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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

#51

Post by theGnuMe »

lupire wrote: post #45
theGnuMe wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The OP paper is easily handled by GOFAI from the 1980s; it's just detecting similar images. 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.

You could probably just train it by taking image segments and duplicating them artificially.

Newer fraud will probably use generative diffusion AIs to make "realistic western plots" on demand .. there's probably a paper in that!

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

#52

Post by rickydroll »

jefe_ wrote: post #28
rickydroll wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems to me that taking down fraudulent academic researchers and barring them from ever having anything to do with research in the future would also have a significant impact on the ethics and behavior of the next generation. If technology is lowering the barriers to fraud detection, why should it be applied to one sector over another?

That's a fair point. However, part of the politics of the situation is that the right end of the spectrum appears bound and determined to discredit any academic or fact-based professions. They also seemed dead set on protecting oligarch and oligarch-lite players from criticism or critical examination.

Academic fraud seems to be self-correcting as we have seen by the numerous reports of fraud and withdrawn papers; as a rule, the players express shame and remorse. Nonacademic fraud doesn't exhibit these characteristics and sometimes seems to be proud of the fraud.

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

#53

Post by rickydroll »

lupire wrote: post #46
rickydroll wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These researchers work for corporations too.

and corporate researchers do commit fraud as well. Look at the number of drug trials that hide results that would interfere with the approval of a drug.

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

#54

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

theGnuMe wrote: post #42
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

They know and if they don't they should not be a co-author.

Baloney. That's literally not how academic papers work in any part of the world. At some point you need to be able to trust your co-authors aren't lying. For example, co-authors of Francesca Gino (the Harvard Biz School prof accused of falsifying data) had to start a project, https://manycoauthors.org/, to essentially compare notes. I'd also consider some of these co-authors victims here.

To be clear, I'm not saying any of the authors get a free pass, but different authors have vastly different levels of culpability.

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

#55

Post by int_19h »

jjackson5324 wrote: post #38
int_19h wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are many working systems that are small enough that they don't need any hierarchy, and function just fine.

Larger systems do require some degree of it, yes. But the ones that have more hierarchy and where it is more rigid, inevitably end up with more of this kind of thing.

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

#56

Post by yjk »

karaterobot wrote: post #19
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.

> For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. Agreed that de-anonymizing will become trivial. This will be a problem not only for bad actors in research, journalism, creative writing, etc., but for internet commenters who believed they'd done due diligence to remain anonymous, and even for research participants who'd expected anonym…

I believe the complete opposite - at least for internet commenters, one could easily use an LLM to generate one's responses.
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