From the article -- "...after researcher Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, was discovered to have falsified data. In Schön’s case, and in his own experience, Muller says, 'people who fake data tend not to do it just once'."
I think this is the "money shot" here, but I admit I am biased :-). I got into a heated debate years ago over the "harshness" of treating students who cheated on an exam. The details are not particularly important but they were obscured by the fact that they involved 'foreign' students at an American university who were expelled (and lost their student Visas) after they were found to have cheated on an exam. The outrage was how these foreign students were "singled out" while "American students doing the same thing were just scolded".
There wasn't enough information available to address whether or not it was discriminatory but my assertion that all students who cheat should be expelled was rebuked as overly harsh and met with calls of "In that case Universities will have to expel their entire student bodies!"
My controversial (if you would believe the responses) take is that these sorts of "minor" infractions against cultural expectations are the basis for corruption. Whether it is telling lies to cover inconvenient (and perhaps inconsequential) truths or cheating to pass an evaluation for which one had not invested the time and effort to prepare. Habituating this behavior creates a stain on all future actions.
> In that case Universities will have to expel their entire student bodies!
Liars think everyone lies; cheaters think everyone cheats. I suspect these were university administrators, which is a job that I can definitely see attracting know-nothing losers who cheated their way through college. So of course they think everyone else did too. I was never aware of even a single instance of cheating among anyone I knew at college (although I was not exactly an inquisitor about it either). I suspect the rate of cheating is much lower than these admins think it is, and also support expelling everyone who is conclusively caught cheating. Conclusively is the big caveat, though: we'd have to be very, very sure. This means a lot more than running their essay through a "plagiarism checker", "AI checker", or some other lazy approach.
No, corruption arises when people lose faith in the system and its rules. Using harsh punishments doesn't work, if some people can pull strings with acquaintances to get themselves out of trouble. A system where every infraction has a minor punishment can work without corruption, if everyone believes everyone else will act honestly.
The serious question that arises from your argument is, should we apply this stance to all parts of life. Should drivers loose their licence indefinitely if they drive to fast or park wrong? Should we chop of the hand of thieves (or maybe forbid them to enter any stores)?
The difference is a college degree is a cert issued by the state. It's not unfair for part of the cert is the presumption that the person is honest. And to deny cert to people known to be dishonest.
Disclosure. I never cheated in college and have a hunch that people trying to make excuses for cheaters are cheaters themselves.
It depends, better comparison would be the test drive where you acquire your license (sry, can't find the word, not a native speaker).
Since it's about exams, right?
I'd say, at school tolerance is appropriate, but at university deliberate and definite cheating justifies at least being recorded like a triple-fail at that particular exam IMO. Which in Europe, AfAIK would mean being "expelled" from your main course if it's a mandatory exam.
Not sure if all the details are right but I am all for harsh penalties for certain kinds or cheating in high-stakes situations.
With "high stakes", I particularly mean things like university exams or scientifc publications, not every violation of the ethical and/or formal rule sets of society in general.
Another example would be a physician who was caught doing something that intentionally and significantly violates the rule set for physicians, endangering his patients: it's not negligience, it's malicious.
But the cultural expectation has shifted. AFAICT, it is now expected that people will cheat as a matter of course.
That may have happened because of past leniency, but at this point expelling students is shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted.
If 10% of students cheat, you can hold the line through punishment. If 80% of students cheat, you have a systemic problem, and beating students is only going to produce better cheaters. The whole structure is now set up to strongly disadvantage those who don't cheat, and once that happens, the decision to cheat ceases to be a moral one.
I went to school during the last century. I did not cheat. Cheating was already pretty common, I knew of plenty of people who did cheat, but the norm (as I understood it) was still to not cheat. If I were go to school today, I'm not sure what I would do. It would depend partly on the stakes.
It's like being an honest politician. You can feel good and pat yourself on the back, but you'll never get elected. (Ok, "honest" may not be the best word for it. Someone who measures the effects of various things and governs accordingly rather than by how popular and marketable positions are, and refuses to make deals that go against principles.)
Disagree. I went to university within the last five years - cheating was rampant but tended to produce students who seriously struggled to keep up with coursework in their third and fourth year. I did not cheat and was typically one of the top performers in my courses.
However we may be operating under different assumptions; there was no assumption of grade curving (it happened a few times when an exam was a little over juiced, but it pulled people into a passing grade instead of pushing people into a failing one). On reflection it sounds like you are anticipating a curve designed to flunk a certain portion of students. I'm not sure if one or the other is the 'default' experience these days.
I had a math professor who did an amazing job at preventing cheating by making coursework more-or-less optional, and then exams would be 50% problems they’d invented specifically for that year, and 50% problems given ahead of time (you only needed to do half of 75% of the exam). If you “got it”, the problems he made up were always very short, whereas half of the preassigned questions were long and tedious.
This basically set a hard cap of a B/B- for any student that wasn’t either wildly talented or engaging with the course material and getting useful feedback from the assignments. It was possible to pass with a C by cheating on assignments (looking up the answer and rewriting it so it wasn’t terribly obvious) and memorizing the solutions to the preassigned problems, which was honestly fair based on the rules he set for the course.
In the 2010’s, cheating was commonplace and socially accepted.
People were still being caught and harshly punished, but nobody would snitch if they saw you up to something. Snitching carried much more social stigma than cheating on an exam or whatever.
What didn’t help was these stupid false positive prone plagiarism detectors like turnitin which would assign an arbitrary “score” that would get you dinged for copying - even if it was original work.
It may be a person's instinct to immediately blame the researcher, and of course, I definitely think data fabrication is never justified.
However, what is the societal problem here? It's the problem that in academia, there are such pressures to publish and be first nowadays that many people will do anything to get ahead. It doesn't help that social media and news sites have introduced a sort of gamification into it.
People have their natures, and the current state of academia encourages cheating, plain and simple. Just like the current state of finance encourages market manipulation.
If we want to fix it, simply outing these fakes will not be enough. While I don't have much sympathy for the cheaters, I also don't have much sympathy for the scientific community that has created this environment.
>It's the problem that in academia, there are such pressures to publish and be first nowadays that many people will do anything to get ahead.
If you can not do honest work in academia you should leave and go work somewhere else.
Fraud is not the correct reaction to the problems of academia, as it actively hurts it even more. Nobody is forced to do academic research for a living, especially if you have a degree in physics.
Another lofty comment about honesty in academia. No research job lets you spend 6 months redoing stuff just to make sure it’s 100%. It’s about publish what you have with enough disclaimers. It’s about convincing the reviewers to get the paper in. Rest will be resolved later.
Classic cases are the Bell labs guy finding organic semiconductors and fermi lab guy finding new elements. They both were just making up stuff which they believed existed but just needed work to be found and published. They would make up experimental data to support existence of theoretical things. The assumption was just publish this first, get the accolades then use it to get money to get someone to eventually do this properly. But they just predicted stuff which weren’t true. Nobody knows the amount of bullshit that was made up that eventually turned out to be true.
All of this because scientists these days are not expected to work on things. They are expected to produce results. Nobody is giving passionate people time and space to explore things. It’s all about results now.
The irony is that the reward for running the rat race is freedom from rat race. Postdocs publish random crap to boost numbers for their tenure which they think will relieve them of this stupidity and let them focus on pure research. but once they catch the tigers tail they gotta keep running.
> No research job lets you spend 6 months redoing stuff just to make sure it’s 100%.
These jobs do exist[1], and we as a society need to figure out how to stop organizing research around a single manager (professor) with zero meaningful oversight.
Remember when Lance Armstrong got in big trouble for taking performance-enhancing drugs for the Tour de France, and he was lambasted in the media?
That might have been right and proper. But years later, I read that of the top 30 finalists that year, every single one was taking performance-enhancing drugs. Presumably the same was true in previous years. Armstrong just happened to be the first-place finalist in a year where they finally had the ability to start testing.
In a case like that, it's not enough to say "if you can't bike fast without steroids, then biking isn't for you!" If cheating is pervasive, those who can't or don't cheat will fall behind and quit, and all that's left will be those willing to cheat. From the POV of Science writ large, if the culture is rotten then the incentives must be changed. You can't rely on the independent integrity of every individual not to cheat, or you'll just end up with only cheaters.
I never said fraud is the correct reaction. Like I said, I believe it is wrong unequivocally.
I did say that fraud is something that is essentially encouraged in academia. Nobody is forced to do it of course, but then again, any system will have its flaws that encourages bad behaviour, and it is also advantageous to restructure the system to minimize that.
> Fraud is not the correct reaction to the problems of academia, as it actively hurts it even more.
Not in the short term. And only for yourself personally if you are found out.
Of course there are perverse incentives which goes against the scientific spirit. It doesn’t even require malicious intent. Neglect and bias can be similarly powerful negative forces.
People who are committing fraud aren't trying to have a correct reaction to the problems of academia, and leaving fixing the problems of academia to them changing their behavior will have the outcome you should expect.
Telling people to be good is a waste of time unless they're your kid or loved one and they really don't want to disappoint you. Fixing your system so it doesn't reward people who commit fraud is the only thing that even has a possibility of working.
If you asked your CISO about securing your system against hackers and their response was "If they can't do honest pen testing, they should leave IT and go work somewhere else." what would your feelings be? OP wasn't trying to justify bad actors, but explain how the system is selecting for them, and we have to accept that our system is running in a world where there will always be back actors present. Systems must be built to be resistant to them.
The issue that the OP pointed out and that your comment completely failed to address is that the way the system is set up is that the pressure to produce either pushes academics either towards dishonesty or pushes them out.
It's not the correct reaction but it's a predictable reaction. Academia has some huge problems with how they measure success and how they police academic integrity. The incentives make this outcome likely.
Any system that relies on individuals adhering to the honor system will be abused. History has shown this repeatedly. We have created an institution that has all the wrong incentives in place. This institution will continue to churn out bad actors who will just get better and better at hiding their trails.
This is a fine position to hold, while excluding more-useful ones as "condoning bad behavior" or "excusing bad behavior" or whatever, if you want to judge people but not solve any problems.
The president of Stanford was caught pressuring his team to fabricate data for years, so this is likely pervasive everywhere in academia nevermind much higher pressure environments with lots of competition like elite institutions in India and China.
I think it's more to do with people in those environments not having good alternatives that creates incentive to do anything to get ahead. If we do some self reflection, similar things can be said about Uber & Airbnb et al. Painting this as cultural phenomenon is not productive IMHO.
I would say yes. I think we need to place a lot more value in publishing research that isn't surprising. Research that simply replicates (or fails to replicate) other research should be just as valuable to one's career as finding something unexpected.
I scientist that has replicated a bunch of studies and identified several that they couldn't replicate is doing something very very valuable for the human race and we (universities, grants, etc.) need to recognize that.
It's all throwing PhDs at novel research. Boring reproducing known things is just one type of support work that is neglected. There is a vast "supply chain" of work that allows novel research to be done, and we've neglected it.
I can see how that can be the case if it's for survival, but no one pressured this person to try to claim to find one of the most sought-after technologies out there. It also doesn't apply cause he voluntarily chose to go to a prestigious university where this kind of pressure exists. Competition can be healthy thing as long as it doesn't threaten the researcher's career, which clearly wasn't the case here. This guy had the balls to do it twice in two years after getting caught, clearly he's set in his ways.
Of course. I am not trying to remove the blame from him. On the other hand, we can also learn from these problems because they often point out nearby flaws in the general system that should be ameliorated. That was my main point.
I agree! I'm just saying that this case in particular does not really show the problem with pressure in Academia. If anything, it shows how lenient the peer-review process is.
> I also don't have much sympathy for the scientific community that has created this environment.
Scientists didn't create this environment: you did. We, as a society, demanded that some sector produce new scientific research at a rate and level that is capable of supporting our economy, and then we allocated a very restricted set of resources for them to do it. And they've done miracles, too! We would literally not be alive today if the scientific community hadn't developed the improvements that allow us to feed, house, and provide energy to 8 billion people. And that's before we get to strictly optional stuff like the computers and networks that power this website.
It's a serious business and obviously that kind of pressure leads to bad results sometimes. But the correct response is to be grateful that we have an engine in our society that produces this basic research (since industry has dramatically lowered spending on basic R&D over the past decades) and try to improve it, not to be pointlessly angry at scientists for living in the system that society's incentives have built for us.
> If we want to fix it, simply outing these fakes will not be enough.
Yes, but without outing these fakes and harshly and punishing them as the first step, we're immediately communicating that this is "ok". "Just fake the data and throw it over the wall, if you get caught, just blame it on pressure and the general academic culture".
This post seems almost completely vacuous to me.
I guess you could read it to mean that if a person cheats, there must be some "societal problem" causing it. That would seem to imply you believe society could in principle be 'fixed' s.t. no one is ever incentivized to cheat. Is that what you mean?
Or simply, s.t. fewer people are incentivized to cheat. In that case, duh. But fewer to what extent? And are there any actual constructive suggestions forthcoming?
my wife spent a year trying to reproduce some data that her research depended on only to eventually find out that it was fraudulent. the original researcher even admitted this to their lab, and he retired and his lab was shut down. no retraction was ever published. my wifes lab tried to publish a paper showing that the original research was fraudulent and the journal was not willing to publish it. she has since left the field, and i have been pretty jaded on science and academia since then
I never understand why folks who have bad individual experiences end up extrapolating that experience to represent an entire area (field, subject, industry etc.).
Or to put it another way, I understand the impulse, buy why not self reflect a bit to figure out if that impulse has merit (it doesn't)?
Surely the fact that, overall, we do make meaningful and real scientific progress over time (we may now have room temperature superconductors!) shows there is more value in the academic process than there is problem, though obviously the problems are substantial and create significant limitations.
Ironically one of the most famous fabrications was also material science[^1]. I'm not in the field so I don't have anything else to add but I suppose these retractions and scandals show that the scientific process is actually working as intended.
They think the real experiment will show what they concluded within some tolerance. They just don’t want to put in the time and effort to do it. they want to publish their hunch with fake data first to get the glory.
For example, US census agency person for a county can just make up numbers based on his understanding of the place without actually doing a full survey. He believes that even if they check, it will be within reasonable tolerance and the final results will be similar. So he just sits at home keep making up numbers year after year. Until someday USPS opens a postoffice based on the numbers and get no customers causing a full investigation.
The world needs an academic fraud Jubilee. We could probably design a cryptographic protocol where you can submit a paper for retraction if and only if all other papers above a threshold are also retracted. A kind of pre-commitment hash for a multi party prisoners dilemma.
Reality is, the way bureaucracies work is the only way to survive in it is to become compromised so that all the other compromised people in it can trust you. From what I can tell from government, there's an informal initiation stage, where you are pressured to commit a fraud, where it shows you can "play ball," and then you are in the fold. An academic fraud jubilee would free a lot of people to do real work. It sounds crazy, but not nearly as crazy as what would have had to occur to create the replication crisis.
This makes me so angry. As an early career researcher it is so easy to make mistakes, and have errors in analysis, or in ways of thinking, that to actively go and commit fraud just really grinds my gears and is just so incredibly unethical and pushes all of science back. we need to have a friendlier environment where honest mistakes can be brought forward without shame and a culture that promotes slow science that isn’t always flashy; sometimes you’re just helping fit one small piece of the puzzle and that is ok and admirable
Science currently looks like somebody going to fish, with the purpose of caught the best fish in the sea.
So first they put the bait inside a plastic box, to weed out all the dumb fishes.
Then they put the box inside another sealed wooden box, with a combination lockpad. Because only a really smart fish with skilled fin-paws should be able to figure out how to open also that box.
For better measure, they finally put the wooden crate out of the water, to select for olympic fishes able to keep its breath for a longer time.
And then put an electronic device in the bottom with an encrypted map to the treasure. When some fish will appear will be the most stupendous fish in the sea, with the most brilliant scales; And everybody will be happy to eat it
And then science waits...
and waits some more,...
a little more...
And after one year, science starts wondering where all the fishes go, and why all of the candidates that appeared are rats.
If you put too much requisites and ask for only ideal flawless careers, made in some unicornia university; in the short time the candidates interested in your job position will start lying. After a while all that remain at your door are cheaters
So, well... enjoy the fruits of your brilliant strategy.
This reminds of a completely different joke about fishes, and getting caught:
Police officer stops someone for driving over the limit. The driver:
- But I wasn't the fastest going on the road. What about the others?
- So when you go fishing, do you always catch the biggest fish?
"If you put too much requisites and ask for only ideal flawless careers, made in some unicornia university; in the short time the candidates interested in your job position will start lying. After a while all that remain at your door are cheaters"
Are you saying doing science is so hard the only way to succeed is to cheat?
This is a slap in the face to scientists doing honest work.
How is it a slap in the face? The point is the metrics by which academia judges science have been divorced from what actually produces good science for a while (and you'll find very few scientists who disagree with that), but it does reward cheaters quite well.
Sure in the short term dishonesty might work for a scientist but long term? Legacy after death? I'm not so sure on that.
Surely the conditions for being a professional academic are much more favorable than times in the past. (By virtue only that University is more accessible to more people today than any other time)
Just because we see flaws today doesn't mean that those flaws can not be 'fixed'.
(Nor that we won't discover new flaws and new fixes: engineering is an interative process).
Well, cheaters are generally more interested in the short term than the long term, and non-cheaters have to content with it too, before they can get to the long term.
> Surely the conditions for being a professional academic are much more favorable than times in the past. (By virtue only that University is more accessible to more people today than any other time)
If anything this has made things worse in the current system, because it has grown so much more competitive. Competition is good only so far as success in the competition is based on contributing to the overall goal, and academia lacks a good alignment between that and rewards, so the competition has some fairly significant negative effects.
I agree there are likely ways to fix the current system, but it will require a concerted effort from many directions, as the current incentive structure rewards many in the current system for perpetuating it.
I'm finding the responses in this whole thread a strong argument for making STEM majors take more social science courses. Econ too, probably, especially behavioral. Way too many are a freshman-level bad "reading" of the situation & systems at play, and of the positions staked out by the more-reasonable posts. And some of the posts are even worse than that—straight-up basic reading comprehension failures.
God's sake, you need to be able to think better about these kinds of things than this to understand business. It's all human systems—you ask for bad behavior, you get bad behavior, and sitting around tut-tutting over the people doing the bad behavior won't do jack-shit to fix things, no matter how good it feels. It's immature as hell.
Ok, but the best way to react to wrong comments is to post correct information. Then the rest of us have something we can learn from. At present it's not even possible to tell which comments you're complaining about, or why they're wrong.
Putting down groups of other commenters just makes the thread more dyspeptic, even if you're right.
Fair. I don't find HN correctable when it veers off of tech topics—confidently-wrong and often ideologically-fixed while lacking basic education in a topic is a bad mix; some folks try, but it mostly just adds to the noise or ends up... well, here, which similar-tone tech-related observations do not, they typically have to get much nastier first and these kinds of general and ought-to-be-obvious expressions of bafflement get a pass, I guess because the HN "hive mind" more often experiences the same "WTF?" as the poster, in those cases.
... however, complaining about it doesn't help, sure, and I'm aware that posting (in basically any capacity...) doesn't improve it, so, shouldn't have posted. I'll leave it be, thanks for the deserved "bop".
I do wish there were a way for HN to get better at this specific thing, as it's always been about the same amount of bad, and avoiding non-tech topics doesn't seem to be something HN's interested in doing ("it's hard to define what that is" well, yes, but other tech-focused forums manage regardless—but they also get less engagement, and that does matter for this site's advertising purposes, I get it).
I think downplaying identity was a good idea to try and I like the ideals of it and appreciate what it's trying to achieve, but I'd say the evidence is firmly favoring the "failed" column for that experiment. We see the same people having the same extensive bad exchanges over and over, and identity helps avoid that with group-education about repeated behaviors by certain posters in certain contexts. Changing course might help with this and some of the other most-acute issues on the site. I expect nothing, just putting it out there. I know, unsolicited opinions are like assholes :-)
Failing that, user-managed blocklists would be a godsend—I know those come with their own problems, but it'd be well worth it on here. Bonus points if you could have separate lists for tech and non-tech posts (I know, tricky, that's why it's bonus points, haha). Some posters exclusively post uninformed flamebait nonsense (within the threshold of "HN Nice" so it keeps happening—not a dig at moderation, that's a Hard Problem in that space) in non-tech threads, but do contribute positively to tech threads. ("so correct them" -> folks do, that's how the threads keep happening, it's like sitting in on a 101 course mostly attended by non-majors who are nonetheless passionate about their uninformed position, and arguing with the professor and won't accept they may be wrong—it's not productive or enlightening) It'd be lovely to never see that again, but get to keep reading the site. Blocklists are the #1-100 features I'd add to the site, if I had a genie that could grant 100 only-HN-feature-related wishes.
Show me someone that questions the scientific method. You would be hard-pressed to find a reasonable person who does. When people criticize "science" they are almost always criticizing academia. Getting pedantic isn't very helpful.
I don't know I think pointing out that OP is talking about academia can help with finding actual root causes. It wasn't a way to criticize the notion in any way. Using two things like science and academia interchangeably is not a minute detail IMO
That would have been a better comment without the dig. I suspect the person you're replying to would find "Against Method" interesting (assuming they haven't already read it).
Apart from the fact that you seriously overestimate the amount of science being done in industry, you seem to also underestimate the amount of government assistance industry receives for doing this research (and more development), either through tax breaks or direct grants.
I think the takeaway is that the scientific method is great, but since science is necessarily conducted by humans, the economic incentives within context of "doing science" also need to be correct for good science to get done.
(Currently, it seems like, this is very often not the case. Hence, your trust in current-science-as-conducted should be correspondingly lower. Lots of variation by field, probably, too.)
(Though then again maybe you shouldn't even believe anything until you see it having actual real effects in your day to day life?)
That's not what he means, he's saying the pressure to constantly publish original research (the more original the better!) creates these incentives to become a rat, that is, to cheat.
That's bullshit, though. Pressure is not an excuse to fabricate data, and no one will defend that claim out loud. But what else does a rambly comment about how hard it is for researchers mean under a story about data fabrication?
The point is it's not an excuse, but it's not surprising that given that pressure those who fabricate data have an edge in the system compared to those who don't. (i.e. if you create an environment where the only way to succeed is to be fraudulent then of course it's going to be populated by frauds)
The original comment calls the people fabricating data "rats" and "cheaters", I'm not sure how you would construe that to be excusing them. The comment is describing that if a system is made to be so difficult you have to cheat to get past it, only cheaters will get past it.
Fraudsters are surprisingly less motivated to excuse themselves to you than most people. Surprisingly you can't depend on them for anything, so one should instead focus on the systems that reward people who commit fraud.
I'm going to assume that Ranga Dias is having a very bad week.
His major discovery, assuming it's real, is room-temp superconductivity in nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride. Trouble is, anything which contains lutetium is going to be intrinsically more scarce and much more expensive than the lead-and-copper RT superconductor that was announced a few days ago. Doped lutetium crystals are also much more difficult to prepare -- and, even more troublesome, it seems they only work at 1 GPa pressure, which is absolutely non-trivial and makes them much more difficult to utilize than commonplace superconductors that can simply be cooled with LN2.
...Oh, and it might not even be real. [1]
To have a different research group discover your holy grail, as you're stuck defending yourself from misconduct allegations, must be an incredibly bad feeling.
Timing, yes, but the Korean paper seems to be a lot more verifiable/falsifiable. No obfuscations and the method that they describe only needs some fairly basic reagents and equipment for replication, plus a few days' worth of time. If they are wrong, we should know pretty soon.
at the end of the day, all of academia is part of the larger "publishing industry"...
though I think that to keep up with the scale, maybe I should call it "publishing institution" (alongside, government institutions, organized crime institutions (arguably blended with the government in some places), industrial institutions, and merchant institutions like banks)
so then, journalism was the first to be redrawn by the internet technology when tech companies became the biggest advertisers in the world. then music, even 'BIG entertainment' is on strike.
and now academia is having its moment, and so many things are unraveling as well
When people talk about stories like this they're invariably discussing the numerator without the denominator. Count up every story about research malpractice that has ever been on HN, and you're not even in the vicinity of 1% of all the research done every year; a truly huge amount of research is published every year, in every field.
The question is how much of that stuff is fraudulent or at least suspect: you'll find that most scientists are skeptical of a large fraction of papers published in their field, there is a lot of crap that gets through peer review, and most will not get openly questioned because it's a lot of effort and quite high-risk, especially if it's a result that's of low importance.
Yes, the label "peer review" is meaningless. There are good peer review processes at top journals and conferences and getting through those is a meaningful accomplishment. Then there are also worthless peer review processes at lower quality avenues. Getting through those is like getting a participation trophy. Yes, you need to show up on time, but not much more than that.
The real peer review happens afterwards, when other researchers actually engage with your work.
I see that the mathematics ultimately provide the basis for a lot of that research, which can be summed up as measuring various things, recording the measurements, and publishing the whole thing. But it's all built on the same essential math at the foundation.
and the mathematics is duplicated a lot to, but this is hard to see, you'd need a 'real' expert, of the kind that can be hand counted
This is true, but as in many areas, power laws apply. The vast majority of research has very low impact and mostly serves fulfilling publication quotas. There is likely plenty of scientific fraud happening in lower tier publications as well, but no one notices because no one cares.
How is this academia’s moment? People have been publishing bad science since its inception, its why we made tools like peer-review which predate the internet.
also this https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=202307201... which is bad because the academia is intended to be above this "petty geopolitics". as far as I know academic collaboration didn't quite stop either during the cold war, but I was born after it was over so I don't really know this, might be wrong.
and more than all these, the whole sci-hub debacle is the biggest telltale.
this is not about good or bad science, but about the money incentives.
maybe I'm in a news-bubble, but I also see things about postdocs being a fraud, even PhD's are now a dubious gamble?
and then I add my personal experience doing a masters at a public 3rd world country university, and I just hope it burns to the ground, which is a bad idea to dwell on.
"One of the most internationally cited scientists, Ai Koyanagi, forced to renounce her controversial contract with a Saudi university"
"The psychiatrist, currently employed in Spain at the Sant Joan de Déu Research Institute, declared that her main place of work was King Abdulaziz University, with the aim of elevating the Arab institution in the international rankings"
And is not the only researcher in that gravy train:
"Seven highly cited Spanish researchers [employed by Spain], paid by universities in Saudi Arabia to increase their prestige [posing as fake full-time employees of that Universities]"
Experimental science is much more prone to fraud. An experimental scientist can misled the whole community knowingly for decades before anyone bothers to replicate their studies. The self correcting loop of science can be very slow.
A theoretical scientist will be caught much sooner and it will cause an irreparable damage to his/her reputation. Who will ever take them seriously after that?
I have a hard time understanding how anyone would think they would actually get away with doing something like this.
Every physicist in this field would pick the paper apart (probably more so due to the history of the subject matter) and in the end it would not be reproducible.
And it would be a result that most labs looking into this would try to reproduce.
Right. I’ve been thinking for awhile that Mr. Dias must have some sort of underlying mental issue to (apparently) repeatedly falsify research in an area that’s sure to attract loads of attention.
Imho he will surely lose his faculty appointment by the time this is over, and won’t have a prayer at getting another.
Well, most of that was about plastic semiconductors, not superconductors, but it is an impressive story of how someone can get away with a blatent fake for so long.
It's rather politically charged, but my favorite thing to recommend on YouTube in general is Innuendo Studios, particularly the "Alt-Right playbook" series. It's actually more widely relevant than the title might suggest too, since a lot of the tactics are more universal in politics now, no matter the party or persuasion.
Of those, "Endnote 2: White Fascism" I consider the most important.
Guess you don't know, if it is fake, do you?
All we have are a few point examples, the total fakery is an unknown.
For decades it has been noted that Math/Physics, are very difficult to peer review, because there might only be a few people that can understand each sub-field. And, since they all work together, there have been cases of 'collusion' in the past.
Social Sciences are not all fake, they do have reproducibility percentages over 50%. You can argue that isn't high enough for your taste, but it is a valid number. Maybe Physicist is in the >90%. That doesn't mean All social science is faulty, or all physicist are pure. They are different fields with different challenges with different ability to do measurements. So, it is hard to re-produce.
Lately, AI papers aren't able to be re-produced. Where is the hate for them?
HN has tendency to pile on to social sciences based on just the same sensational headlines without much knowledge of the fields.
If there was ever a more antithetical statement, it was 'trust the science', because science is supposed to make sense from a seemingly chaotic world and the 'rules' it discovers should be reproducible. The trust should be verifiable.
Unfortunately, this is further complicated by the simple fact that not everyone can even begin to evaluate whether a given information is bs. That is a problem.
Covid would not have even been recorded if it happened 100 years ago. Start flashing on the screen the numbers of people killed by drunk drivers every week and let’s get something done about that instead of crashing trust in our national institutions —- with no survivors!
How would you explain the fact that the “Spanish flu” was recorded? Covid surpassed Spanish flu as the deadliest disease in U.S. back In September 2021.
I think this is the "money shot" here, but I admit I am biased :-). I got into a heated debate years ago over the "harshness" of treating students who cheated on an exam. The details are not particularly important but they were obscured by the fact that they involved 'foreign' students at an American university who were expelled (and lost their student Visas) after they were found to have cheated on an exam. The outrage was how these foreign students were "singled out" while "American students doing the same thing were just scolded".
There wasn't enough information available to address whether or not it was discriminatory but my assertion that all students who cheat should be expelled was rebuked as overly harsh and met with calls of "In that case Universities will have to expel their entire student bodies!"
My controversial (if you would believe the responses) take is that these sorts of "minor" infractions against cultural expectations are the basis for corruption. Whether it is telling lies to cover inconvenient (and perhaps inconsequential) truths or cheating to pass an evaluation for which one had not invested the time and effort to prepare. Habituating this behavior creates a stain on all future actions.