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Fraud, so much fraud

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#541

Post by momoschili »

Maxatar wrote: post #533
momoschili wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The originator explicitly said that 'any engineering book' would contain these references, thus it would seem that this was at least a widespread belief among physicists and engineers at the time. Do you have any example? Again, you and the original poster seem to have this understanding that scientists and engineers from the mid 1800s to early 1900s are not to be trusted. I think that this assertion should be backed…

You have made so many mistakes in your reading that I would urge you next time to carefully re-read people's posts before responding to them. Also never quote someone without using their actual words. For example, it was not explicitly said that any engineering book would contain those references, it was a general statement not a categorical statement. >Again, you and the original poster seem to have this understandi…

>You have made so many mistakes in your reading that I would urge you next time to carefully re-read people's posts before responding to them. Also never quote someone without using their actual words. For example, it was not explicitly said that any engineering book would contain those references, it was a general statement not a categorical statement.

I will admit to some mistakes in comprehension and a poor literal quoting, though I will also maintain that I captured the majority of the essence of what was written in the quote. In the case of "any book about electricity..." vs "any engineering book" the only books that would be relevant to the discussion should be engineering OR science books relating to electricity.

>No, once again that's not what was said. The concept being communicated is that the scientific method works over long periods of time, not short ones. Over long periods of time, such as 200 years, the work that survives peer review and remains significant today are things like Maxwell's work on electromagnetism as opposed to Dr. Franz Mesmer's work on animal magnetism.

With respect to "time" I will refer to another comment I made below in response to the previous OP.

I think it's interesting that you use Mesmer as an example because his work failed to gain the acceptance of the scientific societies of the time, and was in the late 1700s, significantly earlier than the proposed mid 1800s to early 1900s

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#542

Post by physPop »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #333

If I have learned anything over 40 years, is that the number of people who actually live in a way consistent with hypothesis testing, data collection, evidence evaluation framework required to have scientific confidence in future action or even claims is effectively zero That includes people who consider themselves professional scientists, PhD‘s authors, leaders etc. The only people I know who live “scientifically” c…

I would just like to point out the irony of claiming that people live in a way inconsistent with scientific rigour, based solely on personal experience.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#543

Post by nativeit »

fluoridation wrote: post #500
tedk-42 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The writers of these episodes were really on another level considering it was a cartoon. Lisa's first word is still a personal favourite of mine, especially now as a father.

To be honest, it's difficult to tell if the subplot makes sense on purpose, or if the writers just wanted to make a joke and it just happened to end up making sense. I don't think I had ever put the three scenes together before now.

One of the first things I learned in film school is _nothing_ in a production at that level is coincidence or serendipity. To get to the final script and storyboard, the writers would have gone through multiple drafts, and a great deal of material gets either cut, or retooled to reinforce thematic elements. To the extent that The Simpsons was a goofy cartoon, its writers’ room carried a great deal of intellectual and academic heft, and I don’t doubt for a moment that there was full intention with both the joke itself, and the choice to leave the character’s motivations ambiguous.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#544

Post by theultdev »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #395
sesm wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you can do is separate interpretation from observation as much as possible.

TFA is about a person who literally faked the observations. Everyone on this sub is trying to shoehorn in their preferred view of "how to fix science" when the problem here has nothing to do with any of it.

Faked their observation and thus their interpretation. To trust one's alleged observations is to trust the interpretations based on them.

OP suggest was to always observe, no matter the person, which is what TFA is doing.

Feel free to expand on what you think is the problem and solution if you feel everyone is off-target.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#545

Post by momoschili »

mike_hearn wrote: post #415
momoschili wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Took a quick look at your blog. Some of those examples are quite bad, similar to the fake gels in the Science article. Do you know if any of them gained particular attention?

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#546

Post by hovden »

hilux wrote: post #129

I shared this article with an MD/PhD friend who has done research at two of the three most famous science universities in America ... and she said "this [not this guy, this phenomenon] is why I left science." Maybe it's like elite running - everyone who stays competitive above a certain level is cheating, and if you want to enjoy watching the sport, you just learn to look the other way. Except that the stakes for hum…

Blatant fraud is rare in physics, engineering, chemistry. Lying is rare. Quality is high at the highest institutions of physics and chemistry. Exaggerated claims occur, but much less than in day to day life. Top visibility work is quickly reproduced. Reproduction is the essence of science.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#547

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

aliasxneo wrote: post #377

I wonder if there's evidence of fraud _increasing_ or if the detection methods are just improving. In my last workplace, self-evaluation (and, therefore, self-promotion) was mandatory on a semi-annual cycle and heavily tied to compensation. It's not surprising that it became a breeding ground for fraud. Outside of a strong moral conviction (which I would argue is in declining), these sorts of systems will likely alwa…

You're definitely seeing the consequences of papers being written in the past when large-scale fraudulent analysis wasn't that feasible, and now you have all this tech that can scoop it up and look for those "needle in a haystack" instances of fraud.

I'm thinking about all the plagiarism issues uncovered with the publications of the former Harvard president Claudine Gay (and, similarly, of Neri Oxman, the wife of Bill Ackman, who basically was exposed due to Ackman's campaign against Gay). I looked over all the instances of plagiarism in detail, and, while not excusing them, they seemed like less of egregious theft of others' ideas and more like laziness/sloppiness. But I could easily imagine that laziness/sloppiness being fostered by an idea of "How could someone really check this word-for-word anyway?"

Well, now we have tech that makes it almost trivially easy to expose this type of misconduct.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#548

Post by GeekyBear »

mchannon wrote: post #150
GeekyBear wrote: post #121

I've said so many times, but we need to go back to a system where it is possible to make a career in science and get funding for replicating other people's work to verify the results.

This leads to a tragedy of the commons. Say a random nation, say, Sweden, devotes 100% of their governmental and university research budgets toward replication. 70% of the studies they attempt are successfully replicated. 20% are inconclusive or equivocal. 10% are clearly debunked. Now the world is richer, but Sweden? No return on investment for the Swedes, other than perhaps a little advanced notice on what hot new…

Alternately, look at one recent example of massive waste as a result of accepting fraudulent research as valid.

> Hundreds of millions of dollars and [16] years of research across an entire field may have been wasted due to potentially falsified data that helped lay the foundation for the leading hypothesis of what causes Alzheimer’s disease.

https://globalnews.ca/news/9016221/alzheimers-research-poten...

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#549

Post by belief-in-money »

neycoda wrote: post #489
garrettgarcia wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[citation needed]

---

I conjecture the most common underlying motive is to embellish cv, and climb the academic ladder.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#550

Post by ClumsyPilot »

echoangle wrote: post #442
benlivengood wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t understand the standard of modeling you seem to assume. Modeling a human brain, a cephalopod brain and a corvid brain aren’t even mutually exclusive if your model is abstract enough. When I say „a neural network models a human brain“, I’m talking about the high level concept, not the specific structure of a human brain compared to other brains. You could also say that it models a dogs brain if you wanted to.…

> Modeling a human brain, a cephalopod brain and a corvid brain aren’t even mutually exclusive

Take an existing implementation, ChatGPT4 or whatever - is it closer to a brain of a rat or of Albert Einstein?

If you are not sure, then, we, it’s just have some sort of intelligence, not ‘model of a human brain’.

I would wager it’s closer to a rat.

Also the phrase implies that we understand the difference between human brain vs brain of an elephant. For some reason humans are more capable, it’s not just size. At the moment we don’t understand.

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