Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fraud, so much fraud

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 868 posts

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#291

Post by mlsu »

breuleux wrote: post #199
mlsu wrote: post #80

Earlier 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…

You could randomize replications a bit, take away the choice. Or make it so that if you replicated one group's result, you can't replicate them again next time. The key is a bit of distance, a bit of neutrality. Enough jitter to break up cliques.

I don't work in academia but in my experience professors are basically all intellectually arrogant and ego-driven, and would relish having time and space to beat each other at the brain game. A failed replication is their chance to be "the smarter guy in the room" and crack open some long-held belief. A successful replication would probably happen most of the time and be far more boring.

I could imagine, if such a thing were mandated and in place for a while, one could build her career on replications, as a prosecutor or defense. She would publish new research solely to convince her colleagues that she is sharp enough to play prosecutor or defense.

Anything has got to be better than what we have now, where apparently you can cheat and defraud your way through an entire decades-spanning career.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#292

Post by gjs4786 »

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.

All science does is show us how to move a whole bunch of piles of shit over into one big pile of shit, off in the corner. Or perhaps on to an unsuspecting group of poor people because, the burden demands to be he held and somebody has to hold the bag of shit. Right?

We may interpret this as convenience... But the tragedy of the commons says that we can't even have science if someone isn't holding what it is we don't want to be holding... I'm not saying I didn't love science or not think it's super interesting or anything... Can we really say it alleviates suffering or does it displace it for one group of people until a new problem comes in and takes that one's place? How many people here will be holding the bag of shit tonight? USA numba 1!!!

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#293

Post by griffzhowl »

infamouscow wrote: post #153
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…

The Manhattan project was a government project that was run like a startup. If such a project happened today, academic scientists would be trying to figure out ways to bend their existing research to match the grants. Then it would take another 30 years before people started to ask why nothing has been delivered yet.

Run like a startup in what respect?

It was a massive government-directed military project in wartime that was able to recruit all the top theoretical physicists at the time around a common aim in an urgent technological arms race to build the bomb. It included a vast effort of army engineers to build the facilities to process the fuel and so on. I'm not seeing the parallels with startups.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#294

Post by jessriedel »

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…

As a scientist, I agree, although for not quite the reason you gave. Scientists are given tremendous freedom and resources by society (public dollars, but also private dollars like at my industry research lab). I think scientists have a corresponding higher duty for honesty.

Jobs at top institutions are worth much more than their nominal salary, as evidenced by how much those people could be making in the private sector. (They are compensated mostly in freedom and intellectual stimulation.) Unambiguously faking data, which is the sort of thing a bad actor might do to get a top job, should be considered at least as bad a moral transgression as stealing hundreds of thousands or perhaps a few million dollars.

(What is the downside? I have never once heard a researcher express feeling threatened or wary of being falsely/unjustly accused of fraud.)

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#295

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #186
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…

It becomes a survival bias: if people can cheat at a competitive game (or research field) and get away with it, then at the end you'll wind up with only cheaters left (everyone else stops playing).

As they say: the scum rises to the top, true for academia, politics etc, any organization really.

Quote: "The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing"

My own nuanced take on it:

Incompetent people are quick to grab authority and power. On the other hand principled, competent people are reluctant to take on positions of authority and power even when offered. For these people positions of power a)have connotations of a tyrant b) are uninteresting. (i.e technical problems are more interesting) . Also the reluctance of principled people to form coalitions to keep out the cheaters, because they are a divided bunch themselves exacerbates the problem, where as the cheaters often can collude together (temporarily) to achieve their nefarious goals.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#297

Post by crystal_revenge »

momoschili wrote: post #264
crystal_revenge wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anoth…

The point is that I don't believe Turing's ideas were widely considered strange at the time. The point is more that, even under conditions of honest actions, it's very easy for educated, smart, and sincere thinkers to take for fact something that with time we believe is wildly not fact.

Science even at it's most sincere should always be approached with thoughtful skepticism. The phrase that I hear touted often these days "trust the science", is in essence not how science should be thought of.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#298

Post by itronitron »

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…

I used to work with someone up until the point I realized they were so distant from any form of reality that they couldn't distinguish between fact or fiction.

Naturally, they are now the head of AI where they work.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#299

Post by searine »

Balgair wrote: post #273
asdf123qweasd wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, the good scientists leave and the fraudsters start to filter for more fraudsters. If that goes on, its over- the academia has gone. Entirely. It can not grow back. Its just a building with conman in labcoats. My suggestion stands: Give true scientists the ability to hunt fraudsters for budgets. If you hunt and nail down a fraudster, you get his funding for your research.

I mean, the replication crisis had come and gone, about 5 years now. The fraudsters are running the place and have been for at least the last half decade, full stop.

That is a ridiculous exaggeration. Yes, like in every walk of life, fraud happens. However, the extreme success of academic science shows that most of it is real, honest, work.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#300

Post by acchow »

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.

“Average joe”. Humanity evolves slowly over long periods. The average joe today is far more educated than one from 200 years ago.
Post reply on HN