Scientific integrity and the ethics of 'utter honesty'

I have often half-joked about the Journal of Cautionary Tales, and would genuinely find "This particular study went sideways, and here's why..." quite valuable. And also, allowing researchers to still get "credit" for contributing to the knowledge of the doing of science.

Many people subscribe to "weekly videos of random stuff exploding" on YouTube.

But could Schon have gotten away with it? I somehow doubt it. I was going to mention the Schon case and you beat me to it. I recall when news of this case broke, it then led me to read some of his papers that contained the fabricated data. I've never fully understood why Schon faked the data or what he stood to gain by doing so.

First, I've not read Samuel Reich's account of the Schon case you mention, in fact I didn't know it existed or I definitely would have done so. It's now for me to follow that up.

It seems to me there are multiple reasons for why a researcher would fabricate data or commit scientific fraud including those you've mentioned. However, the problem I have is that I find it almost inconceivable that anyone who commits such fraud would actually believe that they could get away with doing so and not get caught.

If the perpetrator simply believed that the fraud would never be discovered during his/her career or lifetime - or perhaps never even after death and thus there'd never be a stain on his/her reputation then I'd reckon we ought to question how he/she became a researcher in the first instance. Such woolly thinking doesn't smack of having much intelligence.

Surely, every researcher knows that even if he/she managed to fool the peer review process with fabricated data (which is quite possible with new research that's not well understood) that this situation wouldn't remain so forever. Once published in widely circulated journals this fabricated data would live on for centuries and the fact that it's fraulent would eventually be discovered. Moreover, a researcher who intends to fabricate data would also know (or ought to know) that once errors in scientific papers are discovered it's usually not hard to distinguish between fabricated data and actual errors, mistakes, etc.

It's a long while since I've read some of Schon's papers but I recall that at the time it was clear even to me who hadn't worked as a researcher in that field that his results were just a little too clean and neat. Sure, by then I had the hindsight of knowing that parts of those papers contained fabricated data but even so it was pretty obvious. Thus, to my mind, the question remains why he undetook such risks with his career. (Perhaps Samuel Reich's book answers that so I'm looking forward to reading it.)

Incidentally, the matter of scientific fraud has never been far from my mind since a somewhat trivial event occurred to me during my student days - although it wasn't trivial at the time (I've recounted this previously). At the end of a chemistry lab experiment the tutor accused me of fabricating the results of a titration and that I adapted my work directly from the textbook, as he reckoned my results were too good to be true. I was absolutely furious and I insisted that he stay back with me in the lab over lunchtime whilst I repeated the titration which he did. The results were that several of the measurements were even closer to the theoretical than the earlier experiment.

That incident led me to not only question and be suspicious of my own data and experimental setups but also those of others. This brings me on to the matter of the replication crisis but I won't elaborate on that further here except to say that Schon must have been worried that others wouldn't be able to replicate his work, that is - as you've mentioned - unless he was pretty certain others would be able to do so, thus his motive.

The reality of when you can't reproduce something is usually some combination of the authors did not report something they considered minor, but which turned out to be important, and/or that you're just bad at it, but in both cases your actual research probably wasn't trying to study that phenomenon - you wanted to use it for something else.

EDIT: I will say, what would be great would be if live-streaming your experiments became a thing (so really just recording them) at least in chemistry (where I worked). There would be immense value in being able to pull the recordings of someone getting the result they claim so you can see their whole technique, setup, lab and process - because that's where the important details creep in.

His parting line "Integrity in science involves a community of practice, unified by its shared values." is really powerful. We cannot do it alone.

Notwithstanding stumbling across a new atom bomb, physicists have it easy compared to computer scientists, I would say.

Our problem is that to the extent we are scientists, in the business of "Truth", our lot now inescapably intersects with the scurrilous worlds of advertising, surveillance and malinfluence - the world of deception and concealment. Computing is embattled to maintain its integrity against the worst sides of its principle funding and applications.

One cannot neatly separate out contemporary software issues of privacy, dignity, agency and freedom, from scientific integrity while using tainted tools - which is what I think Pennock means by a moral community of practice.