Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Researchers taking on fraudulent science

analystnews.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 87 posts

Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science

#21

Post by anonymouskimmer »

etrautmann wrote: post #13
JohnKemeny wrote: post #10

All scientists should sign on top of their papers that what they write is truthful. See also https://datacolada.org/98

That’s so fundamentally core to the idea of authoring a paper that it would be fundamentally useless. Anyone knowingly publishing fraudulent data will not be deterred by a signature. It’s already career ending if discovered.

GP forgot the /s

I had read GP's link prior to this. It's about a researcher claiming that signing a truthfulness statement beforehand reduced lying, but that very research was tampered with.

Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science

#22

Post by anonymouskimmer »

pvaldes wrote: post #18
JohnKemeny wrote: post #10

All scientists should sign on top of their papers that what they write is truthful. See also https://datacolada.org/98

That would for sure deter the serial liars. It was assumed by default that scientists don't lie (and researchers are signing their articles since thousands of years). Innocent until proven guilty is a better system, but... lets add even more bureaucracy to publish, is not insulting enough yet.

GP forgot the /s.

If you haven't yet, GP's link is humorously topical.

Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science

#23

Post by armchairhacker »

derbOac wrote: post #14

I love these people's work. At the same time I don't think any of this really addresses the root causes of the problems, which are career, university administrative, and field (i.e., recognition and attention) incentives. The whole paradigm we use, and the way we treat scientists and fund research, is broken. It feels a little bit like bailing water out of your boat with teacup on one side while ignoring the gaping h…

But how do we “solve” those incentives? There will always be winners and losers, and since successful fraud is by definition indistinguishable from genuine success, there will always be people trying to game the system.

The only effective solution I see is making fraud harder to hide. (There’s also making the penalty for fraud higher and trying to instill integrity, but the problem is some people will still take the risk.)

Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science

#24

Post by bugglebeetle »

kiba wrote: post #20
coolhand2120 wrote: post #4

I really hope these people gain wider support. They seem so anti-establishment, which implies that the establishment is pro fraud. And that sounds about right to me. This is a huge problem. When fraud is rewarded over legitimate research we lose so many times. Once when we reward the fraud, again when the fraudulent research is propagated into the corpus, again when we recognize that this has squelched legitimate sci…

While the problem of fraud is real, exaggerating the extent of the problem is not a good idea either. Otherwise the fraud would be so pervasive that anybody with a PhD attached after name should be distrusted unless proven otherwise.

In many of the disciplines with widespread reproducibility crises (e.g. economics) this is already the case.

Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science

#25

Post by User23 »

armchairhacker wrote: post #23
derbOac wrote: post #14

I love these people's work. At the same time I don't think any of this really addresses the root causes of the problems, which are career, university administrative, and field (i.e., recognition and attention) incentives. The whole paradigm we use, and the way we treat scientists and fund research, is broken. It feels a little bit like bailing water out of your boat with teacup on one side while ignoring the gaping h…

But how do we “solve” those incentives? There will always be winners and losers, and since successful fraud is by definition indistinguishable from genuine success, there will always be people trying to game the system. The only effective solution I see is making fraud harder to hide. (There’s also making the penalty for fraud higher and trying to instill integrity, but the problem is some people will still take the…

> since successful fraud is by definition indistinguishable from genuine success

This is absolutely false in real science and that you say it seriously is proof of just how far gone the academy is. Needless to say no matter how much you fake your data or results, nature is not so easily fooled.

Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science

#26

Post by buitreVirtual »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #19
derbOac wrote: post #14

I love these people's work. At the same time I don't think any of this really addresses the root causes of the problems, which are career, university administrative, and field (i.e., recognition and attention) incentives. The whole paradigm we use, and the way we treat scientists and fund research, is broken. It feels a little bit like bailing water out of your boat with teacup on one side while ignoring the gaping h…

The root cause it too many people for the funding available. If a single scientist can spend $250k per year it's obvious that even rich economies can only support so many of them. Whenever you have this situation you inevitably lead to selection criteria which can, and will, be gamed.

It's not just the funding but the jobs themselves. Universities and even the funding bodies want to show shiny easy-to-digest numbers to their stakeholders to justify tuition and government funds. Which means these institutions in turn expect those numbers from their researchers, who then are happy to comply and build their paper mills and citation cartels, solving no real problems at best and producing fake data at worst.

Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science

#27

Post by kiba »

jltsiren wrote: post #6
coolhand2120 wrote: post #4

I really hope these people gain wider support. They seem so anti-establishment, which implies that the establishment is pro fraud. And that sounds about right to me. This is a huge problem. When fraud is rewarded over legitimate research we lose so many times. Once when we reward the fraud, again when the fraudulent research is propagated into the corpus, again when we recognize that this has squelched legitimate sci…

They seem anti-establishment, because you need an anti-establishment attitude to do investigative work like that. If you are the average conformist, you are happy to work within the system, focusing on your personal goals.

We also shouldn't confuse people who investigated scientific fraud with necessarily being ant-establishment.

After all, being anti-establishment is often associated with scientific quackery.

Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science

#28

Post by gremlinunderway »

dustingetz wrote: post #15
Frost1x wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is a huge problem. When fraud is rewarded over legitimate research we lose so many times. I’d generalize this further and say we have an underlying economy and society that rewards fraud over what should be happening widespread. It’s happening everywhere and lying seems to be one of the best strategies to success. With competitive pressures increasing, it’s often even worth the risk. This may have always been t…

tragedy of the commons

lol what "commons" even exists nowadays? Everything is privatized or driven by small cliques/inner circles. There's no commons to exploit.

Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science

#29

Post by apienx »

The rewards of fraud in this context are orders of magnitude greater than its costs. The article is not wrong when it blames “bad incentives” and “the rampant culture of publish and perish”. The root cause, however, is the steady cultural shift away from honesty, integrity, and other (sine qua non?) values. As a society, we’re way too tolerant of lies and deceit IMHO.

Re: Researchers taking on fraudulent science

#30

Post by pvaldes »

elashri wrote: post #12

There are two things that you should put into perspective when seeing these numbers. 1- The article give pure numbers and does not report ratios. So when they report > Last year, more than 10,000 research papers were retracted, marking an all-time high The source is nature publication and while it gives rate of retraction per year it doesn't show the ratios. So if this is 10,000 out of 5M or 10,000 out of 10M is huge…

> 2- calling it epidemic is clickbait title

This shouldn't be treated as a mathematical problem. The consequence of just one of this 10.000 articles can lead to thousands being killed or suffering traumatic useless treatments that seem designed by sadists. A single article and people still are told decades later that vaccines cause autism. Other, and parents will start believing that bleach enemas will cure their autistic children. Other and millions of dollars will be lost. Spreads like fire and is simply evil.

And when you'll eventually convince everybody that those ideas are nonsense you'll have still 9997 fake articles more to fix.

Post reply on HN