41–50 of 56 posts
Cheating in academia is the perfect crime. Cheaters conducting studies on cheating. If you don’t know a if system is consistent and you ask it to determine if it’s consistent. Brilliant!
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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…
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).
Presumably the same can be done for tabular data and genomic or "omics" data. At the very least statistical techniques can be used. I imagine high throughput imaging modalities will be the main target.
That being said the only way the -omics data will have utility is via AI models which are trained on some task... which present their own problems..
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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).
Well you can train AIs to uncover image fraud and detect manipulation that is well known (imagetwin does this). Presumably the same can be done for tabular data and genomic or "omics" data. At the very least statistical techniques can be used. I imagine high throughput imaging modalities will be the main target. That being said the only way the -omics data will have utility is via AI models which are trained on some…
You don't need a language model. The effort is in collecting and chopping the data to find snippets to compare. NNs can help with that.
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.
I suspect the only way to fight this is to make the papers freely available so anyone can look at them for flaws and dishonesty.
The higher the stakes, the lower the standards.
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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…
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
Crazy that Nature published a article highlighting fraud concerns about Nature's own publications, but Nature has no plans to reduce that fraud.
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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…
> I have a theory that as some indicator of success deviates from a normal tail, there's more likely to be corruption or luck involved. And/or abuse, coercion, and exploitation of others.