Fraud, so much fraud • Hacker News Board

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#591

Post by enugu » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 3:47 AM UTC

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…

Many solutions involving posting data in repositories or audits are being discussed in the comments.

But given that many people are saying that they noticed and quit academia, how about also creating a more direct 'whistleblower' type of system, where complaints (with detailed descriptions of the fraud or a general view on what one sees in terms of loose practices) goes to some research monitoring team which can then come in and verify the problems.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#592

Post by houston_Euler » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 3:51 AM UTC

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…

While Akerlof's Market for Lemons did consider cases where government intervention is necessary to preserve a market, like with health insurance markets (Medicare), he describes the "market for lemons" in the used car market as having been solved by warranties.

If someone brings a plum to a market for lemons, they can distinguish the quality of their product by offering a warranty on its purchase, something that sellers of lemons would be unwilling to do, because they want to pass the cost burden of the lemon onto the purchaser.

The full paper is fairly accessible, and worth a read.

Not sure how this could be applied to academia, one of the problems is that there can be significant gaps between perpetrating fraud and having it discovered, so the violators might still have an incentive to cheat.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#593

Post by insane_dreamer » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 3:58 AM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #54

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…

My recommendation is for journals to place at least equal importance to publishing replications as for the original studies. Studies that have not been replicated should be published clearly marked as preliminary results. And then other scientists can pick those up and try to replicate them. And institutions need to give near equal weight to replications as to original research when deciding on promotions. Should be…

> And then other scientists can pick those up and try to replicate them.

unless there are grants specifically for that purpose, then it's not going to happen; and it's hard to apply for a grant just to replicate someone else's results verbatim. (usually you're testing the theory but with a different experiment and set of data which is much more interesting than simply repeating what they did with their data; in fact replicating it with a different set of data is important in order to see if the results weren't cherry-picked to fit the original dataset).

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#594

Post by I_am_uncreative » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 4:09 AM UTC

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.

From whose perspective and what are we considering right and left? The Democratic party is left of center on social issues, even compared to Europe.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#595

Post by dukeofdoom » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 4:14 AM UTC

jonhohle wrote: post #389

lupire wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong, but people who oppose "science as a cudgel" tend to support "religion as a cudgel", and don't see a difference between science and religion, except that one is the Yellow team and one is the Purple team, and they have a preferred color.

When the public is told to “trust the science”, it is no longer science and is now religion.

It's like paid clergy of old, except we now call them scientists. Sometimes they reveal truths. Most of the time, and most of them are kind of useless. It's self serving bullshit, served by ever growing bureaucracy.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#596

Post by czl » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 4:16 AM UTC

jongjong wrote: post #456

klenwell wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

That's a good one. In my experience, corruption is almost always disguised as neglect and incompetence. Corrupt people meticulously cover their tracks by coming up with excuses to show neglect; some of them only accept bribes that they can explain away as neglect where they have plausible deniability. It doesn't take much brainpower to do well, just malicious intent and knowing the upper limits. IMO, Hanlon's razor "…

> On the topic, I subscribe to Grey's law "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice" so I see idiots as malicious. In the very best case, idiots in positions of power are malicious for accepting the position and thus preventing someone more competent from getting it. It really doesn't matter what their intent is. Deep down, stupid people know that they're stupid but they let their emotions get in the way, same emotions which prevent them from getting smarter.

I think you have things backwards. Being dumb is the default. It takes ability and effort and help to get smarter. Animals and children are dumber than us. Do you think they realize it?

Perversely many who are dumb are trapped thinking they are not dumb:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...

A dumb person (like a dumb child or animal) are what they are one should not attribute malice. Better to try to see things from their point of view and perhaps help them be smarter. This is what I try to do.

Your other remarks are 100% just the point above was sticking out hence my comment.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#597

Post by bbconn » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 4:16 AM UTC

almostgotcaught wrote: post #371

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…

> Arguably some have figured how to game the system to advance their careers lol arguably? i would bet my generous, non-academia, industry salary for the next 10 years, that there's not a single academic with a citation count over say ... 50k (ostensibly the most successful academic) that isn't gaming the system. - signed someone who got their phd at "prestigous" uni under a guy with >100k citations

Terence Tao has well over 50K citations. Maybe one can argue that he’s gaming the system because he alone can decide what problems are deemed to be interesting by the broader community, but he can’t help that.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#598

Post by therealdrag0 » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 4:22 AM UTC

cj wrote: post #93

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?

Here’s a deterrent: 1) revoke all of their academic accreditations and degrees 2) put them on a public “do not publish” list permanently banning them from being named on any paper in a journal

Ya seems obvious tbh.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#599

Post by dukeofdoom » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 4:25 AM UTC

lanstin wrote: post #590

chasd00 wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened all day long during Covid. The answer was never “we don’t know yet” which was at least honest but instead it was always “just trust us”. Exactly like i use to hear from preachers growing up.

The difference between public health and basic research. To stop an epidemic in flight one has to go with ones best guess and that saves lives so they do it.

Even if you still be the fiction of the vaccine saving lives. It was the life of an obese 80 year old with 3 other comorbidities ... for a few months.

The lockdowns resulted in inflation, and caused a lot more poverty and deaths worldwide since. And retarded the normal development of many children.

And we still don't know what kind of long term damage the vaccine caused. My friend that trusted the science, and took every booster, only stopped when she got myocarditis.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#600

Post by ImPostingOnHN » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 4:26 AM UTC

throwawaymaths wrote: post #521

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people are working to fix the K-12+ educational system which is the root cause of many stupid people, but beyond that, it's objectively hard to fix stupid. Most people, stupid or otherwise, wouldn't take a critical thinking course, for example. Many would have no time for it, to say little of motivation. Fewer are proud of being stupid and will shun anything they consider "intellectual".

This is a bad take. Because even the craziest of crazies (the flat earthers) are actually doing the scientific method by running experiments to test their crazy conjectures. What makes them crazy is that they have a poor sense of discernment about when it's worth it to trust authorities and when it's not; they're not dumb, and education is not really failing them (in the sense that they "aren't being taught what scie…

> This is a bad take.

This is a bad start to a post on HN. Less confrontational would be better.

> Because even the craziest of crazies are actually doing the scientific method.

I can name several conspiracy theories off the bat which I've heard repeated by people who have not tested the theories. The vast majority of them, at best, found a video of someone on the internet with "dr" in the username. The percent of "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" folks who have actually personally tested whether steel can lose structural integrity at such temperatures, is absolutely minuscule.

> They are arguably better scientists than "trust the science" folks because at least they are getting out there and moving atoms to test shit.

Reading something on the internet is moving photons and electrons at best, but I can't speak to whether a given Parler thread which convinced someone of a given conspiracy was read inside or outside.