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Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)
61–70 of 121 posts
Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)
#62> Submitting a paper to a conference because it’s got a decent shot at acceptance and you don’t want the time you spent on it go to waste, even though you’ve since realized that the core ideas aren’t quite correct. I don't see a problem with this? If papers are the vehicle for conference entries why shouldn't authors submit it just because it's wrong? Conferences are for discussion. So go there and discuss it... "My…
That's not what papers are for. But I can see how not being an academic would make you think that. What you're describing are workshops with what we would call non-archival proceedings. Places where you write whatever you want and then talk about it. Publications, conference or journal, are supposed to be what are called archival. They are a record of what we've discovered and want to share with the world. They are s…
Some fields do have the opposite problem, though, where standards for publication are so high that they prevent publication of useful ideas or results that could be built on by other researchers. I don’t think a published paper should have to meet some kind of gold standard of completeness and correctness. It just has to report something new or interesting with any appropriate caveats attached.
Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like an issue of administration rather than an issue with the idea of a double-blind review. If you conduct a review that isn't properly blinded, and doesn't have an observable effect, can it really be called a double blind review?
Maybe more that a non-idealistic model of the real world, and common direct experience, show that incentives strongly favor an administrative approach that compromises the double blind.
Unless there's a better way to do it, I this shows a need for better structures for governance and auditing of review boards... Information and science care not for our human folly, it's up to us to seek and execute them properly.
Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)
#64> * A group of colluding authors writes and submits papers to the conference. > * The colluders share, amongst themselves, the titles of each other's papers, violating the tenet of blind reviewing and creating a significant undisclosed conflict of interest. > * The colluders hide conflicts of interest, then bid to review these papers, sometimes from duplicate accounts, in an attempt to be assigned to these papers as…
Even if this reviewers weren't allowed to be submitters, if there is more than one conference, or the conference runs for more than one year, the same mechanism can be used.
Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it’s any consolation I split up with an ex partner after she wanted to put me as a co-author on a pseudoscience bullshit paper that she was working on to try and hit her quota. Her entire field, in the social sciences, is inventing a wild idea and using meta analysis to give it credibility. Then flying to conferences and submitting expenses. I contributed nothing other than a statistical framework which was discar…
Luckily this made-up social science trash won't be used as evidence when shaping our policies, so it's pretty harmless! /s
To be fair, lobbyists will use phony science from any field to influence policy, not just the social sciences. Think of the tobacco industry.
Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)
#66"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? [...] But the mere possibility that any given paper was published through fraud forces people to engage more skeptically with all published work." Well... spending a few weeks reproducing a shiny conference paper that simply doesn't work a…
> I've become so skeptic over the years that I assume almost all papers to be lies until proven otherwise. I couldn't agree more. I have read a lot of psychology papers during my PhD and I think there is very little signal in the papers. Many empirical papers for example use basically the same "gold standard" analysis, which is fundamentally flawed in many ways. One problem for example is that if you would use anothe…
How could this be corrected? The scientific community has lost a lot of credibility with the public, and the backlash is obvious in recent policy changes. Fast forward four years. Assume Trump and RFK jr have successfully destroyed the current system. What should replace it?
How could the Federal government ensure that public monies only fund high quality research? Could policy re-shape the incentives and unlock a healthy scientific sector?
Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)
#67(2021) Together, we can force the community to reckon with its own shortcomings, and develop stronger, better, and more scientific norms. It is a harsh treatment, to be sure – a chemotherapy regimen that risks destroying us entirely. But this is our best shot at destroying the cancer that has infected our community. And now, nearly 4 years later, research funding gets DOGE'd...
Yup. and MAHA'd. The question is: what comes next? Once the current administration executes their democratic mandate to destroy institutions, how should we rebuild those capabilities?
In this case, how could the federal government ensure that academic funding flows to researchers and institutions that are doing genuinely high quality research? How can we remove funding from low-quality and fraudulent actors?
Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)
#68I had two experiences at the polar opposites of the spectrum - one research team I worked on had very high standards and was comfortable being patient for material that had value. The other involved an approach that obviously stood no chance to be useful to anyone.
Some differences:
- The first one was in a space with more low hanging fruit
- The first one was after large effect sizes, not the kind where you can massage the statistical model
- The second one was a topic with far higher public interest
- The second one was primarily an analytic project, whereas the first one was primarily experimental
I feel like bad science lives in the middle of a spectrum - you have young fields/subfields with boring but impressive experimental breakthroughs, and on the other end you have highly political questions that have been argued to death without resolution. Bad science is about borrowing some of the strategies used in politics because all the important experiments have already been done.
Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a co-author are you not able to do so?
In theory $SYSTEM is the most excellent thing that humanity could ever hope and everyone knows they that by acting in accordance with the stated expected behaviors, they will act in the best way they can think of to achieve the best result for everybody. In practice people see that $SYSTEM is rotten and most likely to doom everyone on the long span, with increasingly absurd actions accepted silently on the road. But…
Thank you for providing the link for this- it's greatly interesting to see how such a failure could occur through human means and the significant impact it had, and how it can directly relate to academia (really, many topics, anywhere there is a '$SYSTEM').
The cover ups in the article were also interesting- a deliberate staging to Mao to prevent uncovering the truth. I'm not sure how this compares directly (is there a centralized authority with power to fix the issue that is being lied to, compared to the decentralized "rotten" system, where the status quo is understood and 'accepted').
Re: Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've become so skeptic over the years that I assume almost all papers to be lies until proven otherwise. I couldn't agree more. I have read a lot of psychology papers during my PhD and I think there is very little signal in the papers. Many empirical papers for example use basically the same "gold standard" analysis, which is fundamentally flawed in many ways. One problem for example is that if you would use anothe…
How could this be corrected? The scientific community has lost a lot of credibility with the public, and the backlash is obvious in recent policy changes. Fast forward four years. Assume Trump and RFK jr have successfully destroyed the current system. What should replace it? How could the Federal government ensure that public monies only fund high quality research? Could policy re-shape the incentives and unlock a he…
Consequences with the current system would suffice.
Ignorance as a defense needs to go too. Ignorance as a defense is too powerful and we should balance it more towards hurting the supposedly ignorant rather than everyone else. Basically, a redefining of wilful ignorance so it's balanced as stated.