Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fraud, so much fraud

science.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

751–760 of 868 posts

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#751

Post by redman25 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #378
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…

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.…

Isn't that the point that if they couldn't have been fixed that they were problematic in the first place?

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#752

Post by momoschili »

vasco wrote: post #584
momoschili wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to need some citations here since the texts that I'm familiar with from that time period are "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" by Maxwell (mid-late 1800s) and "A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity" by E. T. Whittaker, neither of which mentions anything of the sort. I suspect you are choosing from texts that at the time likely would not have been considered academic or standard.

Sure, check out Audel's Electric guide, 1927 print, volume 10, for example. This is a series of books intended for practitioners at the time, in wide circulation in the USA. The "Electric Therapeuthics" section changed a lot with each edition so it's even interesting to compare across older versions if you can find multiple. I didn't want to reference specific old niche books but if you're willing to ebay it, I guess…

Awesome thanks for providing a reference!

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#753

Post by hombre_fatal »

dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #707
abenga wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>No control group? 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 im…

Let me guess. All of this is to say that you leaned into eating saturated fat, got high cholesterol, and because nothing happened in 10 years, the converging lines of evidence that constantly replicate over a half century are wrong.

Or maybe you started smoking and because there were no RCTs on smoking, then nobody can actually know if it's bad for you, but your N=1 has more epistemic value because you feel okay.

Just getting flashbacks from those hokey "carnivore diet" videos that Youtube keeps wanting me to watch.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#754

Post by [deleted] »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #753
dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No control group? 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 im…

Let me guess. All of this is to say that you leaned into eating saturated fat, got high cholesterol, and because nothing happened in 10 years, the converging lines of evidence that constantly replicate over a half century are wrong. Or maybe you started smoking and because there were no RCTs on smoking, then nobody can actually know if it's bad for you, but your N=1 has more epistemic value because you feel okay. Jus…

[deleted]

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#755

Post by temporallobe »

I personally know two PhDs who faked a large portion of their data in order to complete the dissertation process. The reality is that you can get stuck in the research phase because genuine, large sample-size quantitative data is often extremely difficult if not impossible to obtain, and in the cases I personally know, they simply mocked it in a realistic way. And there’s no way to know since the surveys are often anonymous.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#756

Post by instakill »

cdaringe wrote: post #734
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #333

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…

> effectively zero That feels extreme. Zero is a cold, dark, lonely number. Maybe it’s correct—i dont know. Ive worked on only a couple of projects in this space, and while the incentives certainly involved publishing, i dont feel that it equated to abandoning the SciMethod. Instead, it was the cost to pay for the ability to continue doing science. Can you really stand by ZERO? How about a 1%. Meet me somewhere above…

OP said effectively zero, not zero. These are semantically very different.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#757

Post by BlueTemplar »

bbconn wrote: post #597
almostgotcaught wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Arguably some have figured how to game the system to advance their careers lol arguably? i would bet my generous, non-academia, industry salary for the next 10 years, that there's not a single academic with a citation count over say ... 50k (ostensibly the most successful academic) that isn't gaming the system. - signed someone who got their phd at "prestigous" uni under a guy with >100k citations

Terence Tao has well over 50K citations. Maybe one can argue that he’s gaming the system because he alone can decide what problems are deemed to be interesting by the broader community, but he can’t help that.

In this case, it might matter that mathematics aren't strictly speaking, a science.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#758

Post by BlueTemplar »

infamouscow wrote: post #564
griffzhowl wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case any high-priority military intelligence project is "like a startup". Why say that it's run like a startup as opposed to just saying it was run like a high-priority military-intelligence project? The GP suggested that a reason for the success of the Manhattan project was that it was run like a startup, whereas it seems more illuminating to point out that it was a massively funded military project in warti…

In a startup—especially one that is heavily funded, like a government—roadblocks that can be resolved by eliminating paperwork, cutting through bureaucracy, or simply by paying money, tend to disappear. No serious person can argue this being plausible today. Sam Altman will drop 10B at a blink of an eye if it means unblocking a major problem for OpenAI. The government spends 10x that all of the time without anything…

What about the overwhelming majority of startups, which are poorly funded ?

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#759

Post by dasudasu »

DigitalPaladin wrote: post #368
pbreit wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as it's all peer reviewed!!

I'm assuming /s above. Because the amount of pencil-whipped "peer review" feedback I've received could fit in a shoe box, because many "reviewers" are looking for the CV credit for their role and not so much the actual effort of reviewing. And there's no way to call them out on their laziness except maybe to not submit to their publication again and warn others against it too. And, to defend their lack of review, all…

I never understood how peer reviewers are supposed to "validate" a paper and how they’re tacitly thought to be doing so by the general public. Authors make claims based on data reviewers don’t have direct access to, from experiments they obviously can’t supervise the execution. They’re forced to accept the claims at face value. In my experience (and I’ve been on both sides), it’s more about overall quality and impact. Journals don’t want badly written papers on unremarkable topics. It’s closer to being a harsh anonymous editor than a real safeguard of “science™.”

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#760

Post by kjkjadksj »

dekhn wrote: post #62

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…

Gels tell you quite a lot, its what question you are asking that is more relevant to the results being useful over the technique. Of course people lie and cheat in science. Wet lab and dry lab. So many dry lab papers for example are out there where code are supposedly available “by request” and we take the figures on faith.
Post reply on HN