It should be a requirement to be able to provide the anonymized raw data for publication in peer reviewed journals and multiple retractions should have an effect on the credibility of the authors and their chances of being able to publish such research. Without the penalty, there is no chance of reduction in such fraud.
I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
241–250 of 363 posts
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
The field is over-crowded, for one. Two, its participant pool is almost exclusively undergraduate students on university campuses in WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) nations. Three, experimental designs may rely on questionably reliable, possibly retrospective self-report to infer patterns of affect and cognition. Four, experiments are often conducted in highly contrived laboratory envi…
What is an example of extremely good science in psychology? What's a result we can hold up to scrutiny and believe truthfully with conviction?
As the other commenter mentioned, cognitive psychology is well-developed (working memory, the relationship between action impulses and our subjective awareness thereof, etc). And there is very good social psychological research on a number of useful topics including diffusion of responsibility, the fundamental attribution error, the effect of dissenting voices on groupthink, the influence of perceived authority on human decision-making (Milgram), etc. Kahneman and Tversky's contributions (and all of "behavioral economics") could also be considered social psychology.
Anyways, though, I'm not sure it's super useful to "believe with conviction" in science. Shouldn't we hold all results up to scrutiny, and weigh them on the evidence?
Along these lines, by far the most important takeaway from the last 50 years of academic psychology, imho, is that we are usually far too willing to trust our own personal judgment. The brain is as much a self-deception engine as it is a reasoning machine. We have a far hazier view of what actually goes on in our minds than we usually think we do.
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#243In 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…
The number of incentives driving this kind of activity in science is disheartening.
So many papers get published, few are read widely, and even fewer are replicated, they'll still get citations if the talk circuit is played right. Citations are what advance a scientist in their career, and anything that could be tossed off as an unfortunate statistical anomaly or error is unlikely to end a career.
In such a world, "optimal play" would be to intentionally or unintentionally P-hack, or just slightly embellish results such that the work is interesting to cite, but not interesting enough to replicate. People who do this will eventually move up ahead of everyone else, ultimately favoring incremental but bogus resuls.
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#244An inspector general in the U.S. Navy informed me that the Navy does not have a rule against plagiarism.
Take this as career advice if you want.
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#245In 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 taking up masters(Materials Science) after a spell in Corporate. I was really hoping to go into research and academia. This is quite disappointing to hear.
Then again, it helps to remove any expectations that any field would be devoid of politics in general. Bit relieved to be disillusioned now, rather than much later.
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I don't like the science-bro movement, but I also think they might fill an important niche. The anti-science movement has too many people and too much time and too high of a (answer time / question time) gish-gallop ratio for scientists to possibly engage with. If scientists try to fight the anti-science crowd, they will lose. Science bros, for all their faults, can trade blows on more even footing, and that's someth…
Science bros often misuse "anti-science" to try to shutdown opinions they disagree with. Hence people worried about the unlikely event of being killed by a nuclear power plant are anti-science, but people worried about the even more unlikely event of being killed by a super intelligent AI aren't. Misusing the word "science" (particularly by people who don't seem to have a good grasp on it) and turning it into a rhetorical cudgel is harmful, and pushes the idea that science is ideological.
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#247The belief that any research is automatically true is so bogus and so abused that industries and lobbyists came to rely on it. It’s sad that then people blindly push as “it’s science”. Main issue is the sheer amount of papers being published and the lack of capacity of the body of experts to read all of it. I guess it’s the professionalisation of research. People publish papers to improve their rankings and not becau…
There actually is more than enough capacity to peer review ( ). It's just that nobody wants to do it. It costs time and money. Not compensated by the publisher, of course. ( ) edit: that's raw body count. I wouldn't know how many people could actually spot the errors mentioned in the OP.
From the article:
> For example, one paper reported mean task scores of 8.98ms and 6.01ms for males and females, respectively, but a grand mean task score of 23ms.
A 9th grader should be able to find that inconsistency, if you give them the table and tell the to find the number that is wrong.
(the other stuff is harder to detect, and I fully understand that you can't request and re-process the raw data for every paper you peer review. Some of these numbers....)
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#248In 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…
The number of incentives driving this kind of activity in science is disheartening. So many papers get published, few are read widely, and even fewer are replicated, they'll still get citations if the talk circuit is played right. Citations are what advance a scientist in their career, and anything that could be tossed off as an unfortunate statistical anomaly or error is unlikely to end a career. In such a world, "o…
The thing I find disheartening is that if fraudulent results are being cited, it must mean that the mechanism of "standing on the shoulders of giants" is not working. One would expect that these papers would be contributions that citing scientists could benefit from and use in their own work with impact. For example if scientist A truly developed an O(N) sorting algorithm, then a scientist B might use it in their work to derive some other result.
I guess in some fields of science the effective dependency graph of academic work is very flat, and the true results get plucked and developed by industry (being true results it is actually possible to meet the higher reproducibility bar there). And the citations don't actually reflect the true dependencies, but some political/social graph instead. Too bad.
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#249In 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…
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Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#250Chinese researcher is full of shit and fabricates results, news at 11. For the haters, this is not racism but nationalism, China super incentivizes bullshit research at a high level these days, and it's gotten bad enough that we're starting to distrust any "work" that comes out of it. I don't know what the solution is, other than to subject Chinese submissions to more stringent and specifically non-Chinese review. Th…
Why would it be racist? I have noticed in English-language discourse that often, shall-we-call-it, “non-white countries” are “races” but “white countries” are “nations”. Also, Christianity and Judaïsm are religions, but Islām is a race. Explain me that.
> Islām is a race.
Muslim here, that sounds absurd. In fact one of my biggest annoyances is when people view all Muslims around the world as single entity. Every stupid trait of every Muslim majority culture gets blamed on entire Muslim world.