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Fraud, so much fraud

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#141

Post by dekhn »

fsckboy wrote: post #125
dekhn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamma knife? Basically the entire field of radiotherapy? TMS is magnetic, not EM (the coil generates a magnetic field, which induces localized currents in the body being treated)

> TMS is magnetic, not EM (the coil generates a magnetic field, which induces localized currents in the body ME? the coil generates an M which induces localized E in the body as shown by localized currents? (which produce some more M, but only just enough)

I can't parse what you are saying, but there's a difference between EM radiation and a magnetic field (and the resulting locally induced currents). Think in terms of an MRI machine: it puts you in a giant magnet (causing the various nuclear spins to align with the field) and then sends a bunch of EM radiation (radiofrequency). The former is a magnetic field, not EM radiation.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#142

Post by BobaFloutist »

bonoboTP wrote: post #91
scarmig wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should be able to build an entire career out of replications: hired at the best universities, published in the top journals, social prestige and respect. To the point where every novel study is replicated and published at least once. Until we get to that point, there will be far fewer replications than needed for a healthy scientific system.

> social prestige and respect This one is the showstopper. No matter what you do with rules and regulations, if people aren't impressed by it at a watercooler conversation, or when chatting at a cocktail party at a conference, or when showing a politician around in your lab then nothing else matters. How prestigious something is is not a lever you control.

There absolutely exist skilled scientists that would happily make a living unglamorously replicating studies, if the money was there.

Prestige is a nice motivator, but making a living at all is always the baseline, and is often sufficient.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#143

Post by yunwal »

jimbokun wrote: post #47
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…

I think the error is putting trust in scientists as people, instead of putting trust in science as a methodology. The methodology is designed to rely on trusting a process, not trusting individuals, to arrive at the truth. I guess it also reinforces the supreme importance of reproducibility. Seems like no research result should be taken seriously until at least one other scientist or group of scientists are able to r…

How does this work for things like COVID vaccines, where waiting for a reproduction study would leave hundreds of thousands dead? Ultimately there needs to be some level of trust in scientific institutions as well. I do think placing higher value on reproducibility studies might help the issue somewhat, but I think there also needs to be a larger culture shift of accountability and a higher purpose than profit.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#144

Post by jboggan »

When I was in my doctoral program I had some pretty promising early results applying network analysis to metabolic networks. My lab boss/PI was happy to advertise my work and scheduled a cross-departmental talk to present my research in front of ~100 professors or so. While I was making a last-minute slide for my presentation I realized one chart looked a little off and I started looking into the raw data. I soon realized that I had a bug in my code that invalidated the last 12 months of calculations run on our HPC cluster. My conclusions were flat out wrong and there was nothing to salvage from the data. I went to my lab boss the night before the talk and told him to cancel it and he just told me to lie and present it anyways. I didn't think that was moral or scientifically sound and I refused. It permanently damaged my professional relationship with him.

No one else I talked to seemed particularly concerned about this, and I realized that a lot of people around me were bowing to pressure to fudge results here and there to keep up the cycle of publicity, results, and funding that the entire academic enterprise relied upon. It broke a lot of the faith I had been carrying in science as an institution, at least as far as it is practiced in major American research universities.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#145

Post by doitLP »

jimbokun wrote: post #47
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…

I think the error is putting trust in scientists as people, instead of putting trust in science as a methodology. The methodology is designed to rely on trusting a process, not trusting individuals, to arrive at the truth. I guess it also reinforces the supreme importance of reproducibility. Seems like no research result should be taken seriously until at least one other scientist or group of scientists are able to r…

The way I sum it up is: science is a method, which is not equivalent to the institution of science, and because that institution is run by humans it will contain and perpetrate all the ills of any human group.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#146

Post by indymike »

artificialLimbs wrote: post #102
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do hate the player. People are taught ethics for a reason: no set of rules and laws are sufficient to ensure integrity of the system. We rely on personal integrity. This is why we teach it to our children.

How did those teachings work out for the fraudsters?

Their parents taught them different ethics.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#147

Post by qudat »

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.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#148

Post by tensor »

wordsinaline wrote: post #98
jimbokun wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the error is putting trust in scientists as people, instead of putting trust in science as a methodology. The methodology is designed to rely on trusting a process, not trusting individuals, to arrive at the truth. I guess it also reinforces the supreme importance of reproducibility. Seems like no research result should be taken seriously until at least one other scientist or group of scientists are able to r…

This error really went viral during the pandemic and continues to this day. We're in for an Orwellian future if the public does not cultivate some skeptic impulse.

I'd say the public needs to develop some rational impulse, it already has plenty of skepitism to the point where people no longer trust science the methodology. Instead, they genuinely believe there is some alternative to finding the truth, and now simply believe the same old superstitions and bunk that people have prior to the scientific revolution.

Speaking of Orwell, I don't think science comes into it. Rather, when people stop believing in democracy, things will degenerate into authoritarianism. It's generally pretty hard to use science the methodology to implement an authoritarian government as the scientific method by definition will follow the evidence, not the will of a dictator.

However, something that looks like science but isn't could be used, especially if the public doesn't understand science and thus can't spot things that claim to be science but don't actually follow the scientific method.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#149

Post by momoschili »

jvanderbot wrote: post #132
momoschili wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to need some citations here since the texts that I'm familiar with from that time period are "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" by Maxwell (mid-late 1800s) and "A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity" by E. T. Whittaker, neither of which mentions anything of the sort. I suspect you are choosing from texts that at the time likely would not have been considered academic or standard.

Your points of memory are not counterpoints. Those are the ones that lived - and are not indicative of the general quality of science during those times. Obvious survivor bias. The fact that you can recall those reinforces the point that the value is determined by how long it is useful and remembered, not the fact that it was published.

Indeed, but you are clearly missing the historical context as these were two highly celebrated and referenced texts of the time period by leading scientists. However, it appears that the leading scientific minds (of which Maxwell and Whittaker are) did not include these uses in their texts. I do not dispute that science can be wrong (in fact it is almost always 'wrong' in the end) nor do I dispute that there could have been published research in those applications. I would argue that these applications were likely fringe at best within the scientific community by the mid 1800s.

There are of course incredible scientists that went down disappointing paths (eg Shockley, Dyson, Pauling) in terms of their research output later on, though one must remember that typically this occurs outside their original field of expertise.

If you read my comment you will see that I am asking for the references to the claims the previous author made. I simply provided my own references which werew written at the time and are representative of the times that do not corroborate the tall tale of the previous author. If you have any references to support their claim I would be interested in perusing them.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#150

Post by mchannon »

GeekyBear wrote: post #121

I've said so many times, but we need to go back to a system where it is possible to make a career in science and get funding for replicating other people's work to verify the results.

This leads to a tragedy of the commons. Say a random nation, say, Sweden, devotes 100% of their governmental and university research budgets toward replication.

70% of the studies they attempt are successfully replicated. 20% are inconclusive or equivocal. 10% are clearly debunked.

Now the world is richer, but Sweden? No return on investment for the Swedes, other than perhaps a little advanced notice on what hot new technologies their sovereign funds and investors ought not to invest in.

A bloc of nations, say NAFTA/CAFTA-DR, or the European Union, might be more practical.

That's the carrot. As for the stick, bad lawyers can get disbarred, bad doctors can get "unboarded". Some similar sort of international funding ban/blacklist for bad researchers would be useful.

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