Fraud, so much fraud

    "The crises that face science are not limited to jobs and research funds. Those are bad enough, but they are just the beginning. Under stress from those problems, other parts of the scientific enterprise have started showing signs of distress. One of the most essential is the matter of honesty and ethical behavior among scientists.
    The public and the scientific community have both been shocked in recent years by an increasing number of cases of fraud committed by scientists. There is little doubt that the perpetrators in these cases felt themselves under intense pressure to compete for scarce resources, even by cheating if necessary. As the pressure increases, this kind of dishonesty is almost sure to become more common.
    Other kinds of dishonesty will also become more common. For example, peer review, one of the crucial pillars of the whole edifice, is in critical danger. Peer review is used by scientific journals to decide what papers to publish, and by granting agencies such as the National Science Foundation to decide what research to support. Journals in most cases, and agencies in some cases operate by sending manuscripts or research proposals to referees who are recognized experts on the scientific issues in question, and whose identity will not be revealed to the authors of the papers or proposals. Obviously, good decisions on what research should be supported and what results should be published are crucial to the proper functioning of science.
    Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face.
    We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. ..."

Questioning novel science is one thing but questioning if the Earth is flat or Germ Theory is another thing all together. The problem with skeptics is that they sometimes hang around conspiracists.

It's hard to not discount these people when the person next to them thinks black people are biologically inferior. Then when those skeptics don't distance themselves or don't explicitly condemn those bad actors, it brings to question if their positions are born of skepticism or some strange prejudice, and that they merely constructed the cover of skepticism to hide their strange prejudices.

For example, during the Covid pandemic there was a lot of questioning around masks. In hindsight, the answer is obvious: it doesn't really matter if masks were or were not effective, because they're essentially free to wear. Even in the worst case, nobody is actually hurt.

But there were many, maybe millions, of mask deniers who would simply refuse to wear them. They were doing this because of institutional distrust and political motivations, not because they truly believed the masks were dangerous. And this is the trouble: these people are skeptics, but they're skeptics with an end-goal of political destabilization, i.e. they're dangerous.

When you mix it all together, which people often do to themselves, it's discredits the very thought process.

Similarly, the heads of famous science labs have lots of talented scientists who want to work with them. The involvement of a lab director varies wildly, but for the hyper productive, famous ones, it's largely the director curating great people, providing scientific advice, and setting a general research direction. The lab director gets named on all these papers that get generated from this process.

So 800 papers isn't necessarily a red flag if the director is great at fundraising and has lots of graduate students/post docs doing the heavy lifting.

I wonder if a market-driven approach could work here, where hedge funds hire external labs to attempt to reproduce the research underlying new pharmaceutical companies or trials and then short the companies whose results they can’t replicate before results get reported.