71–80 of 133 posts
Stuff involving room-temp superconductors would be about the last thing I'd ever want to fabricate.
Schön got away with it for years. One of my favorite video essays is a long exploration of that case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfDoml-Db64
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're talking about Academia, not science. The scientific method is not at fault here.
I don't want to be pedantic or argumentative, but I think you've created a straw-man of the comment you're replying to. scientific institutions != scientific method Academia is the most prestigious scientific institution.
For some. For others its national labs, like Los Alamos or NASA centers. In those, the culture is very different.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's bullshit, though. Pressure is not an excuse to fabricate data, and no one will defend that claim out loud . But what else does a rambly comment about how hard it is for researchers mean under a story about data fabrication? Ed: to be clear, the one making the argument about publishing pressure in a sensible way is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36881029
Observing that fixing the latter might eliminate most of the behavior doesn't mean you think the behavior's good.
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.
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.…
Academia is zero sum. All zero sum endeavors result in this kind of behavior.
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…
Classic cases are the Bell labs guy finding organic semiconductors and fermi lab guy finding new elements. They both were just making up stuff which they believed existed but just needed work to be found and published. They would make up experimental data to support existence of theoretical things. The assumption was just publish this first, get the accolades then use it to get money to get someone to eventually do this properly. But they just predicted stuff which weren’t true. Nobody knows the amount of bullshit that was made up that eventually turned out to be true.
All of this because scientists these days are not expected to work on things. They are expected to produce results. Nobody is giving passionate people time and space to explore things. It’s all about results now.
The irony is that the reward for running the rat race is freedom from rat race. Postdocs publish random crap to boost numbers for their tenure which they think will relieve them of this stupidity and let them focus on pure research. but once they catch the tigers tail they gotta keep running.
my wife spent a year trying to reproduce some data that her research depended on only to eventually find out that it was fraudulent. the original researcher even admitted this to their lab, and he retired and his lab was shut down. no retraction was ever published. my wifes lab tried to publish a paper showing that the original research was fraudulent and the journal was not willing to publish it. she has since left…
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…
It's true, and also entirely unhelpful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're talking about Academia, not science. The scientific method is not at fault here.
I don't want to be pedantic or argumentative, but I think you've created a straw-man of the comment you're replying to. scientific institutions != scientific method Academia is the most prestigious scientific institution.
That's an opinion. Industry does a lot more worthwhile science than academia, and does it without tax money, in my opinion.
Was the transistor invented by academia? You can argue that's engineering, rather than science. In my opinion the difference is semantics.