I can't manage to be really surprised. We already know many people will cheat when the incentives are right. And when the law of the land is “publish or perish”, then some will publish by any means necessary. Thinking “this subsegment of society is so honorable, they won't cheat” would be incredibly naive.
Fraud, so much fraud
71–80 of 868 posts
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#72This stuff just ENRAGES me.
With that off my moobs ... for those interested in the broader topic, I highly recommend Science Fictions, by Stuart Ritchie. The audiobook is also excellent.
I'm not a working scientist, and I found it completely engaging. Worth it just for the explanation of p-hacking.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you, science fraud is terrible. It pollutes and breaks the scientific method. Enormous resources are wasted, not just by the fraudster but also by all the other well meaning scientists who base their work on that. In my experience no, most fraudsters are not evil people, they just follow the incentives and almost non-existent disincentives. Scientist has become just a job, you find all kinds of people th…
"most fraudsters are not evil people, they just follow the incentives and almost non-existent disincentives" Maybe I'm too idealistic but why does following incentives with no regard for secondary consequences not evil?
IMO “evil” is a misconception. People have different beliefs and psychological needs, and placed in certain incentive structures that has the outcomes that we see. You can call certain behaviors “evil”, but that doesn’t explain anything about why the behaviors occur.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#74I'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…
There was a period of time when science was advanced by the aristocrats who were self funded and self motivated. Once it became a distinguished profession the incentives changed. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
Goodhart's Law!
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#75This 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…
> ... as academics become more desperate.
Yes and ... we're already there.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#76I'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…
There was a period of time when science was advanced by the aristocrats who were self funded and self motivated. Once it became a distinguished profession the incentives changed. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
> There was a period of time when science was advanced by the aristocrats who were self funded and self motivated.
From a distance the practice of science in early modern and Enlightenment times might look like the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. If you read the detailed history of the times you'll see that the reality was much more messy.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#77There are unfortunately very rarely consequences for academic fraud. It's not just that we only catch a small fraction — mostly the most brazen image manipulation — but these cases of blatant fraud happen again and again, to resounding silence. Ever so rarely, there may be an opaque, internal investigation. Mostly, it seems that academia has a desire to not make any waves, keep up appearances, and let the problem qui…
And occasionally a grad student who discovers academic dishonesty, and complains internally (naively trusting administrators to have humility and integrity), has their career ended.
I suppose a silver lining to all the academic fraud exposés of the last few years is that more grad students and faculty now know that this is a thing, and one that many will try to cover up, so trust no one.
Another silver lining might be that fellow faculty are more likely to believe an accusation, and (if they are one of the awful people) less likely to think they can save funding/embarrassment/friend by neutralizing the witness.
(ProTip: If the success of your dishonesty-reporting approach is predicated on an internal administrator having humility and integrity, realize that those qualities are the opposite of what has advanced a lot of academic careers.)
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#78These 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…
Don't hate the player hate the game. Governments made scientist only survive if they show results and specifically the results they want to see. Otherwise no anymore grants and you are done. Whether the results are fake or true does not matter
"Science" nowadays is mostly BS, while the scientific method (hardly ever used in "science" nowadays) is still gold.
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pick up an old engineering book at some point, something from mid 1800's or early 1900's and you'll quickly realize that the trust people put on science isn't what it should be. The scientific method works over a long period of time, but to blindly trust a peer review study that just came out, any study, is almost as much faith as religion, specially if you're not a high level researcher in the same field and have sp…
We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them. It's one of the most important diagnostic and treatment options we have. I think what you're referring to is invalid therapies ("woo" or snake oil or just plain ignorance/greed) but it's hard to distinguish those from legitimate therapies at times.
> We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them.
Do you have examples of usage as a treatment? I can only think of rTMS (whose effectiveness is contentious).
Re: Fraud, so much fraud
#80This 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…
We can solve this at the grant level. Stipulate that for every new paper a group publishes from a grant, that group must also publish a replication of an existing finding. Publication would happen in pairs, so that every novel thing would be matched with a replication.
Replications could be matched with grants: if you receive $100,000 grant, you'd get the $100,000 you need, plus another $100,000 which you could use to publish a replication of a previous $100,000 grant. Researchers can choose which findings they replicate, but with restrictions, e.g. you can't just choose your group's previous thing.
I think if we did this, researchers would naturally be incentivized to publish experiments that are easier to replicate and of course fraud like this would be caught eventually.
I bet we could throw away half of publications tomorrow and see no effect on the actual pace of progress in science.