I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go? • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by jdsalaro » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 7:08 AM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #31

In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…

I'm sorry but this saddens me to no end, even I did better science during my BSc and MSc; it's not just disheartening, it's frightening. Reading this almost made me feel ill to my stomach. I don't know what else to say at the blatant disregard for scientific ethics and sense of duty.

And we complain that the public at large doesn't trust us "educated" folk, well I can't see why...

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

#42

Post by Ace17 » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 7:09 AM UTC

> I was curious to see how the self-correcting mechanisms of science would respond [...] > I was disappointed by the response from Southwest University. Their verdict has protected [a fraudulent researcher] and enabled him to continue publishing suspicious research at great pace.

The self-correcting mechanisms of science can only correct knowledge. Those mechanism work mainly by requiring the research works to be checkable by others. Self-correctness emerges by the accumulation of checks on the same topic, all leading to the same conclusion, and by the progressive retractation of bad research ... not by the elimination of "bad researchers".

Efficiently "correcting" people, whatever that means, is a different beast. Such a mechanism belongs to an administrative entity who can emit decisions - and, by construction, who can make errors.

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

#43

Post by dnautics » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 7:14 AM UTC

qqj wrote: post #38

dnautics wrote: post #31

In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…

this is incredible. And I thought I had it bad with politics in tech companies... this is some next level not giving a fuck right there - people who cheat like that should be punished severely, and work as supermarket cashiers, not become fricking professors. Unfortunately, I too, were I in your shoes, wouldn't pursue it much further past filing a formal complaint or two: the game is asymmetrical, it's much harder to…

About half of my friends in grad school have had their careers damaged to varying extent by academic fraud, some have wasted lives chasing bad results (one friend lost several years chasing a bad result by Homme Hellinga), some have had bad stuff perpetrated upon them by bad actors with big names (one had her result we suspect - stolen by Carolyn Bertozzi via the review process, luckily her boss was a member of NAS and PNAS track-III'd the paper ahead of Bertozzi's publication).

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

#44

Post by SubiculumCode » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 7:15 AM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #31

In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…

I am not doubting your story, but I know plenty of solid careful scientists doing honest work and being successful. One of these successful scientists self-retracted a high impact paper after he discovered that he had made a data coding mistake. It was painful, but he did the right thing of his own accord, even though it halted work on several follow-up papers that he was drafting.

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

#45

Post by esja » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 7:17 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #23

thaumasiotes wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the person producing the output is not responsible for it really working, it almost certainly won't. Even innocently this will be the case with anything complex Indeed, there's a great example in the article itself, in a totally unrelated area: > I felt these journals generally did their best, and the slowness of the process likely comes from the bureaucracy of the process and the inexperience editors have with…

> these reasonable journals weren't able to use their retraction process even though they wanted to, because the process never gets used and therefore isn't in a usable state. Actually, this made me think about a journal purposefully running intentionally spurious papers, with a challenge to the readership to identify which paper was fake. If the system worked, that would cause every paper published in the journal to…

Interesting idea... reminds me of Chaos Monkey.

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

#46

Post by SubiculumCode » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 7:18 AM UTC

cosmotic wrote: post #12

If journals retract, they lose reputation. Thus they have incentives to ignore the problems, which explains the authors results.

but mostly likely they'll never publish that author again.

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

#47

Post by op03 » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 7:20 AM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #31

In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…

Dont worry about it. It becomes a trap and many of them loose their minds as them dig themselves into deeper and deeper holes not knowing what else to do. Source: shrink in the family at a univ counselling center. At the end of the day they are misguided people.

Even though there is a high price, their function is to train the survival skills of the honest folk who rise up the food chain. And dont have any doubt they have survived these type of people (usually thanks to the right networks and mentors), have developed their own tricks and exist in large numbers.

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

#48

Post by runsWphotons » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 7:21 AM UTC

There have been several discussions about this topic this year and there are lots of interesting anecdotes in the responses. Is anyone aware of a good longer form review of the difficulties obstructing better reproducibility and more honesty in academic publishing? Something attempting to collect the different theories and observations people make in discussions like these?

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

#49

Post by davetannenbaum » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 7:22 AM UTC

maximilianroos wrote: post #27

thaumasiotes wrote: post #10

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…

Here, "random assignment" means randomly assigning half the participants to each of two bins, I think.

Right --- it's called block randomization.

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

#50

Post by dnautics » Wed, Jan 27, 2021, 7:25 AM UTC

op03 wrote: post #47

dnautics wrote: post #31

In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…

Dont worry about it. It becomes a trap and many of them loose their minds as them dig themselves into deeper and deeper holes not knowing what else to do. Source: shrink in the family at a univ counselling center. At the end of the day they are misguided people. Even though there is a high price, their function is to train the survival skills of the honest folk who rise up the food chain. And dont have any doubt they…

I don't particularly care about him per se (though i'm sorry to burst your model of society, from what I hear over my residual science network, I'm pretty sure he's oblivious or doesn't care), I'm a bay area dev, and I'm making enough money and have made good investments in friend's startups that my only regret is not having started sooner. Hopefully I'll be able to cash out with enough to do my own biotech, so I'm just biding my time for now. But what does concern me is that this is endemic in chemistry. It's not talked about much outside.... Which makes me wonder if other sciences are just as bad, "we just don't hear it". The incentive structure and nearly nonexistent self-reporting accountabilily is just the same; and meanwhile everything operates under a general social deification of the sciences.