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Fraud, so much fraud

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Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#91

Post by bonoboTP »

scarmig wrote: post #69
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…

You should be able to build an entire career out of replications: hired at the best universities, published in the top journals, social prestige and respect. To the point where every novel study is replicated and published at least once. Until we get to that point, there will be far fewer replications than needed for a healthy scientific system.

> social prestige and respect

This one is the showstopper. No matter what you do with rules and regulations, if people aren't impressed by it at a watercooler conversation, or when chatting at a cocktail party at a conference, or when showing a politician around in your lab then nothing else matters.

How prestigious something is is not a lever you control.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#93

Post by cj »

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?

Here’s a deterrent:

1) revoke all of their academic accreditations and degrees

2) put them on a public “do not publish” list permanently banning them from being named on any paper in a journal

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#94

Post by dhruvkar »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #87
Lionga wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When everything is a commodity (nothing runs outside of the market economy), the incentives are skewed to this type of behavior.

'Hate' the player' and 'hate' the game.

Some things shouldn't be part of the market economy - education, health and food.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#95

Post by ChainOfFools »

mbreese wrote: post #50
slashdave wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GenAI will make faking western blots fantastically easy

Many journals now require all versions of a gel image that is used in a figure. So, you’d have to fake the full image that is cropped down to the lanes used in the figure. I think there aren’t as many of those raw images around to train AI on… yet.

I predict it will get even worse than that, in the next couple of decades I expect any document or work that has a substantial reward associated with it, either financially or in terms of career advancement or a grade for critical course work in one's major, or penalty such as indictment or conviction, to be backed by a time stamped stack of developing documentation, drafts, revisions, with these time stamp validated against a trusted custodial clock and a seed random string marking the start of work, recorded in some immutable public form.

Accompanying to finish document will be a hash of all of these works along with their associated timestamps, originals of can be verified if necessary to prove a custodial chain of development over a plausible period of time and across multiple iterations of the development of the work - a kind of signed time-lapse slideshow of its genesis from blank page to finished product as if it had a mandatory and global "track changes" flag enabled from the very beginning - by which the entire process can be proved an original human-collaborated work and not an insta-generated AI fiction.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#96

Post by Spivak »

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.

You are clearly deeply disconnected from the actual practice of research.

The best you can really say is that the statistics chops of most researchers is lacking and that someone researching say caterpillars is likely to not really understand the maths behind the tests they're performing. It's not an ideal solution by any means but universities are starting to hire stats and cs department grads to handle that part.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#97

Post by dekhn »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #88
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.

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 sent to the editor. Merely being a non-fraud is only part of success.

(note: I've changed my definition of success, I now realize that I never ever really wanted to be a tenured professor at a Tier 1 university, because that role is far less fulfilling that I thought it would be).

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#98

Post by wordsinaline »

jimbokun wrote: post #47
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 think the error is putting trust in scientists as people, instead of putting trust in science as a methodology. The methodology is designed to rely on trusting a process, not trusting individuals, to arrive at the truth. I guess it also reinforces the supreme importance of reproducibility. Seems like no research result should be taken seriously until at least one other scientist or group of scientists are able to r…

This error really went viral during the pandemic and continues to this day. We're in for an Orwellian future if the public does not cultivate some skeptic impulse.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#99

Post by coding123 »

> and others appear to be running for cover.

In every industry right now there appear to be a lot of people running cover. I have a personal belief, with the exception of a few industries, 50% of managers are simply running cover. This is easy to explain:

1/ Nothing follows people

2/ Jobs were easy to get in the last 3 years (this is changing FAST)

3/ Rinse and repeat and stay low until you're caught.

Re: Fraud, so much fraud

#100

Post by SpaceManNabs »

SpaceManNabs wrote: post #33

I had a feeling academia was just run a ran by people letting blatant fraud, exploitation and abuse of phd students, stealing during peer-review, and just other forms of plagiarism, fraud, and exploitation slide by. They let it slide by because correcting these things would lead to massive changes in academia that might put them out of jobs. Every year that feeling becomes more certain. Glad I quit the track in grad…

alright, am i being downvoted because of my perniciousness to those leading academia, or because I was too sympathetic to the people being exploited?
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