Scientific integrity and the ethics of 'utter honesty'

The best autopsy of Jan Hendrik Schon case is "Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World (2009)", by Eugenie Samuel Reich. It explains a lot of the questions asked in this article, such as "how 16 fraudulent papers could have made it through the peer review process of the two premier science journals in the world".

The thing about the Schon case is this: he might have got away with all of it if it had turned out that such electronic devices made with organic plastic crytals had actually been capable of being created with that era's technology. Imagine a scientist who guesses about the outcome of a particular experiment, but just isn't good enough to get the data - so they engage in fabrication of data, so that they can be 'first to publish' and hence get the credit. Others come along with more skill and essentially replicate the fraudulent results. The original fraudster gets the credit for the discovery.

The actual practical result of that case, by the way, was that now anyone publishing in that field has to submit electron microscopy images with their report as proof that they actually did fabricate some kind of device, rather than just inventing it all. Schon didn't do that, but now everyone has to. That's progress, at least.

As far as this quote: "Sometimes doing the right thing may mean not being completely honest in a larger social setting in order to prevent a great harm."

How does that work out in practice if you're a researcher in an academic department and discover your colleague down the hall is fabricating data in this manner? Most won't say a word, and their rationale is that (1) they'll be in the position of being the whistleblower, with all that entails, and (2) the fallout will make their institution look really bad and might hurt the ability of other researchers in that department to get grants. So it's not implausible that everyone in the department knows of the fraud, but they ignore it for years in the name of 'being good colleagues.'

I think this very incrementalist, formulaic view of science that stresses replication, falsification and so on is in many ways broken. For one as Russ Ackoff used to point out, one cannot get what one wants by merely not doing the wrong thing. There is an infinite amount of false or uninteresting theories, and so you end up with Borges library of Babel, which in many ways is the status quo already of automated, bureaucratic science, which produces almost endless amounts of low impact research.

I think a better way to do science is not to rely on honesty or processes, but to do science with practical goals in mind and to be ambitious enough to produce results that will assert themselves by virtue of their impact.

The Manhattan Project, mentioned in an ethical context in the piece is to me a good example of a scientific project that did not rely on ordinary scientific veracity or processes, but on goal-oriented work with a positive rather than negative (in the technical sense of the term) result in mind, that one could simply not argue about. It also explains I think why a lot of cutting edge research today has moved into the corporate sector. Rather than being constrained by academic formalisms there is focus on novelty and big leaps.

the frequency of arguments about trust in science or honesty today to me is mostly an example of the absolutely low and marginal impact and irrelevance of much research. Operation Warp Speed for me is a good modern example of how science ought to be done. Very much not in the spirit of debate or scientific bureaucracy but by using new technology to pursue a goal where success or failure would be obvious.

Is there a journal that only publishes properly reproduced results? I mean, a scientific paper is basically a draft until others manages to reproduce it, only at that point is it reliable, so it seems like there would be great value having such a journal.

> A journal of failed experiments might prevent a lot of duplicated effort.

We need to consider first that duplicated effort is not necessarily wasted effort. It could be that one scientist who tried the experiment and found that it failed didn't account for certain externalities, or just did a poor job. Maybe trying it again is just what needs to happen for a discovery to be made.