> 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.
Fraud, so much fraud
401–410 of 868 posts
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#402When 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…
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
#403As 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…
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
#404Earlier 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.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#405Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#406Earlier 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.
It still means that they are massively, massively outweighed by loud tribalism.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#407I'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…
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
#408Earlier 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.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#409These 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…
https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v056n06_...
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#410If 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