41–50 of 133 posts
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 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!
Once you have a critical mass, then cheating becomes normalized and you would be a fool not to cheat.
Stuff involving room-temp superconductors would be about the last thing I'd ever want to fabricate.
Imho he will surely lose his faculty appointment by the time this is over, and won’t have a prayer at getting another.
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.…
> However, what is the societal problem here? I would say yes. I think we need to place a lot more value in publishing research that isn't surprising. Research that simply replicates (or fails to replicate) other research should be just as valuable to one's career as finding something unexpected. I scientist that has replicated a bunch of studies and identified several that they couldn't replicate is doing something…
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 phy…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However, what is the societal problem here? I would say yes. I think we need to place a lot more value in publishing research that isn't surprising. Research that simply replicates (or fails to replicate) other research should be just as valuable to one's career as finding something unexpected. I scientist that has replicated a bunch of studies and identified several that they couldn't replicate is doing something…
A fundamental problem with research academia is that we scaled it up massively without introducing more division of labor.
Science currently looks like somebody going to fish, with the purpose of caught the best fish in the sea. So first they put the bait inside a plastic box, to weed out all the dumb fishes. Then they put the box inside another sealed wooden box, with a combination lockpad. Because only a really smart fish with skilled fin-paws should be able to figure out how to open also that box. For better measure, they finally put…
I think you're talking about Academia, not science. The scientific method is not at fault here.
scientific institutions != scientific method
Academia is the most prestigious scientific institution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tl;dr: not allowing data fabrication is some kind of lofty, unreasonable standard that doesn't allow science to be published. Please.
That's not what he means, he's saying the pressure to constantly publish original research (the more original the better!) creates these incentives to become a rat, that is, to cheat.
A theoretical scientist will be caught much sooner and it will cause an irreparable damage to his/her reputation. Who will ever take them seriously after that?