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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?

#311

Post by singhrac »

jfengel wrote: post #303
singhrac wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can second this. Working in industry, the bar is quite high for rigor. The general attitude of industrial researchers is to be very very skeptical of academia, since a lot of things just don't reproduce (cherry-picked data, p-hacking, only work in a narrow domain, etc., etc.). These researchers are almost all people with PhDs in various science fields, so not exactly skeptics.

The bar is different, but so are the aims. Industry works solely on stuff that's reproducible because it wants to put these things into practice. That makes for an admirable level of rigor, but constrains their freedom to look at unprofitable and unlikely ideas. That inevitably results in inadvertent p-hacking. The first attempt to look at something unexpected is always "This might be nothing, but..." They call in ot…

I agree with you, and I don't want my comment to be read as an indictment of academia exactly - we couldn't live without it, it has huge returns on investment, etc. It's worth reading 10 bad papers to find 1 with a kernel of a good idea (and worth spending research funding on 100 bad experiments to get 1 useful result).

I think what I mean to say is that the skills required in industrial research (which can be quite speculative in well-funded companies, by which I mean a 5% chance of success or so) are somewhat different from those required in academia.

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

#312

Post by Blikkentrekker »

kube-system wrote: post #308
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very good that the general public is less believing in science. I remember well when the public was very believing, including me, and in hindsight it was always undeserving of such faith. It was a very misguided thing to take a conclusion as fact, so long as it be called “science”, for often upon closer inspection the methodology was dubious, and it was never attempted to be reproduced, so even if the methodolo…

To be credible does not require infallibility. The broader social consequence of the general public losing faith in science is not that they will suddenly become enlightened in the nuances of the scientific discovery process -- it is that they will turn to alternative sources of truth. Science isn't a perfect source of truth but it is a heck of a lot better than seeking truth through mythology, tribalism and the opin…

I find that much of the newly inspired criticism on science after the appearance of the replication crisis did not go to alternative source of truth but started to admit that there is much that men don't know and won't know.

The problem is man's arrogance that it knows, that it can find a solution to every quæstion it asks.

“science” is also not even close to “not infallible” it is a complete coinflip whether any peer-reviewed result is even worth the paper it's printed on.

Dare I say it's under that, because it's a coinflip whether the data are even reproducible, but the conclusions derived from the data, even if they be reproducible, are almost invariably involving bigger leaps of faith than making data up.

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

#313

Post by petschge »

austinjp wrote: post #131
raister wrote: post #34

What about Editor's ethics or lack thereof? I got accepted in a Chinese-oriented journal (i.e. most of the Editorial Board were Chinese) - I am not just 'saying' this, I'm saying because the OP mentioned "it's a Chinese thing" over results and datasets, whatever, I digress. On the last revision round, the Editor told me that I was lacking some references, which he promptly send me. Turned out that 6 out 6 of his 'rec…

As others have noted, this is a global problem, not just Chinese. The version that is more difficult to detect is when a cabal of colleagues agree to push each others' papers in this way. So editor A says "you should really quote authors B, C and D." And somewhere else, editor B is saying "you should really quote authors A, C and D." Machine learning might be a way to tackle this at scale, by teasing out these associ…

How do you propose to detect if A, B, C and D are a cabal that push their own papers or if they are the people who actually know the subject and want to improve the quality of paper that new people produce?

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

#314

Post by ricksunny »

I’m wondering how many folks are aware that a similar case of research misconduct is actually affecting the covid origin investigation?

Essentially a lot of scientists in 2020/2021 cite the same two research papers on impounded pangolins to support that covid-19’s virus, SARS-CoV-2, had a close cousin(s) infecting pangolins.

However, this analysis from an MIT Broad Institute genomics researcher, Alina Chan PhD, implicates research misconduct on the part of those two articles’ authors.

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1320344055230963712?s=21

Turns out the authors of the pangolin papers can’t provide the complete pangolin-infecting coronavirus sample genome (i.e. they can’t provide ‘the source code’ if you will), and they profess not having coordinated with each other or even knowing each other even though authors from both papers published a paper (notably also a pangolin cov genome oriented) together just a couple months before the outbreak came out.

Mainstream virologists like Angela Rasmussen PhD now call the pangolin cov genomes ‘a mess’,

https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/13498414893842841...

and yet these papers continue to get cited to help prop up the natural origin line.

U.S. Right to Know published the email traffic between the Nature Medicine & PLOS Pathogens editors and the two sets of authors of the research papers in question:

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1354455267656785925?s=21

. . . and after all that those authors still come up short. In other words, there’s ‘weirdness’ around the provenance of those pangolin cov datasets, and the lack of formal retractions from Nature and PLOS Pathogens (despite those journals’ editors’ posted Q&A with the authors) means that the natural origin line continues to gain unearned steam (beyond being reasonably treated as simply the pandemic origin’s null hypothesis).

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

#315

Post by [deleted] »

throw998 wrote: post #286
qwantim1 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find this fascinating. If we allow ourselves to entertain the idea of quantum time paradoxes, could it be that the radioactivity was in fact caused by the ghost of Marie Curie herself ? She would have a very strong and obvious reason to haunt the science.

[deleted]

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

#316

Post by academonic »

mooseburger wrote: post #260
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…

Shouldn't you name and shame this guy in this comment? It doesn't seem like he deserves anonimity.

I think the grad student was this guy: https://twitter.com/dougfowler42 (Douglas M Fowler)

His work at Scripps matches the same research group and timeframe of when dnautics was there, and he's now a professor in UW's genomics lab. The topic described seems to fit what he was researching then, and he received a prestigious grad student award for it.

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

#317

Post by aspaceman »

roel_v wrote: post #208
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you edit the Wikipedia page or challenge the interpretation in the talk page?

Wikipedia itself has descended into the same pathologies you see in 'science' today: a bunch of gatekeepers who, by account of having been there the longest, have set up a moat of rules and 'culture' and such, to the point where newcomers are shut down or drowned out. I'm not saying it's impossible to get in; but only those that sufficiently mould themselves to the existing people and structures will last long enough…

What are you even talking about?

I genuinely have no idea. You mind tangibly identifying how Wikipedia has descended into chaos like you say?

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

#318

Post by prewett »

throw998 wrote: post #286
qwantim1 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find this fascinating. If we allow ourselves to entertain the idea of quantum time paradoxes, could it be that the radioactivity was in fact caused by the ghost of Marie Curie herself ? She would have a very strong and obvious reason to haunt the science.

That sounds like self-imposed slavery: every time someone wants radioactivity, Marie Curie's ghost needs to show up and produce it. What with all the nuclear reactors and RTGs on far-flung spacecraft, she's a busy ghost.

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

#320

Post by toomim »

tinyhouse wrote: post #259
hinkley wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could sense this sort of problem even in CS and could not wait to get into an applied position as soon as possible. If you cannot build the thing you’re an expert in, you’re no kind of expert I understand.

It's true CS has this problem. But that doesn't mean you cannot do reproducible research in academia. It's up to you.

If you are outcompeted by people with lower morals, then is it really up to you? You either have to succumb to taking shortcuts, or lose your funding.
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