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I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

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Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#261

Post by 1MachineElf »

cies wrote: post #178

Many stories like this and people wonder why the general public is less "believing" in science lately. I think sadly the general public is right not to believe as strongly in science as it maybe once did, the results though are dramatic in "baby bathwater" kind of proportions. I think science should fix itself. Just publishing paper should not be the metric to reward. A retraction should seriously reward the flaw fin…

Last week in a university course, I was surprised to read in A Short History of Physics in the American Century (Cassidy, 2013), that at least with Physics, US public perception of science had been tumultuous following the WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. As a scientific discipline, it only reached maturity through the war-effort, which earned it infamy for bringing about terrorizing nuclear weapons.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#262

Post by foobarian »

op03 wrote: post #47
dnautics wrote: post #31

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…

Dont worry about it. It becomes a trap and many of them loose their minds as them dig themselves into deeper and deeper holes not knowing what else to do. Source: shrink in the family at a univ counselling center. At the end of the day they are misguided people. Even though there is a high price, their function is to train the survival skills of the honest folk who rise up the food chain. And dont have any doubt they…

Reminds me of the protagonist in movie Fargo played by William H. Macy.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#263

Post by Blikkentrekker »

captain_price7 wrote: post #250
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be racist? I have noticed in English-language discourse that often, shall-we-call-it, “non-white countries” are “races” but “white countries” are “nations”. Also, Christianity and Judaïsm are religions, but Islām is a race. Explain me that.

> Islām is a race. Muslim here, that sounds absurd. In fact one of my biggest annoyances is when people view all Muslims around the world as single entity. Every stupid trait of every Muslim majority culture gets blamed on entire Muslim world.

I find it absurd too, but it is often how it is phrased in English-language discourse, even in Dutch discourse the anti-Islām branch phrases it as such: the language suggests that one can identify a “Muslim” by some kind of physical phænotype of his body.

The difference is that in general in Dutch discourse, such statements are considered racist or betraying such a mentality, and frequently protested, but, in English-language literature, even the “left” that claims to champion the causes of all these “races” and “religions” still very often writes in a way that betrays a mentality that some religions and countries are “races” and others are not.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#264

Post by at-fates-hands »

Radim wrote: post #189
mlang23 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is worse. If you mention that you are not trusting every scientific results per se, you're being labeled as stupid and uneducated . This sort of absolute reasoning is making the distrust even worse. How can you have trust in a in a system that is unwilling to publicly admit its shortcomings? Trust and honesty come in pairs.

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 found that the movement you talk about is more about putting your faith in the "scientist" as opposed to the actual "science".

It seems much easier to find scientists who will tow your political viewpoint and then people can use them as a resource to prove that unless you take this person's "expertise" as gospel, then it proves you are a science "denier".

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#265

Post by [deleted] »

stanford_labrat wrote: post #165
dnautics wrote: post #31

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 did my undergrad at UW and was heavily involved with the GS department. There’s only so many people this could be lol, really makes me wonder. Edit: found who it is. Why am I not surprised?

[deleted]

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#266

Post by ziotom78 »

tinyhouse wrote: post #259
hinkley wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could sense this sort of problem even in CS and could not wait to get into an applied position as soon as possible. If you cannot build the thing you’re an expert in, you’re no kind of expert I understand.

It's true CS has this problem. But that doesn't mean you cannot do reproducible research in academia. It's up to you.

Well, I believe that the biggest problem is that there are very little incentives in doing that. Everybody (your university, the Government, the funding agencies...) rushes you to publish as many papers as possible, get zillions of citations, and boost your h-index; however, they do not give a damn about the reproducibility of the results you are publishing.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#267

Post by archi42 »

I have friends (now M.Sc.s in CS) who did support people writing psychology stuff (PhD & Masters thesis mostly, as well as papers) at my alma mater. The key take away was: Many of the students at that dep were either bad in statistics, or outright abused them to "prove" the desired effect via manipulation of the data or intentionally using the wrong method. Both faculty and students would not listen to experts telling them that their statistical method was weak. The most amusing/saddening point was when one of them was fired because he said he couldn't solve the Halting Problem for them (& I mean that literally, it was a crucial part of an experiment).

Now a family member works as a data scientist, supporting students with statistical analysis (for thesis/papers). Same thing there, a lot of students seek her help because they're bad with statistics (well, at least they don't fabricate data...), some want their thesis written by her (she drops that kind of job) and some expect her to hammer the data until it fits their hypothesis (which seems to be the most annoying/exhausting, because she has to convince them their method is wrong and the result pointless).

Overall take away: I'm sorry, but for some fields simply have to classify a PhD as worthless unless I've read the work myself :(

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#268

Post by foobarian »

cryptica wrote: post #101
dnautics wrote: post #31

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…

The modern financial system is making a butchery out of honest people. I've seen it happen over and over at many different companies and industries. Educational institutions are rotting from the inside. Idiots were being rewarded at the expense of intelligent people and now the idiots have taken over control and rewarding other idiots. If you want to know what happens next, watch 'Idiocracy' or 'Planet of the apes'.…

> You can see it based on how slow scientific development has gotten

I feel that the cause and effect are reverse; while the low hanging fruit was available and getting discovered it was a lot harder to get away with fraudulent results. But now that we're facing diminishing returns and more fish in the pond due to years of overtraining fraud is easier to sell.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#269

Post by pdpi »

fer wrote: post #252
missingrib wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Wikipedia really as bad as you are claiming? Can you give some examples? It seems to me like a lot of the articles are accurate, and some of the check marked or featured articles are downright great.

Wikipedia is overall great, though highly politicized in some topics, for science/engineering topics there's actual review by other Wikipedians and sourcing is solid. Moreover, the talk page always has anything that might be controversial about the article that you might be interested in. Sure, it will rarely display incorrect data, but it happens less and less as antivandalism bots become smarter.

> Moreover, the talk page always has anything that might be controversial about the article that you might be interested in.

This, plus access to the per-article revision history, ensures a much higher degree of transparency than any other comparable work.

Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?

#270

Post by driverdan »

roel_v wrote: post #225
realradicalwash wrote: post #143

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…

"Peer review" is not "have someone else re-do the experiment". That's just not feasible, especially since reviews are done without pay. It's not realistic to expect people to spend more than a few hours reviewing a paper. That amount of time is barely enough to check for overall conceptual issues and maybe flag some really glaring deficiencies. (And then conclude with 'accepted with minor revisions', those 'revisions…

But there were glaring deficiencies in the stats. Anyone reviewing the papers should have caught them.
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