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

311–320 of 868 posts

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#311

Post by lupire »

drevil-v2 wrote: post #287
antisthenes wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In defence of the "less bright people" or deplorables as others have called them - they are deeply suspicious of Science(tm) used as a cudgel. They intuit that some parasitic entity or entities has latched on to Science and is co-opting it for it's own gain to achieve it's own purposes which run counter to the interests of the people. The heavy handed Covid response and censorship is a prime example of that. The whol…

You're not wrong, but people who oppose "science as a cudgel" tend to support "religion as a cudgel", and don't see a difference between science and religion, except that one is the Yellow team and one is the Purple team, and they have a preferred color.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#312

Post by nonrandomstring »

inglor_cz wrote: post #277
nonrandomstring wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Was it ever? Ancient texts are full of complaints that people have become immoral, unlike in the Golden Age, which was conveniently long ago.

Of course. We've always had criminals. And as you say, throughout history people have complained about it. All I'm saying is that today people positively celebrate it, and - according to the parent poster - we now demand criminality as a necessity for "success".

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#313

Post by 8f2ab37a-ed6c »

yunwal wrote: post #133
eig wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A key skill for any scientist is to differentiate quality work and science that can be easily faked. The Alzheimer's and Parkinson's fields are too easy to fake, and too difficult to replicate. The new ideas are only ~20 years old. Big pharma companies are understandably wary of published papers. When people say "trust the science", they often refer to things like masks, and antibiotics, and vaccines. That science is…

> When people say "trust the science", they often refer to things like masks, and antibiotics, and vaccines. That science is hundreds of years old and have been replicated thousands of times. When people say "trust the science" they're usually referring to fairly recent developments. Covid vaccines were in development and testing for just over 18 months before being mandated and were certainly not replicated on a lar…

Exactly. Nobody needs to be told to "trust the science" on gravity and electricity, nobody asks to consult scientific consensus. The argument only arises for the more suspicious niches.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#314

Post by owenpalmer »

mmooss wrote: post #195
owenpalmer wrote: post #181

> But at the same time I have a lot of sympathy for the honest scientists who have worked with Masliah over the years and who now have to deal with this explosion of mud over parts of their records. This really is quite unfortunate.

Is it? Is it possible that none of them knew? Should they have responsibilities to go with the benefits of putting their names on major discoveries?

Ah, I see how you could misunderstand. In context, this sentence was contrasting between those who knew, and those who didn't know about the fraud. To make my point more clear:

It's impossible that none of them knew.

It's possible that some of them didn't know.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#315

Post by lupire »

concordDance wrote: post #288
antisthenes wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not sure the two uses of "science" in your post are using the same meanings of the word. Science is the name given to a few different processes, a body of knowledge and statements by designated spokespersons. Each of these have different flaws and failure modes in different environments and domains.

Appositive comma, or missing Harvard comma?

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#316

Post by roca »

Lerc wrote: post #138
slashdave wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GenAI will make faking western blots fantastically easy

Eventually AI will also be able to reliably audit papers and report on fraud. There may be newer AI methods of fraud, but it will only buy you time. As both progress, committing to record a fraud generated by technology will almost certainly be detected by a later technology. I would guess that we're within 10 years of being able to automatically audit the majority of papers currently published. That thought must giv…

The problem is that detecting fraud is fundamentally harder than generating plausible fraud. This is because ultimately a very good fraud producer can simply produce output that is identically distributed to non-fraud.

For the same reason, tools that try to detect AI-generated text are ultimately going to lose the arm's race.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#318

Post by lupire »

searine wrote: post #299
Balgair wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How so? The fraction of academic science that is applied to anything, anywhere, with clearly identifiable impact is both a tiny fraction of academic science, and also often detrimental quality of impact.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#319

Post by hansonkd »

jltsiren wrote: post #310
jeremyjh wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Insurance companies insure one off events all the time. You can literally insure anything, its just a matter if the premiums outweigh what you perceive as the risk. "Uninsurable" just means the price is too high to be considered practical.

The research might be novel, but the procedures for research and publication are very similar. So insurance companies would just make sure that you followed a protocol which minimizes their risk.

perverse incentives are taken into account by insurance. Insuring someone is always a adversarial back and forth to determine if they are being truthful or not. Which is why Life insurance companies require a physical. They don't just have you self report and then accept it as fact.

Industry professionals like lawyers and doctors carry malpractice insurance. A lawyer can still commit fraud. Insurance isn't a black and white thing. It is a sliding scale that ties risk to a monetary value.

Its not rocket science. Just actuarial science. ;)

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#320

Post by momoschili »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #297
momoschili wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is a difference between "not considered strange at the time" and "science" via scientific publication and subsequent consensus validating the idea. I have mentioned that luminaries can have odd ideas multiple times in this thread, it's not something I seek to deny. However, as I continue to reiterate, these ideas are generally:

1. outside their areas of expertise

2. not validated by independent scientific research

I completely agree that science should be approached with thoughtful skepticism, and I agree that 'trust the science' might not necessarily be the best semantics to use. However, it is not clear that skepticism by all parties should be considered with equal weight. Most of the times, people should "trust the science" because they are not equipped to be skeptical.

Post reply on HN