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Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

blogs.bmj.com

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Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#41

Post by nextos »

ta988 wrote: post #22

When you want to do a proper work, your grants and papers get rejected because they are not innovatove enough or don't go far enough. So it is not a surprise that people that lied in their applications about what they can realistically do also lie when it comes to reporting results. Unfortunately there is no way out. I stopped counting how many reviewers of my grants disagreed on what was proposed, one saying that it…

You are absolutely right.

Furthermore, universities tend to require tons of publications to promote you. Things are spinning out of control. I know a few EU countries where the written norm is to need > 100 publications to qualify for a full professorship, with equally ridiculous requirements for associate and assistant positions.

Obviously, this encourages and rewards completely broken practices. Many associate and full professors in my area only care about stamping their names into as many journal articles as humanly possible. Some of them are already beyond 500, with many of these in top tier journals (Nature, Science, Cell, NEJM). Obviously, they hardly ever contribute anything. Their serfs do all the work. Their job is basically to plot in order to stay on top of their neofeudal shire.

In addition to this, funding bodies do nothing after fraud has been proven. ERC only terminates grants on rare occasions. https://forbetterscience.com/ discusses many cases of serial fraudsters who keep getting funded despite having retracted 10 or 15 articles in major journals.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#42

Post by artifact_44 »

adolph wrote: post #18

Is this some vaccine hesitancy in disguise from BMJ? Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of The BMJ, became worried about research fraud in the 1980s, but people thought his concerns eccentric. Research authorities insisted that fraud was rare, didn’t matter because science was self-correcting, and that no patients had suffered because of scientific fraud. All those reasons for not taking research fraud seriously…

That was my first thought as well. Casting doubt, and then in a few days we'll see this opinion piece references by some right wing politician who is vaccinated but "can understand their constituents hesitency to trust the medical establishment".

Also I haven't seen anyone bring up the perverse incentive of capitalism in this thread. Like.. let's just pretend this is moral failing rather than the literal race to the bottom of capitalism.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#43

Post by adolph »

long_time_gone wrote: post #31
adolph wrote: post #18

Is this some vaccine hesitancy in disguise from BMJ? Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of The BMJ, became worried about research fraud in the 1980s, but people thought his concerns eccentric. Research authorities insisted that fraud was rare, didn’t matter because science was self-correcting, and that no patients had suffered because of scientific fraud. All those reasons for not taking research fraud seriously…

Is there a name for the phenomenon where an internet comment is guilty of doing the thing it accuses others of doing?

also need the name for the one where an accusation is made through a question

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#44

Post by BitwiseFool »

ethanbond wrote: post #28
ta988 wrote: post #22

When you want to do a proper work, your grants and papers get rejected because they are not innovatove enough or don't go far enough. So it is not a surprise that people that lied in their applications about what they can realistically do also lie when it comes to reporting results. Unfortunately there is no way out. I stopped counting how many reviewers of my grants disagreed on what was proposed, one saying that it…

Yep. The incentives in science are all wrong. To maximize your chances of publication (i.e. keeping your job), you have to make the most outlandish claims you can possibly maybe defend. Additionally, the complexity of data/analysis is increasing every day while also the esoteric domain knowledge required to make any progress is deeper and more specialized.

Not enough people realize that science and academia are just as prone to organizational politics and corruption as everything else. Peer reviewed studies are great, but, just because it was published doesn't mean it represents "The Truth". And sadly, being skeptical of studies makes you appear less credible in arguments.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#45

Post by uhhyeahdude »

injidup wrote: post #35
birdyrooster wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess if you don't even feel comfortable sharing the identity of any of the parties, we really have no chance to identify bad actors from good as a community.

https://shop.powerinsole.com/en/blogs/news/doppelblindstudie... I actually bought one of the devices and took it apart on video. There is nothing inside except 4 magnets and a plastic printed card. No active circuits and no power source and no components such as resistors or capacitors and certainly there is no microchip inside. edit below are links to pictures of the device and accompanying text as originally on fac…

Thank you. What a load of infomercial buzzword nonsense. The last part about some “further research and experience” showing even better results if the product is worn all the time is especially galling.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#46

Post by adolph »

artifact_44 wrote: post #42
adolph wrote: post #18

Is this some vaccine hesitancy in disguise from BMJ? Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of The BMJ, became worried about research fraud in the 1980s, but people thought his concerns eccentric. Research authorities insisted that fraud was rare, didn’t matter because science was self-correcting, and that no patients had suffered because of scientific fraud. All those reasons for not taking research fraud seriously…

That was my first thought as well. Casting doubt, and then in a few days we'll see this opinion piece references by some right wing politician who is vaccinated but "can understand their constituents hesitency to trust the medical establishment". Also I haven't seen anyone bring up the perverse incentive of capitalism in this thread. Like.. let's just pretend this is moral failing rather than the literal race to the…

Perverse incentives exist in many socio-political systems, capitalism isn't unique in that regard. For example, the Soviet whaling industry [0] sounds almost like the paperclip maximization AI [1].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_in_the_Soviet_Union_an...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#47

Post by patrec »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #7
gotoeleven wrote: post #3

The war on standards is creating a low trust society.

I don't know. The amount of people that take one poorly measured data point and use that as a north star seems more troubling to me - than a society with low trust. I'm not convinced a low-trust society is inherently bad. I am convinced that a society that has high trust in garbage data is bad.

I know this is a forum for nerds, but I struggle to understand how anyone could seriously believe that being surrounded by people who are either psychopathic or paranoid is probably A-OK, as long as they are all competent statisticians.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#48

Post by birdyrooster »

javajosh wrote: post #40
birdyrooster wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess if you don't even feel comfortable sharing the identity of any of the parties, we really have no chance to identify bad actors from good as a community.

"Naming and shaming" comes with risk - probably a lot more risk than upside. The risk is that the parties get something actionable, kind of like "probable cause" in criminal cases. The upside is maybe a small effect on a few HN minds that might remember this when considering this Uni's reputation. The other risk is that it's an act that can easily be abused. It is very easy to level charges against someone without pr…

Yes, that is why you would expect their claim to be corroborated with (even circumstantial) evidence when dropping names.

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#49

Post by dpatru »

As shown both in the article and in the comments, scientific establishment seems content to tolerate fraud. But when research goes against big money interests, suddenly standards become very strict. See how Andrew Wakefield was treated. https://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7452

Re: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

#50

Post by ModernMech »

ta988 wrote: post #22

When you want to do a proper work, your grants and papers get rejected because they are not innovatove enough or don't go far enough. So it is not a surprise that people that lied in their applications about what they can realistically do also lie when it comes to reporting results. Unfortunately there is no way out. I stopped counting how many reviewers of my grants disagreed on what was proposed, one saying that it…

> When you want to do a proper work, your grants and papers get rejected because they are not innovatove enough or don't go far enough.

Not being innovative enough isn't the root cause though. The real issue is there isn't enough funding to go around, and so the bar is higher than it needs to be. Available research funding in the US is a paltry sum considering the aggregate ROI of discoveries and technologies that originate in universities. Funding rates can be as low as 10-20%, with thousands of researchers competing for the same grants. They need to all paint a tortured story of how their idea will be the next big invention.

The problem with our system is that we put public money into research, which is then commercialized by corporations and sold to consumers, and corporations/universities end up capturing the profits. Those profits are then invested in ways that yield short-term returns instead of being reinvested in research.

Some of those profits are supposed to come back to the government and reinvested in research, but more and more corporations (and I consider universities to be a kind of corporation with the way they act like hedge funds that do education as a side hustle) are figuring out how to keep as much of those profits as possible, despite those profits only being made possible in the first place due to publicly funded research.

What if we increase funding into research? VCs are willing to pour millions into ridiculous or tenuous ideas because they know a single success will more than make up for the duds. Lower the stakes, make funding more available to researchers, and then maybe we won't need to squeeze every bit of "innovation" out of every research dollar. Make room for research that fails or yields a negative result. This is important work that is valuable and needs to be done, but there's no funding for it. We could double the amount of funding for e.g. the NSF and it would still be a drop in the federal government's proverbial bucket.

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