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Fraud, so much fraud

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401–410 of 868 posts

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#401

> It seems like a strange thing to take someone with a long and respected career and subject them to what would essentially be a Western blot and photomicrograph audit before offering them a big position. This is absolutely something that we should routinely be doing, though.

yeah it sounds a little bit absurd to me. It's just basic due diligence. You don't not run a background check on a potential employee just bc their resume looks good and they got a reference. In those cases you still go, "Annoying we have to wait because we want this person on board NOW and it's a fairly shallow investigation that 99% of the time doesn't reveal anything even if there is something, but it's the standard procedure."

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#402

When I was in my doctoral program I had some pretty promising early results applying network analysis to metabolic networks. My lab boss/PI was happy to advertise my work and scheduled a cross-departmental talk to present my research in front of ~100 professors or so. While I was making a last-minute slide for my presentation I realized one chart looked a little off and I started looking into the raw data. I soon rea…

Coding errors are a really common source of fraud unfortunately. You did the right thing but the vast majority don't. Given a choice between admitting the grant money was wasted, the exciting finding isn't real, everyone who cited your work should retract their papers or just covering it up, the pressure to do the latter is enormous.

During COVID I talked to a guy who used to do computational epidemiology. He came to me because I'd written about the fraud that's endemic in that field and wanted to get stuff off his chest. He was a research programmer, assisting scientists. One of the stories he told involved checking the code for a model written in FORTRAN. He discovered it was mis-using an FFI and using pointer values in equations instead of the dereferenced values. Everything the program had ever calculated was garbage. He checked and it had been used in hundreds of papers. After emailing the authors with a bug report, he got a reply half an hour later saying the papers had been checked and the results didn't change so nothing needed to be done.

Little known fact: the COVID model that drove lockdowns in the UK and USA was nothing but bugs. None of the numbers it produced can be replicated. When people pointed out that this was a problem academics went on the attack, claimed none of the criticism was legitimate because it didn't come from experts, and of course simp journalists went along with all of it. They got away with it completely and will probably do it again in future. Even in this thread you can see people defending COVID science as the good stuff! It was all riddled with fraud.

Part of the issue is that scientists are mostly self taught coders who aren't interested in coding. They frequently use a standard of: if it looks right, it is right. The whole thing becomes a circular exercise in reinforcing their priors.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#403

As a scientist who has published in the neuroscience space, I don’t what to say other than the incentives in academia are all messed up. Back in the late 90s, NIH made a big push on ‘translational research”, that is, researchers were strongly encouraged to demonstrate their research had immediate, real world benefits or applications. Basic research and the careful, plodding research needed to nail down and really ans…

There's evidence that the turning point was in the 90s but I suspect the real underlying problem is indirect funds as a revenue stream for universities, combined with the imposition of a for-profit business model expectation from politicians at the state and other levels. The expectation changed from "we fund universities to teach and do research" to "universities should generate their own income", which isn't really…

Good points, thanks. As I’m sure you’re aware, the indirect rates at some universities are above 90%. That is, for every dollar that directly supports the research, almost another dollar goes to the university for overhead. Much of this overhead is legitimate: facilities and equipment expenses, safety training, etc… but I suspect a decent portion of it goes to administrative bloat, just as much as the education-only part of the university has greatly increased administrative bloat over the last 30-40 years.

Another commentator made a separate point about how professors don’t always get paid a lot, but they make it up in reputation. Ego is a huge motivator for many people, especially academics in my observation. Hubris plays no small part in the hype machine surrounding too many labs.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#404

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.

Already done: https://imagetwin.ai/

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#405
I'm not a scientist because of fraud and other reason related to academia, but I thought one of the tennets of an experiment was reproducibility. Were his experiments reproduced independently? Why not?

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average Joe does not care about politics…

If one only cares about democrats vs dems (or left vs "far right" in Europe) one also doesn't REALLY care about politics. Caring = caring to understand how the system works and how the incentives work for participants in it. If I'm super generous I would guess maybe 0,1 percent of the population cares by that definition.

I think you're a little too harsh in that judgement. I'd say it's at least 1%. Possibly even 5%.

It still means that they are massively, massively outweighed by loud tribalism.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#407

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 eage…

Scale this experience out to tens of thousands of young people. These kinds of people should not be teaching! A good teacher is capable of fearlessly admitting to a room of children that they were wrong and the students were right, or better yet that they have no idea what the answer is!

We have done a great disservice to human intellect to have mistaken the gift that empiricism gives of predicting the world, with knowledge of the world itself of which we possess almost nil.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#408

Earlier 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.

This is a weird take, assuming the average researcher cannot be an average Joe, and also that average people aren't also worried about their livelihood...you might want to revisit your view of the world.

No, it's not. A researcher might an average Joe, but that doesn't mean that the average researcher is the same as the average Joe.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#409
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…

Calls to mind Isaac Asimov's "shotgun curve".

https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v056n06_...

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#410
post #83

If you're an academic and want to use the fastest publishing stack ever created that also helps guide you to building the most honest, true thing you could create, I have built Scroll and ScrollHub specifically for you. https://hub.scroll.pub/?template=paper Happy to provide personal help onboarding those who want to use this to publish their scientific work. breck7@gmail.com

Youtube of porting a paper to Scroll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJBBAR-F2s
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