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Fraud, so much fraud

science.org

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#621

Post by searine »

mistercheph wrote: post #413
searine wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much every industry functions on a foundation of basic scientific knowledge discovered in academic labs, run by honest people trying to understand the natural world. Fraud happens. Bad theories happen. The slow turn of scientific wheels takes centuries to crush them but it will always win. Profit doesn't turn those wheels. Our entire modern lifestyle is the impact.

Is it possible that society is the thing with turning wheels and knowledge is the thing getting crushed underneath it?

That how it was, and it can easily go back to that.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#622

Post by neom »

regus wrote: post #232
neom wrote: post #11

I'm the furthest thing from a scientist unless you count 3,000 hours of PBS spacetime, but I love science and so science/academia fraud to me, feels kinda like the worst kinda fraud you can commit. Financial fraud can cause suicides and ruin in lives, sure, but I feel like academic fraud just sets the whole of humanity back? I also feel that through my life I've (maybe wrongly) placed a great deal of respect and trus…

This is pretty funny. I usually hear this kind of language when a religious person is so devastated when their priest or pastor does something wrong that it causes them to leave their religion altogether. Are you going to do the same thing for scientism?

I'm not a particularly religious person, I didn't realize what you described is something that happens with any great frequency. Never the less, I suppose one is able to leave a particular place of worship and not leave a religion, as it is with any way people form their views on something societal like this, it's on a spectrum? Religion, Politics, Science, Sex, Education, whatever.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#623

Post by dartharva »

> A former NIA official who would only speak if granted anonymity says he assumes the agency did not assess Masliah’s work for possible misconduct or data doctoring before he was hired.

> Indeed, NIH told Science it does not routinely conduct such reviews, because of the difficulty of the process. “There is no evidence that such proactive screening would improve, or is necessary to improve, the research integrity environment at NIH,” the agency added.

LOL. Here are your tax dollars at work, Americans.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#624

Post by aetherspawn »

jahewson wrote: post #617
aetherspawn wrote: post #540

It’s time that someone starts a thing similar in appearance to GitHub, but for science (datasets, images, calculations, scripts) and then, if journals required it, it just might get traction and make fraud science easy to spot. Edit: found this article which says everything I wanted to say but couldn’t put into words. https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/we-need-a-github-for-ac... Add another aspect here that LaTeX i…

> Add another aspect here that LaTeX is a bit outdated in 2024 (I know that’s controversial! Sorry) I met Leslie Lamport seven or eight years ago and asked him what a completely modern LaTeX might look like. He replied “well, we won’t be using PDFs in twenty years” and so it would need to be something completely different. Something interactive, with depth. Remembering, of course, to focus on quality content first an…

I think the important thing is capturing information in basic blocks (text, images, etc) and having the flexibility to reflow it later for any modern presentation mode, be it ingestion by LLM, listening to it, or just rendering it on desktop, mobile.

Translation and a11y is another important consideration here.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#625

Post by fourfun »

mistercheph wrote: post #391
Centigonal wrote: post #137

I hate the thought that researchers and drug developers may have wasted their effort and dollars developing drugs based on one extremely selfish person's bogus results.

Don't worry, a lot of them are fudging their numbers too, it's no biggie

You can’t fake human clinical trials.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#626

Post by binoct »

stickfigure wrote: post #613
binoct wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if it came across as non-falsifiable, that was not the intent. Neural networks do not directly encode high-level reasoning and logic, yes. But in the spectrum of “does this model the actual functioning of an animal/human brain”, they lack both a 1st order model of how biological neurons and neural chemistry behaves, but also lack anything like the multiple levels of structural specialization present in nervous…

That's true, but we also don't know that the multiple levels of structural specialization are necessary to produce "approximately human" intelligence. Let's say two alien beings landed on earth today and want you to settle a bet. They both look weird in different ways but they seem to talk alike. One of them says "I'm intelligent, that other frood is fake. His brain doesn't have hypersynaptic gibblators!" The other s…

I think we are arguing on different tracks, probably due to a difference in understanding of ‘model’.

There are arguments to be made, including the Turing test, for some sort of intelligence and potential equivalence for LLMs. I am probably more skeptical than most here that current technology is approaching human intelligence, and I believe the Turing test is in many ways a weak test. But for me that is different, more complex discussion I would not be so dismissive of.

I was originally responding to the claim “isn’t a neural network a simplified model of the working of the human brain”. A claim I interpreted to mean that NNs are system models of the brain. Emphasis on “model of the working of”, as opposed to “model of the output of”.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#627

Post by hansvm »

Lerc wrote: post #552
roca wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that detecting fraud is fundamentally harder than generating plausible fraud. This is because ultimately a very good fraud producer can simply produce output that is identically distributed to non-fraud. For the same reason, tools that try to detect AI-generated text are ultimately going to lose the arm's race.

It's not a race though. Once the fraud is committed to record it can no longer advance in sophistication. Mechanisms for detection will continue to advance.

I think the argument is that if you produce your fraud from an appropriate probability distribution, any "detection" method other than independently verifying the results is snake oil.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#629

Post by rdtsc »

worik wrote: post #464
tim333 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preventing people from working if they didn't get a covid vaccine was a bit heavy handed. And saying it was likely made in a lab in China is kind of censored to this day. I think partly because the science community doesn't want to take flack for doing risky stuff and killing millions.

> Preventing people from working if they didn't get a covid vaccine was a bit heavy handed. Nobody did that. They prevented you from working with me Nobody here or there was forced to get a vaccine. But if you refused it was right to shun you Freedom is about more than the individual. We as a group should be free from the consequences of individual actions

Wrong they did that to me. Not a small company either. Yeah you can play games with “we won’t fire you, we’ll just stop paying you and won’t allow you to work”.

It’s like they watched Office Space and thought they’d “Milton” everyone.

> Freedom is about more than the individual.

The individual is what it starts with.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#630

Post by echoangle »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #550
echoangle wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 br…

It’s probably closest to modeling a housefly, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also a model of a human brain. Being a model doesn’t require that it exactly captures every aspect and scale, it means that it tries to approximate the working principle. Just like a SIR model doesn’t really model how an infection in an organism works, but it still models infection behavior of COVID between humans.
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