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Fraud, so much fraud

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#231

Post by crystal_revenge »

momoschili wrote: post #63
vasco wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick up an old engineering book at some point, something from mid 1800's or early 1900's and you'll quickly realize that the trust people put on science isn't what it should be. The scientific method works over a long period of time, but to blindly trust a peer review study that just came out, any study, is almost as much faith as religion, specially if you're not a high level researcher in the same field and have sp…

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.

Here's a more recent (1950) example that I think makes parent's point quite well:

> I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.

Anyone on this site who doesn't know what this is from should feel a bit of shame in the current era of hype around machine intelligence, so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader if you aren't already familiar with this paper.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#232

Post by regus »

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…

This is pretty funny. I usually hear this kind of language when a religious person is so devastated when their priest or pastor does something wrong that it causes them to leave their religion altogether. Are you going to do the same thing for scientism?

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#233

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

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?

This is exactly what personal integrity is about. You make the right choices specifically and only because they are right. And they are hard choices because you are forgoing immediate gain.

Time favors integrity, and a lack of integrity is usually punished. Sometimes at the individual level, as you age and see the error of your ways. Sometimes at the group level, as you watch your community suffer.

"You reap what you sow."

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#234

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

Lionga wrote: post #84
eig wrote: post #44

This sort of behavior is only going to worsen in the coming decades as academics become more desperate. It's a prisoner's dilemma: if everyone is exaggerating their results you have to as well or you will be fired. It's even more dire for the thousands of visa students. The situation is similar to the "Market for lemons" in cars: if the market is polluted with lemons (fake papers), you are disincentivized to publish…

BS governmental desperation to show any "result" (even if it is fake) is what brought us here. As scientist have to show more fake results to get more grants. Removing the government from science could help, not the other way around.

Good luck with that sentiment here.

People just went through the last five years and will go to their graves defending what they saw first hand. To admit that maybe those moves and omissions weren’t helpful would be to admit their ideology was wrong. And that can not be.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#235

Post by NemoNobody »

luckydata wrote: post #187
vasco wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick up an old engineering book at some point, something from mid 1800's or early 1900's and you'll quickly realize that the trust people put on science isn't what it should be. The scientific method works over a long period of time, but to blindly trust a peer review study that just came out, any study, is almost as much faith as religion, specially if you're not a high level researcher in the same field and have sp…

the best example is psychology. the entire field needs to be scrapped and started over, nothing you read on any of those papers can be trusted, it's just heaping piles of bad research dressed with a thin veil of statistical respectability.

This will be the second time it's been entirely scrapped and restarted ;)

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#236

Post by mym1990 »

dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #178
sitkack wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If humanity is to mature, we should be an open book when it comes to incentives and build a world purposefully with all incentives aligned to the outcomes we collectively agree upon. https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/ Charlie Munger's Misjudgment #1: Incentive-caused Bias https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-2yIO8cnvw https://fs.blog/bias-incentives-reinforcement/

>outcomes we collectively agree upon. lol, what are the chances? The average Joe is interested in Dem vs Rep or what the latest show on Netflix. The average researcher is worried about his livelihood, tenure etc.

This is a weird take, assuming the average researcher cannot be an average Joe, and also that average people aren't also worried about their livelihood...you might want to revisit your view of the world.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#237

Post by vanderZwan »

Lionga wrote: post #78
dekhn wrote: post #62

These sorts of articles raise so many thoughts and emotions in me. I was trained as a computational biologist with a little lab work and ran gels from time to time. Personally, I hated gels- they're finicky, messy, ugly, and don't really tell you very much. But molecular biology as a field runs on gels- it's the priimary source of results for almost everything in molbio. I have seen more talks and papers that rested…

Don't hate the player hate the game. Governments made scientist only survive if they show results and specifically the results they want to see. Otherwise no anymore grants and you are done. Whether the results are fake or true does not matter "Science" nowadays is mostly BS, while the scientific method (hardly ever used in "science" nowadays) is still gold.

> Don't hate the player hate the game.

When the game is designed by the most succesful players you absolutely should hate the players for creating a shitty game.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#238

Post by ksplicer »

antisthenes wrote: post #183
testfoobar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud. As I've gotten older, I understand that Charlie Munger's observation "“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” is applicable everywhere - including science. Academic scientists' careers are driven by publishing, citations and impact. Arguably some have figured how to game the system to advance their caree…

> Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud. Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science", when in reality science is still the best way to push humanity forward and alleviate human suffering, _despite_ all the fraud and misaligned incentives that may influence it.

I try to distinguish between "the scientific process" and building scientific consensus. As rigorous as the scientific process may be, building consensus is always a messy and human thing.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#239

Post by leephillips »

clpm4j wrote: post #166

I'm not a researcher or academic, but when I think of roughly how long it takes me to do meaningful deep work and produce a project of any significance, I'm struck by the fact that his 800 papers isn't a red flag? Even if you allocate ~3 months per paper, that's over 200 years of work. Is it common for academics to produce research papers in a matter of days? From the article: Masliah appeared an ideal selection. The…

Among other things my physics career taught me: anyone who is listed as an author on more than 200 papers is almost definitely a plagiarist, in the sense of a manager who adds his or her name to the papers of the underlings in his or her lab. When I was still bothering to go to conferences I would sometimes have fun with them (the male variety is easy to spot: look for the necktie) by asking detailed questions about the methodology of the research. They never have any idea how the work was actually done.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#240

Post by NemoNobody »

sitkack wrote: post #169
testfoobar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud. As I've gotten older, I understand that Charlie Munger's observation "“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” is applicable everywhere - including science. Academic scientists' careers are driven by publishing, citations and impact. Arguably some have figured how to game the system to advance their caree…

If humanity is to mature, we should be an open book when it comes to incentives and build a world purposefully with all incentives aligned to the outcomes we collectively agree upon. https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/ Charlie Munger's Misjudgment #1: Incentive-caused Bias https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-2yIO8cnvw https://fs.blog/bias-incentives-reinforcement/

Sounds like regulation to me ;)

I totally agree with you

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