How much of this fraud is committed by Chinese? I've known several people in academia who told me about blatant cheating and fraud committed by them, their culture does not frown upon this behavior, and now everyone is paying the price.
Please commit more blatant academic fraud
81–90 of 365 posts
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#82The idea that a field can be reformed by making it worse until it suddenly faces a reckoning and emerges much better is ... I don't know where people keep getting the idea that this might work. It has never worked in any field ever in history. The thing that can happen: fields gradually split into rigorous and non-rigorous camps. Like with evidence-based medicine, or chemistry/alchemy. Depending on the field, either…
Well, I wonder if this could force people to start publishing their code so others can replicate the results.
This would help greatly with the kinds of issues that are being discussed:
- It would be much harder to hide makeup results and cherry-picked seeds
- Useless research would not be as easy to hide
- The real-world impact of the research would be more valued.
- Researchers would be forced to recheck their code for it to be presentable, which could be a net benefit in terms of finding mistakes
- and so on..
I do imagine this could harm the number of replications of the research. However, I think there can be a net positive effect from such a policy. What do you think?
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#83Thank goodness I am retired and don't have to publish stuff in the current environment. Thirty years ago when machine learning was a sleepy backwater, life was a lot easier for us.
As a present-day researcher (or at least someone who aspires to be), I'm eagerly waiting for the hype to die down, and for ML to become a sleepy backwater again. You were lucky to play around with ML during those days. The neat thing is, the next AI winter, we'll still have massive hardware rigs. That's very different from 30 years ago. It's a lot easier to discover new things when you can just test every possibility…
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Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#84The idea that a field can be reformed by making it worse until it suddenly faces a reckoning and emerges much better is ... I don't know where people keep getting the idea that this might work. It has never worked in any field ever in history. The thing that can happen: fields gradually split into rigorous and non-rigorous camps. Like with evidence-based medicine, or chemistry/alchemy. Depending on the field, either…
It's interesting that programming used to be rigorous. Whole programs were written out and verified before anyone would invest the computer time. IBM had a range of flowchart templates for it! Then the growing availability of computing resources flipped the cost-benefit calculation in favor of getting it done at any cost, and quality control processes haven't been able to keep up.
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#85I think we need to rethink the core concept of Universities having publish or perish as a part of being a Professor. The reason why fraud exists is because of the incentive structure and due to the nature of research you have intelligent people that will game the system. So, we have to figure out how to change the incentive structure so that professors don't attempt to perform Academic Fraud or we h ave to figure out if fraud does exist after the fact.
I have tried to reproduce ML / Deep learning research. I have a few heuristics that don't really tell me if fraud exists but either they just can't release the data due to special circumstances that I can understand or it isn't kosher. The biggest one is that you have to register or ask them for their test data. Another one is that the paper has been published for more than two years and there are no citations from other work.
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#86Wow, 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…
How is it possible that professors with impeccable academic credentials get fired for jokes nearly instantly [1], yet this student's professor was allowed to carry on until he resigned two years later [2]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Tim_Hunt_contro... [2] https://eu.gainesville.com/story/news/education/campus/2021/...
Tenure
I had a professor in a chemistry lab that was proud of the amount of complaints he received against him.
He literally threw the two ring binder it at me while I was in his office. It must have been a hundred pages. He kept it on the wall like a trophy.
I talked to a Counselor at the school, and before I could complete my sentance, he said Dr. Berzergian? (I don't remember the exact spelling of his name.). The Conselor said he, and the Dr., almost got into fisticuffs over his attitude. He told me to take the course at another college.
I realized later all his "problem" students were young males.
Yes--I truly believe this was his twisted way of hitting on people.
A few years later, I was in a bar in San Francisco talking about this professor whom really gave me a bad time. By chance, he knew of the guy, and told me about him.
This was in the nineties, but oh boy if he acted this way today, and I stole that stack of complaints---well who knows?
This professor caused students to change majors, and even drop out.
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I'm not talking about outright fraud but the more subtler forms mentioned in the article. I think it's probably harder for outsiders to understand the nuance. It's not "who are they", its everyone. The incentives are set up wrong. Blaming individuals is insufficient. It's like dreaming if only politicians stopped lying. Academia is a hierarchy and a power system. People have interests, reputation, prestige and…
> I think it's probably harder for outsiders to understand the nuance. No, it's simple. It's called game theory. So, who benefits from the publish or perish system that drives this profoundly fraudulent behavior and outcomes in science? You are avoiding the "who" question. Why not maybe , perhaps , identify the who and get them removed from their position? It may or may not even be a fellow scientist. > lack of publi…
I disagree that this is for the lizardmen, the leftists, the woke or whoever. No, it's us all. We need publications because otherwise research is hard to evaluate for outsiders. If it's evaluated by peers, it's politics again.
There's a generic problem in academia and there is a specific one in the explosively growing and lucrative ones like AI. We can't think clearly if we blur all sorts of complaints against academia into a generic complaint against elites or something. Publish or perish also comes from the desire to measure, quantify things objectively etc. It's a generic trend in the management community. It's easier to hide behind mechanistic procedures, we live the age of the bureaucrat and not of the strong leader, for various historic reasons. Of the doctrine of equality, not of Great Men theories. But it all leads too far.
I recommend the SSC articles on Moloch for thinking deeper about this.
Why do parents chase extracurriculars and test drilling for their kid? Because it's competitive. With lower stakes, backwater academia can have lower pressure amd perhaps more attention and care.
We cannot abstract away the human. This is not a mere technical problem of a problem of morals in a few individuals. Read some novels, drama etc. We in the technical fields would benefit a lot from learning more from the humanities, literature, even classics from Antiquity. Man has not changed, our nature is still rich and complex and the same lesson that power corrupts.
Re training: outside the US, PhD programs have no explicit training. Training stops at the master level. From day one you just work on methods in the hope to publish the results. Advisors usually don't have a lot of time for each individual PhD student. Maybe let's call it experience, not training.
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#88The idea that a field can be reformed by making it worse until it suddenly faces a reckoning and emerges much better is ... I don't know where people keep getting the idea that this might work. It has never worked in any field ever in history. The thing that can happen: fields gradually split into rigorous and non-rigorous camps. Like with evidence-based medicine, or chemistry/alchemy. Depending on the field, either…
Well, I wonder if this could force people to start publishing their code so others can replicate the results. This would help greatly with the kinds of issues that are being discussed: - It would be much harder to hide makeup results and cherry-picked seeds - Useless research would not be as easy to hide - The real-world impact of the research would be more valued. - Researchers would be forced to recheck their code…
I'm active in the security and privacy field, and some conferences have started "artifact reviews" [1][2], where authors can optionally submit the data and code that go along with their work.
It's definitely an improvement, but the devil is in the details. Should these be mandatory? If they're mandatory, then what quality standards should artifacts meet? Who's ensuring those standards are followed? How should proprietary code and sensitive human-subjects research data be handled? There's also the question of what code should be made public: Is it just the analysis that produced the metrics on the paper (e.g., R scripts, Jupyter notebooks, etc.)? Or should it also include the data collection and pre-processing? How about the code that didn't produce immediately publishable results, but could be useful for future work?
[1] https://petsymposium.org/artifacts.php
[2] https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/call-for-...
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#89I manage an applied research group in the machine learning space, particularly AutoML and synthetic data generation. That means is we read the latest literature and create applications. Sometimes we build new research, most of the time we patent something new. But the goal is to get research to production as fast and as impactful as possible.
The first thing I do when sorting research (papers, blog posts, presentations, etc) is sort the research by “B.S.”, “maybe B.S.”, “probably real”.
If you look at research papers in computer science, half are what have the following problem: “running a simulation over and over until the authors get the results They like”.
I can’t tell you how many papers with thousands of citations are just blatantly wrong. They don’t run corrections based on the number of simulations they run, they don’t take into account other variables, etc
This isn’t limited to CS either. Biology, economics, environmental sciences, etc all suffer the same fate.
The worst part about it, is it’s PEER REVIEWED. Meaning, others agree this is the way to do things, which is why I don’t trust academia almost at all.
Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
You would think that allegedly driving a PoC student to suicide would count for something in the PC twitter sphere…
Are Asians PoC? I thought they were not and that was literally the only reason the oft repeated phrase “black and other PoC” didn’t literally translate into “not white”.
Only when it is politically convenient