701–710 of 868 posts
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Reminds me of this quote: > "The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -and therefore never scrutinize or question." -Stephen Jay Gould
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “ – Mark Twain
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…
It's complicated. Historically scientific fraud could be construed as 'good-intentioned' - typically a researcher in a cutting edge field might think they understood how a system worked, and wanting to be first to publish for reasons of career advancement, would cook up data so they could get their paper into print before anyone else. Indeed, I believe many academic careers were kicked off in this manner. Where it al…
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“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “ – Mark Twain
Which he never said, making the not-quote doubly accurate
- Abraham Lincoln
Maybe relevant: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/18/know-trouble/
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Models are used as orders of magnitude cheaper substitutes of real thing in learning, predicting, and so on, known as «modelling». AI, in it current state, is not good enough to serve as substitute for human, or human brain, but good enough to serve as substitute of human level intelligence. At this point, we are able to model brain of a fly. It looks like you are confused by similarity of scheme, model, and similari…
It just depends on your definition of a model, but to me, a neural network is modeled after how a human brain works. If Apes were man-made, I would also count them as a model of a human.
We know how to produce apes.
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If humanity is to mature, we should be an open book when it comes to incentives and build a world purposefully with all incentives aligned to the outcomes we collectively agree upon. https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/ Charlie Munger's Misjudgment #1: Incentive-caused Bias https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-2yIO8cnvw https://fs.blog/bias-incentives-reinforcement/
I don't think that's really going to work. People won't list all their incentives, because some of them are implicit and others are embarrassing or "creepy". Others will absolutely judge you for what incentivizes your actions, therefore hiding them is the status quo. If you say that your incentive for working out is to look good and be popular with the ladies then people will judge you for it, even if it's exactly th…
This 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…
Is this really the case the though? Isn't the whole point of tenure (or a big selling point at least) insulating academics from capricious firings?
The big question I have is that there are names on these fraudulent papers, so why are these people still employed? If you generate fictitious data to get published, you should lose any research or teaching job you have, and have to work at McDonald's or a warehouse for the rest of your life. There are plenty of people who want to be professors that we can eliminate the ones who will lie while doing it without losing much (perhaps anything). If your job was funded by taxpayer funds there should be criminal charges associated with willfully and knowingly fabricating data, results, or methods. At that point you're literally lying in order to steal taxpayer funds, it's no different than a city manager embezzling or grabbing a stack of $20 bills out of the cash register.
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Nutrition is one place where you can start, because it is possible to do some practical experiments. But, be warned, you will easily spend a decade investigating it. I picked the subject, because I'm sure that in the end you will have achieved something of great value: your own relatively better health. (I said relatively, because diet is only one of the factors that influences health, although I say it's an importan…
> Experiment on yourself No control group? > Form your own opinion after a decade After a decade, differences in your body will mostly be because you are 10 years older. Such experiments are largely pointless because the only people doing them are people who care about their health. You are more likely to be healthy because of the totality of your life choices, not the specific things you do in the diet experiment.
Nope. Start simple. ( if you can do a full blown experiment with multiple people, by all means go for it)
>After a decade, differences in your body will mostly be because you are 10 years older.
Correct. (did, you think I did not know that?)
>Such experiments are largely pointless
I leave you to decide that, given there are no well controlled experiments in mainstream nutrition, we are left with imperfect choices. (There are small experiments that are conducted by either small groups or individuals, that are pretty high quality IMO).
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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 t…
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.…
Why are these obvious low value papers a) getting grants, b) getting published, c) not permanently damaging the researchers' careers?
If you do bad work you eventually get fired, why don't we do the same thing with research academics who do bad work?
This 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…
> if everyone is exaggerating their results you have to as well or you will be fired. Is this really the case the though? Isn't the whole point of tenure (or a big selling point at least) insulating academics from capricious firings? The big question I have is that there are names on these fraudulent papers, so why are these people still employed? If you generate fictitious data to get published, you should lose any…
That, and you select for the kind of people who are willing to fake results to further their own careers.
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There would still be incentives for collusion (I "reproduce" your research, you "reproduce" mine), and researchers pretending to reproduce papers but actually not bothering (especially if they believe that the original research was done properly). Ultimately, I'm not sure how to incentivize reproduction of research: it's very easy to fake a successful reproduction (you already know the results, and the original resea…
It is much much harder to sustain a conspiracy among many distributed people over time, than it is to fake your own research results. Making fraud much less convenient will greatly reduce the amount of it.
If you publish a paper with fraudulent data, methods, or results, and you received any state or federal funds for it, there should be prison time. You stole taxpayer money.
I'm not saying for when people are wrong, I'm saying for when you can prove someone knowingly lied. It won't catch anyone, and you need to bar to be high enough that people don't go to jail for being bad scientists, but right now there is zero social, professional, or legal risk is just lying your ass off to get the next grant and keep the spice flowing.
Nobody's going to do that when changing the numbers in your Excel sheet carries a risk of a decade or two in a minimum security prison.