Seems to be censored from the NIH staff directory now https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/staff/masliah-eliezer
Fraud, so much fraud
51–60 of 868 posts
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#52There are unfortunately very rarely consequences for academic fraud. It's not just that we only catch a small fraction — mostly the most brazen image manipulation — but these cases of blatant fraud happen again and again, to resounding silence. Ever so rarely, there may be an opaque, internal investigation. Mostly, it seems that academia has a desire to not make any waves, keep up appearances, and let the problem qui…
The people doing the investigation have a vested interest in keeping it quiet.
It's like the old quote... "If you commit fraud as an RA that's your problem. If you commit fraud as the head of department that's the university's problem."
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#53For all the complaints about AI generated content showing up in scientific journals, I'm exited for the flip side, where an LLM can review massive quantities of scientific publications for inaccuracies/fraud. Ex: Finding when the exact same image appears in multiple publications, but with different captions/conclusions. The evidence in this case came from one individual willing to volunteer hundreds of hours producin…
LLMs might find some specific indications of possible fraud, but then fraudsters would just learn to avoid those. LLMs won’t be able to detect when a study or experiment isn’t reproducible.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#54This sort of behavior is only going to worsen in the coming decades as academics become more desperate. It's a prisoner's dilemma: if everyone is exaggerating their results you have to as well or you will be fired. It's even more dire for the thousands of visa students. The situation is similar to the "Market for lemons" in cars: if the market is polluted with lemons (fake papers), you are disincentivized to publish…
My recommendation is for journals to place at least equal importance to publishing replications as for the original studies.
Studies that have not been replicated should be published clearly marked as preliminary results. And then other scientists can pick those up and try to replicate them.
And institutions need to give near equal weight to replications as to original research when deciding on promotions. Should be considered every researchers responsibility to contribute to the overall field.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#55For all the complaints about AI generated content showing up in scientific journals, I'm exited for the flip side, where an LLM can review massive quantities of scientific publications for inaccuracies/fraud. Ex: Finding when the exact same image appears in multiple publications, but with different captions/conclusions. The evidence in this case came from one individual willing to volunteer hundreds of hours producin…
I'm hoping it won't have the same results as AI Detectors for schoolwork, which have marked many legitimate papers as fraud, ruining several students' lives in the process. One even marked the U.S. Constitution as written by AI [1].
It's fraud all the way down, where even the fraud detectors are fraudulent. Similar story to the anti-malware industry, where software bugs in security software like CrowdStrike, Sophos, or Norton cause more damage than the threats they prevent against.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/11ha4qo/gptzero_an...
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#56Once, at 3Com, Bob Metcalfe introduced a talk by one of his MIT professors with the little joke, "The reason academic politics is so vicious is that nothing's at stake." The guy said, "That depends on whether you consider reputation 'nothing.' " I guess what that shows is, you can always negotiate and compromise over money, but reputation is more of a binary. An academic can fake some work, and as long as he's never…
I have always said that while professors get paid less money than in industry, they are compensated in reputation to make up for it. Status and reputation are the currency of academia.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#57I'm the furthest thing from a scientist unless you count 3,000 hours of PBS spacetime, but I love science and so science/academia fraud to me, feels kinda like the worst kinda fraud you can commit. Financial fraud can cause suicides and ruin in lives, sure, but I feel like academic fraud just sets the whole of humanity back? I also feel that through my life I've (maybe wrongly) placed a great deal of respect and trus…
It's complicated. Historically scientific fraud could be construed as 'good-intentioned' - typically a researcher in a cutting edge field might think they understood how a system worked, and wanting to be first to publish for reasons of career advancement, would cook up data so they could get their paper into print before anyone else.
Indeed, I believe many academic careers were kicked off in this manner. Where it all goes wrong is when other more diligent researchers fail to reproduce said fraudulent research - this is what brought down famous fraudster Jan Hendrik Schön in the field of plastic-based organic electronics, which involved something like 9 papers in Science and Nature. There are good books and documentaries on that one. This will only be getting worse with AI data generation, as most of those frauds were detected by banal data replication, obvious cuts and pastes, etc.
However, when you add a big financial driver, things really go off the rails. A new pharmaceutical brings investors sniffing for a big payout, and cooking data to make the patentable 'discovery' look better than it is is a strong incentive to commit egregious fraud. Bug-eyed greed makes people do foolish things.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#58I'm the furthest thing from a scientist unless you count 3,000 hours of PBS spacetime, but I love science and so science/academia fraud to me, feels kinda like the worst kinda fraud you can commit. Financial fraud can cause suicides and ruin in lives, sure, but I feel like academic fraud just sets the whole of humanity back? I also feel that through my life I've (maybe wrongly) placed a great deal of respect and trus…
As a collective endeavor to seek out higher truth, maybe some amount of fraud is necessary to train the immune system of the collective body, so to speak, so that it's more resilient in the long-term. But too much fraud, I agree, could tip into mistrust of the entire system. My fear is that AI further exacerbates this problem, and only AI itself can handle wading through the resulting volume of junk science output.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#59For all the complaints about AI generated content showing up in scientific journals, I'm exited for the flip side, where an LLM can review massive quantities of scientific publications for inaccuracies/fraud. Ex: Finding when the exact same image appears in multiple publications, but with different captions/conclusions. The evidence in this case came from one individual willing to volunteer hundreds of hours producin…
How would that be possible? Novelty is a known weakness of the LLMs and ideally the only things published in peer-reviewed journals are novel.
Wouldn’t it be cool if people got credit for reproducing other people’s work instead of only novel things. It’s like having someone on your team that loves maintaining but not feature building.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#60I'm the furthest thing from a scientist unless you count 3,000 hours of PBS spacetime, but I love science and so science/academia fraud to me, feels kinda like the worst kinda fraud you can commit. Financial fraud can cause suicides and ruin in lives, sure, but I feel like academic fraud just sets the whole of humanity back? I also feel that through my life I've (maybe wrongly) placed a great deal of respect and trus…
I think the error is putting trust in scientists as people, instead of putting trust in science as a methodology. The methodology is designed to rely on trusting a process, not trusting individuals, to arrive at the truth. I guess it also reinforces the supreme importance of reproducibility. Seems like no research result should be taken seriously until at least one other scientist or group of scientists are able to r…
There is no way to do any kind of science without putting trust in people. Science is not the universe as it is presented. Science is the human interpretation of observation. People are who carry out and interpret experiments. There is no set of methodology you can adopt that will ever change that. "Reproducibility" is important, but it is not a silver bullet. You cannot run any experiment exactly in the same way ever.
If you have independent measurements you cannot rule out bias from prior results. Look at the error bars here on published values of the electron charge and tell me that methodology or reproducibility shored up the result. https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/264/timeline-of-meas...