Verifiable computing and data lineage are important mitigation to be developed here.
Fraud, so much fraud
241–250 of 868 posts
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#242Earlier 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.
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…
What is the source?
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#243This 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…
My recommendation is for journals to place at least equal importance to publishing replications as for the original studies. Studies that have not been replicated should be published clearly marked as preliminary results. And then other scientists can pick those up and try to replicate them. And institutions need to give near equal weight to replications as to original research when deciding on promotions. Should be…
Replications are not very scientifically useful. If there were flaws in the design of the original experiment, replicating the experiment will also replicate the flaws.
What we should aim for is confirmation: a different experiment that tests the underlying phenomenon that was the subject of the first paper.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
If people can get away with it, they will do it. Rules and punishments for breaking them exist for a reason.
My sole rational argument for Christianity is that it has made the societies that it is, or was, infused with, more honest than the ones that were not.
If I read pagan Roman observations about life and people, they strike me as way, way more honest (sometimes brutally honest) than anything that we are used to for the last 1000 years, perhaps with exceptions like Machiavelli and some verbal jokes of the "unprintable" character.
In Christian theory, everyone is a sinner, but in a real Christian society, people try to cover up their particular sins all the time, at least against other laypeople (not the priest), which leads to the opposite of honesty - hypocrisy.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#245Earlier 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…
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.
I believe if we taught philosophy in school to a non-trivial level we wouldn't have to rely on trust/faith.
I wonder if it's possible to get people to wonder why the one discipline that has the tools to deal with all of these epistemic, logical, etc issues isn't taught in school. You'd think it would be something that people would naturally wonder about, but maybe our fundamentalist (and false) focus on science as the one and only source of knowledge has damaged our ability to wonder independently.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#246Earlier 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…
Lots of people doing research find this depressing to the point of quitting. Many of my peers left research as they couldn't stomach all this nonsense. In experimental fields, the current academic system rewards dishonesty so much that ugly things have become really common. In my relatively short career, I have been asked to manipulate results several times. I refused, but this took an immense toll, especially on two…
> I've also witnessed first-hand how people that manage to publish well adopt monopolistic strategies, sabotaging interesting grant proposals from other groups or stalling their article submissions while they copy them. This is a problem that seldomly gets discussed.
Agree. Everyone has heard about the extreme fraud cases, but the casual toxicity that the pressure cooker environment elicits is rarely discussed and probably a far larger problem. I say that as someone who has spent too much time in this environment and never witnessed outright fraud - that I know of.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You know you wrote this on the Internet? The thing the government created to do science?
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
alright, am i being downvoted because of my perniciousness to those leading academia, or because I was too sympathetic to the people being exploited?
They would be out of jobs. You're being downvoted because you're correct—HN is an eco chamber for zealous regurgitation of opinions of the academy and media—institutions that have decayed. It's been happening slowly for awhile, but now things are starting to come apart at the seams.
It is really annoying because a common response is
"We know academia is bad. But this is the best we have and it is hard to improve"
when that is false on two counts.
1. If you had said the same thing before 2016 or covid, people would not agree that academia is rife with fraud or worthy of skepticism. 2. The same people saying the system dismiss how can it be improved are the same ones that would suffer from disruption as you say. They have the power to dismiss these arguments to begin with.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#249Earlier 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.
> Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science"
Unfortunately many "smart" people insist on telling "dumb" people how to think instead of having the introspection and humility to examine where we've gone wrong and spending a lot of time and effort on fixing it.
No, easier to gaslight the idiots
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#250I'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…
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…
Why do you need to go back 100-170 years, if it's an issue? Aren't there more recent examples?