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Fraud, so much fraud

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#301

Post by vostrocity »

greenavocado wrote: post #124
Lionga wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A true scientist never says, "trust me" or even worse, "trust the science." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnPFL0Dr34c

Reminds me of this tweet that calls out the problem of the popular position "science is real"

"Science isn’t real - that’s terrible epistemology. It’s a process or method to generate and verify hypotheses and provisional knowledge, using replicable experiments and measurements. We don’t really know the real - we just have some current non-falsified theories and explanations that fit data decently, till we get better ones. The “science is real” crowd generally haven’t done much science and take it on faith."

[1] https://x.com/rao_hacker_one/status/1811295722760982939

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#302

Post by mncharity »

photochemsyn wrote: post #36

Anecdotally, during my (fairly short-lived) academic career, in which I did research with three different groups, 2/3 of them were engaging in fraudulent research practices. Unfortunately the one solid researcher I worked for was in a field I wasn't all that interested in continuing in, and as a naive young person who believed in the myth of academic freedom and didn't really understand the funding issue, I jumped sh…

> mathematical and astronomical research, the most fraud-free areas of academics. There's no money to be made

So we're systemically safeguarding the quality of astronomy research, by setting up a gradient (at MIT: restaurant catering for business talks, pizza for CS, stale cookies for astronomy) to draw off some flavors of participants and thus concentrate others?

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#303

Post by SamPatt »

dekhn wrote: post #97
nonrandomstring wrote: post #88

Earlier 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.

To me, at the time, successful would have been getting a tenure-track position at a Tier 1 university, discovering something important, and never publishing anything that was intentional fraud (I'm OK with making some level of legitimate errors that could need to be retracted). Of those three, I certainly didn't achieve #1 or #2, but did achieve #3, mainly because I didn't write very much and obsessed over what was s…

The older I get the more sympathy I have for people who claim they didn't become traditionally successful due to adhering to ethical principles.

I used to think that was just cope. But now I've been in a few situations where there's fairly clear opportunities to profit from shady behavior, and seen colleagues that I formerly respected jump at the chance.

Thanks for not being a fraud.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#305

Post by Optimal_Persona »

I'm surprised that people are surprised by science being done in non-scientific ways.

I got a taste of this in my high school honors biology class. I decided to do a survey of redwing blackbirds in my town. I had a great time, there was a cemetery across the street from my house with a big pond, where 6-8 males hung out. I was excited when later in the season several females also arrived and took up residence.

I eagerly wrote up my results in a paper. I thought I did "A" level work but was distressed when the teacher gave me B- or C+. She said "My husband and I are birdwatchers who have published papers on redwing mating habits in the area, and we haven't seen any females this year. Neither did one of your classmates who watched redwings in her neighborhood." While she did not directly in writing accuse me of fraud, she strongly implied it.

I told her to grab her binoculars and hang out at the cemetery one morning. She declined, as she was a published authority and didn't need to actually observe with her own eyes. IIRC I had photos but they were from faraway with a Kodak Instamatic (this was the mid-'80s), so she didn't accept those as evidence.

I often wonder if my life would have gone in a different direction if I had a science teacher who actually followed the scientific method of direct observation! It didn't come easy to me, but I was very interested in science before this showed me clearly that science is just another human endeavor, replete with bias, ego, horseshit, perverse incentives, and gatekeeping.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#307

Post by throwaway14356 »

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…

Then hiring the uninteresting gel seems preferable.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#308

Post by huijzer »

testfoobar wrote: post #106
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…

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…

> Academic scientists' careers are driven by publishing, citations and impact. Arguably some have figured how to game the system to advance their careers. Science be damned.

I’ve talked to multiple professors about this and I think it’s not because they don’t care about science. They just care more about their career. And I don’t blame them. It’s a slippery slope and once you notice other people who start beating you, then it’s very hard to stay on the righteous pad[note]. Heck I even myself in the PhD have written things I don’t agree with. But at some point you have to pick your battles. You cannot fight every point.

In the end I also don’t think they care that much about science. Political parties often push certain ideas more or less depending on their beliefs. And scientist know this since they will often write their own ideas such that it sounds like it solves a problem for the government. If you think about it, it’s kind of a miracle that sometimes something good is produced from all this mess. There is some beauty to that.

[note] I’m not talking about blatant fraud here but about the smaller things like accepting comments from a reviewer which you know are incorrect, or using a methodology that is the status quo but you know is highly problematic.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#309

Post by sva_ »

> There's also a proposed Alzheimer's therapy called cerebrolysin, a peptide mixture derived from porcine brain tissue. An Austrian company (Ever) has run some small inconclusive trials on it in human patients and distributes it to Russia and other countries (it's not approved in the US or the EU). But the eight Masliah papers that make the case for its therapeutic effects are all full of doctored images, too.

> cerebrolysin

This was discussed here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41239161

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#310

Post by jltsiren »

jeremyjh wrote: post #204
jltsiren wrote: post #107

Earlier 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.

You are not the first person in the world to own a home or drive a car. Insurance companies can offer you cost-effective insurance, because you are doing effectively the same things as many other people.

Science is largely about doing novel things and often being the first person in the world to try something. In order to understand the risks, you have to understand the actual research, as well as the personalities and personal lives of the people doing it.

Then there is the question of perverse incentives. Research fraud is not a random event but an intentional action by the people who take the insurance. If they manage to convince you to underwrite their research, they know that the consequences of getting caught will be less severe than without the insurance, making fraud more likely. Normally intentional fraud would not be covered by the policy, but here covering it would be the explicit purpose of the insurance.

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