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Fraud, so much fraud

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#341

Post by klenwell »

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…

I think my favorite Simpsons gag is the episode where Lisa enlists a scientist (voiced by Stephen Jay Gould) to run tests to debunk some angel bones that were found at a construction site.

In the middle of the episode, the scientist bicycles up to report, dramatically, that the tests "were inconclusive".

In the end, it's revealed that the bones were a fraud concocted by some mall developers to promote their new mall.

After this is revealed, Lisa asks the scientist about the tests. He shrugs:

"I'm not going to lie to you, Lisa. I never ran the tests."

It's funny on a few levels but what I find most amusing is that his incentive is left a mystery.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#342

Post by andrewflnr »

neom wrote: post #11

I'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…

> Stuff like this seems to bother me more than it rationally should.

It's bothering you a rational amount, actually. These people have done serious damage to lots of lives and humanity in general. Society as a whole has at least as much interest in punishing them as it does for financial fraudsters. They should burn.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#343

Post by mncharity »

AlbertCory wrote: post #29

Once, 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…

> reputation

A caveat that "reputation", like competence, is more variagated and localized than is often appreciated. As with someone who is highly competent and well regarded in their own subfield, while simultaneously rather nutter about some nearby subfield where they don't actually work.

One can have a reputation like "good, but beware they have a thing for ". Or "ignore their results using - they see what they want to see". Subtext that gets passed among professors chatting at conferences, and to some extent to their students, but otherwise isn't highly accessible.

When people speak of creating research AI's using just papers... that's missing seemingly important backchannels. And corresponding with authors. Attempting research AI as developing-world professionally-isolated professor.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#344

Post by SpaceManNabs »

searine wrote: post #324
SpaceManNabs wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You are being downvoted because you extrapolating from one fraud case to call all scientists dishonest. I can do it too. Person named SpaceManNabs made a bad post. There for all posts by SpaceManNabs, and probably all posts on HackerNews are bad. A dishonest lot.

> from one fraud case to call all scientists dishonest

I specifically mention that the majority of scientists are not dishonest. The majority of scientists are not running academia. The majority of scientists are suffering from this system, to differing degrees.

If I were as rude as you, I'd extrapolate on reading ability, especially since it is not just one fraud case.

Regardless, even if I was wrong on that, all my other criticisms of academia still stand, like exploitation of the phd students. I really hope the grad student unions get what they want.

I appreciate your response though. Makes me feel confident that it is just salty people on HN that hate truth, because otherwise, why would you mischaracterize what I said?

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#345

Post by derbOac »

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #37

As a scientist who has published in the neuroscience space, I don’t what to say other than the incentives in academia are all messed up. Back in the late 90s, NIH made a big push on ‘translational research”, that is, researchers were strongly encouraged to demonstrate their research had immediate, real world benefits or applications. Basic research and the careful, plodding research needed to nail down and really ans…

There's evidence that the turning point was in the 90s but I suspect the real underlying problem is indirect funds as a revenue stream for universities, combined with the imposition of a for-profit business model expectation from politicians at the state and other levels. The expectation changed from "we fund universities to teach and do research" to "universities should generate their own income", which isn't really possible with research, so federal funding filled the gap. This lead to the indirect fund firehose of cash, pyramid scheme labs, and so forth and so on. It sort of became a feedback loop, and now we are where we are today.

Translational research is probably part of it but I think it's part of a broader hype and fad machine tied to medicine, which has its own problems related to rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and monopolies, among other things. It's one giant behemoth of corruption fed by systemic malstructurings, like a biomedical-academic complex of problematic intertwined feedback loops.

I say this as someone whose entire career has very much been part of all of it at some level.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#346

Post by SkyMarshal »

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…

> Academic scientists' careers are driven by publishing, citations and impact.

Publishing and citations can and are gamed, but is impact also gamed on a wide scale? That one seems harder to fake. Either a result is true and useful, or it's not.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#347

Post by doctorpangloss »

photochemsyn wrote: post #36

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 sh…

> ...[bio people make money by] spin their research off to a startup... ...mathematical and astronomical research [is] fraud-free...

You are talking about a part of the academy that relative to medicine, so few people do.

Show up to a bank looking like someone who knows math, and they'll cut you a huge check. Is that not fraud?

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#348

Post by jeremyjh »

hansonkd wrote: post #263
jeremyjh wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is like saying my insurance company has to follow me around for a week while I drive before they can underwrite a policy. If there is money to be made, and money to be lost, the actuaries will find a way. The problem could be, that it may become impossible to publish certain kinds of papers that are very well supported and valuable because no institution can afford the insurance.

> that it may become impossible to publish certain kinds of papers that are very well supported and valuable because no institution can afford the insurance. What type of research would that be? Just publish it online without insurance and everyone will treat it as it unverified and uninsured... separate from other research that is. Once the risk of the publishing research has gone down (i.e. reputable peers approve,…

If it is possible to advance your career by publishing uninsured research then we've just renamed the problem, although I do like the idea of adding this structure. Eventually there could be so much of it that it would become an accepted norm that your research isn't actually published in a journal until five years after you informally publish it. Other scientists in the field have to be abreast of the latest findings, so now these informal publications are the true journals.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#349

Post by Der_Einzige »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #346
testfoobar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Academic scientists' careers are driven by publishing, citations and impact. Publishing and citations can and are gamed, but is impact also gamed on a wide scale? That one seems harder to fake. Either a result is true and useful, or it's not.

[flagged]

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#350

Post by bboygravity »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #330
dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>outcomes we collectively agree upon. lol, what are the chances? The average Joe is interested in Dem vs Rep or what the latest show on Netflix. The average researcher is worried about his livelihood, tenure etc.

Average Joe does not care about politics…

If one only cares about democrats vs dems (or left vs "far right" in Europe) one also doesn't REALLY care about politics.

Caring = caring to understand how the system works and how the incentives work for participants in it.

If I'm super generous I would guess maybe 0,1 percent of the population cares by that definition.

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