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Please commit more blatant academic fraud

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Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#121

Post by teachingassist »

bonoboTP wrote: post #111
alisonkisk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern science doesn't have peer review! Peer review works within a community, scientists review each other's work to decide who to trust. But the public and funding agencies are not part of that review! So why to we believe or fund the results? Either we are not their peers and should not engage with them, or we should be reviewing their work as part of the publication process. We also have "peers" in criminal prose…

The problem is that laypeople or bureaucrats can't judge highly specialized technical contributions. It's already difficult to do if your subfield is a different niche.

> It's already difficult to do if your subfield is a different niche.

It's not that difficult, at least in science and science-adjacent fields. The scientific method still follows the same principles.

If you are used to reading papers, you can tell when someone has elided important detail, or not included the evidence for their claims - or, if someone [or a whole subfield] is using technical language to obfuscate their work.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#123

Post by dalbasal »

The level of academic unhappiness with publishing and its surrounds is actually surprising to me.

First, I never hear the counterargument.. that current publishing is OK. Does it exist, or is everyone unhappy while nothing changes?

Second, I'm surprised at how much of a single institution academia seems to be. "Publish or Perish," for example, has to be supported by tenure committees, grant makers and such. Are they all the same?

Michael Stonebraker^ suggests that tenure committees accept a limited number of papers on a resume. This is to encourage lower volume, higher quality publication. What stops some tenure committees from implementing such changes.

I just don't understand what's locking everything into place.

^https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFKl_5JTnA&t=853s

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#124

Post by Igelau »

cryptica wrote: post #97

One big problem in our society is that there is a Darwinian selection process occurring which selects for psychopathy. It's only going to get worse. Psycopaths are attracted to power and are willing to do anything for it so they are more likely to get it. Power comes with money. Money allow psychopaths to have more children. The children are more likely to be psychopaths too so they will also end up in positions of p…

Anecdata and not medical advice, but I used to think up a lot of things like this before I started taking SSRIs.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#125

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

alisonkisk wrote: post #99
teddyh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve noticed a pattern where, wherever someone feels the need to write (after a disparaging story about someone else) “ They were not joking ” or “ They really said this ”, it’s almost always false, and the disparaged person really was joking, or really did not say that, or it was taken wildly out of context, etc.

What's the missing context here? That he used an important public speaking opportunity to actually mock the women he was assigned to help, and we misunderstood it as a serious appeal? That he was being fake offensive because it would be funny or enlightening? This wasn't an opportunistic pun. Humor is rooted in one's worldview.

I don't know any of the context here, but it seems to me that what the quote actually says is that the author admits that he is unable to function effectively with female colleagues, that there are other men like him, and that it's a problem that mustn't be allowed to hold women back from doing science.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#126

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

newswasboring wrote: post #75
throwaway45209 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a lunch for female journalists and scientists, Hunt gave a speech... "It's strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls? Now, ser…

People keep bringing out that this can be a joke, but he said this two days later "I did mean the part about having trouble with girls. It is true that I have fallen in love with people in the lab, and that people in the lab have fallen in love with me, and it's very disruptive to the science. It's terribly important that, in the lab, people are on a level playing field. And I found these emotional entanglements made…

So what part of falling in love with people in the lab, people in the lab falling in love with you, and that affecting concentration and productivity, is so evil as to get someone fired?

Sorry, honest question. Being from a different culture, I honestly fail to get this kind of outrage. For me it's just a description of humans being human...

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#127

Post by biztos »

tlb wrote: post #59

The 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…

> Medical research and bridge-building are mostly rigorous, programming is mostly non-rigorous.

Medical research and bridge-building are increasingly dependent on programming. Maybe they are less rigorous than we like to think?

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#128

Post by bonoboTP »

teachingassist wrote: post #121
bonoboTP wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that laypeople or bureaucrats can't judge highly specialized technical contributions. It's already difficult to do if your subfield is a different niche.

> It's already difficult to do if your subfield is a different niche. It's not that difficult, at least in science and science-adjacent fields. The scientific method still follows the same principles. If you are used to reading papers, you can tell when someone has elided important detail, or not included the evidence for their claims - or, if someone [or a whole subfield] is using technical language to obfuscate the…

There are many levels of analysis to a paper. Yours is part of it but not the full picture. One other thing is the novelty aspect. To assess that, you need to know the current state of the field. Also the best practices, known methodological pitfalls, judge what is a valid chain of reasoning and what is too speculative etc. It's far from simple and I often see outsiders online criticizing largely irrelevant things while missing core issues. There's no shortcut to expertise in a field. You need first hand experience and knowledge of the state of the art. Otherwise, if papers have to talk to laypeople or generic scientists, we'll see even more smokes and mirrors. The idea of peer review is that a work should be challenged by those best equipped to challenge it.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#129

Post by afarrell »

newswasboring wrote: post #75
throwaway45209 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a lunch for female journalists and scientists, Hunt gave a speech... "It's strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls? Now, ser…

People keep bringing out that this can be a joke, but he said this two days later "I did mean the part about having trouble with girls. It is true that I have fallen in love with people in the lab, and that people in the lab have fallen in love with me, and it's very disruptive to the science. It's terribly important that, in the lab, people are on a level playing field. And I found these emotional entanglements made…

Honestly, the people who jump to conclusions about him saying this need to read some Berné Brown.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#130

Post by dahart »

raphlinus wrote: post #102
tlb wrote: post #59

The 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…

I'll give my reading, and a tip to the author. To me, this did not read as a serious proposal to actually commit more fraud. Rather, it was a "modest proposal" in the tradition of Swift, in which the actual call to action was for the field to be more critical of papers, especially to be on the lookout for all fraud, both the obvious kind and the more subtle variants, the latter of which also do great damage to the fi…

I assumed it was tongue in cheek, but the end of the article really convinced me that the author is serious about his ‘let it get worse so it can get better proposal’ stance.

“Widespread fraud would force us to re-strengthen our community’s academic norms, transforming the way we do research, and improving our collective ability to progress humanity’s knowledge.

“So this is a call to action: please commit more academic fraud.

[...]

“Let’s make explicit academic fraud commonplace enough to cast doubt into the minds of every scientist reading an AI paper. Overall, science will benefit.”

Given the number of people in academics and politics and software and just about any field who argue from the ‘let’s burn it down and rebuild it’ position, even if it is satire, it’s basically impossible to tell.

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