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Fraud, so much fraud

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#151

Post by scarmig »

mlsu wrote: post #80
jimbokun wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We can solve this at the grant level. Stipulate that for every new paper a group publishes from a grant, that group must also publish a replication of an existing finding. Publication would happen in pairs, so that every novel thing would be matched with a replication. Replications could be matched with grants: if you receive $100,000 grant, you'd get the $100,000 you need, plus another $100,000 which you could use t…

> I bet we could throw away half of publications tomorrow and see no effect on the actual pace of progress in science.

It might actually improve the pace of science, if the half eliminated were not replicable and the remaining half were written by researchers knowing that they would likely face a replication attempt.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#153

Post by infamouscow »

testfoobar wrote: post #106
dekhn wrote: post #62

These sorts of articles raise so many thoughts and emotions in me. I was trained as a computational biologist with a little lab work and ran gels from time to time. Personally, I hated gels- they're finicky, messy, ugly, and don't really tell you very much. But molecular biology as a field runs on gels- it's the priimary source of results for almost everything in molbio. I have seen more talks and papers that rested…

Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud. As I've gotten older, I understand that Charlie Munger's observation "“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” is applicable everywhere - including science. Academic scientists' careers are driven by publishing, citations and impact. Arguably some have figured how to game the system to advance their caree…

The Manhattan project was a government project that was run like a startup.

If such a project happened today, academic scientists would be trying to figure out ways to bend their existing research to match the grants. Then it would take another 30 years before people started to ask why nothing has been delivered yet.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#154

Post by Maxatar »

momoschili wrote: post #63
vasco wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick up an old engineering book at some point, something from mid 1800's or early 1900's and you'll quickly realize that the trust people put on science isn't what it should be. The scientific method works over a long period of time, but to blindly trust a peer review study that just came out, any study, is almost as much faith as religion, specially if you're not a high level researcher in the same field and have sp…

Going to need some citations here since the texts that I'm familiar with from that time period are "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" by Maxwell (mid-late 1800s) and "A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity" by E. T. Whittaker, neither of which mentions anything of the sort. I suspect you are choosing from texts that at the time likely would not have been considered academic or standard.

Because those two texts are the two among literally thousands of scientific publications that have survived the test of time, which is exactly the point being made.

This might seem crazy to hear now, but when Maxwell first published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865, no one cared, it received very little attention at the time.

It was decades later in 1888 with the work of Hertz that Maxwell's equations started to gain significance within the scientific community.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#155

Post by waveBidder »

jimbokun wrote: post #54
eig wrote: post #44

This 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…

journals have zero incentives to care about any of this.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#156

Post by mbreese »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #95
mbreese wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many journals now require all versions of a gel image that is used in a figure. So, you’d have to fake the full image that is cropped down to the lanes used in the figure. I think there aren’t as many of those raw images around to train AI on… yet.

I predict it will get even worse than that, in the next couple of decades I expect any document or work that has a substantial reward associated with it, either financially or in terms of career advancement or a grade for critical course work in one's major, or penalty such as indictment or conviction, to be backed by a time stamped stack of developing documentation, drafts, revisions, with these time stamp validated…

I actually thought that digital timestamps would have been a great use-case for blockchains. They are publicly available and auditable. If you're working from hashes, you don't necessarily need to make the raw data public, just the hash. It is a use-case that has an intrinsic value to the data generator and the future auditor (so you could charge something for it). I know there was some work done on this, but I think it lost momentum due to trying to generate crypto as a value storage medium.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#157

Post by momoschili »

Maxatar wrote: post #154
momoschili wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to need some citations here since the texts that I'm familiar with from that time period are "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" by Maxwell (mid-late 1800s) and "A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity" by E. T. Whittaker, neither of which mentions anything of the sort. I suspect you are choosing from texts that at the time likely would not have been considered academic or standard.

Because those two texts are the two among literally thousands of scientific publications that have survived the test of time, which is exactly the point being made. This might seem crazy to hear now, but when Maxwell first published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865, no one cared, it received very little attention at the time. It was decades later in 1888 with the work of Hertz that Maxwell's eq…

It seems convenient that the evidence to corroborate the claim can't be found yes?

I think you will also find that the publications of the 1800-1900s are quite well preserved.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#158

Post by [deleted] »

tredre3 wrote: post #79
dekhn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them. It's one of the most important diagnostic and treatment options we have. I think what you're referring to is invalid therapies ("woo" or snake oil or just plain ignorance/greed) but it's hard to distinguish those from legitimate therapies at times.

> We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them. Do you have examples of usage as a treatment? I can only think of rTMS (whose effectiveness is contentious).

[deleted]

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#159

Post by a1445c8b »

qudat wrote: post #147

While I agree this is a big problem, science should never be defined by a single article. I was always taught that science is a tree of knowledge where you build off previous positive results, all of which collapse when an ancestor turns out to be false.

In this particular case, the person of interest published 800 widely cited papers. That seems like a considerable collapse.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#160

Post by fluidcruft »

eig wrote: post #44

This 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…

I wonder if there are any studies on whether fraud increased after the Bayh-Dole Act. There's certainly fraud for prestige, that's pretty expected. But mixing in financial benefits increases the reward and brings administrators into play.
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