221–230 of 363 posts
Two of the mentioned studies seem to be related to the question whether violent games and movies influence our behaviour. Assuming Qian Zhang's work is fraudulent, what was his agenda? That violent games are OK, or the opposite?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We hear it all the time. Its an ancient story. The history of science is full of these stories. Misguided/driven/ambitious people are always looking for shortcuts and they will find them. Its like dealing with mosquitos, cockroaches, weeds, software bugs and cancer. It never ends.
I think the point of GP's story is that this isn't just one or two bad apples here and there, but it's endemic in that domain - and most likely in others too (I'm leaning to believe that; it's not the first story like this I've read in recent years). Being an endemic problem means you have to switch your assumptions; when reading a random scientific paper, you're no longer thinking, "this is probably right, but I mus…
I think there should be a bounty for revealing the truth
FOSS still has a lot of vulnerabilities, but it has also caught a lot of vulnerabilities and more people know what to look for. Perhaps this is why there is so much resistance to sci-hub, because there are so many compromised editors and academics who risk exposure?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also describes medical research. Only it's even worse. Problem is, you have no choice if you want to work in a university hospital. The system essentially tells you "you'll be doing shit science... or you'll leave!". Been at it for more than 10y, and no hint of change in sight. This is going to be really, really hard to change unfortunately.
How is medical research shit science?
There are multiple reasons degrading research quality. An important one is spreadsheet incompetence. Another one is that medical research goes hand in hand with academic achievement, which in medicine also means money and power (probably more than in most other fields). I guess we have the same kind of problems as everyone else, overall.
One thing people often miss is that clinical data is of abysmal quality and reliability, so honest analysis is really difficult.
We are dealing with 5+ papers that are fraudulent and another 5+ newer papers that are most likely fraudulent, too. That is, there have been 20, 25+ reviewers looking at those papers. Their job was to carefully read them and double check the numbers. All of them gave those papers a pass. I am at a loss here. The authors' behaviour is outrageous, but this story is also about a broken reviewing process, partly due to w…
In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…
In academia, the goal is to publish. The peer-review process won't care to repeat your experiments. And the chance that other lab repeating your experiments was slim -- why spending time repeating other people's success?
In contrast, in industry, an experiment has to be bullet-proof reproducible in order to be ending up in a product. That includes materials from multiple manufacturing batches of reagents, at multiple customer sites with varying environmental conditions, and operator with vastly different skills.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This science-bro movement scares me too. "But SCIENCE said so! You're a SCIENCE denier!" It feels like a religion, with its own T-shirts and all. Appeals to authority, intellectual posturing… often from people with little understanding of the actual science. Honest insiders are way more careful with any absolute statements. No wonder there's a (also scary) rise of conspiracy theories. How do people not observe those…
I think people have to get more serious about separating science as a procedure from scientism (that is, philosophical issues that are often discussed in tandem). When one uses the phrase, “science denier”, it often means, “you don’t agree with my philosophy/metaphysics/economic policy” rather than “you deny these particular facts”, which causes people to be rightly concerned. I’m not optimistic that this is going to…
In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…
I've reported similar misconduct before. Was told the claims were very concerning, and that there was a quite clear problem that would be investigated. A few months later, I was informed the problem had been resolved, though on inspection, nothing had changed. I learned their investigation involved asking the person of interest if everything was legitimate, to which they said yes. Investigation closed. I am truly dis…
In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…