‘A very disturbing picture’: another retraction for controversial physicist

interesting timing with this hitting the front page yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36864624

at the end of the day, all of academia is part of the larger "publishing industry"...

though I think that to keep up with the scale, maybe I should call it "publishing institution" (alongside, government institutions, organized crime institutions (arguably blended with the government in some places), industrial institutions, and merchant institutions like banks)

so then, journalism was the first to be redrawn by the internet technology when tech companies became the biggest advertisers in the world. then music, even 'BIG entertainment' is on strike.

and now academia is having its moment, and so many things are unraveling as well

Keep in mind it's different authors though!

It may be a person's instinct to immediately blame the researcher, and of course, I definitely think data fabrication is never justified.

However, what is the societal problem here? It's the problem that in academia, there are such pressures to publish and be first nowadays that many people will do anything to get ahead. It doesn't help that social media and news sites have introduced a sort of gamification into it.

People have their natures, and the current state of academia encourages cheating, plain and simple. Just like the current state of finance encourages market manipulation.

If we want to fix it, simply outing these fakes will not be enough. While I don't have much sympathy for the cheaters, I also don't have much sympathy for the scientific community that has created this environment.