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Fraud, so much fraud

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#421

Post by dr_kiszonka »

hprotagonist wrote: post #2

> 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.

I agree. To their defense, he had a few hundred papers published before joining, according to PubMed, and was a leader in his field: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Masliah%20E&filter=dat...

My concern is that with AI getting better and easier to use (e.g., in Photoshop) fraud will be extremely hard to detect.

We might need to re-think how research is done and results verified.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#422

Post by jknoepfler »

wredue wrote: post #322
itronitron wrote: post #298

Earlier 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.

The reality on the ground (for me) has been refreshingly sane.

I work at a company with a substantial BI/ML footprint. Our head of research was tasked with evaluating the applicability of LLMs to either our product or our daily workflows.

To date the consensus is that there isn't much there for our product, that integrating LLMs into our models would introduce more problems than it would solve, and that we should cautiously experiment with allowing engineers to use tools like co-pilot, provided we take adequate steps to protect our IP.

It was a reasonable exercise carried out by a reasonable person for reasonable reasons (from my POV). I imagine this isn't an uncommon story? Color me pessimistically optimistic?

For practical reasons we need to have an answer to the buzzword bingo when communicating with customers/company ownership, and now we do. Now we don't talk much about it because there isn't much to talk about.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#423

Post by jeremyjh »

hansonkd wrote: post #355
jeremyjh wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is possible to advance your career by publishing uninsured research then we've just renamed the problem, although I do like the idea of adding this structure. Eventually there could be so much of it that it would become an accepted norm that your research isn't actually published in a journal until five years after you informally publish it. Other scientists in the field have to be abreast of the latest finding…

I see your point, the success of this would have to align with a change in the broader academia to only cite research from insured researchers. The "organic" way this would happen is if there was a shift so that journals with insured research are far more valuable than uninsured research. Or perhaps if companies started suing researchers for negligence and fraud and recuperate costs if they used research that was lat…

But that is not how research works in Academia. They have to follow the bleeding edge of the field, or they may be doing work of their own that is already irrelevant. They will not wait until a consortium of insurance companies and underwriters have done the actuarial analysis and come up with an underwriting product that the institution has funded (and what is the institution's business model for recovering this cost in a field of pure research, anyway?)

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#424

Post by ls612 »

daedrdev wrote: post #28

Is there no liability for the author? There are billions of dollars wasted in drug trials and research that can be tied to this fraud. Surely they can face some legal issues due to this?

The line between outright fraud, bad methods correctly implemented, messy data, and implementation bugs is fuzzy. Trying to criminalize anything not very very clearly #1 quickly turns into a case of “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”. You think groupthink in academia is bad just wait until professional disputes lead to jail time for the loser.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#425

Post by [deleted] »

godelski wrote: post #366
searine wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a ridiculous exaggeration. Yes, like in every walk of life, fraud happens. However, the extreme success of academic science shows that most of it is real, honest, work.

It is field dependent but I'm not entirely against what the parent said. I work in ML and I am positive that all this is going on[0]. There's lots of true believers though and that's what makes things extra hard. Sometimes the fraudsters take over by making the system become incompetent and everyone is in good company. In this was fraud isn't committed with intent, weirdly enough. Just look at all the ML reasoning pa…

[deleted]

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#427

Post by slashdave »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #95
mbreese wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many journals now require all versions of a gel image that is used in a figure. So, you’d have to fake the full image that is cropped down to the lanes used in the figure. I think there aren’t as many of those raw images around to train AI on… yet.

I predict it will get even worse than that, in the next couple of decades I expect any document or work that has a substantial reward associated with it, either financially or in terms of career advancement or a grade for critical course work in one's major, or penalty such as indictment or conviction, to be backed by a time stamped stack of developing documentation, drafts, revisions, with these time stamp validated…

Sounds complicated. You could just demand the lab log books. They are supposed to be dated and countersigned. Standard practice is to counter sign outside your group.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#428

Post by fluoridation »

klenwell wrote: post #341
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…

I think my favorite Simpsons gag is the episode where Lisa enlists a scientist (voiced by Stephen Jay Gould) to run tests to debunk some angel bones that were found at a construction site. In the middle of the episode, the scientist bicycles up to report, dramatically, that the tests "were inconclusive". In the end, it's revealed that the bones were a fraud concocted by some mall developers to promote their new mall.…

Well, the incentive is that he didn't want to run the tests out of laziness (i.e. he lacked an incentive to run them). He ran to Lisa to give his anticlimactic report not to be deceptive, but rather he just happened to be cycling through that part of town and just needed to use the bathroom really badly.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#429

Post by tim333 »

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?

Preventing people from working if they didn't get a covid vaccine was a bit heavy handed.

And saying it was likely made in a lab in China is kind of censored to this day. I think partly because the science community doesn't want to take flack for doing risky stuff and killing millions.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#430

Post by CarpaDorada »

slashdave wrote: post #420
CarpaDorada wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I extrapolate to all of academia, but not to all academics (persons working in academia). My methodology is based on my intuition and my experiences. Already in this YC article the comments appear to be akin to the first meeting between battered housewives. You don't have to believe me or others, I'm just issuing a warning to anyone thinking of getting into academia: be alarmed and alert, and always careful. It's nothing like the movies portray academia to be, instead it's a thieves den, or a poker table, etc, you get the point.
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