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Please commit more blatant academic fraud

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Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#281

Post by ssivark »

josalhor wrote: post #82
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…

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…

In the steel-manned implementation, I would like the plots and tables to be auto-re-generated on publication, from submitted code. That would ensure that the results can have no “hidden state” and the paper cannot claim anything more than what their publicly shared implementation guarantees.

This is par for the course in theoretical work; we should strive to apply the same standards of rigor to experimental work.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#282

Post by rscho »

bumby wrote: post #268
rscho wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The context is that he in essence says that this problem has no good solution, but he thinks that the co-ed labs are the best alternative even with all the shortcomings that go with them. Everyone will be perfectly professional until someone falls in love and the PC solution crumbles to dust. And FWIW, I think he's right.

> Everyone will be perfectly professional until someone falls in love Isn’t this the case with everything? I.e., if “everything is fine until it isn’t” it’s not really saying much of anything except he doesn’t think he can create a culture of professionalism within his lab. Does this “welp, we can’t do anything about our base desires” extend outside romantic relations? Would it be acceptable to claim “well, physical…

> Would it be acceptable to claim “well, physical altercations are just going to happen because you know people will get mad at each other from time to time”?

Are you willing to punish people with jail time or worse for falling in love and adopting the behaviour that goes with it? This is the other extreme of your argument, and there are many places in the world where this is the social norm.

The PI can do everything he/she wants, love will happen and people will behave accordingly. The point is acknowledging that this is not a problem that arises at a single point in time allowing you to fire the offender, but that it happens along a continuum that will constantly decrease lab efficiency.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#283

Post by b3morales »

rscho wrote: post #160
underseacables wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tenure system. It protects more bad professors than it retains good ones.

No tenure, no exploratory science and no moonshot. Newton was a dangerous asshole. Would you exchange differential calculus for squeaky-clean academia? I don't think so ...

There's an old quote to the effect that, if forced to choose one thing to destroy: either the Principia Mathematica or the Sistine Chapel*, choose the Principia. The reason? The Principia is a monumental achievement, but it's also universal, and it can be rediscovered. The paintings are the unique creation of one moment in time, unduplicatable.

*Or some other work of art; I can't remember the original exactly.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#284

Post by prepend »

skystarman wrote: post #280
prepend wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FUnny you leave out the part where he also said if you criticize a woman in the lab they cry... Do you think women in the lab, when criticized, are more likely, less likely, or equally likely to cry? Is the scientist’s comment mean spirited, or sexist, or just an observation? I think it’s important to consider what the intent behind these jokes are. The Wikipedia article calls out statements from 29 other scientist…

"WHen making terribly misogynistic comments his INTENT wasn't to be misogynistic, it's just based on his experience that women are driven primarily by their emotions and unable to handle pressure!" Really solid defense!

I’m not defending him and it’s funny you think this is some pro/con situation.

That being said misogyny requires intent, right. It means someone who hates or dislikes women. So if you make a statement that every time you criticize a woman, she cries and don’t have ill intent toward women, then that isn’t a sign of misogyny.

I don’t think women are any more likely to cry than men, but if there’s research that shows it so, is that misogynistic?

If you say “women are shorter than men” is that misogynistic?

I think it largely depends on intent as if someone is trying to demean women or does hate women, that’s a big difference. Saying women are shorter than men as part of some overall argument on inferiority is clearly misogynistic.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#285

Post by szarnyasg »

fighterpilot wrote: post #157

I watched a lecture by an MIT database professor who recommends that the top 10 schools only allow up to 3 papers on CVs for junior faculty applications and 10 for tenure applications. He thinks this will be enough to start a culture shift towards quality over quantity, which could go some way towards addressing the fraud and collusion ring issues by removing the incentive for these behaviors.

Was it Mike Stonebraker's talk "My 10 Fears about the Future of the DBMS Field"? (2018 Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lecture, presented at the University of Illinois): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJFKl_5JTnA

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#286

Post by tomjakubowski »

wyager wrote: post #211
the_lonely_road wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

They’ve recently started using the term “BIPOC” to clarify that Asians are excluded, and when they want to include Asians they’ll say “BIPOC and AAPI”.

No, by any good faith source that I have read, BIPOC does not at all exclude Asians. "The acronym BIPOC refers to black, indigenous, and other people of color and aims to emphasize the historic oppression of black and indigenous people."

Incidentally, one of the co-founders of the "BIPOC Project" is an Asian-American woman.

* https://www.thebipocproject.org/

* https://dbpedia.org/page/Person_of_color

* https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-bipoc-5025158

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#287

Post by a9h74j »

galimaufry wrote: post #212
a9h74j wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw something similar in an academic's blogged advice ten or fifteen ago: "At graduate level, you should cultivate [peers and a concentration] such that your intellectual correspondence is publishable." I took that as plausible enough at the time to mention the advice once to a graduate student in philosophy. I did not take it at the time as immediately translatable into a [simply translated?] phrase I have heard s…

> "At graduate level, you should cultivate [peers and a concentration] such that your intellectual correspondence is publishable." ... I did not take it at the time as immediately translatable into a [simply translated?] phrase I have heard since: "friendship corruption." This seems misguided, and I certainly hope that this 'friendship corruption' concept never catches on. There are great papers that started as lette…

Well said. My comment was phrased in response to its parent comment looking askance at "amassing enormous citations." There is love of truth and not all is corruption.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#288

Post by wyager »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #286
wyager wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ve recently started using the term “BIPOC” to clarify that Asians are excluded, and when they want to include Asians they’ll say “BIPOC and AAPI”.

No, by any good faith source that I have read, BIPOC does not at all exclude Asians. "The acronym BIPOC refers to black, indigenous, and other people of color and aims to emphasize the historic oppression of black and indigenous people." Incidentally, one of the co-founders of the "BIPOC Project" is an Asian-American woman. * https://www.thebipocproject.org/ * https://dbpedia.org/page/Person_of_color * https://www.ve…

From the BIPOC project website: “We use the term BIPOC to highlight the unique relationship to whiteness that Indigenous and Black (African Americans) people have”

If it included Asians they would just keep using POC.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#289

Post by bumby »

rscho wrote: post #282
bumby wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone will be perfectly professional until someone falls in love Isn’t this the case with everything? I.e., if “everything is fine until it isn’t” it’s not really saying much of anything except he doesn’t think he can create a culture of professionalism within his lab. Does this “welp, we can’t do anything about our base desires” extend outside romantic relations? Would it be acceptable to claim “well, physical…

> Would it be acceptable to claim “well, physical altercations are just going to happen because you know people will get mad at each other from time to time”? Are you willing to punish people with jail time or worse for falling in love and adopting the behaviour that goes with it? This is the other extreme of your argument, and there are many places in the world where this is the social norm. The PI can do everything…

>Are you willing to punish people with jail time or worse for falling in love and adopting the behaviour that goes with it?

No, because one is a criminal offense and the other is a breach of ethics. From that standpoint, it was a bad analogy. But I would hold someone accountable for being unprofessional in the workplace. To be clear, I’m not saying to punish people for falling in love, I’m saying you can hold them accountable for letting it affect the workplace and creating an unprofessional environment.

>The PI can do everything he/she wants, love will happen and people will behave accordingly.

This is probably where we disagree. I think the PI holds some responsibility for setting the tone of the work culture. You may not be able to control people’s feelings but you can make it clear that certain actions are not going to be tolerated. That’s especially necessary in cases of fraternization. It’s the PI’s job to maintain the professional standards of the lab.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#290

Post by missedthecue »

b3morales wrote: post #275
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It's painfully reductive and one-dimensional. What about envy and hate, hero worship, and other emotional attachments? Those have no effect on working environment? What about men and women who aren't romantically attracted to (respectively) women and men? Are gay men relegated to the women's lab? But only one per batch, lest they fall in love with each other? (And bisexual people can only be trusted to do science on…

Feelings of love are notoriously hard to "manage". This is the plot line of most Rom-Coms for instance.
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