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Please commit more blatant academic fraud

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Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#61

Post by cycomanic »

geofft wrote: post #26

There's another solution: give up on academia. The model of academia works well when some part of society is willing to fund researchers spending time on open-ended basic research, even if it produces no results. Saying "Don't engage in unethical behavior" is well and good, but if the incentives are towards unethical behavior, you shouldn't expect very much. Academic funding and employment is very closely linked to t…

I find it quite ironic that every time some unethical academic behaviour is published on HN, there's several posts about "move to industry this never happens here". I mean this is HN, a significant portion of the industry is working on optimizing for clicks and keeping people engaged (addicted?) to some platform or the other. Let's not even talk about the blatantly unethical (and often times illegal) things that happen in the startup world to increase evaluations, secure funding etc.

Now academia has lots of issues, but to say industry is better... It's sort of like telling an amateur athlete who is upset by some competitors using caffeine (or amphetamines) to instead to professional sport, because they are more ethical. The stakes (and money) are much higher so people are more willing to cheat to gain an edge.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#62

Post by FabHK »

MattGaiser wrote: post #10
blagie wrote: post #3

It's worth noting: In most of these cases, even when caught, the guilty parties and the bad papers remain unnamed. There are known-to-the-editors fraudulent papers in major journals still being cited. The consequences of committing academic fraud are minor, and the consequences of not doing so generally mean no academic jobs or tenure. There isn't a 99.99% innocent claim here (as at the end of the article). This stuf…

With laws, there are full time police officers, investigators, and prosecutors working to catch people. And even then, most crimes go unsolved and unpunished. Even without the complicity, stopping fraud and bad behavior is a difficult problem. Part time reviewers and reputation seem woefully insufficient counters.

That would be interesting, if universities had full time academic integrity officers whose job was to detect academic fraud.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#63

Post by busterarm »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #23
2sk21 wrote: post #6

Thank goodness I am retired and don't have to publish stuff in the current environment. Thirty years ago when machine learning was a sleepy backwater, life was a lot easier for us.

As a present-day researcher (or at least someone who aspires to be), I'm eagerly waiting for the hype to die down, and for ML to become a sleepy backwater again. You were lucky to play around with ML during those days. The neat thing is, the next AI winter, we'll still have massive hardware rigs. That's very different from 30 years ago. It's a lot easier to discover new things when you can just test every possibility…

That kind of compute still costs money. You still have to find the funding for it.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#64

Post by dwighttk »

throwaway45209 wrote: post #46
berndi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it possible that professors with impeccable academic credentials get fired for jokes nearly instantly [1], yet this student's professor was allowed to carry on until he resigned two years later [2]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_shaming#Tim_Hunt_contro... [2] https://eu.gainesville.com/story/news/education/campus/2021/...

At a lunch for female journalists and scientists, Hunt gave a speech... "It's strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls? Now, ser…

"Now, seriously..." it isn't a very good joke, but what makes you think that isn't a joke?

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#65

Post by MattGaiser »

FabHK wrote: post #62
MattGaiser wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With laws, there are full time police officers, investigators, and prosecutors working to catch people. And even then, most crimes go unsolved and unpunished. Even without the complicity, stopping fraud and bad behavior is a difficult problem. Part time reviewers and reputation seem woefully insufficient counters.

That would be interesting, if universities had full time academic integrity officers whose job was to detect academic fraud.

Or just have some academic equivalent to SDETs. Have a replication and analysis team that checks that statistical quality, code, basic science, etc.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#66

Post by sillysaurusx »

busterarm wrote: post #63
sillysaurusx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a present-day researcher (or at least someone who aspires to be), I'm eagerly waiting for the hype to die down, and for ML to become a sleepy backwater again. You were lucky to play around with ML during those days. The neat thing is, the next AI winter, we'll still have massive hardware rigs. That's very different from 30 years ago. It's a lot easier to discover new things when you can just test every possibility…

That kind of compute still costs money. You still have to find the funding for it.

Nah, a motivated hacker can use a Colab TPU or GPU for free. It's how I started.

There's an ungodly amount of resources available now compared to even 10 years ago, let alone 30. The bottleneck is usually motivation.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#67

Post by teachingassist »

vinni2 wrote: post #24

Which is why several journals are pushing for reproducibility as a requirement and dedicated reproducibility tracks where there are opportunities to call bluff on established papers. As an academic from a small lab in an unknown university it is shocking for me when we are unable to reproduce performance numbers from papers by popular institutions.

> several journals are pushing for reproducibility as a requirement

The current requirement for academic publishing is peer-review, i.e.:

"Colleagues in my field looked over it briefly and said it's ok [because it doesn't challenge their work]"

This inevitably leads to whole fields of science being corrupted and biased in ways that we can't easily identify.

Science publishing standards could be improved in any number of ways: e.g. original data must be shared in an open format, publish your hypotheses before doing the research, publish the code, standardise the setting out of methods and statistics and results so that other scientists in and out of the field have a hope of following them.

Nobody in the industry is motivated to change this, and hides behind the romantic ideal of a scientist pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules to discover novel theories.

If such a scientist exists today, we can't identify them against the background of noise.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#68

Post by [deleted] »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #5

Hmmm. Here we see the following claim: > By partaking in a form of fraud that has left the Overton window of acceptability, the researchers in the collusion ring have finally succeeded in forcing the community to acknowledge its blind spot. For the first time, researchers reading conference proceedings will be forced to wonder: does this work truly merit my attention? Or is its publication simply the result of fraud?…

[deleted]

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#69

Post by the_lonely_road »

berndi wrote: post #44
rscho wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... non-PC jokes are a liability risk for the institution at large. Dead students are not. We have an identical phenomenon in hospitals: there are huge campaigns against sexism and the like, while there are multiple young professionals committing suicide from burn-out every year and noone does as much as bat an eyelash. Contrary to victims of discrimination, dead people can't easily organize into coordinated lega…

You would think that allegedly driving a PoC student to suicide would count for something in the PC twitter sphere…

Are Asians PoC? I thought they were not and that was literally the only reason the oft repeated phrase “black and other PoC” didn’t literally translate into “not white”.

Re: Please commit more blatant academic fraud

#70

Post by user-the-name »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #5

Hmmm. Here we see the following claim: > By partaking in a form of fraud that has left the Overton window of acceptability, the researchers in the collusion ring have finally succeeded in forcing the community to acknowledge its blind spot. For the first time, researchers reading conference proceedings will be forced to wonder: does this work truly merit my attention? Or is its publication simply the result of fraud?…

The author is saying that all of the papers are bullshit, garbage, and a waste of time. He is saying that everyone is turning a blind eye to this. He is saying that now that the fraud has got this bad, it is out in the open, and people will be forced to deal with the fact that the entire field is filled with garbage.
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