I hate the thought that researchers and drug developers may have wasted their effort and dollars developing drugs based on one extremely selfish person's bogus results.
Don't worry, a lot of them are fudging their numbers too, it's no biggie
Fraud, so much fraud
391–400 of 868 posts
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hacker news is completely flooded with “AI learns just like humans do” and “AI models the human brain” despite neither of these things having any concrete evidence at all. Unfortunately it isn’t just bosses being fooled by this. Scores of people push this crap. I am not saying AI has no value. I am saying that these idiots are idiots.
What evidence for „AI models the human brain“ do you want? Isn’t a neural network pretty clearly a simplified model of the working of the human brain? What is there to prove?
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. The fact that we are seeing this kind of discourse within the scientific community is in my opinion a great argument for the scientific method.
Why? Some guy writing an op-ed saying how frustrating it is that science is full of fraud is a great argument for the scientific method? There have been people writing articles like this for over 20 years if not much longer about all kinds of fields. Nothing ever happens, nothing ever improves, it never goes beyond people saying "tut tut how terrible". This sort of thing is entirely predictable and will keep happenin…
I don't think Derek Lowe is frustrated that "science is full of fraud", this is likely editorialization on your part. It seems that it stems specifically from Masliah, who is common across all papers in the dossier. Granted, Masliah appears to be prolific, so this is admittedly a large issue in the peer review and verification structure in this field.
To put this into context though:
Let's begin by supposing that fraud exists in all ventures where people stand to gain, which I don't think is controversial at all, especially not in this comment section.
In light of this assumption the fact that this all came out in the first place is proof that being a luminary does not make you immune from investigation. That this happens 'over and over again' simply means that eventually we catching this fraud. The fact that the scientific community is constantly trying to reproduce and verify is why these become public in the first place.
So on the contrary, it's not that nothing ever happens or nothing ever improves. There will be articles like this one in twenty years because there will still be fraudsters in twenty years, and there will still be scientists working to verify their work.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#394Only fix I can see is making scientific fraud criminal. But it has to be straight fraud and not just bad science.
I can't imagine any other vocation where you can take public and private money, then cheat the stakeholders into thinking they got what they payed for, only to just walk away from it all when you are found out. Picture a contractor claiming to have build a high-rise for a developer, doctored photos of it, and then just go oops moneys all gone with no consequences when the empty lot is discovered years later.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no way to do any kind of science without putting trust in people. Science is not the universe as it is presented. Science is the human interpretation of observation. People are who carry out and interpret experiments. There is no set of methodology you can adopt that will ever change that. "Reproducibility" is important, but it is not a silver bullet. You cannot run any experiment exactly in the same way eve…
What you can do is separate interpretation from observation as much as possible.
TFA is about a person who literally faked the observations. Everyone on this sub is trying to shoehorn in their preferred view of "how to fix science" when the problem here has nothing to do with any of it.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#396I've said so many times, but we need to go back to a system where it is possible to make a career in science and get funding for replicating other people's work to verify the results.
This leads to a tragedy of the commons. Say a random nation, say, Sweden, devotes 100% of their governmental and university research budgets toward replication. 70% of the studies they attempt are successfully replicated. 20% are inconclusive or equivocal. 10% are clearly debunked. Now the world is richer, but Sweden? No return on investment for the Swedes, other than perhaps a little advanced notice on what hot new…
Wouldn’t science in total be impossible to fund if this argument were true? What advantage does Sweden have from doing science and publishing if everyone else gets to use it and they could just wait for someone else to do it? If this was how it worked, wouldn’t every scientist work in secret and never publish anything?
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, but you are clearly missing the historical context as these were two highly celebrated and referenced texts of the time period by leading scientists. However, it appears that the leading scientific minds (of which Maxwell and Whittaker are) did not include these uses in their texts. I do not dispute that science can be wrong (in fact it is almost always 'wrong' in the end) nor do I dispute that there could ha…
And what's to say that other highly celebrated and highly referenced texts from that time were not based on bad science or were outright frauds? Your memory of them? Picking the winners as examples is not good sampling.
The originator explicitly said that 'any engineering book' would contain these references, thus it would seem that this was at least a widespread belief among physicists and engineers at the time. Do you have any example?
Again, you and the original poster seem to have this understanding that scientists and engineers from the mid 1800s to early 1900s are not to be trusted. I think that this assertion should be backed by considerable evidence, and that burden is of course mostly on you
I don't dispute that there were doctors applying electricity and/or magnetism to the body in an "un"-rigorous manner, but is there documentation that suggests that the scientists at the time had come to the conclusion that it worked?
Also notably, Whittaker's work was a 'loser'. I chose it specifically for this purpose. I had read parts of it previously because it was a 'loser' as he chose to dispute Einstein's contributions to special relativity.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
Far more educated. But certainly not smarter.
And it's not at all clear if that education does anything other than magnify their intellectual predispositions. The smart people can make great strides, but the stupid will be stupid louder and harder. And the average may well just be... more average.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#399Earlier 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…
> 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
There clearly are single examples here and you would lose this bet.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#400I'm not a researcher or academic, but when I think of roughly how long it takes me to do meaningful deep work and produce a project of any significance, I'm struck by the fact that his 800 papers isn't a red flag? Even if you allocate ~3 months per paper, that's over 200 years of work. Is it common for academics to produce research papers in a matter of days? From the article: Masliah appeared an ideal selection. The…
Similar to > Founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX. CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc. Owner, CTO and Executive Chairman of X (formerly Twitter). Founder of The Boring Company, X Corp., and xAI. Co-founder of Neuralink, OpenAI, Zip2, and X.com (part of PayPal) It can only be a fraud.
Depends on your definition of fraud. Musk is obviously not chief engineer of SpaceX while actively working at Twitter, Tesla, and Neuralink. The founding claims aren’t that unbelievable though, founding 10 companies in 30 years isn’t that hard.
I would call it heavy exaggeration.