I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

I once read an article that theorized that as a covert means of pre-war, countries would publish bogus disease, human health, and pathology data along with fake stats on "how poisonous is XYZ things".

Wish I could find it. Struck me as creepy.

The model of science that worked from Newton to Landau seems to be falling apart in today's scale.

There are millions of people whose livelihood depends on publishing, so they will publish anything they'll get away with. The amount of noise is beyond any researcher's ability to pick through. True incremental improvements in all areas are drowned in a steady flow of bad research.

Top tier institutions seem to survive in some sort of bubbles.

> There are millions of people whose livelihood depends on publishing, so they will publish anything they'll get away with.

This is also the problem with the iOS App Store and the Google Play store. They are modeled off Linux repositories, and those do not cause major problems. The phone app stores are riddled with problems, because you can charge for apps in those stores.

If you're willing to pay people to lie to you, they will. You have to make the tradeoff between higher participation with lots of fraud, and lower participation with not that much fraud.

> Top tier institutions seem to survive in some sort of bubbles.

Not really; compare Brian Wansink at Cornell. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Wansink )

Research output is reliable where it is actively relied on by engineers -- and not elsewhere. At this point, fraud is the norm and research is the exception in academia overall.

I've reported similar misconduct before. Was told the claims were very concerning, and that there was a quite clear problem that would be investigated. A few months later, I was informed the problem had been resolved, though on inspection, nothing had changed. I learned their investigation involved asking the person of interest if everything was legitimate, to which they said yes. Investigation closed. I am truly disappointed at what has become of the industry I used to appreciate so much.

This is pretty interesting stuff, but one note:

> The correction explains away the failures of randomization as an error in translation; the authors now claim that they let participants self-select their condition. This is difficult for me to believe. The original article’s stressed multiple times its use of random assignment and described the design as a "true experiment.”

> They also had perfectly equal samples per condition ("n = 1,524 students watched a 'violent' cartoon and n = 1,524 students watched a 'nonviolent' cartoon.") which is exceedingly unlikely to happen without random assignment.

This actually cannot happen with random assignment either. The only way you're going to get equal numbers in each bin is if your process is intentionally constrained to do that. If assignment were random, the odds of assigning 1,524 to one bin and 1,524 to the other bin would be C(3048, 1524) / 2^3048, or 1.4%.