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Cracking down on research fraud

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Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#41

Post by nostrebored »

rumanator wrote: post #31
ktaylora wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industry kinda already has. Products launched. Teams managed. A candidate's publication record is a conversation starter during interviews, but I feel like years of experience at a company working on launching a successful project is a much more valuable currency.

> Industry kinda already has. Products launched. This suggestion is so detached from both the problem and the very nature of academia that it's straight-out laughable. I mean, what do product launches have to do building knowledge on the state of the art, identifying a novel idea, doing the iterative work to refine the idea, and finally document it to the public? Product launches at best require you to manage people…

The private sector does do research, and for RoI /it actually has to work/.

Academia is a cesspit of politics and dishonesty. Forming the most effective cartels, sensationalizing your results, and being well networked with other academics is not aligned with getting results on actual problems.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#42

Post by bsder »

opportune wrote: post #27
logicslave wrote: post #6

The root of the problem is that we allow people with high esteemed credentials to run society. They jumped through a hoop. "You got straight As at 14 - 18 years old and got into an ivy league school as a result? Here run this venture fund." "You got a PhD in Economics with a good publication by P-hacking your secret data? Here take a run at the FED with power over the US Economy. Your Phd shows that you are the man f…

All three of those examples are missing a step of like 5-20 years in the middle. Nobody is running a venture fund as a 22 year old ivy grad (barring someone who's taking over for their family member, but in that case it has nothing to do with being an ivy grad), nobody is running the FED right out of a PhD, nobody is a director at a big corporation right out of a PhD. Presumably once those people are in such high-pow…

> it's certainly possible they've lied and cheated their entire career but it's definitely less likely they'll make it that far that way.

The number of people who make "correct, active decisions" is vanishingly small.

It's less they've cheated than "Did you really make correct decisions or did your coin just come up heads 8 times in a row?" Other people may have been as smart or smarter, but if the coin flip went tails, they get politically hammered.

Success has a large part of "survivor bias" to it.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#43

Post by jariel »

ktaylora wrote: post #10
Something1234 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing out the problem with credentials. Name a better indicator then for being competent.

Industry kinda already has. Products launched. Teams managed. A candidate's publication record is a conversation starter during interviews, but I feel like years of experience at a company working on launching a successful project is a much more valuable currency.

" Products launched. Teams managed."

This definitely has zero to do with quality research being published, and even in startup land, those things are nice to have but still don't prove anything, unless they were the directing agents of those initiatives.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#44

Post by rumanator »

cblconfederate wrote: post #24

Equalize the field, radically remove research hierarchies. Liberate research funding from pointless bureaucracies and 4-year grants and instead pay scientists to work on whatever they like most. Let science be fun again I always return to this article from David Hubel (of Hubel&Wiesel): https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(09)00733-8 I arrived at his lab around noon and found him working alone, recording f…

> Liberate research funding from pointless bureaucracies and 4-year grants and instead pay scientists to work on whatever they like most.

Bureaucracy exists to ensure that funds are indeed spent on research instead of jet skis and shiny toys, and hierarchies are established to focus work on specialized topics pertaining to the state of the art of a field of research.

All your suggestions do is ensure that less funds are spent on research, and the few work that is performed cannot be any form of deep dive or continuous effort on a topic, thus resulting only in low-hanging fruits.

And by the way, the minute a researcher complains he needs help with his research is the moment you get a hierarchy.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#45

Post by nostrebored »

viburnum wrote: post #33
ramraj07 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was not faced with such a shitty situation, and I probably would have done the same as well, but the right thing would have been to report it.

If you report it then the grant money is gone and everybody in the lab loses their job and all the PhD students are derailed.

In most fields this is unimportant. Bad research can have significant public policy impact.

Sure, it sucks for the students, but you have to introduce accountability in academia for it to stop being worthless.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#46

Post by sgillen »

DanielleMolloy wrote: post #30

I've read that before 2003, the whole of humanity has published as many scientific papers as from 2003 to 2016. So what happened around 2000? Who has turned the scientific mission into a blind competition for superficial metrics? So many people in science I meet (apart from the few who benefited from this system, and therefore were selected by it) are frustrated by publishing for the sake of publishing (not science)…

I think it’s mostly a numbers game, more PhDs, roughly the same number of research position. This means most scientists don’t know most other scientists in their field, and so the metrics people use to select become more important. That and the increased competition, means a bigger rat race, more pressure to publish, etc.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#47

Post by alexashka »

logicslave wrote: post #6

The root of the problem is that we allow people with high esteemed credentials to run society. They jumped through a hoop. "You got straight As at 14 - 18 years old and got into an ivy league school as a result? Here run this venture fund." "You got a PhD in Economics with a good publication by P-hacking your secret data? Here take a run at the FED with power over the US Economy. Your Phd shows that you are the man f…

I'll trade my credential for a few million any day of the week.

Never have any takers, I wonder why.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#49

Post by CannoloBlahnik »

logicslave wrote: post #6

The root of the problem is that we allow people with high esteemed credentials to run society. They jumped through a hoop. "You got straight As at 14 - 18 years old and got into an ivy league school as a result? Here run this venture fund." "You got a PhD in Economics with a good publication by P-hacking your secret data? Here take a run at the FED with power over the US Economy. Your Phd shows that you are the man f…

This is absolutely not the reality of a PhD. On what planet do people with those backgrounds get those positions out of their PhDs? What's the basis for this entire comment?

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#50

Post by rumanator »

nostrebored wrote: post #41
rumanator wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Industry kinda already has. Products launched. This suggestion is so detached from both the problem and the very nature of academia that it's straight-out laughable. I mean, what do product launches have to do building knowledge on the state of the art, identifying a novel idea, doing the iterative work to refine the idea, and finally document it to the public? Product launches at best require you to manage people…

The private sector does do research, and for RoI /it actually has to work/. Academia is a cesspit of politics and dishonesty. Forming the most effective cartels, sensationalizing your results, and being well networked with other academics is not aligned with getting results on actual problems.

> The private sector does do research, and for RoI /it actually has to work/.

The private sector does research with researchers, not product managers.

The process is exactly the same. It's not a public vs private thing. It's a research vs production thing. Research is open-ended and iterative and exploratory. Product design is close-ended, focused, and with hard requirements. Research has zero to do with product management, and you don't change the nature of the problem by pretending that a scientific discovery is a product expecting to be launched.

> Academia is a cesspit of politics and dishonesty.

Oh awesome. Have you ever did any corporate work? Because if you believe that academia suffers from this problem but corporations don't then I have a few bridges I'd like to sell you.

At least in academia you do need to have your publications to back you up. In corporate environments all you have is the cesspool part.

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