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

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

#181

Post by gryn »

pas wrote: post #147
arethuza wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own, rather bitter, experiences with academic research in the early 1990s led me to suspect that by trying to "manage" academic research at a large scale was utterly counter productive and was optimising for all the wrong things (publications, career progression, money, politics) and was actually dramatically reducing the amount of actual science being done. I left, co-founded a startup and never regretted it for…

What does conservative mean in this context? Could you explain it a bit? Thanks!

If I had to guess, in the academic context it would mean no actual novel thinking, just churning out more papers on the same `winning` theories in the field, things where before even starting you have a clear idea of what the result would look like.

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

#182

Post by qwantim1 »

renewiltord wrote: post #113
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…

My cousin was a student at a lab where a sketchy grad student doctored results too. She was majorly sketched out by the whole thing and that the PI supported the whole op. It was very painful and set her back a bit but she managed to switch to a different lab and do proper work, defend her thesis, graduate, and get far away from those people. Now we just shake our head in disbelief at them but at that point it was fa…

Attention and effort will go to “well-presented fake”.

Marie Curie believed that radioactivity might have been caused by ghosts or the paranormal because of such things.[1] While there may actually be ghosts or other things paranormal, I’d bet that Marie Curie was fooled.

The good part is that Curie’s work persists, and we think we have more understanding about radioactive substances.

I’m not sure whether she had to spend time specifically debunking the ghost-of-radioactivity theory; that just happened because of her work studying radioactive substances and their effects.

[1]- https://www.famousscientists.org/scientists-who-believed-in-...

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

#183

Post by pdpi »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #137
renewiltord wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My cousin was a student at a lab where a sketchy grad student doctored results too. She was majorly sketched out by the whole thing and that the PI supported the whole op. It was very painful and set her back a bit but she managed to switch to a different lab and do proper work, defend her thesis, graduate, and get far away from those people. Now we just shake our head in disbelief at them but at that point it was fa…

Every now and then I go through some of wikipedias sources on certain social topics because I don't trust them at all. The amount of BS I've found in papers, even though I don't eve have any research background at all is impressive. My favourite was probably this one paper where the author essentially made a reddit-post asking a community about themselves, then cherry-picked (the post is still up, with timestamps and…

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. It’s a secondary source that aggregates knowledge from primary sources.

For all the problems wikipedia does have, this isn’t one of them. It’s not their job to second guess published research.

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

#184

Post by mam2 »

cies wrote: post #178

Many stories like this and people wonder why the general public is less "believing" in science lately. I think sadly the general public is right not to believe as strongly in science as it maybe once did, the results though are dramatic in "baby bathwater" kind of proportions. I think science should fix itself. Just publishing paper should not be the metric to reward. A retraction should seriously reward the flaw fin…

> Many stories like this and people wonder why the general public is less "believing" in science lately. I.

Eh im not sure bad studies is the cause.

Scientists, especially doctors, wanting to use their authority i some debates while 2 of them can be saying completely opposed things maybe, however, contribute...

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

#185

Post by px43 »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #104
panabee wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have been thinking a lot about this problem. society has innumerable unsolved problems in healthcare, and many talented people who would like to contribute but cannot. in software, the open-source model allows people to advance critical initiatives without quitting their day jobs or making onerous commitments. how can we achieve the same in healthcare, that is let outsiders contribute and advance the state of the a…

> how can we achieve the same in healthcare, that is let outsiders contribute and advance the state of the art? The Biohacking community is actually really adept, and had made a lot of progress in making Science accessible, prior to COVID you had teams already working together across continents and different time zones. So when someone like Josiah Zayner wanted to tackle a COVID vaccination trial on himself and other…

Josiah's videos about demystifying the COVID vaccine all got taken down, then the entire channel got shut down. Super disappointing move by YouTube. It was definitely one of my favorite channels for science education.

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

#186

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

radiator wrote: post #117
jdsalaro wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

This is true, and in my opinion there is one more tendency which you also imply. Not only the public at large, but even University graduates start to an extent distrusting those who are "professionals" in academia. It is simply a whole other world, where you are only judged by the number of papers under your name, perhaps never having contributed to anything practical - seems so detached from real life.

Hk a that old saying go?

Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach.

In my experience this is accurate in the overwhelming majority of cases.

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

#187

Post by LockAndLol »

How are we, the laymen, supposed to trust published, peer-reviewed papers? They seem to be just a bunch of words now with little meaning.

Before, I used to consider scientific papers... well, scientific and would try to base an informed opinion on the abstracts and conclusions. After reading blog entries like these and actually reading some papers (especially soft science papers which are easier to understand), even as a layman, some glaring mistakes can be spotted.

Popular scientists like Dawkins and that black astronomer are happy to point out the glaring problems in other areas of life, but it's looking more and more like the scientific field doesn't have its shit together either.

On a scale of bullshit to trustworthy, where stuff like Breitbart and ThePinkNews live in swamps of bullshit, scientific publications and papers seem to barely reach "believable". One always has to question "who payed for this research", "who reviewed it", "which country is this from", "what reasons could there have been to do this research", "are these results too good to be true", "who would benefits from these results", etc.

It seems like one really cannot trust anybody or anything and has to constantly keep their wits about themselves.

Will we ever be able to clean up our act? What can we do?

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

#188

Post by robertlagrant »

mlyle wrote: post #63
SubiculumCode wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am simply providing a counter-example of academic integrity to make the point that one's personal experiences, good or bad, may not reflect what is generally true of academica/science.

I think that probably most people show integrity... but it's a problem if review processes, editorial mechanisms, and culture reward those who don't show it.

The problem is of a lack of data publishing. All data should be published; all conclusions published (preferably with the code that generated the conclusions) so corrections can be made and improved conclusions drawn easily.

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

#189

Post by Radim »

mlang23 wrote: post #157
jdsalaro wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It is worse. If you mention that you are not trusting every scientific results per se, you're being labeled as stupid and uneducated . This sort of absolute reasoning is making the distrust even worse. How can you have trust in a in a system that is unwilling to publicly admit its shortcomings? Trust and honesty come in pairs.

This science-bro movement scares me too. "But SCIENCE said so! You're a SCIENCE denier!"

It feels like a religion, with its own T-shirts and all. Appeals to authority, intellectual posturing… often from people with little understanding of the actual science. Honest insiders are way more careful with any absolute statements.

No wonder there's a (also scary) rise of conspiracy theories.

How do people not observe those as two sides of the same coin?

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

#190

Post by jhbadger »

arethuza wrote: post #108
jdsalaro wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

My own, rather bitter, experiences with academic research in the early 1990s led me to suspect that by trying to "manage" academic research at a large scale was utterly counter productive and was optimising for all the wrong things (publications, career progression, money, politics) and was actually dramatically reducing the amount of actual science being done. I left, co-founded a startup and never regretted it for…

The problem with going to a startup is it is kind of like going from the frying pan into the fire. As someone who has worked in both academia and industry, while academia and its pursuit of publications leads to bad behavior, industry and its pursuit of money is even more unprincipled. While it might not be that hard to fool peer reviewers with nonsense, it is way easier to fool venture capitalists, who often know no science and and are just listening for the hot buzzwords.
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