681–690 of 868 posts
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My employer of 750k people made it very clear, upload proof of vaccination or be fired. That’s a fact.
That was GP's point. Being fired != being prevented from working. You are still free to get a job at a different employer that has different policies.
-- Karl Marx
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…
What's amazing to me is that journals don't require researchers to submit their raw data. At least, as far as I know. The only option for someone who wants to double check research is to completely replicate a study, which is quite a bit more expensive than double checking the researcher's work.
One of the purposes of a site on which I work (https://fairsharing.org) is to assist researchers in finding places where they might upload their data (usually to comply with publishers' requirements).
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> They just care more about their career. It's not even that. In most fields, you need lab space and equipment and grad students to get stuff done. And to pay for that, you need funding. And to get funding, you need to publish and apply for grants. You have to pay attention to the "career" side of things -- otherwise, you won't get to do the science at all.
That’s exactly the rationale the corrupt senator uses to justify his actions in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Bud: Lou, I got a sure thing. Anacott Steel.
Lou: No such thing, except death and taxes. Not a good company any more. No fundamentals. What's goin' on, Bud? You know something? Remember, there are no short cuts, son. Quick-buck artists come and go with every bull market. The steady players make it through the bear markets. You're a part of something here, Bud. The money you make for people creates science and research jobs. Don't sell that out.
Bud: You're right, but you gotta get to the big time first, then you can do good things.
Lou: You can't get a little bit pregnant, son.
Bud: Lou, trust me. lt's a winner. Buy it.
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Because those two texts are the two among literally thousands of scientific publications that have survived the test of time, which is exactly the point being made. This might seem crazy to hear now, but when Maxwell first published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865, no one cared, it received very little attention at the time. It was decades later in 1888 with the work of Hertz that Maxwell's eq…
It seems convenient that the evidence to corroborate the claim can't be found yes? I think you will also find that the publications of the 1800-1900s are quite well preserved.
You posted this less than 15 minutes after my comment, friend.
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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…
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.…
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've met so many people who self-diagnose with those "conditions", because, I think, they want the world to feel sorry for them, or something.
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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?
The stuff on PCR test false positives went somewhat viral and got some attention from outside of academia but of course it was during COVID so it was ignored by the institutions.
The stuff on epidemiology and the history of Neil Ferguson was triggered originally by an article in the Telegraph. It went no further than that.
The fake lesion surgery got noticed on Twitter and I think it was eventually retracted but the perps still work for the NHS.
The paper mills and fake biology papers gets published about occasionally in mainstream press. But nothing happens.
So... no. Not really.
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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 "…
I wouldn't attribute malice to Hanlon's razor, but yes, even dogs and small children know how to play dumb and the children just keep getting better at it.
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Replication is over-emphasised. Attempts to organise mass replications have struggled with basic problems like papers making numerous claims (which one do you replicate?), the question of whether you try to replicate the original methodology exactly or whether you try to answer the same question as the original paper (matters in cases where the methodology was bad), many papers making obvious low value findings (e.g.…
So then, how on earth does this stuff even get published? What exactly is it that we're all doing here? If a finding either cannot be communicated enough for someone else to replicate it, or cannot be replicated because the method is shoddy, can we even call that science? At some level I know that what I'm proposing isn't realistic because the majority of science is sloppy. P-hacking, lack of detail, bad writing, bad…
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…