Trust the science.
Fraud, so much fraud
261–270 of 868 posts
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Would I have been more successful What are you talking about? You _are_ successful. You're not a fraud like all those other tossers.
That is not enough to most people. And if it is enough for others, then it is probably because they were fortunate enough to fall back on something better.
> That is not enough to most people.
You absolutely nail the most profound pathology of our time. Being a decent, honest, smart, hardworking person is just "not enough" any more. We've created a normatively criminal society.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
In other words, you are suggesting more stringent peer review conducted by insurance companies. And because insurance companies are too small to have sufficient in-house expertise on every topic, the reviews will be usually done by external consultants. The costs might be from $10k for simple papers to hundreds of thousands for large complex papers. The insurance model does not really work when the cost of evaluating…
That is like saying my insurance company has to follow me around for a week while I drive before they can underwrite a policy. If there is money to be made, and money to be lost, the actuaries will find a way. The problem could be, that it may become impossible to publish certain kinds of papers that are very well supported and valuable because no institution can afford the insurance.
> that it may become impossible to publish certain kinds of papers that are very well supported and valuable because no institution can afford the insurance.
What type of research would that be? Just publish it online without insurance and everyone will treat it as it unverified and uninsured... separate from other research that is.
Once the risk of the publishing research has gone down (i.e. reputable peers approve, or the findings were replicated), the cost of the insurance goes down also.
if something is so costly to insure, there would be a reason and thus the system works.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#264Earlier 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…
Alan Turing was an incredible computer scientist and mathematician.
Unfortunately he is out of his area of expertise in physics and human biology/neuroscience (? not sure where telepathy would be if it was to be rigorously studied). This is akin to Freeman Dyson on global warming.
That scientists can have strange ideas is something nobody can dispute. That those strange ideas enter into scientific legitimacy is another story entirely.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gamma knife? Basically the entire field of radiotherapy? TMS is magnetic, not EM (the coil generates a magnetic field, which induces localized currents in the body being treated)
> TMS is magnetic, not EM (the coil generates a magnetic field, which induces localized currents in the body ME? the coil generates an M which induces localized E in the body as shown by localized currents? (which produce some more M, but only just enough)
OP is making a distinction between "EM Radiation" (i.e. "light") and "Quasistatic fields".
This is warranted because they are pretty different - light has a frequency distribution, diffracts, etc, and can be focused to propagate energy over distances large compared to its source, whereas quasistatic fields (by definition) have no frequency distribution, and die as 1/r^2 or faster
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can solve this at the grant level. Stipulate that for every new paper a group publishes from a grant, that group must also publish a replication of an existing finding. Publication would happen in pairs, so that every novel thing would be matched with a replication. Replications could be matched with grants: if you receive $100,000 grant, you'd get the $100,000 you need, plus another $100,000 which you could use t…
There would still be incentives for collusion (I "reproduce" your research, you "reproduce" mine), and researchers pretending to reproduce papers but actually not bothering (especially if they believe that the original research was done properly). Ultimately, I'm not sure how to incentivize reproduction of research: it's very easy to fake a successful reproduction (you already know the results, and the original resea…
It is much much harder to sustain a conspiracy among many distributed people over time, than it is to fake your own research results.
Making fraud much less convenient will greatly reduce the amount of it.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like all things in life that have risks of fraud, negligence or potential failure, insurance could be the answer. Want to publish in a peer reviewed paper? Well then your institution or you should take out a bond or insurance policy that guarantees your work is accurate. The insurance amount would fluctuate based on how big of impact this study could have. Is it a drug that will be consumed by millions? Big insurance…
In other words, you are suggesting more stringent peer review conducted by insurance companies. And because insurance companies are too small to have sufficient in-house expertise on every topic, the reviews will be usually done by external consultants. The costs might be from $10k for simple papers to hundreds of thousands for large complex papers. The insurance model does not really work when the cost of evaluating…
> you are suggesting more stringent peer review conducted by insurance companies
Absolutely not. Underwriters are smart. They use other variables and methods for determining risk. They don't need to directly recreate and peer review the research themselves.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can solve this at the grant level. Stipulate that for every new paper a group publishes from a grant, that group must also publish a replication of an existing finding. Publication would happen in pairs, so that every novel thing would be matched with a replication. Replications could be matched with grants: if you receive $100,000 grant, you'd get the $100,000 you need, plus another $100,000 which you could use t…
That doesn’t fix the incentives, people will just commit fraud when replicating results so they can perform more original research.
Don't require the replication to be successful. Failure to replicate a result is just as valuable as successfully replicating a result.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#269[dead]
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The problem with putting the onus on the journals is there is no incentive for them to reward replications. Journals don't make money on replicated results. Customers don't buy the replication paper they just read the abstract to see if it worked or not. I do like the idea of institutions giving tenure to people with results that have stood the test of time, but again, there is no incentive to do so. Institutions wan…
If all that's true, we should just shut down all the science institutions across the board. They're worth nothing if they are not vigorously pursuing the truth about the world.