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Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

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Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#101

Post by autoexec »

araes wrote: post #87
BeetleB wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me introduce you to theoretical condensed matter physics, where no one cares if the data confirms the hypothesis, because they are writing papers about topics that very likely can never be tested. At least in the social sciences there is an expectation of having some data!

That's actually the part about people constantly negging on social sciences [1] that I often find confusing. There's huge amounts of data available (geography, lots and lots of maps; history, huge amount of historical documentation; economics, vast amounts of public datasets produced every month by most governments; political science, censuses, voting records, driver registrations, political contest results all over…

People who hate "social science" are surely targeting too wide, but there's plenty of terrible research hiding under that umbrella that relies exclusively on social media/internet surveys/self-reported data and absolutely deserves criticism.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#102

Post by buescher »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #82
ploynog wrote: post #45

Double-blind review is a mirage that does not hold up. While I was in academia I reviewed a paper that turned out to be a blatant case of plagiarism. It was a clear Level 1 copy according to the IEEE plagiarism levels (Uncredited Verbatim Copy of more than 50% of a single paper). I submitted all of these findings with the original paper and what parts were copied (essentially all of it) as my review. A few days later…

When we criticize without proposing a fix or alternative, we promote the implicit alternative of tearing something down without fixing it. This is often much worse than letting the imperfect thing stand. So here's a proposal: do what we do in software. No, really: we have the same problem in software. Software developers under high pressure to move tickets will often resort to the minor fraud of converting unfinished…

Yeah, the alternative to a double-blind review that isn't a double-blind review is a double blind review.

The alternative to not enforcing existing rules against plagiarism is to enforce them.

The alternative to ignoring integrity issues i.e."minor fraud" in the workplace is to apply ordinary workplace discipline on them.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#103

Post by genewitch »

cess11 wrote: post #96
ninalanyon wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does rather depend on the industry. Research in fields relevant to electrical engineering are much less likely to be fraudulent because the industry actually uses the results to make the products and the customers depend on those products working as specified.. If you discover a better and cheaper ceramic insulator you can be confident that transformer manufacturers will take it up but the big companies are well s…

Graphene in electrical engineering is a staple of every (dis)reputable papermill.

"New battery tech promises 1.5x density, no fire risk, 20 year lifespan"

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#104

Post by cgcrob »

araes wrote: post #87
BeetleB wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me introduce you to theoretical condensed matter physics, where no one cares if the data confirms the hypothesis, because they are writing papers about topics that very likely can never be tested. At least in the social sciences there is an expectation of having some data!

That's actually the part about people constantly negging on social sciences [1] that I often find confusing. There's huge amounts of data available (geography, lots and lots of maps; history, huge amount of historical documentation; economics, vast amounts of public datasets produced every month by most governments; political science, censuses, voting records, driver registrations, political contest results all over…

I’m not ragging on the whole field. If I narrow it down too much they’ll know who I am and you will know who they are.

I’ll reduce it to a part of psychology.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#105

Post by genewitch »

proto-n wrote: post #86
michaelt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, perhaps I wasn't clear about what I'm trying to say. I don't think we should stop training researchers in common mistakes and fraudulent methods to watch out for. I'm just saying: I don't believe anyone actually tells budding researchers that they should commit fraud. Instead I think the process is probably more like this: Year 1: Statistics/research training. Here are a load of subtle mistakes to watch out for a…

I still disagree. It's more like "omg I should have published at least a few papers by now, what am I doing" and then you start frantically looking for provable things in the dataset. You find one that you can also support with a nice story. Now either a) You were not tought about how or why this is wrong and you publish the paper b) You were, and know that you should collect a separate dataset to test the hypothesis…

Maybe I'm misreading but you both seem to say the same thing.

New student is shown how to read a paper, how to spot egregious errors and all the things listed above.

Student, i guess feels forced to publish. And maybe uses murkier tactics to get the paper published.

As Dr Frank Etscorn said, "I can show anything correlates to anything else." We were discussing vitamin D papers anf I was testing that paper funding AI mentioned on HN a few times last year.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#106

Post by genewitch »

proto-n wrote: post #86
michaelt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, perhaps I wasn't clear about what I'm trying to say. I don't think we should stop training researchers in common mistakes and fraudulent methods to watch out for. I'm just saying: I don't believe anyone actually tells budding researchers that they should commit fraud. Instead I think the process is probably more like this: Year 1: Statistics/research training. Here are a load of subtle mistakes to watch out for a…

I still disagree. It's more like "omg I should have published at least a few papers by now, what am I doing" and then you start frantically looking for provable things in the dataset. You find one that you can also support with a nice story. Now either a) You were not tought about how or why this is wrong and you publish the paper b) You were, and know that you should collect a separate dataset to test the hypothesis…

I can't edit from my phone, maybe the nuance is in your final sentence?

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#107

Post by genewitch »

foldr wrote: post #62
light_hue_1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what papers are for. But I can see how not being an academic would make you think that. What you're describing are workshops with what we would call non-archival proceedings. Places where you write whatever you want and then talk about it. Publications, conference or journal, are supposed to be what are called archival. They are a record of what we've discovered and want to share with the world. They are s…

Some fields do have the opposite problem, though, where standards for publication are so high that they prevent publication of useful ideas or results that could be built on by other researchers. I don’t think a published paper should have to meet some kind of gold standard of completeness and correctness. It just has to report something new or interesting with any appropriate caveats attached.

I don't know I'm sure Monsanto put out[0] a lot of papers about how effective glyphosate is but another team decided to test glyphosate against the "inert" ingredients in roundup and found glyphosate was actually the weakest pesticide of the group.

Now, my pet theory is that they knew glyphosate wasn't that great, but talked it up in papers as a sacrificial anode sort of thing "gee shucks it looks like glyphosate based pesticides are harmful to humans (or bees, or fish, or) so we'll stop manufacturing that formulation."

But, Possibly due to academia, they have fanboys and cheerleaders and I think that's why it's still around and in heavy use even though we're not sure it's a good idea.

[0] Bayer Monsanto funds studies at agricultural universities.

P. S. Just watch.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#108

Post by genewitch »

porridgeraisin wrote: post #89
bjackman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I thought this would be a really useful resource but I think the people the author is complaining about do much better than most benchmarking I see in the industry Almost all the benchmarking results I see is just a percentage difference between two algebraic means, no statistical analysis whatsoever. Very common interaction: QA folks say "your change degraded some of our metrics and improved some others". I know…

Yep. The most recent example that's stuck in my head is actually much worse: they didn't even take the mean! One sample! https://github.com/denoland/pm-benchmark Check the run bench shell script (there's not much else in the repo anyways)

Hey, that's perfectly valid for arguing with your friend about which one to deploy on our server, all things equal.

I do this sort of thing to see what tools are faster all the time. ripgrep, ag(silver searcher), grep, MongoDB was one we were arguing about for a while recently.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#109

Post by genewitch »

tensor wrote: post #91
SirHumphrey wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your lab is different (if you work in a research setting), but most of the researchers will readily admit that most of their research output is at least somewhat bull**. It's something that is trained in to people from high school research projects onwards - people judging your results usually do not have time or ability to research you work and even if they have they usually have much more importing things to…

Excuse me? Based on what? In my time in academia exactly zero researchers would claim that their work is somewhat bullshit. As a society, there is laughably little support for science, instead the majority of policy and business decisions are based on fairy tales and snake oil. We need more trust in science.

As of this comment scroll location, there are at least three people that admitted to co-authiring a paper they knew was BS.

So you don't know anyone, but I can counter with those three anecdotes.

3>1

Qed I am right, statistically.

Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)

#110

Post by burntsushi »

genewitch wrote: post #108
porridgeraisin wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. The most recent example that's stuck in my head is actually much worse: they didn't even take the mean! One sample! https://github.com/denoland/pm-benchmark Check the run bench shell script (there's not much else in the repo anyways)

Hey, that's perfectly valid for arguing with your friend about which one to deploy on our server, all things equal. I do this sort of thing to see what tools are faster all the time. ripgrep, ag(silver searcher), grep, MongoDB was one we were arguing about for a while recently.

Which one won? :)

(I'm the author of ripgrep.)

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