Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please commit more blatant academic fraud

jacobbuckman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 365 posts

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#11

Post by berndi »

Wow, the amount of depravity in some academic circles is astonishing.

The article links [1] the case of a PhD student at the University of Florida who was forced to participate in such a publication collusion ring and was pressured to commit scientific fraud by fabricating results and submitting them to a conference [2], being threatened with physical harm should he decide to go public.

This student saw no way out and decided to kill himself.

Just a few days after the suicide, the department thought it would be appropriate for the student's own lab to have a "fun" excursion and to document it on Instagram [3].

I'm lost for words.

[1] https://medium.com/@tnvijayk/potential-organized-fraud-in-ac... [2] https://huixiangvoice.medium.com/the-hidden-story-behind-the... [3] https://www.instagram.com/p/Bz1EExLhdYD/

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#12

Post by jollybean »

berndi wrote: post #11

Wow, the amount of depravity in some academic circles is astonishing. The article links [1] the case of a PhD student at the University of Florida who was forced to participate in such a publication collusion ring and was pressured to commit scientific fraud by fabricating results and submitting them to a conference [2], being threatened with physical harm should he decide to go public. This student saw no way out an…

Imagine if this happened in private enterprise, like at Google. The press would be all over it 24/7.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#13

Post by totalZero »

jollybean wrote: post #12
berndi wrote: post #11

Wow, the amount of depravity in some academic circles is astonishing. The article links [1] the case of a PhD student at the University of Florida who was forced to participate in such a publication collusion ring and was pressured to commit scientific fraud by fabricating results and submitting them to a conference [2], being threatened with physical harm should he decide to go public. This student saw no way out an…

Imagine if this happened in private enterprise, like at Google. The press would be all over it 24/7.

Yes, I agree. It seems to me that academia feels external to the power structure, so it rarely gets the same kind of attention as industry because it doesn't stir up resentment.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#15

Post by thaumasiotes »

tom_mellior wrote: post #8
thaumasiotes wrote: post #5

Hmmm. 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?…

> If I'm reading conference papers, why would I worry about whether one of them is the product of review collusion? Because the one you are reading may have crowded out a better one. Even if the current review system is essentially random, replacing it with something that is essentially a contest of well-connectedness is worse. Young researchers with good ideas but fewer connections, or people from less well-known in…

None of that reflects negatively on the paper. There is no additional caution warranted when reading papers. That's just a question of "are you happy with the state of the world?". You can think about that question any time.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#16

Post by sillysaurusx »

One surprising discovery about AI: There's nothing inherently wrong with cherrypicking. I used to think it was this dirty thing. Oh, you're only showing your best results?

But the best results are what matters. If you can create an amazing song from scratch by telling a computer what to do, you only need to do it once. The song is still good.

And it's easy to automate. If you have a way of detecting a good song, or at least filtering out rubbish, then you can generate thousands of attempts to get the good result.

I like to say "It's hard to pick cherries from a rotten tree."

The flipside of this post, though, really hits home. I recently was super excited about a paper called FNet, which showed that "fourier transforms can be competitive with transformers", i.e. just replace multihead attention with a fourier transform. 7x faster on a GPU! Woo!

Buried in section 3.1, they casually note that BERT with half the parameter count completely dominates them in terms of accuracy: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1393315603973386240

In other words, the paper was ... advertised in a misleading way, to put it kindly. Most of the transformers they compared with aren't the traditional multihead GPT style transformer that people think of when they hear "transformer". And the one that was (BERT) totally annihilated them.

But it's also easy to jump to conclusions too quickly. I've been a hothead in the past, and called out a paper when it turned out that I just didn't understand enough. It's tricky to know for sure.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#17

Post by jollybean »

totalZero wrote: post #13
jollybean wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if this happened in private enterprise, like at Google. The press would be all over it 24/7.

Yes, I agree. It seems to me that academia feels external to the power structure, so it rarely gets the same kind of attention as industry because it doesn't stir up resentment.

They are part of the power structure, they're just 'protected'. Most publications don't want to be seen as promoting a narrative that goes 'against science' even though of course it's not. There's no room for nuance in populism.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#18

Post by wincent »

Best part of the article is the footnote, where the author characterizes his own papers:

> This paper is bullshit, this paper (a NeurIPS oral) is bullshit, this paper is complete bullshit, this paper is mostly good science but also has a sprinkling of bullshit. Apologies to my co-authors.

https://jacobbuckman.com/2021-05-29-please-commit-more-blata...

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#20

Post by qPM9l3XJrF »

MattGaiser wrote: post #10
blagie wrote: post #3

It's worth noting: In most of these cases, even when caught, the guilty parties and the bad papers remain unnamed. There are known-to-the-editors fraudulent papers in major journals still being cited. 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 stuf…

With laws, there are full time police officers, investigators, and prosecutors working to catch people. And even then, most crimes go unsolved and unpunished. Even without the complicity, stopping fraud and bad behavior is a difficult problem. Part time reviewers and reputation seem woefully insufficient counters.

Yes, I'm very skeptical of Buckman's claim that more fraud will help. Seems similar to a claim around 2015-2016 that voting for Donald Trump will inspire America to clean up its act politically. Institutions aren't biological systems that operate according to mysterious hormetic processes. Institutions are created by humans and thrive or decay based on whether they effectively channel human effort. Be the change you want to see in the world. And if you wreck something, and others apply blood sweat and tears to recreate it in a way that's better than the original, you don't get to take any credit as the wrecker.
Post reply on HN