since undergone a social revolution of considerable dimensions, which is also why there isn’t an easy fix) better than this one.

Humans are, by our biology, social creatures. Modern humanity more than ever before. If you’re not considering the social effects, then IMO you’re not addressing anything of value.

In every industry right now there appear to be a lot of people running cover. I have a personal belief, with the exception of a few industries, 50% of managers are simply running cover. This is easy to explain:

1/ Nothing follows people

2/ Jobs were easy to get in the last 3 years (this is changing FAST)

3/ Rinse and repeat and stay low until you’re caught.

https://hub.scroll.pub/?template=paper

Happy to provide personal help onboarding those who want to use this to publish their scientific work. [email protected]

I mean, get this: an extremely gifted Mathematician living on a measly salary in Russia had had his millenium prize almost stolen by a Harvard professor. What more evidence do you need?

My advice to anyone going into Hollywood would be to stay away from drugs; my advice to anyone going into academia is to treat every interaction as if you’ve just sat at a poker table in Las Vegas.

Our experience of things has a lot of bias toward what we want to hear. Generalization plays into sterotypes and ideology.

edit: and it’s not things I’ve heard, instead it is direct experiences, i.e. people stole my work, and things like that. As a graduate student to watch professors come to you with problem X, take what you’ve said (an actual solution) and publish a paper without attribute, that sort of thing; to report it and have nothing be done about it, et cetera, and on it goes, it’s just instance after instance of such behavior, or the million ways in which they are careful to trick you into working on their problems without receiving attribute. One such trick for example, that again happened to me, is that after a conference talk I got into an e-mail discussion where I explained my approach; I was told that “they already have these results” (the trick here was to divulge less in the talk than what was currently known in order to be able to avoid “significant progress by another person” in the case another person does share new progress that they have already established, and hence not having to share attribution.) It turned out that our discussion was enough for them to go from n=3,4 to a general formula involving primes, because I pointed out a certain property they had not noticed. This is just a single example of the sorts of tricks, aside from total fraud, that happen, and one of the milder incidents I had happen to me.

If you are unable to “extrapolate to all of academia” then I suggest you be more selective in your statements.

    "The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.
    The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
    Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
    Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
    We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. ..."

We need to seriously rethink our approaching to stewarding these institutions and ideas, public trust is rightfully plummeting.

I’ve done Biology and CS for almost 20 years now, I’ve worked at four of the top ten research institutions in the world. The ratio of honest to bullshit academics is alarmingly low.

Most of these people should be in jail. Not only do they commit academic fraud, many of them commit other types of crimes as well. When I was a PhD student, my 4 year old daughter was kidnapped by staff at KAUST. Mental and physical abuse is quite common and somewhat “accepted” in these institutions. Sexual harassment and sexual abuse is through the roof.

I am very glad that, slowly, these things are starting to vent out. This is one real swamp that needs to be drained.

Some smartass could come up and say “where is your evidence for this?”. This is what allows this abhorrent behavior to thrive. Do you think these people are not smart enough to commit these crimes in covert ways? The reason why they do it is because they know no one will find out and they will get away with it.

What’s the solution? I’ve thought about this a lot, a lot. I think a combination of policies and transparency could go a long way.

Because of what they did to me, I am fully committed to completely destroy and expunge people who do these things from academia. If you, for whatever reason, would like to help me on this mission, shoot me an email, there’s a few ideas already taking shape towards that goal.

Bad actors are attracted to glamor and prestige because they’re part of the cloaks and levers they use to escape consequences. Bad actors are far less attracted to, just as an example, living in Wisconsin, Michigan, or Indiana and telling people at conferences that they work at UW rather than Cambridge. UCs are also vastly more welcoming and supportive of working and middle class students than HYPSM even at the graduate level. That doesn’t mean that you won’t find any assholes at these places, and go too low in the rankings and you’ll see ugly competition over scarce resources, but there’s a sweet spot where more honorable people who aren’t chasing prestige cluster and you’ll find more support and recourse. Public schools ranked 5-15 are best for students without significant, significant social savvy and other forms of protection, IMO.

Do you think these are also the best for incoming faculty?

I’m not 100% satisfied with how they handled the situation (they took a while to react to the issue) but in the end we were able to leave that place and I’m happy with that.

Every year that feeling becomes more certain. Glad I quit the track in grad school.

I feel terribly for all the incredibly smart and hard working academics that remain honest and try to make it work. They do what they love, otherwise they wouldn’t do such intensive work with so much sacrifice.

It is really disheartening too because academia only turns on the “honesty filter” when it comes to minor grad students that pissed off the wrong people. But you can do all this fraud constantly and become president of harvard if you know the right politics.

Dishonest lot. I hope karma is real so they get what is coming to them for taking advantage of people that just love to increase humanity’s knowledge.

You’re being downvoted because you’re correct—HN is an eco chamber for zealous regurgitation of opinions of the academy and media—institutions that have decayed. It’s been happening slowly for awhile, but now things are starting to come apart at the seams.

“We know academia is bad. But this is the best we have and it is hard to improve”

when that is false on two counts.

1. If you had said the same thing before 2016 or covid, people would not agree that academia is rife with fraud or worthy of skepticism.
2. The same people saying the system dismiss how can it be improved are the same ones that would suffer from disruption as you say. They have the power to dismiss these arguments to begin with.

I can do it too. Person named SpaceManNabs made a bad post. There for all posts by SpaceManNabs, and probably all posts on HackerNews are bad. A dishonest lot.

I specifically mention that the majority of scientists are not dishonest. The majority of scientists are not running academia. The majority of scientists are suffering from this system, to differing degrees.

If I were as rude as you, I’d extrapolate on reading ability, especially since it is not just one fraud case.

Regardless, even if I was wrong on that, all my other criticisms of academia still stand, like exploitation of the phd students. I really hope the grad student unions get what they want.

I appreciate your response though. Makes me feel confident that it is just salty people on HN that hate truth, because otherwise, why would you mischaracterize what I said?

A scapegoat is something that takes on all the sins of a lot of others who skate free. If Masliah is the only one who ever suffers, then he IS a scapegoat, but if this article serves to uncover a lot of other bad actors, then he’s not. And if his example serves to warn a lot of other scientists to clean up their acts, then his suffering is a benefit.

Defund universities. No more student loans, make them have to earn their place in the market or we will continue to suffer under the manipulated system that is actually killing students.

This… it’s no longer about value its about optics… Problem exists in most industries now. The pendulum needs to swing back the other way before it’s too late to stop the decay…

Nassim Taleb said that people think weathermen are terrible predictors of the future. He says meteorology is among the most accurate sources of predictions in our lives. But we can easily validate it and we see the mistakes. If we had as much first hand experience with other types of predictions we’d appreciate the accuracy of weatherman. My point is: just because you know the flaws in a system don’t assume it isn’t better than another.