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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

#111

Post by motohagiography »

The world needs an academic fraud Jubilee. We could probably design a cryptographic protocol where you can submit a paper for retraction if and only if all other papers above a threshold are also retracted. A kind of pre-commitment hash for a multi party prisoners dilemma.

Reality is, the way bureaucracies work is the only way to survive in it is to become compromised so that all the other compromised people in it can trust you. From what I can tell from government, there's an informal initiation stage, where you are pressured to commit a fraud, where it shows you can "play ball," and then you are in the fold. An academic fraud jubilee would free a lot of people to do real work. It sounds crazy, but not nearly as crazy as what would have had to occur to create the replication crisis.

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

#112

Post by cycomanic »

constantcrying wrote: post #18
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 phy…

The issue that the OP pointed out and that your comment completely failed to address is that the way the system is set up is that the pressure to produce either pushes academics either towards dishonesty or pushes them out.

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

#113

Post by fullspectrumdev »

sfink wrote: post #104
ChuckMcM wrote: post #87

From the article -- "...after researcher Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was discovered to have falsified data. In Schön’s case, and in his own experience, Muller says, 'people who fake data tend not to do it just once'." I think this is the "money shot" here, but I admit I am biased :-). I got into a heated debate years ago over the "harshness" of treating students who cheated on an exam.…

But the cultural expectation has shifted. AFAICT, it is now expected that people will cheat as a matter of course. That may have happened because of past leniency, but at this point expelling students is shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. If 10% of students cheat, you can hold the line through punishment. If 80% of students cheat, you have a systemic problem, and beating students is only going to prod…

In the 2010’s, cheating was commonplace and socially accepted.

People were still being caught and harshly punished, but nobody would snitch if they saw you up to something. Snitching carried much more social stigma than cheating on an exam or whatever.

What didn’t help was these stupid false positive prone plagiarism detectors like turnitin which would assign an arbitrary “score” that would get you dinged for copying - even if it was original work.

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

#114

Post by pessimizer »

constantcrying wrote: post #18
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 phy…

People who are committing fraud aren't trying to have a correct reaction to the problems of academia, and leaving fixing the problems of academia to them changing their behavior will have the outcome you should expect.

Telling people to be good is a waste of time unless they're your kid or loved one and they really don't want to disappoint you. Fixing your system so it doesn't reward people who commit fraud is the only thing that even has a possibility of working.

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

#115

Post by pessimizer »

andrewflnr wrote: post #54
gilmore606 wrote: post #39

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

Fraudsters are surprisingly less motivated to excuse themselves to you than most people. Surprisingly you can't depend on them for anything, so one should instead focus on the systems that reward people who commit fraud.

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

#116

Post by dilap »

LBTables wrote: post #89
dilap wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure, but in practice when people use the word science (as in "trust the science"), they mostly mean research happening in academia

...which is unfortunate, and worth pointing out that academia is not the only conductor of scientific research.

I think the takeaway is that the scientific method is great, but since science is necessarily conducted by humans, the economic incentives within context of "doing science" also need to be correct for good science to get done.

(Currently, it seems like, this is very often not the case. Hence, your trust in current-science-as-conducted should be correspondingly lower. Lots of variation by field, probably, too.)

(Though then again maybe you shouldn't even believe anything until you see it having actual real effects in your day to day life?)

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

#117

Post by [deleted] »

esafak wrote: post #78
gfdsgvbcd wrote: post #73

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…

What field?

[deleted]

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

#118

Post by catgary »

sfink wrote: post #104
ChuckMcM wrote: post #87

From the article -- "...after researcher Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was discovered to have falsified data. In Schön’s case, and in his own experience, Muller says, 'people who fake data tend not to do it just once'." I think this is the "money shot" here, but I admit I am biased :-). I got into a heated debate years ago over the "harshness" of treating students who cheated on an exam.…

But the cultural expectation has shifted. AFAICT, it is now expected that people will cheat as a matter of course. That may have happened because of past leniency, but at this point expelling students is shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. If 10% of students cheat, you can hold the line through punishment. If 80% of students cheat, you have a systemic problem, and beating students is only going to prod…

I had a math professor who did an amazing job at preventing cheating by making coursework more-or-less optional, and then exams would be 50% problems they’d invented specifically for that year, and 50% problems given ahead of time (you only needed to do half of 75% of the exam). If you “got it”, the problems he made up were always very short, whereas half of the preassigned questions were long and tedious.

This basically set a hard cap of a B/B- for any student that wasn’t either wildly talented or engaging with the course material and getting useful feedback from the assignments. It was possible to pass with a C by cheating on assignments (looking up the answer and rewriting it so it wasn’t terribly obvious) and memorizing the solutions to the preassigned problems, which was honestly fair based on the rules he set for the course.

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

#119

Post by bamfly »

dang wrote: post #99
bamfly wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm finding the responses in this whole thread a strong argument for making STEM majors take more social science courses. Econ too, probably, especially behavioral. Way too many are a freshman-level bad "reading" of the situation & systems at play, and of the positions staked out by the more-reasonable posts. And some of the posts are even worse than that—straight-up basic reading comprehension failures. God's sake,…

Ok, but the best way to react to wrong comments is to post correct information. Then the rest of us have something we can learn from. At present it's not even possible to tell which comments you're complaining about, or why they're wrong. Putting down groups of other commenters just makes the thread more dyspeptic, even if you're right. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair. I don't find HN correctable when it veers off of tech topics—confidently-wrong and often ideologically-fixed while lacking basic education in a topic is a bad mix; some folks try, but it mostly just adds to the noise or ends up... well, here, which similar-tone tech-related observations do not, they typically have to get much nastier first and these kinds of general and ought-to-be-obvious expressions of bafflement get a pass, I guess because the HN "hive mind" more often experiences the same "WTF?" as the poster, in those cases.

... however, complaining about it doesn't help, sure, and I'm aware that posting (in basically any capacity...) doesn't improve it, so, shouldn't have posted. I'll leave it be, thanks for the deserved "bop".

I do wish there were a way for HN to get better at this specific thing, as it's always been about the same amount of bad, and avoiding non-tech topics doesn't seem to be something HN's interested in doing ("it's hard to define what that is" well, yes, but other tech-focused forums manage regardless—but they also get less engagement, and that does matter for this site's advertising purposes, I get it).

I think downplaying identity was a good idea to try and I like the ideals of it and appreciate what it's trying to achieve, but I'd say the evidence is firmly favoring the "failed" column for that experiment. We see the same people having the same extensive bad exchanges over and over, and identity helps avoid that with group-education about repeated behaviors by certain posters in certain contexts. Changing course might help with this and some of the other most-acute issues on the site. I expect nothing, just putting it out there. I know, unsolicited opinions are like assholes :-)

Failing that, user-managed blocklists would be a godsend—I know those come with their own problems, but it'd be well worth it on here. Bonus points if you could have separate lists for tech and non-tech posts (I know, tricky, that's why it's bonus points, haha). Some posters exclusively post uninformed flamebait nonsense (within the threshold of "HN Nice" so it keeps happening—not a dig at moderation, that's a Hard Problem in that space) in non-tech threads, but do contribute positively to tech threads. ("so correct them" -> folks do, that's how the threads keep happening, it's like sitting in on a 101 course mostly attended by non-majors who are nonetheless passionate about their uninformed position, and arguing with the professor and won't accept they may be wrong—it's not productive or enlightening) It'd be lovely to never see that again, but get to keep reading the site. Blocklists are the #1-100 features I'd add to the site, if I had a genie that could grant 100 only-HN-feature-related wishes.

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

#120

Post by jldugger »

sbalamurugan wrote: post #77
constantcrying wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Another lofty comment about honesty in academia. No research job lets you spend 6 months redoing stuff just to make sure it’s 100%. It’s about publish what you have with enough disclaimers. It’s about convincing the reviewers to get the paper in. Rest will be resolved later. Classic cases are the Bell labs guy finding organic semiconductors and fermi lab guy finding new elements. They both were just making up stuff w…

> No research job lets you spend 6 months redoing stuff just to make sure it’s 100%.

These jobs do exist[1], and we as a society need to figure out how to stop organizing research around a single manager (professor) with zero meaningful oversight.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/leu2016193#

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