Fraud, so much fraud • Hacker News Board

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#711

Post by pc86 » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 1:37 PM UTC

robotelvis wrote: post #709

pc86 wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well you aren’t going to get tenure unless you distort your results and it’s hard to change established habits. That, and you select for the kind of people who are willing to fake results to further their own careers.

Yeah I agree with you, I guess I just keep coming back to "make the punishment so eye-wateringly harsh very few people are stupid enough to try it."

Most types of fraud carry a $100-250k monetary penalty and up to 20, 25, 30 years in prison.

The number of people willing to fabricate research data decreases dramatically if you're going to have to pay the grant back from your $20/hr warehouse job after you spend the better part of a decade in a minimum security prison.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#712

Post by robotelvis » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 1:39 PM UTC

mlsu wrote: post #291

breuleux wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You could randomize replications a bit, take away the choice. Or make it so that if you replicated one group's result, you can't replicate them again next time. The key is a bit of distance, a bit of neutrality. Enough jitter to break up cliques. I don't work in academia but in my experience professors are basically all intellectually arrogant and ego-driven, and would relish having time and space to beat each other…

The tricky thing with randomizing is that science gets very specialized, both with equipment required and knowledge. So there may only be a handful of people whose work you can competently replicate.

And those same people are reviewing the papers you publish and will not hesitate to sabotage your career if you have made them look bad by failing to replicate their papers.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#713

Post by dennis_jeeves2 » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 1:40 PM UTC

dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #538

bashfulpup wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this, do tell the direction to be nudged in. I wish to experience this new level of understanding.

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…

lol 'smolder' I saw your comment before you deleted it.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#714

Post by pcrh » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 1:41 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #243

jimbokun wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Replications are not very scientifically useful. If there were flaws in the design of the original experiment, replicating the experiment will also replicate the flaws. What we should aim for is confirmation : a different experiment that tests the underlying phenomenon that was the subject of the first paper.

This happens more often than one would expect.

No researchers are going to invest the time needed to replicate complex neurobiological experiments such as those Masliah conducted.

However, if the results are sound, others will be able to build upon them, and this happens a lot more often than fraud does.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#715

Post by robotelvis » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 1:42 PM UTC

jltsiren wrote: post #351

mlsu wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it would be better to have separate grants for replication studies. If something becomes a mandatory administrative burden, people will see it as low-prestige work and try to avoid it. And the kind of people who are good at novel research are often also good at ignoring duties they don't like, or completing them with a minimal effort if forced to. But if there is separate funding for replication studies, it w…

Another reason for doing this is that if the people doing replication also do original research then calling out someone’s work as bad incentivizes them to sabotage your work when they inevitably review your papers.

You can avoid that to some extent by having replication and original work be separate specialities - and making sure that replication gets prestige so good people do it.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#716

Post by robotelvis » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 1:45 PM UTC

ammbauer wrote: post #436

calebh wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This stuff happens in Computer Science too. Back around 2018 or so I was working on a problem that required graph matching (a relaxed/fuzzy version of the graph isomorphism problem) and was trying algorithms from many different papers. Many of the algorithms I tried to implement didn't work at all, despite considerable effort to get them to behave. In one particularly egregious (and highly cited) example, the algorit…

Name and shame :)

Calling out bad work is career suicide. You are defecting on your tribe. That’s half of the problem.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#717

Post by projektfu » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 1:46 PM UTC

Zamiel_Snawley wrote: post #514

projektfu wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replications don't frequently get published but they do get attempted, because any decent researcher is going to replicate a result they rely on to build the next step. Unfortunately, you can get stuck in the mud as I did and be unable to replicate the prior findings. Is it technique or were the original results in error? We'll never know. Building more results without replications is what caused the psychology crisi…

Reproducibility should be a fundamental quality of published experiments. If the published work under specifies the experiment such that it is unreproducible, that means the results can’t be reliably extrapolated because there are unstated conditions.

Well, yeah, but there are established techniques that are still very finicky. For example, staining frozen sections with fluorescent antibodies can go wrong in many ways and favors the experienced. Electron microscopy can take a lot of training to get right, and also requires careful staining techniques to get meaningful results. RNA work (e.g. FISH) is very sensitive to the presence of RNase which is ubiquitous and difficult to exclude from preparations. So a procedure can be specified that is reproducible but getting the same conditions is more difficult than, say, using Nix.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#718

Post by cto_of_antifa » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 1:49 PM UTC

lazyeye wrote: post #523

testfoobar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How much do these same incentives apply to climate science, where huge amounts of money are now in play?

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#719

Post by pcrh » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 1:51 PM UTC

DevX101 wrote: post #207

clpm4j wrote: post #166

I'm not a researcher or academic, but when I think of roughly how long it takes me to do meaningful deep work and produce a project of any significance, I'm struck by the fact that his 800 papers isn't a red flag? Even if you allocate ~3 months per paper, that's over 200 years of work. Is it common for academics to produce research papers in a matter of days? From the article: Masliah appeared an ideal selection. The…

It's kind of like, when reporters say a CEO built [insert ridiculously complex product here], ex: ascribing the success of OpenAI to Sam Altman, or Apple to Steve Jobs. Sure there were important in setting the direction, and allocating resources but they didn't actually do the work. Similarly, the heads of famous science labs have lots of talented scientists who want to work with them. The involvement of a lab direct…

800 is a lot, even for someone with a big lab.

More than likely many of those authorships were "honorary", that is Masliah "lent" his (once-famous) name to help others publish their own work. He likely provided little actual contribution to many of these papers.

As such one would normally only give an author "full" credit (and responsibility) if they appear as either first or last in the list of authors. In the biosciences these are the positions indicating substantial contributions to the published work.

His co-authors are now going to be very annoyed as association with this "honorary" author will now cast doubt upon their own work.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#720

Post by jboggan » Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 2:00 PM UTC

shusaku wrote: post #554

jboggan wrote: post #144

When I was in my doctoral program I had some pretty promising early results applying network analysis to metabolic networks. My lab boss/PI was happy to advertise my work and scheduled a cross-departmental talk to present my research in front of ~100 professors or so. While I was making a last-minute slide for my presentation I realized one chart looked a little off and I started looking into the raw data. I soon rea…

> My conclusions were flat out wrong and there was nothing to salvage from the data. Wow that’s pretty crazy. I have to say many times in my career I’ve been writing a paper and realized “** there’s a bug”, and had to redo everything. But the overall conclusion never changed because the idea was grounded from several different angles(usually the pieces fit together even better). One bug might invalidate your result,…

>I think the real issue was your boss wasn’t active enough in your work to make it robust to coding mistakes.

That's a major issue and it went beyond coding, I picked a very well known and influential advisor and eventually discovered he didn't really direct any research or write papers, that was all the research assistants and postdocs. I was pretty much left on my own and expected to surface with a paper to put his name on.