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Fraud, so much fraud

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#371

Post by almostgotcaught »

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…

> Arguably some have figured how to game the system to advance their careers

lol arguably? i would bet my generous, non-academia, industry salary for the next 10 years, that there's not a single academic with a citation count over say ... 50k (ostensibly the most successful academic) that isn't gaming the system.

- signed someone who got their phd at "prestigous" uni under a guy with >100k citations

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#372

Post by dotnet00 »

momoschili wrote: post #323
drevil-v2 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How are "heavy handed covid response and censorship" a prime example of that?

A decent chunk of the pandemic response was politicians power tripping in the name of The Science and later having to roll things back, either because of public backlash (eg hotlines to encourage snitching on their neighbors), because it was actually illegal (requiring all large businesses to have their employees vaccinated or tested weekly), or because of politics (initially telling the public that masks were ineffective, then tripling down on mask mandates, Harris saying the vaccine could not be trusted based on Trump talking about its efficacy).

There was also dumb stuff like social media suppressing mention of covid, even to this day youtubers use euphemisms to refer to that period.

To me it seems perfectly understandable how people who aren't actually involved in science might mix up The Science and actual science after all the political nastiness of those years, especially when we add on top all of the awful pop science reporting from the past decades.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#373

Post by jltsiren »

hansonkd wrote: post #319
jltsiren wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 minimi…

> The research might be novel, but the procedures for research and publication are very similar.

This is wrong.

Some time ago, I completed the checklists for publishing a paper in a somewhat prestigious multidisciplinary journal. Large parts of the lists were about complying with various best practices and formal requirements in different fields. I often didn't even understand the questions outside my field. And the questions nominally within my field were often category errors. They assumed a mode of doing research that was far from universal. Overall, the process was more frustrating than (let's say) applying for a US visa.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#374

Post by azan_ »

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.

It's really easy to verify that this claim is pure nonsense - we still have very real, astonishing scientific progress.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#375

Post by chrisjj »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #127

This is terribly terribly frustrating. For every one of these cheats there are hundreds of honest, extremely hard-working ETHICAL scientists who toil 60 hours a week doing the thing they love. It is also terribly frustrating that, being human after all, smooth talkers with a confident stride, an easy smile, eager to shake hands can and do quickly climb the academic ladder, especially the administrative latter. This m…

> For every one of these cheats there are hundreds of honest, extremely hard-working ETHICAL scientists

Every one of these /discovered/ cheats.

Remember this particular cheat was one of your ethicals until a few moments ago.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#377

Post by aliasxneo »

I wonder if there's evidence of fraud _increasing_ or if the detection methods are just improving.

In my last workplace, self-evaluation (and, therefore, self-promotion) was mandatory on a semi-annual cycle and heavily tied to compensation. It's not surprising that it became a breeding ground for fraud. Outside of a strong moral conviction (which I would argue is in declining), these sorts of systems will likely always be targets for fraudulent behavior.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#378

Post by mike_hearn »

mlsu wrote: post #80
jimbokun wrote: post #54

Earlier 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…

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…

Replication is over-emphasised. Attempts to organise mass replications have struggled with basic problems like papers making numerous claims (which one do you replicate?), the question of whether you try to replicate the original methodology exactly or whether you try to answer the same question as the original paper (matters in cases where the methodology was bad), many papers making obvious low value findings (e.g. poor children do worse at school) and so on.

But the biggest problem is actually that large swathes of 'scientists' don't do experiments at all. You can't even replicate such papers because they exist purely in the realm of the theoretical. The theory often isn't even properly written down! They will tell you that the paper is just a summary of the real model, which is (at best) found in a giant pile of C or R on some github repo that contains a single commit. Try to replicate their model from the paper, there isn't enough detail to do so. Try to replicate from the code, all you're doing is pointlessly rewriting code that already exists (proves nothing). Try to re-derive their methodology from the original question and if you can't, they'll just reject your paper as illegitimate criticism and say it wasn't a real replication.

Having reviewed quite a lot of scientific papers in the past six years or so, the ones that were really problematic couldn't have been fixed with incentivized replication.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#379

Post by soganess »

griffzhowl wrote: post #293
infamouscow wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just want to echo this!

They built a gosh darned city... oh wait, I was wrong, they built three. It was run like an extremely high-value military project, which is exactly what it was. Sure it was more theoretical than other military projects(at the time), but that is the game sometimes.

I get the sense that some folks just think "faster then we would do it now" is the same as startup. Which, to put it politely, I strongly disagree with. Startups are great and I am grateful for the daily value adds to my life, but pretending everything "fast" has startup mentality is just missing the mark.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#380

Post by tokai »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #346
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…

> Academic scientists' careers are driven by publishing, citations and impact. Publishing and citations can and are gamed, but is impact also gamed on a wide scale? That one seems harder to fake. Either a result is true and useful, or it's not.

Impact here actually means citations. They clumsily say citations twice. Underlining the field of bibliometrics is the idea that citations correlates with the impact the a paper has on scientific discourse. It's intentionally vague because its hard to say what even highly cited papers objectively achieve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_impact

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