Please commit more blatant academic fraud • Hacker News Board

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#181

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Sun, May 30, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #5

Hmmm. Here we see the following claim: > By partaking in a form of fraud that has left the Overton window of acceptability, the researchers in the collusion ring have finally succeeded in forcing the community to acknowledge its blind spot. For the first time, researchers reading conference proceedings will be forced to wonder: does this work truly merit my attention? Or is its publication simply the result of fraud?…

>> If I'm reading conference papers, why would I worry about whether one of them is the product of review collusion?

Well, because if there's no incentive to write a good paper, very few good papers will ever get written and you'll waste your time reading crap papers.

I get what you say: if the process is random anyway, then what's the problem? But the process is not random: authors maximise their chances to publish their paper if they partake in a collusion ring. Partaking in a collusion ring diverts resources from writing a good paper, therefore the quality of published papers goes down the drain. The most important resource necessary to write a good paper of course is the motivation to not publish crap. If that goes, everything else follows.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#182

Post by pasabagi » Sun, May 30, 2021, 3:09 PM UTC

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #126

newswasboring wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep bringing out that this can be a joke, but he said this two days later "I did mean the part about having trouble with girls. It is true that I have fallen in love with people in the lab, and that people in the lab have fallen in love with me, and it's very disruptive to the science. It's terribly important that, in the lab, people are on a level playing field. And I found these emotional entanglements made…

So what part of falling in love with people in the lab, people in the lab falling in love with you, and that affecting concentration and productivity, is so evil as to get someone fired? Sorry, honest question. Being from a different culture, I honestly fail to get this kind of outrage. For me it's just a description of humans being human...

I guess for me the thing that's really crappy about this quote is that it shows his underlying attitude - that women are basically always potential romantic partners.

If he was into men, and he said he didn't want men in the lab because he might fall in love with them, you can sort of see how absurd it is, and how unpleasant it is to be the object of romantic fantasy when you're just trying to get on with your job.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#183

Post by riversam » Sun, May 30, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

I have a story of a CS "professor" and fraud.

I am a student at University of the People. It's an online-only school which relies on volunteer instructors who are paid a small honorarium for each class. Instructor involvement varies from instructor-to-instructor, but most act mostly as moderators rather than instructors. This is due to the "peer learning" environment of the school.

In 2015, the university either hired or hosted (or had some relationship with) an instructor who was fired a month later. He was fired because he'd lied about his credentials. He claimed to have a PhD from either Stanford or MIT, but had none.

Prior to volunteering at the school, he'd worked on building up an online profile for himself. Yes, astroturfing.

He wrote a few "academic" articles on Second Life. In one, he claims one of the founders of the game as his co-author or a contributor. He "published" this article to a couple of websites and then he posted it on Wikimedia Commons. It has even been cited in real academic works.

He wrote a self-published book on Second Life which he submitted to the Library of Congress. He leverages this quite often.

He claimed to hold a "world record" on an ACM ICPC challenge. And he managed to work this into the ACM ICPC article on Italian Wikipedia which has since been removed.

He used Freebase and Wikidata to create "info boxes" about himself on search engines.

He even spent time writing fake articles promoting himself on a websites including Blasting News and IMDb. On the latter he claims to have created a commercial with Julia Roberts.

The best part is that while he was at University of the People he was also running a service to help students cheat services like Turnitin. This was something he prompted on LinkedIn, Reddit, and even Wikipedia. Yes, the traces are still there on Wikipedia.

To this day, the guy holds a grudge against the university. He posts fake reviews on TrustPilot. He posts comments on the Reddit sub such as posing as a fake recruiter or going on about the university's subsidiary in Israel. He uses a plethora of socks and IPs to edit the university's Wikipedia pages and engage in edit wars. He has also tried to scrub some of his past actions by getting articles deleted.

And this doesn't even get into his attacks on other institutions, attempt to run an Italian NGO/political party, and more. My mind continues to be blown as I dig into his activities.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#184

Post by ModernMech » Sun, May 30, 2021, 3:14 PM UTC

zitterbewegung wrote: post #85

I think we need to rethink the core concept of Universities having publish or perish as a part of being a Professor. The reason why fraud exists is because of the incentive structure and due to the nature of research you have intelligent people that will game the system. So, we have to figure out how to change the incentive structure so that professors don't attempt to perform Academic Fraud or we h ave to figure out…

> So, we have to figure out how to change the incentive structure so that professors don't attempt to perform Academic Fraud or we h ave to figure out if fraud does exist after the fact.

One possible way: increase funding to the arts and sciences. The total NSF budget was ~$8B, or 0.03% of US GDP. We could double that and no one would even notice. Increased funding means more money to go around, means higher acceptance rates for grants, means less incentive to write fraudulent papers.

The best part is, you have the power to actually change this. Write your congressperson, vote for a congressperson who pledges to do this, run for congress yourself, or organize other people to do this with you.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#185

Post by DistressedDrone » Sun, May 30, 2021, 3:15 PM UTC

fighterpilot wrote: post #157

I watched a lecture by an MIT database professor who recommends that the top 10 schools only allow up to 3 papers on CVs for junior faculty applications and 10 for tenure applications. He thinks this will be enough to start a culture shift towards quality over quantity, which could go some way towards addressing the fraud and collusion ring issues by removing the incentive for these behaviors.

If the universities wanted the problem fixed it would be fixed. I truly don't believe research universities are focused on producing value (other than to themselves).

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#186

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Sun, May 30, 2021, 3:15 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #15

tom_mellior wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I'm reading conference papers, why would I worry about whether one of them is the product of review collusion? Because the one you are reading may have crowded out a better one. Even if the current review system is essentially random, replacing it with something that is essentially a contest of well-connectedness is worse. Young researchers with good ideas but fewer connections, or people from less well-known in…

None of that reflects negatively on the paper. There is no additional caution warranted when reading papers. That's just a question of "are you happy with the state of the world?". You can think about that question any time.

>> None of that reflects negatively on the paper.

I think it does. Good papers are written by people who care about doing good research, whose primary motivation is to do good research. Such people will not accept to collude or commit academic fraud to get their papers published, because they are idealistic and are in research because they want to do useful work. To such people, committing fraud is anathema, for personal reasons that have nothing to do with economic or other incentives.

There are such people in academia but they are also crowded out, to borrow tom_mellior's turn of phrase, from others, who don't hesitate to commit academic fraud to get published and who don't give two flying figs about the quality of their own work. This is obviously a concerning state of affairs that can only be detrimental to the overall quality of research.

So I'm sorry but you're dismissing the issue out of hand without having thought about all the consequences. Academic fraud is like, I don't know, broken windows? It just perverts everything around it and creates a black hole of bullshit that sucks everything in it. Good research cannot thrive in such conditions.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#187

Post by wpietri » Sun, May 30, 2021, 3:16 PM UTC

berndi wrote: post #11

Wow, the amount of depravity in some academic circles is astonishing. The article links [1] the case of a PhD student at the University of Florida who was forced to participate in such a publication collusion ring and was pressured to commit scientific fraud by fabricating results and submitting them to a conference [2], being threatened with physical harm should he decide to go public. This student saw no way out an…

I definitely wonder if industry is any better here. At least in academia, the papers are public, so there's an opportunity for scrutiny. But I've heard tell of "AI" boondoggles in both large companies and small. E.g., the large corporate "AI" efforts burning millions without making any real improvements. And I wonder how many startups out there have standards that are in effect lower than academia, but instead of writing papers they are shipping products than harm people's lives when they go wrong.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#188

Post by Veen » Sun, May 30, 2021, 3:16 PM UTC

alisonkisk wrote: post #99

teddyh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve noticed a pattern where, wherever someone feels the need to write (after a disparaging story about someone else) “ They were not joking ” or “ They really said this ”, it’s almost always false, and the disparaged person really was joking, or really did not say that, or it was taken wildly out of context, etc.

What's the missing context here? That he used an important public speaking opportunity to actually mock the women he was assigned to help, and we misunderstood it as a serious appeal? That he was being fake offensive because it would be funny or enlightening? This wasn't an opportunistic pun. Humor is rooted in one's worldview.

> What's the missing context here?

The missing context is that many women he worked with defended him. That he has consistently worked with, hired, supported, and promoted women throughout his career. That he has done far more to benefit women in science and humanity generally than the whining Twitterati who denounced him ever will.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#189

Post by fighterpilot » Sun, May 30, 2021, 3:18 PM UTC

DistressedDrone wrote: post #185

fighterpilot wrote: post #157

I watched a lecture by an MIT database professor who recommends that the top 10 schools only allow up to 3 papers on CVs for junior faculty applications and 10 for tenure applications. He thinks this will be enough to start a culture shift towards quality over quantity, which could go some way towards addressing the fraud and collusion ring issues by removing the incentive for these behaviors.

If the universities wanted the problem fixed it would be fixed. I truly don't believe research universities are focused on producing value (other than to themselves).

Apparently it wasn't always like this, and it used to be common for junior faculty hires to have only 0 or 1 publications coming out of their PhD program.

Why did the culture deteriorate so much and become so myopically focused on weakly informative metrics like publication count?

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#190

Post by jacobbuckman » Sun, May 30, 2021, 3:19 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #130

raphlinus wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give my reading, and a tip to the author. To me, this did not read as a serious proposal to actually commit more fraud. Rather, it was a "modest proposal" in the tradition of Swift, in which the actual call to action was for the field to be more critical of papers, especially to be on the lookout for all fraud, both the obvious kind and the more subtle variants, the latter of which also do great damage to the fi…

I assumed it was tongue in cheek, but the end of the article really convinced me that the author is serious about his ‘let it get worse so it can get better proposal’ stance. “Widespread fraud would force us to re-strengthen our community’s academic norms, transforming the way we do research, and improving our collective ability to progress humanity’s knowledge. “So this is a call to action: please commit more academ…

Author here -- it's intended as satire, don't worry, haha. I know that nobody would ever actually do this so I decided to just lean into it. If I had any real power by which to fix things, I would have a much more nuanced take.