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Fraud, so much fraud

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#81

Post by momoschili »

tredre3 wrote: post #79
dekhn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them. It's one of the most important diagnostic and treatment options we have. I think what you're referring to is invalid therapies ("woo" or snake oil or just plain ignorance/greed) but it's hard to distinguish those from legitimate therapies at times.

> We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them. Do you have examples of usage as a treatment? I can only think of rTMS (whose effectiveness is contentious).

The most boring example is x-rays. Slightly less boring are the radiation therapies for cancer.

What is maybe the most applicable that is widely accepted is electric therapy for people recovering from ACL surgeries.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#82

Post by dekhn »

tredre3 wrote: post #79
dekhn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them. It's one of the most important diagnostic and treatment options we have. I think what you're referring to is invalid therapies ("woo" or snake oil or just plain ignorance/greed) but it's hard to distinguish those from legitimate therapies at times.

> We use EM radiation for illnesses and doctors apply them. Do you have examples of usage as a treatment? I can only think of rTMS (whose effectiveness is contentious).

Gamma knife? Basically the entire field of radiotherapy? TMS is magnetic, not EM (the coil generates a magnetic field, which induces localized currents in the body being treated)

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#83

Post by breck »

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Happy to provide personal help onboarding those who want to use this to publish their scientific work. breck7@gmail.com

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#84

Post by Lionga »

eig wrote: post #44

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…

BS governmental desperation to show any "result" (even if it is fake) is what brought us here. As scientist have to show more fake results to get more grants.

Removing the government from science could help, not the other way around.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#85

Post by eig »

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?

A key skill for any scientist is to differentiate quality work and science that can be easily faked.

The Alzheimer's and Parkinson's fields are too easy to fake, and too difficult to replicate. The new ideas are only ~20 years old. Big pharma companies are understandably wary of published papers.

When people say "trust the science", they often refer to things like masks, and antibiotics, and vaccines. That science is hundreds of years old and have been replicated thousands of times.

TL;DR: Some science should absolutely be trusted, some shouldn't. It's not surprising that you can't make blanket statements on a superfield ranging from germ theory to cold fusion.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#86

Post by masswerk »

AlbertCory wrote: post #29

Once, at 3Com, Bob Metcalfe introduced a talk by one of his MIT professors with the little joke, "The reason academic politics is so vicious is that nothing's at stake." The guy said, "That depends on whether you consider reputation 'nothing.' " I guess what that shows is, you can always negotiate and compromise over money, but reputation is more of a binary. An academic can fake some work, and as long as he's never…

But this is really a societal/political issue: since we decided that economic capital is king and symbolic capital not that much… (This is really the story of the last four decades or so.)

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#87

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

Lionga wrote: post #78
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…

Don't hate the player hate the game. Governments made scientist only survive if they show results and specifically the results they want to see. Otherwise no anymore grants and you are done. Whether the results are fake or true does not matter "Science" nowadays is mostly BS, while the scientific method (hardly ever used in "science" nowadays) is still gold.

Do hate the player. People are taught ethics for a reason: no set of rules and laws are sufficient to ensure integrity of the system. We rely on personal integrity. This is why we teach it to our children.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#88

Post by nonrandomstring »

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…

> Would I have been more successful

What are you talking about? You _are_ successful. You're not a fraud like all those other tossers.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#89

Post by Lionga »

slashdave wrote: post #18
idunnoman1222 wrote: post #6

The amazing part about this to me is that the only reason the authors were caught is image manipulation. The fraud in numbers and text? Not so easy to uncover. Prediction: papers stop using pictures entirely

GenAI will make faking western blots fantastically easy

The YC company that wanted to sell fake survey results (yes they really had a launch HN with that idea) will surely be the first to sell fake science results next. YC disrupting sciences
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