Please commit more blatant academic fraud

Please commit more blatant academic fraud
jacobbuckman.com

The consequences of committing academic fraud are minor, and the consequences of not doing so generally mean no academic jobs or tenure.

There isn't a 99.99% innocent claim here (as at the end of the article). This stuff is widespread. This is much more accurate:

"because everybody is complicit in this subtle fraud, nobody is willing to acknowledge its existence"

Littman is at Brown, where the majority of the CS department engages in this !@#$%. I'm not trying to single out Brown. Parts of MIT, Stanford, etc. are even worse.

Here we see the following claim:

> By partaking in a form of fraud that has left the Overton window of acceptability, the researchers in the collusion ring have finally succeeded in forcing the community to acknowledge its blind spot. For the first time, researchers reading conference proceedings will be forced to wonder: does this work truly merit my attention? Or is its publication simply the result of fraud?

But I don't see how this follows. If I follow the link to the description of the actual fraud ( https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/6/252840-collusion-rings... ), it says essentially the opposite: the "fraudulent" papers are no different from papers published by ordinary means.

> the review process is notoriously random. In a well-publicized case in 2014, organizers of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference formed two independent program committees and had 10% of submissions reviewed by both. The result was that almost 60% of papers accepted by one program committee were rejected by the other, suggesting that the fate of many papers is determined by the specifics of the reviewers selected

> In response, some authors have adopted paper-quality-independent interventions to increase their odds of getting papers accepted. That is, they are cheating.

> Here is an account of one type of cheating that I am aware of: a collusion ring.

> A group of colluding authors writes and submits papers to the conference.

> The colluders share, amongst themselves, the titles of each other's papers, violating the tenet of blind reviewing

> The colluders hide conflicts of interest, then bid to review these papers, sometimes from duplicate accounts, in an attempt to be assigned to these papers as reviewers.

> The colluders write very positive reviews of these papers

So the system is: conferences already can't tell the difference between a good paper and a bad paper. Researchers respond by adopting strategies for passing review that are irrelevant to paper quality (since paper quality doesn't count). But those strategies aren't bad for paper quality. If I'm reading conference papers, why would I worry about whether one of them is the product of review collusion?