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Fraud, so much fraud

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#771

Post by ProjectArcturis »

almostgotcaught wrote: post #371
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…

> 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

I would take that bet. I postdoc'd with a very accomplished researcher (he won multiple Nobel Prize "precursor" awards). He certainly understood the social aspect of science - you need to be able to convince people your theories are correct and important - but I wouldn't say he "gamed the system" in any significant way.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#772

Post by AndrewKemendo »

instakill wrote: post #756
cdaringe wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah this is actually important distinction.

It exists but not to an extent the impact to the overall social structure is actually functionally impactful

They serve as “impossible standards” and generally excluded as outliers - occasionally as leaders but in many cases they are assassinated for challenging authorities or otherwise demonized.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#773

Post by ProjectArcturis »

aziaziazi wrote: post #673
momoschili wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a philosophical perspective, I don't see how the vaccine mandates for public jobs is appreciably different than vaccine requirements for public school that already exist. As far as the China lab goes, there were plenty of scientific papers that studied the China leak theory, though I personally don't know what they found.

The difference between the vaccines you're talking about lies in their development time: The one in school have been (tested) around for decades before getting mandatory.

The COVID vaccines have now been around for 4 years now, and there is no evidence they are appreciably more dangerous than those other vaccines that took longer to develop.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#774

Post by ScoobleDoodle »

jongjong wrote: post #456
klenwell wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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 "…

Dunning Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.

That is to say some of the incompetent are so incompetent they can’t distinguish between their incompetence and an actual expert. This is exhibited very publicly in some contestants of the American Idol genre of shows.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#775

Post by hyperdimension »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #607
LtWorf wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I attended the opening talk of a local science festival. The speaker was a psychology researcher from UK who flew here for that, and the talk was about conspiracy theories. When they introduced her they stated that she wouldn't accept any questions from the audience. This was received with boos and shouts that it was not real science. She then proceeded to bundle all the conspiracy theories together. Going from "the…

This actually may be true although somewhat indirectly with respect to at least one well-known conspiracy belief. If I recall correctly, the Flat Earth Society was originally concieved as a prank intended to lampoon actual conspiratorial groups (I.e. Nasa faked the moon landing, JFK was a mob hit etc) But through some combination of timing, convimcing execution, and media interest coincidentally developing in the sam…

That's the same shape as the OBEY clothing line, incidentally.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#776

Post by dfedbeef »

madmask wrote: post #24
neom wrote: post #11

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…

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…

That is what evil usually looks like. You expected horns and fire?

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#777

Post by nathan_compton »

carapace wrote: post #583
sitkack wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 keep mentioning this but no one seems to be picking up on it.) There is an algorithm that was developed in the late 80's in the context of therapy that could be used to align incentives and collectively agree on outcomes. The algorithm is a simple recursive procedure where the guide or therapist evokes the client's motivation or incentive for an initial behaviour and then for each motivation in turn until a (so-ca…

NLP and related stuff is not taken all that seriously among main stream scientists, you should probably say.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#778

Post by lupusreal »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #395
sesm wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you can do is separate interpretation from observation as much as possible.

TFA is about a person who literally faked the observations. Everyone on this sub is trying to shoehorn in their preferred view of "how to fix science" when the problem here has nothing to do with any of it.

You're talking about science, the methodology. They're talking about science, the social institution. Scientists lying is a problem with the latter, not the former.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#779

Post by notheyarent »

consteval wrote: post #205
ta8645 wrote: post #65

Everyone seems to acknowledge this is a problem, but refuse to believe it actually affects anything when it comes time to "trust the science". Yes, science is corrupted, but all the results can be trusted, and the correct answer is always reached in the end. So, is it really a problem? Or not?

It's a matter of how established the science actually is. Questioning novel science is one thing but questioning if the Earth is flat or Germ Theory is another thing all together. The problem with skeptics is that they sometimes hang around conspiracists. It's hard to not discount these people when the person next to them thinks black people are biologically inferior. Then when those skeptics don't distance themselve…

Nobody fucking cares about politics mate. People can’t breath with them on hot crowded city buses or for 9 hours straight when working. Your just a cuck who wore his face happy trying to justify his cowardice now to himself. Nobody else is interested in your shit ideas and theories

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#780

Post by brnaftr361 »

ScoobleDoodle wrote: post #774
jongjong wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

Dunning Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. That is to say some of the incompetent are so incompetent they can’t distinguish between their incompetence and an actual expert. This is exhibited very publicly in some contestants of the American Idol genre of shows. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...

D&K ironically misengineered their tests and inadventently misconstrued their data due to floor and ceiling effects. If you ran the gamut of their tests against random noise you get similar results.

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-...

I posit that anyone who uses DK unironically is actually committing to the DK-paradox, something I'll leave you to define for yourself.

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