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

nature.com

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

#11

Post by chubbnix »

BSEdlMMldESB wrote: post #6

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 th…

How is this academia’s moment? People have been publishing bad science since its inception, its why we made tools like peer-review which predate the internet.

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

#12

Post by radicaldreamer »

This the same discovery which was supposedly replicated by another team just last month: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.06301

Of course, the researcher in question has already raised venture funding (~$16.5M) and filed for patents.

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

#13

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

lockhouse wrote: post #9

It feels like karma after being told we had to blindly “trust the science” during the pandemic.

If there was ever a more antithetical statement, it was 'trust the science', because science is supposed to make sense from a seemingly chaotic world and the 'rules' it discovers should be reproducible. The trust should be verifiable.

Unfortunately, this is further complicated by the simple fact that not everyone can even begin to evaluate whether a given information is bs. That is a problem.

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

#14

Post by supazek »

lockhouse wrote: post #9

It feels like karma after being told we had to blindly “trust the science” during the pandemic.

Covid would not have even been recorded if it happened 100 years ago. Start flashing on the screen the numbers of people killed by drunk drivers every week and let’s get something done about that instead of crashing trust in our national institutions —- with no survivors!

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

#15

Post by radicaldreamer »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #10

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.…

The president of Stanford was caught pressuring his team to fabricate data for years, so this is likely pervasive everywhere in academia nevermind much higher pressure environments with lots of competition like elite institutions in India and China.

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

#16

Post by BSEdlMMldESB »

chubbnix wrote: post #11
BSEdlMMldESB wrote: post #6

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 th…

How is this academia’s moment? People have been publishing bad science since its inception, its why we made tools like peer-review which predate the internet.

there was this:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/07/too-greedy-m...

also the scandals in standford and harvard.

also this https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=202307201... which is bad because the academia is intended to be above this "petty geopolitics". as far as I know academic collaboration didn't quite stop either during the cold war, but I was born after it was over so I don't really know this, might be wrong.

and more than all these, the whole sci-hub debacle is the biggest telltale.

this is not about good or bad science, but about the money incentives.

maybe I'm in a news-bubble, but I also see things about postdocs being a fraud, even PhD's are now a dubious gamble?

and then I add my personal experience doing a masters at a public 3rd world country university, and I just hope it burns to the ground, which is a bad idea to dwell on.

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

#17

Post by tptacek »

BSEdlMMldESB wrote: post #6

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 th…

When people talk about stories like this they're invariably discussing the numerator without the denominator. Count up every story about research malpractice that has ever been on HN, and you're not even in the vicinity of 1% of all the research done every year; a truly huge amount of research is published every year, in every field.

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

#18

Post by constantcrying »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #10

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.…

>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.

If you can not do honest work in academia you should leave and go work somewhere else.

Fraud is not the correct reaction to the problems of academia, as it actively hurts it even more. Nobody is forced to do academic research for a living, especially if you have a degree in physics.

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

#19

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

gwill wrote: post #4

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

I'm going to assume that Ranga Dias is having a very bad week.

His major discovery, assuming it's real, is room-temp superconductivity in nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride. Trouble is, anything which contains lutetium is going to be intrinsically more scarce and much more expensive than the lead-and-copper RT superconductor that was announced a few days ago. Doped lutetium crystals are also much more difficult to prepare -- and, even more troublesome, it seems they only work at 1 GPa pressure, which is absolutely non-trivial and makes them much more difficult to utilize than commonplace superconductors that can simply be cooled with LN2.

...Oh, and it might not even be real. [1]

To have a different research group discover your holy grail, as you're stuck defending yourself from misconduct allegations, must be an incredibly bad feeling.

[1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06162-w

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

#20

Post by Gordonjcp »

supazek wrote: post #14
lockhouse wrote: post #9

It feels like karma after being told we had to blindly “trust the science” during the pandemic.

Covid would not have even been recorded if it happened 100 years ago. Start flashing on the screen the numbers of people killed by drunk drivers every week and let’s get something done about that instead of crashing trust in our national institutions —- with no survivors!

[dead]
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