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Fraud, so much fraud

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#161

Post by dyauspitr »

layer8 wrote: post #73
mden wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"most fraudsters are not evil people, they just follow the incentives and almost non-existent disincentives" Maybe I'm too idealistic but why does following incentives with no regard for secondary consequences not evil?

IMO “evil” is a misconception. People have different beliefs and psychological needs, and placed in certain incentive structures that has the outcomes that we see. You can call certain behaviors “evil”, but that doesn’t explain anything about why the behaviors occur.

Physical pain is objective. Someone inflecting physical pain is evil unless it’s in self defense or common sense situations like a doctor performing surgery.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#162

Post by projektfu »

pmarreck wrote: post #115
hacksoi wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people can get away with it, they will do it. Rules and punishments for breaking them exist for a reason.

My sole rational argument for Christianity is that it has made the societies that it is, or was, infused with, more honest than the ones that were not.

That sounds like it is loaded with a lot of "no true Scotsman" caveats including, perhaps, Scotland, which has crime like any other country.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#164

Post by calebh »

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…

This stuff happens in Computer Science too. Back around 2018 or so I was working on a problem that required graph matching (a relaxed/fuzzy version of the graph isomorphism problem) and was trying algorithms from many different papers.

Many of the algorithms I tried to implement didn't work at all, despite considerable effort to get them to behave. In one particularly egregious (and highly cited) example, the algorithm in the paper differed from the provided code on GitHub. I emailed the authors trying to figure out what was going wrong, and they tried to get funding from me for support.

My manager wanted me to right a literature review paper which skewered all of these bad papers, but I refused since I thought it would hurt my career. Ironically the algorithm that ended up working the best was from one of the more unknown papers, with few citations.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#165

Post by masswerk »

AlbertCory wrote: post #116
masswerk wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is really a societal/political issue: since we decided that economic capital is king and symbolic capital not that much… (This is really the story of the last four decades or so.)

There are some people who think everything is "a societal/political issue." But that one-dimensional view is boring. Life is more than politics.

Well, this is about Pierre Bourdieu, and he had a few things to say about academia, as in Homo Academicus.

And I'm not sure what example could illustrate the problem with the lopsided valuation of economic capital and the general devaluation of symbolic capital (as compared to pre-1980s, we have since undergone a social revolution of considerable dimensions, which is also why there isn't an easy fix) better than this one.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#166

Post by clpm4j »

I'm not a researcher or academic, but when I think of roughly how long it takes me to do meaningful deep work and produce a project of any significance, I'm struck by the fact that his 800 papers isn't a red flag? Even if you allocate ~3 months per paper, that's over 200 years of work. Is it common for academics to produce research papers in a matter of days?

From the article: Masliah appeared an ideal selection. The physician and neuropathologist conducted research at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) for decades, and his drive, curiosity, and productivity propelled him into the top ranks of scholars on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. His roughly 800 research papers, many on how those conditions damage synapses, the junctions between neurons, have made him one of the most cited scientists in his field.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#167

Post by infamouscow »

SpaceManNabs wrote: post #100
SpaceManNabs wrote: post #33

I had a feeling academia was just run a ran by people letting blatant fraud, exploitation and abuse of phd students, stealing during peer-review, and just other forms of plagiarism, fraud, and exploitation slide by. They let it slide by because correcting these things would lead to massive changes in academia that might put them out of jobs. Every year that feeling becomes more certain. Glad I quit the track in grad…

alright, am i being downvoted because of my perniciousness to those leading academia, or because I was too sympathetic to the people being exploited?

They would be out of jobs.

You're being downvoted because you're correct—HN is an eco chamber for zealous regurgitation of opinions of the academy and media—institutions that have decayed. It's been happening slowly for awhile, but now things are starting to come apart at the seams.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#168

Post by qudat »

a1445c8b wrote: post #159
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.

I see this as a pruning process and an inevitable part of science.

But I would further argue against what others were saying about personal ethics. Science must remove the human as much as possible from the process.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#169

Post by sitkack »

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…

If humanity is to mature, we should be an open book when it comes to incentives and build a world purposefully with all incentives aligned to the outcomes we collectively agree upon.

https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/

Charlie Munger's Misjudgment #1: Incentive-caused Bias https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-2yIO8cnvw

https://fs.blog/bias-incentives-reinforcement/

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#170

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

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…

> At the time (20+ years ago) it didn't occur to me that anybody would intentionally modify images of gels to promote the results they claimed

Fraud I suspect is only tip of the iceberg, worse still is delusion that what is taught is factually correct. A large portion of mainstream knowledge that we call 'science' is incorrect.

While fraudulent claims are relatively easy to detect, claims that are backed up by ignorance/delusion are harder to detect and challenge because often there is collective ignorance.

Quote 1: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence"

Quote 2:"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts"

Side note: I will not offer to back up my above statements, since these are things that an individual has to learn it on their own, through healthy skepticism, intellectual integrity and inquiry.

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