Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fraud, so much fraud

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 868 posts

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#481

Post by robwwilliams »

eig wrote: post #44

This sort of behavior is only going to worsen in the coming decades as academics become more desperate. It's a prisoner's dilemma: if everyone is exaggerating their results you have to as well or you will be fired. It's even more dire for the thousands of visa students. The situation is similar to the "Market for lemons" in cars: if the market is polluted with lemons (fake papers), you are disincentivized to publish…

The incentive structures in science has been relatively stable since I entered the field in 1980 (neuroscience, developmental biology, genetics). Quality and quantity of science is extraordinary, but peer review is worse than bad. There are almost no incentives to review the work of your colleagues properly. It does not pay bills and you can make enemies easily.

But there was no golden era of science to look back on. It has always been a wonderful productive mess—much like the rest of life. As least it moves forward—and now exceedingly rapidly.

Almost unbelievably, there are far worse crimes than fraud that we completely ignore.

There are crimes associated with social convention in science of the type discussed by Karl Herrup with respect to 20 years of misguided focus on APP and abeta fragments in Alzheimer’s disease:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546010/how-not-to-study-a-di...

This could be called the “misdemeanors of scientific social inertia”. Or the “old boys network”.

There is also an invisible but insidious crime of data evaporation. Almost no funders will fund data preservation. Even genomics struggles but is way ahead in biomedical research. Neuroscience is pathetic in this regard (and I chaired the Society for Neuroscience’s Neuroinformatics Committee).

I have a talk on this socio-political crime of data evaporation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZhnXU8gV44&embeds_referring...

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#482

Post by greenavocado »

dekhn wrote: post #434
vostrocity wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of this tweet that calls out the problem of the popular position "science is real" "Science isn’t real - that’s terrible epistemology. It’s a process or method to generate and verify hypotheses and provisional knowledge, using replicable experiments and measurements. We don’t really know the real - we just have some current non-falsified theories and explanations that fit data decently, till we get better…

It's probably better to say that engineering based on science is usually real. Engineering cares a lot less about falsifying theories and more on what existing theories seem to have general predictive value, and can be used to do stuff, including things where human lives are at risk (tall buildings, fire reduction materials, airplanes). And if there are failures out in the field, they're inspected, and those results…

I think you've hit on an important point. Science isn't about finding absolute truth, but rather about generating testable hypotheses that can be validated through experimentation and observation. This is why it's so crucial for scientists to follow the scientific method - they need to be willing to revise their theories based on new evidence. Your comparison between science and engineering is a good one. Engineering is often more focused on practical application, whereas science is more about understanding the underlying mechanisms that govern our world.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#483

Post by rsa4046 »

nobody9999 wrote: post #437
tim333 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Every few years you can vote left or right, If you're talking about the US, you can vote center-right (Democratic) or far right (Republican). There is no viable left wing party in the US.

This can't be said often enough. We have two right wing parties in the US. That's it.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#484

Post by Wyoming23 »

nobody9999 wrote: post #437
tim333 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Every few years you can vote left or right, If you're talking about the US, you can vote center-right (Democratic) or far right (Republican). There is no viable left wing party in the US.

These posts are tiresome. They all boil down to "my view should be the middle".

You could just as well claim the Democrats are far left and the republicans center left.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#485

Post by worik »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #223
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…

This is why institutions break down in the long run in any civilization. People like you, people of principle are drown out my agents acting exclusively in their own interest without ethics. It happens everywhere. The only solution to this is skin in the game. Without skin in the game the fraudsters fraud, the audience just naively goes along with it, and the institution collapses under the weight of lies.

> The only solution to this is skin in the game.

Another solution is the opposite, no skin in the game

Remove cocrete incentives and pay salaries

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#486

Post by masswerk »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #335
masswerk wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is really a societal/political issue: since we decided that economic capital is king and symbolic capital not that much… (This is really the story of the last four decades or so.)

The person who did this fraud decided that symbolic capital > economic capital (by being in academia/govt).

The problem being, we have "economized" academia, by things like "publish or perish", a citation pseudo stock market or third party funding, and all incentives are built around this pseudo-economy. Which also imports all the common incentives found in economy…

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#488

Post by neycoda »

testfoobar wrote: post #106
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…

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…

That attitude coincides with current delusion in our society that science is perpetuating a fraud at the level of religions whose leaders are trying to control their flock for financial and sexual gain.

A broken system that incentivizes fraud over knowledge is a real problem.

An assertion that scientists chase the money by nature is a dangerous one that will set us back to the stone age when instead we should be traversing the space as a whole.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#489

Post by neycoda »

garrettgarcia wrote: post #443
fluoridation wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought his incentive was to defend the idea of miracles/faith/angels/God.

More often than not in scientific fraud I've seen the underlying motives be personal beliefs than financial. This is why science needs to be much stronger in weeding out the charlatans.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#490

Post by Aloisius »

photochemsyn wrote: post #36

Anecdotally, during my (fairly short-lived) academic career, in which I did research with three different groups, 2/3 of them were engaging in fraudulent research practices. Unfortunately the one solid researcher I worked for was in a field I wasn't all that interested in continuing in, and as a naive young person who believed in the myth of academic freedom and didn't really understand the funding issue, I jumped sh…

I imagine how common fraud is has more to do with the relative number of researchers in a field and the chance of getting caught.

Sure money could be a factor, but the desire for prestige can motivate people just as easily.

Post reply on HN