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Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of 6 Papers by Top Researchers

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Re: Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of 6 Papers by Top Researchers

#31

Post by int_19h »

39838sjdjn wrote: post #8
kenjackson wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do sometimes wonder if the same attributes that puts people at their top of their fields is the same atribute that makes them more willing to sacrifice their integrity for prestige... It seems like this just happens too frequently (or maybe it just appears that way because these are media reported).

I'm not sure what direction of causation you have in mind but as someone in academics (tenured professor etc) I think the answer is definitely yes. One thing that should be setting off alarm bells now is how often these scandals in the last couple of years have involved people who are in very high-level administrative positions at these institutions. Not only because of the values that might be instilled downward in…

This is a broad issue with any kind of hierarchical power structure, no matter what it is ostensibly about. Once you have hierarchy, you have politics as a profession/lifestyle, and sociopaths always win that game in the long run.

Re: Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of 6 Papers by Top Researchers

#32

Post by livueta »

kr0bat wrote: post #23
asylteltine wrote: post #7

I don’t trust anything coming out of academia anymore. First we had over 50% of psychology being nonsense, then sociology (not surprising), then the hard sciences too. But then we also have the rampant ideology problem where you are forbidden from even researching certain topics/questions and if you do, you are blacklisted. They need a hard reckoning. What happened to science? Who cares what the ideological implicati…

Hold on, I've heard of the replication crisis - though I don't know the scale - but are you saying that over 50% of "hard science" is bunk? I find that hard to swallow.

Not addressing the parent's specific claim, but there was recent discussion of a disturbingly high proportion of studies in one field being fake/flawed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37572394

> "For more than 150 trials, Carlisle got access to anonymized individual participant data (IPD). By studying the IPD spreadsheets, he judged that 44% of these trials contained at least some flawed data: impossible statistics, incorrect calculations or duplicated numbers or figures, for instance. And in 26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged — either because the authors were incompetent, or because they had faked the data."

Re: Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of 6 Papers by Top Researchers

#33

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

kenjackson wrote: post #3
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #2

I think the Crimson article mentioned in this article has better info about the actual details of the alleged manipulation: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/22/dana-farber-iss...

I do sometimes wonder if the same attributes that puts people at their top of their fields is the same atribute that makes them more willing to sacrifice their integrity for prestige... It seems like this just happens too frequently (or maybe it just appears that way because these are media reported).

> or maybe it just appears that way because these are media reported

When thinking about it more, I think that is also highly likely. It many of these cases the most "famous" author is the last one on the paper, but is the first to be highlighted in the media. That is, oftentimes the work was just done in their labs but they did little more than review. But there is such pressure for those toiling in the labs to make a "big" splash that it's not hard to think that some small number of them would be willing to cheat. This line from the original blog post (https://forbetterscience.com/2024/01/02/dana-farberications-...) reporting on the findings is telling:

> “You should reach out to Dr. Hidde Ploegh- the first author, Dr. Boaz Tirosh was in his laboratory.”

> Well Laurie, it’s your paper, if you care about it being correct, you could very well reach out yourself!

While I agree that Laurie Glimcher should be very concerned about any research misconduct done under her authorship, I think it's premature to get out the pitchforks when there are potentially many levels of indirection here.

Re: Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of 6 Papers by Top Researchers

#34

Post by AlexanderTheGr8 »

newman8r wrote: post #13

I've been thinking about how with the rise of LLMs, we're going to uncover A LOT of "bad studies" over the next decade. Could be some sort of mass reckoning. Probably better to admit it all now than be uncovered in 5 years.

how would LLMs help with uncovering "bad studies"? I don't think LLMs are yet sophisticated enough to figure out potential plagiarism or Adobe Photoshop copy-and-paste (as mentioned in the article above).

Re: Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of 6 Papers by Top Researchers

#35

Post by [deleted] »

rickydroll wrote: post #20
newman8r wrote: post #13

I've been thinking about how with the rise of LLMs, we're going to uncover A LOT of "bad studies" over the next decade. Could be some sort of mass reckoning. Probably better to admit it all now than be uncovered in 5 years.

I would prioritize looking for financial and corporate fraud. It would have a much bigger impact on society than looking for any problems with academic studies. If we can take down those people and bar them from ever having anything to do with finance in the future, I think that would have an important impact on the ethics and behavior of the next generation.

[deleted]

Re: Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of 6 Papers by Top Researchers

#36

Post by ninjaK4t »

39838sjdjn wrote: post #8
kenjackson wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do sometimes wonder if the same attributes that puts people at their top of their fields is the same atribute that makes them more willing to sacrifice their integrity for prestige... It seems like this just happens too frequently (or maybe it just appears that way because these are media reported).

I'm not sure what direction of causation you have in mind but as someone in academics (tenured professor etc) I think the answer is definitely yes. One thing that should be setting off alarm bells now is how often these scandals in the last couple of years have involved people who are in very high-level administrative positions at these institutions. Not only because of the values that might be instilled downward in…

[dead]

Re: Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of 6 Papers by Top Researchers

#37

Post by nsagent »

breckenedge wrote: post #27
goalieca wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take incentivation to the extreme, look no further than the publishing criteria for academic positions in China. https://www.nature.com/articles/463142a

Anecdotally I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on recommended systems and it blows me away how many Chinese papers there are (papers written by researchers in China) and how many claim to beat the current “state-of-the-art” often without saying what that is.

No joke, I was just reviewing a paper for NAACL a couple of weeks ago and the authors made up a brand new task, then stated that they had achieved the state-of-the-art on it. In my review I mentioned that was a meaningless statement for a new task, but I guess some researchers are incentivized to claim that in their papers.

Re: Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of 6 Papers by Top Researchers

#38

Post by jjackson5324 »

int_19h wrote: post #31
39838sjdjn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what direction of causation you have in mind but as someone in academics (tenured professor etc) I think the answer is definitely yes. One thing that should be setting off alarm bells now is how often these scandals in the last couple of years have involved people who are in very high-level administrative positions at these institutions. Not only because of the values that might be instilled downward in…

This is a broad issue with any kind of hierarchical power structure, no matter what it is ostensibly about. Once you have hierarchy, you have politics as a profession/lifestyle, and sociopaths always win that game in the long run.

Uh no? Every functioning system we have on the planet is hierarchical. And each system has a different degree of effectiveness & success with some being more corrupt than others.

Just dismissing everything as "welp, that's just hierarchical power structures" is dumb.

Re: Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of 6 Papers by Top Researchers

#40

Post by cbsmith »

39838sjdjn wrote: post #8
kenjackson wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do sometimes wonder if the same attributes that puts people at their top of their fields is the same atribute that makes them more willing to sacrifice their integrity for prestige... It seems like this just happens too frequently (or maybe it just appears that way because these are media reported).

I'm not sure what direction of causation you have in mind but as someone in academics (tenured professor etc) I think the answer is definitely yes. One thing that should be setting off alarm bells now is how often these scandals in the last couple of years have involved people who are in very high-level administrative positions at these institutions. Not only because of the values that might be instilled downward in…

Worth noting that with success also comes scrutiny. The "causation" here may just be the added scrutiny.
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