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Fraud, so much fraud

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#791

Post by asdf123qweasd »

fluidcruft wrote: post #727
asdf123qweasd wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not true entirely. There is research, with huge impacts and the money leveraging- keeps it brutally honest. Nothing makes it out of a lab and into a fab, without certainty of the method working at least in lab conditions reproduceable. There are many billions, but not that many billions.

> nothing makes it out of a lab and into a fab, without certainty of the method working at least in lab conditions reproducible. The article describes multiple full clinical drug trials both completed (inconclusive==can't prove harm, effect is so small that benefit cannot be excluded) and ongoing that are fundamentally built on the fabricated results which literally do represent many billions of private investment. U…

Fair point, thank you for your time and well crafted argument.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#792

Post by asdf123qweasd »

azan_ wrote: post #374
Balgair wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the replication crisis had come and gone, about 5 years now. The fraudsters are running the place and have been for at least the last half decade, full stop.

It's really easy to verify that this claim is pure nonsense - we still have very real, astonishing scientific progress.

But is it proportional to the investment of time and people participating in it. If you take the amount of money/people invested into the sciences at a point in time , lets take: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference

And then, put the number of contributors and the rate of progress against one another, my guess is that you would see a massive slowdown of progress, so massive actually, that explenations about the slowdown abound. There is the "all easy apples have been picked" theory, the "only life&death systemic competition forces contributors to produce good science" theory and a ton of others. All basically trying to explain the same phenomena- which could also be explained by: "hackers, hacking hackers, hacking processes, leave no financial substance behind to have people who actually do the scientific leg-work."

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#793

Post by matthewdgreen »

theultdev wrote: post #544
matthewdgreen wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Faked their observation and thus their interpretation. To trust one's alleged observations is to trust the interpretations based on them. OP suggest was to always observe, no matter the person, which is what TFA is doing. Feel free to expand on what you think is the problem and solution if you feel everyone is off-target.

The initial GP comment made the point that, at some level, science requires trust. And (in the case of TFA) specifically trust that the person making the observations is actually performing the experiments and recording them correctly -- rather than making them up. You can verify and replicate (and we do quite a bit of that, modulo the fact that resource constraints are a huge problem in science) but without some degree of trust you're in trouble.

But the OP's suggestion was that to fix this specific problem of faked observations, you should separate interpretation and observation. I don't see how that fixes this problem at all. And in my view the first step in solving the problem is to come up with some sense of how serious the problem is: meaning, rather than dwelling on each terrible isolated case and panicking, try to determine what the actual prevalance is and what the overall impacts are. With that information you can make resource-allocation decisions in how to address it. The HN response is much too emotional for anything useful to come of it (except for more anger and confirmation bias.)

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#794

Post by csaid81 »

csaid81 wrote: post #735
daedrdev wrote: post #28

Is there no liability for the author? There are billions of dollars wasted in drug trials and research that can be tied to this fraud. Surely they can face some legal issues due to this?

He could be prosecuted under current fraud laws, but this hardly ever happens. I wrote a blog post on how to make this easier, including a new criminal statute specifically tailored for scientific fraud. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41672599

Sorry, here's the correct link https://chris-said.io/2024/06/17/the-case-for-criminalizing-...

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#795

Post by consf »

testfoobar wrote: post #106
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…

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…

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#796

Post by nonrandomstring »

dekhn wrote: post #97
nonrandomstring wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would I have been more successful What are you talking about? You _are_ successful. You're not a fraud like all those other tossers.

To me, at the time, successful would have been getting a tenure-track position at a Tier 1 university, discovering something important, and never publishing anything that was intentional fraud (I'm OK with making some level of legitimate errors that could need to be retracted). Of those three, I certainly didn't achieve #1 or #2, but did achieve #3, mainly because I didn't write very much and obsessed over what was s…

As another commenter said, thanks for being a scientist and not a fraud. Whatever you think you achieved (which may be more than you think).

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#797

Post by consf »

nextos wrote: post #131
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…

Lots of people doing research find this depressing to the point of quitting. Many of my peers left research as they couldn't stomach all this nonsense. In experimental fields, the current academic system rewards dishonesty so much that ugly things have become really common. In my relatively short career, I have been asked to manipulate results several times. I refused, but this took an immense toll, especially on two…

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#798

Post by consf »

_heimdall wrote: post #332
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…

The fact that it can still be considered science when intentional fraud is involved is a huge problem itself.

Science, at its core, is supposed to be a method of systematically seeking truth through rigorous experimentation, observation, and reasoning. When intentional dishonesty enters the equation, it undermines the entire purpose of the scientific endeavor

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#799

Post by consf »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #249
antisthenes wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud. Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science", when in reality science is still the best way to push humanity forward and alleviate human suffering, _despite_ all the fraud and misaligned incentives that may influence it.

> Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science" Unfortunately many "smart" people insist on telling "dumb" people how to think instead of having the introspection and humility to examine where we've gone wrong and spending a lot of time and effort on fixing it. No, easier to gaslight the idiots

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#800

Post by consf »

worik wrote: post #470
djfobbz wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also science: There are more new cases of cancer in the United States now than there have ever been before.

> There are more new cases of cancer in the United States now than there have ever been before. Sigh That is because antibiotics, essentially The mechanism by which antibiotics cause cancer is they stop you dying from bacterial infection, once a huge (biggest?) killer. You still have to die of something....

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