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Fraud, so much fraud

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#411

Post by jonas21 »

huijzer wrote: post #308
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. Arguably some have figured how to game the system to advance their careers. Science be damned. I’ve talked to multiple professors about this and I think it’s not because they don’t care about science. They just care more about their career. And I don’t blame them. It’s a slippery slope and once you notice other people who start beating you…

> They just care more about their career.

It's not even that.

In most fields, you need lab space and equipment and grad students to get stuff done. And to pay for that, you need funding. And to get funding, you need to publish and apply for grants.

You have to pay attention to the "career" side of things -- otherwise, you won't get to do the science at all.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#412

Post by jfengel »

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

I really feel stupid asking experienced developers to do FizzBuzz. Not one has ever failed. But I have heard tons of anecdotes of utterly incompetent developers being weeded out by it.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#413

Post by mistercheph »

searine wrote: post #334
lupire wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty much every industry functions on a foundation of basic scientific knowledge discovered in academic labs, run by honest people trying to understand the natural world. Fraud happens. Bad theories happen. The slow turn of scientific wheels takes centuries to crush them but it will always win. Profit doesn't turn those wheels. Our entire modern lifestyle is the impact.

Is it possible that society is the thing with turning wheels and knowledge is the thing getting crushed underneath it?

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#414

Post by araes »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #186
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…

It becomes a survival bias: if people can cheat at a competitive game (or research field) and get away with it, then at the end you'll wind up with only cheaters left (everyone else stops playing).

And thus we have the Earth. Where all looks like a broken MMO in every direction. Everybody refuses to participate, because it's 100% griefers, yet nobody can leave.

Business: Can you get a law written to command the economy to give you money or never suffer punishments? Intel fabs (https://reason.com/2024/03/20/federal-handout-to-intel-will-...), Tesla dealers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_US_dealership_disputes), Uber taxis (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/uber-files-leak...), ect... Are you wealthy enough there's nothing "normals" can really do? EBay intimidation scandal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal).

Economic Academia: Harvard Prof. Gino (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/11/harvard-busines...)

Materials Academica: Doping + Graphene = feces papers (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acsnano.9b00184) "Will Any Crap We Put into Graphene Increase Its Electrocatalytic Effect?" (Bonus joke! Crap is actually a better dopant material.)

Gaming: Roblox double cut on sales (that people mostly just argue about how enormous it is, because the math's purposely confusing) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28247034)

Politics: Was Santos ever actually punished?

Military: The saga of the Navy, Pacific Fleet, and Fat Leonard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal) "exploited the intelligence for illicit profit, brazenly ordering his moles to redirect aircraft carriers, ships and subs to ports he controlled in Southeast Asia so he could more easily bilk the Navy for fuel, tugboats, barges, food, water and sewage removal."

Work: "Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...)

There's others, that's just already so many...

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#415

Post by mike_hearn »

momoschili wrote: post #393
mike_hearn wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fra…

I don't think it's true that eventually we are catching this fraud :( This keeps happening because so much is out there, it doesn't follow that all or even most of it is being caught. Even a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent being caught would yield a constant stream of such stories. I have a collection of articles on my blog dating back years that cover various fraudulent papers in different fields, and even whole fields in which the bulk of all papers are based on fraud (e.g. the literature dealing with misinformation bots on Twitter). None of them have ever been retracted or even had any of the problems be acknowledged outside of the blogosphere.

It's really hard to understand the scale of the problem until you wade through it yourself. Fraud is absolutely endemic in science. Dig in and you can easily uncover bogus papers, and none of them will ever be acknowledged or retracted. In particular there's a nasty attitude problem in which reports of fraud from outside the academic institutions will frequently be written off as "right wing" and thus inherently illegitimate. This can happen regardless of the nature of the criticism or whether it's in any way political. Literally, things like bug reports or reports of numbers that don't add up can be discarded this way. Thus they implement an unwritten rule that only academics are allowed to report fraud by academics, and of course, they are strongly incentivized not to do so. So Lowe is correct. It's really a mess.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#416

Post by hansonkd »

jltsiren wrote: post #373
hansonkd wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you are desperately trying to fit something black and white rather than thinking critically that there is a spectrum of research, some of which is similar to others which can easily have procedures for insuring and others that are more complex that require more diligence from the insurance company. Just like nearly every single thing an insurance company does.

Yes there is novel research that has never been done before? So what? That doesn't change if you can get insurance or not. Thats a failed argument from the beginning.

Anyways you don't seem to be having a discussion in earnest and instead you seem to be intentionally disregarding large pieces of the above arguments and trying to shoehorn in your idea that if there is unique research being done that it means that it is impossible to tell the risk of anything. Kinda silly.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#417

Post by tim333 »

bboygravity wrote: post #350
mensetmanusman wrote: post #330

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.

There's a problem that if you care, as an average person, it's hard to do much with it. Every few years you can vote left or right, which unless you happen to live in a marginal constituency or swing state, has no effect.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#418

Post by jknoepfler »

antisthenes wrote: post #183
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…

> 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 believe the phrase is "trust but verify."

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#419

Post by benlivengood »

echoangle wrote: post #392
wredue wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

One clear piece of evidence would be ruling out "AI models the corvid brain" or "AI models the cephalopod brain" which might narrow it toward the human brain.

That it's functionally impossible to do either leads me to believe that "it models some form of intelligence" is about the best we can prove.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#420

Post by slashdave »

CarpaDorada wrote: post #32
slashdave wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've given two examples. Please explain why you can extrapolate to all of academia.

From personal experience, it is all I've seen. Could anyone be in a position to extrapolate to all of academia without speaking from personal experience? I'm not speaking of all academics (hence 'most'). It's a statement similar to "Hollywood has a drug problem" or something of that sort. My advice to anyone going into Hollywood would be to stay away from drugs; my advice to anyone going into academia is to treat eve…

> you'll realize the academic dishonesty policy is essentially the playbook by which academics behave

If you are unable to "extrapolate to all of academia" then I suggest you be more selective in your statements.

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