Fraud, so much fraud

From personal experience, it is all I've seen. Could anyone be in a position to extrapolate to all of academia without speaking from personal experience? I'm not speaking of all academics (hence 'most'). It's a statement similar to "Hollywood has a drug problem" or something of that sort.

My advice to anyone going into Hollywood would be to stay away from drugs; my advice to anyone going into academia is to treat every interaction as if you've just sat at a poker table in Las Vegas.

It's wrong to think that because there is reports of fraud or systematic error in science you shouldn't trust it. I'm sure all those things exist. But they also exist in every other institution with a lot less self-reflection and self-correction.

Nassim Taleb said that people think weathermen are terrible predictors of the future. He says meteorology is among the most accurate sources of predictions in our lives. But we can easily validate it and we see the mistakes. If we had as much first hand experience with other types of predictions we'd appreciate the accuracy of weatherman. My point is: just because you know the flaws in a system don't assume it isn't better than another.

Anecdotally, during my (fairly short-lived) academic career, in which I did research with three different groups, 2/3 of them were engaging in fraudulent research practices. Unfortunately the one solid researcher I worked for was in a field I wasn't all that interested in continuing in, and as a naive young person who believed in the myth of academic freedom and didn't really understand the funding issue, I jumped ship to another field, and found myself in a cesspool of data manipulation, inflated claims, and all manner of dishonest skullduggery.

It all comes down to lab notebooks and data policies. If there is no system for archiving detailed records of experimental work, if data is recorded with pencils so it can later be erased and changed, if the PI isn't in the habit of regularly auditing the world of grad students and postdocs with an eye on rigor and reproduciblity, then you should turn around and walk out the door immediately.

As to why this situation has arisen, I think the corporatization of American academics is at fault. If a biomedical researcher can float a false claim for a few years, they can spin their research off to a startup and then sell that startup to a big pharmaceutical conglomerate. If it fails to pan out in further clinical trials, well, that's life. Cooking the data to make it look attractive to an investor - in the almost completely unregulated academic environment - is a game that many bright-eyed eager beavers are currently playing.

As supporting evidence, look at mathematical and astronomical research, the most fraud-free areas of academics. There's no money to be made in studying things like galactic collisions or exoplanets, the data is all in the public domain (eventually), and with mathematics, you can't really cook up fraudulent proofs that will stand the test of time.

There was a period of time when science was advanced by the aristocrats who were self funded and self motivated.

Once it became a distinguished profession the incentives changed.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

> If Shell's scientists publish a paper

A lot of companies reward employees for publications. Mine certainly does. Also an oil company may not be such a great example since they directly and covertly rewarded scientists for publishing papers undermining climate change research.