Cracking down on research fraud • Hacker News Board

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#151

Post by nl » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 3:51 AM UTC

adminprof wrote: post #143

martincmartin wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you suggest as an alternative?

This entire thread is really frustrating for me to read. A lot of these ideas are one-liners from people who have had very little experience with different parts of academia, except maybe being a student. Every single idea here are debated to death by academics already (not just university academics, but funding agencies, academic societies, award panels, journal editors and conference organizers), with changes happe…

Not sure who downvoted this, but this is 100% on the money in my experience.

People here are writing comments like that funding should be tied to "how systematic, logical, and well-documented the research is" as though these things are correlated to the existing criteria at all.

Much of the criticism here is like someone who knows how to build roads criticising agile software development because it makes it look like no one knows what they are going to build in the end. It's frustrating, and wrong, but the errors are subtle and aggregative.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#152

Post by vkou » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 3:53 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #149

vkou wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the problem is a bit more structural then that. A single professor trains dozens of grad students over the course of their career. Even if you remove every single foreigner, and every single person who does not want to pursue a career in academia, you still end up with dozens of graduates - per professor. The number of jobs available for those graduates? One - that professor's - when he or she retires. And until…

> The number of jobs available for those graduates? One - that professor's - when he or she retires. This simply isn't true. Remaining in academia is only one of many career paths for graduate students, and many are financially compensated much better. Some examples of these include physics and math grad students being recruited by hedge funds, comp sci grad students being recruited by tech companies and geology grad…

I already excluded the people who are getting a degree because they want to go to industry with it.

Of the 'stay-in-academia' camp, the ratio is hideously stacked against the graduates.

New and emerging universities aren't doubling the academic jobs pool every five years... Which is what it would take to keep up with the graduates being churned out.

(And incidentally, they are also contributing to the oversupply, because their professors will also be churning out even more new graduates.)

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#153

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 3:53 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#154

Post by adamsea » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 4:01 AM UTC

dodobirdlord wrote: post #126

jgeada wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? We seem to have no problem with infinite funding for Department of Defense and to bail out banks. The amount needed for science is paltry by comparison and typically has much better long term return on investment.

It would be far more fair to say that we have no problem with infinite funding for non-discretionary entitlement spending, since that's most of that the Federal Government spends money on. Military spending in the US is not wildly outside of the norm for the developed world as a percentage of GDP, and money spent to "bail out banks" is a rounding error in terms of spending, and has historically turned a profit for th…

What is entitlement spending?

These?

"Social Security and Medicare are sometimes called "entitlements," because people meeting relevant eligibility requirements are legally entitled to benefits, although most pay taxes into these programs throughout their working lives."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expenditures_in_the_United_Sta...

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#155

Post by auggierose » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 4:13 AM UTC

voxl wrote: post #138

dasudasu wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The topic of funding is a recurrent one in these types of discussions. There are always more people wanting to do science than what is available in funding. There needs to be a process to allocate resources that takes into account competency for the job. Just granting it at random or equally is probably very very far from optimal if it means that an exceptional PI cannot even do the things to push his/her research to…

I think there should be two pools of money, one that is granted at random to anyone who has obtained a professorship at a university, let that be the first filter for competency. The second pool of money can be given to projects that have immediate social interest and impact, and the government can, in this case, be very selective as there should be some social weight to succeeding here. The first pool is for idea ge…

I guess the first positive outcome of this would be that everybody working at a university would be immediately promoted to be a professor. ;-)

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#156

Post by DoreenMichele » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 4:15 AM UTC

So, some years ago, Temple Grandin wrote a set of standards and McDonald's adopted it and they buy so much beef that it became the de facto new standard for the beef industry. And it's a set of standards that helps beef producers succeed rather than a "gotcha" trying to find who is guilty.

And that's the way you make the world a better place. Not by looking for new and creative ways to nail "bad guys" to the wall after you started from an assumption of guilt.

I don't like this article. I don't like it at all. My feeling is that it was written as an emotional response to the pandemic and it is getting traction on HN for the exact same reason.

People are stressed out and they are looking for a villain to go after. It won't fix the real problem -- the pandemic -- but that's how people tend to behave in a crisis.

And it's a slippery slope towards a more draconian world. It doesn't make things better.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#157

Post by etrautmann » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 4:19 AM UTC

gwerbret wrote: post #77

These issues of research fraud come up often, but the root of the problem is a bit more subtle. In North America at least, biomedical research labs operate largely as fiefdoms of the individual principal investigators (PIs). The actual research work falls almost entirely on the backs of grad students and postdoctoral fellows. The grad students need to generate "good" data in order to graduate, the postdocs need the s…

HHMI does fund some of the most enormously successful work in biomedical science, but they start with the very best of the best. It's not clear how much of these labs success is the result of the precise funding structure, although it's obviously helpful to spend less time writing grants (or just have additional resources).

These labs are up for renewal from HHMI every 5 years, and as such, do face the same pressure to continue publishing high-impact work.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#158

Post by exmadscientist » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 5:01 AM UTC

moralestapia wrote: post #150

tlb wrote: post #35

Estimating from my own reading, 1% of research is fraud and 80% is worthless for other reasons. Numbers vary between fields. If that's the case, what's the argument for why we should spend time doing something about the 1%? Solving 100% of the 1% wouldn't change the overall situation much. Possible arguments include: - Fixing the 80% is hard, but fixing the 1% is satisfying (to the aggressively conventional-minded, a…

>1% of research is fraud You are way, waaaaaay underestimating the extent of the problem.

I think you didn't understand the grandparent poster's point. They're arguing, basically, that only 1% of research is deliberate fraud, but 80% is simply useless garbage. The reasons for the garbage are varied, but any way you slice it, it's worthless. So why worry so much about the maliciously useless when there's so much incompetent uselessness?

That matches my experience back when I was an active researcher. Intentional fraud is rare (and highly damaging). Garbage research and garbage papers are everywhere. And even most of the non-garbage research is useless! The core differentiator there is that we just don't know which things will be useful without hindsight. But we can identify plenty of things that were not helpful to anyone and we knew it... yet we still funded those programs.

I think we're mostly in agreement that the size of the problem is vast, even if we might disagree on labelling.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#159

Post by shuckles » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 5:08 AM UTC

logicslave wrote: post #51

opportune wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Part of the point is that the gap in the middle often doesn't matter. I've hung around the Stanford crowd and as I enter my thirties I am awestruck by the opportunities they have regardless of what they have done since graduation. The credential is almost all that matters, as long as they dont mess up massively. A common path is: Graduate Stanford => Work at Mckinsey => Get hired into VC. Graduate Stanford => Raise 1…

Of every 2,000 graduating seniors at Stanford every year, far less than 1% end up in top consulting companies. Even fewer raise a Series A 2-3 years out of school. I am personally not so shocked that these individuals end up succeeding at other social games. They have a track record of doing so.

Re: Cracking down on research fraud

#160

Post by obmelvin » Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 5:11 AM UTC

etrautmann wrote: post #157

gwerbret wrote: post #77

These issues of research fraud come up often, but the root of the problem is a bit more subtle. In North America at least, biomedical research labs operate largely as fiefdoms of the individual principal investigators (PIs). The actual research work falls almost entirely on the backs of grad students and postdoctoral fellows. The grad students need to generate "good" data in order to graduate, the postdocs need the s…

HHMI does fund some of the most enormously successful work in biomedical science, but they start with the very best of the best. It's not clear how much of these labs success is the result of the precise funding structure, although it's obviously helpful to spend less time writing grants (or just have additional resources). These labs are up for renewal from HHMI every 5 years, and as such, do face the same pressure…

HHMI is crazy, it has definitely had a positive impact on my girlfriends PhD experience and allowed her to take on a 'post doc killer' project. It's taken her almost 3 years, but she's gotten great quality data, and just got a great review back from Nature Chem with proposed experiments as expected.

Also, the period can increase as time goes on. Her lab doesn't have to renew for 9 years I think (they renewed last summer), if not 7.

Just my 2c, it seems to me like these funding structures do have a positive impact on the research environment. That said, it's obviously a model that really requires them to select the best of the best labs as you mention, because one org (or even the gov) quite simply can't give blank checks to every lab.