My brother is dying of a grade 4 brain tumor, and I've spend countless hours poring through papers. Horrifying to realize they may be falsified. I am always sceptical of pre-clinical studies since so many have tended to fail in the real world, but now I wonder how many were just fake? These aren't scientists but thieves robbing public money with no skin the game.
Reading through papers on cholangiocarcinoma: most of them ARE falsified. And I want to harm people for it. Only three new drugs in 29 years. And I can’t help but think it’s partially due to this.
Mother has stage 4 intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma.
The deepest irony is of course that they themselves are probably going to get cancer at some point and die years earlier than if they hadn't poisoned the science.
David Sabatini was anointed a future Nobel Laureate by the university-academic complex.
What's astonishing is that when his work was discovered to have silly photoshop manipulations, he reacted by calling (on Twitter) the people who caught him "steaming turds".
I'm a bit suspicious of your attempt to impugn Ackman, who is the leading voice in the fight against academic dishonesty... at Harvard... by women... not married to him... who tolerate Palestinians. His focus is oddly specific, if it's still an important contribution to scientific integrity.
That's a very long article that beats around the bush whilst simultaneously confirming that he violated the various institutes' policies, which is why he was fired. There is no alternative story presented there other than some background details.
These policies exist and require a zero tolerance application because sexual harassment can be done in a very subtle manner, often purposely, that allows the harasser an escape hatch, but the effects are no less impactful. Further, power dynamics will also very quickly catalyze any personal or working relationship. Thus, as a person in power, it is even more important to not have even the appearance of improper relations.
I can understand how lawyers can be scum and manipulative, but he was the one who let the relationship start the investigation.
The fact that Knouse had her own lab - she was not a subordinate of Sabatini - and she was the one primarily pursuing the relationship are rarely mentioned. Why is only one party being punished when both are culpable? It'd odd how the passive actor who, as you put it, "let the relationship start" has greater culpability than the one taking the initiative to start the relationship. Evidently the people enforcing these policies don't see women as equals, in their eyes women lack the same degree of responsibility and agency as men.
Furthermore, the claims that Sabatini had harassed other women are totally unfounded yet outlets continue to insist that Sabatini was a serial harasser.
There’s literally f.all point having peer review if the peer reviewers who passed this junk for publication aren’t the ones deciding if the paper needs to be retracted when this stuff comes out.
How are these journals retaining any prestige when this stuff is un-retracted?
The stink should be smeared all over all of them. The publishers should be sued into the ground for fraud given the exorbitant subscription fees. I can’t think of a single reason not to burn it all down.
Peer review means "other academics read the paper and provide feedback about whether the paper is novel, important, and clear." This usually involves a couple hours of work from the reviewer.
It is woefully incapable of detecting fraudulent data. How could it? Some fraud has been caught through statistical analysis of datasets, but this takes a lot of time and requires expertise that most academics don't have. Detecting faked images has an even less clear path that people can follow.
Academic fraud is bad. But it isn't like other ecosystems are more effective and capable of detecting fraudulent work.
The journals suck, but mostly for reasons totally unrelated to the limitations of peer review.
The peer reviewers are clearly capable of going back and reviewing the new criticism about the paper at the direction of the journal and deciding, “Yes. We didn’t see this at the time but the criticism is valid and the paper should be withdrawn.”
Note that there is presently no note on the publications that the papers should not be relied on in any way. The authors are pretending there is no problem which is utterly ridiculous and embarrassingly so. I’m not ok with that as the status quo. I don’t think anyone should be.
We need to burn these failed institutions down, and hard. A lesson needs to be taught to our larger terribly immature public: do this crap and you'll be destroyed.
"Dana-Farberications" is indirectly playing on the name of someone who presumably had nothing to do with these allegations, and who sounds more at the other end of the spectrum of respectability:
> Sidney Farber (September 30, 1903 – March 30, 1973) was an American pediatric pathologist. He is regarded as the father of modern chemotherapy for his work using folic acid antagonists to combat leukemia, which led to the development of other chemotherapeutic agents against other malignancies. Farber was also active in cancer research advocacy and fundraising, most notably through his establishment of the Jimmy Fund, a foundation dedicated to pediatric research in childhood cancers. The Dana–Farber Cancer Institute is named after him.
They or their estate are perfectly capable (maybe, depending on contracts) of removing their name from the institute. If you want to pay to have your name attached to something, you should be prepared to have your name attached to that something and its activities.
It always amazes me how lazy and amateurish this type of fraud is. Copying and pasting pictures? Can't even add a little fuzz? I'm often trying to teach scientists to code, if they actually learned they could fake data much more credibly. Schon[0] was another big one; he didn't copy images but rather numbers which made up graphs. Adding some noise would've been really easy. It makes one wonder how much fraud is never caught simply because the fraudsters are a little smarter.
A basic assumption in science is that the raw facts a scientist presents are true. People question the statistical methods, they question which conclusions are appropriate given the data, but raw data itself is assumed to be accurate. We apply a lot more scrutiny to clinical trials (for obvious reasons), but trying to apply that same standard to all research everywhere would be cost prohibitive and slow research by a huge amount.
A lot of journals use image-duplication detectors now (the post mentions ImageTwin.ai) so I expect this particular form of fraud will stop. I suspect cherry-picking data ("inappropriate data exclusion") is the most common form, and will remain so. It's very difficult (often impossible) to detect.
On the positive side, I suspect the impact of stuff like this is fairly minimal. Everybody in the field knows that experimental biology is difficult and results are untrustworthy. Even excluding outright fraud, it's really easy to just mess something up. Or get a result which is "true" but doesn't generalize, and so it's useless. Good scientists don't trust something just because it's in Nature/Science/Cell, if they really care about the result then they replicate it before building on it. This would remain true even if all deliberate fraud stopped immediately.
[1] I dunno about the mouse one, it doesn't seem to be a direct copy/paste and a good experimentalist will do a lot to ensure consistent conditions. Everything else is pretty blatant though.
This is all true, but think your conclusions are not correct.
I don't think this is true for everyone. If it is difficult, and easy to mess something up, then all the more reason to have as accurate results as possible. Fudging data isn't acceptable.
"Everybody in the field knows that experimental biology is difficult and results are untrustworthy"
"Good scientists don't trust something just because it's in Nature/Science/Cell, if they really care about the result then they replicate it before building on it"
-> But, I'm Joe Blow, I'm not setting up a lab to replicate every study I read about. This might be fine for a VC, test it before building something. But it forgets how many people might make smaller decisions based on an article in Nature or Cell.
or Extrema: I just read about the Higgs-Boson, do I need to not trust the results until I can build a collider and replicate it.
It's not actually fine for VCs. I recall reading somewhere (forget where) that VCs are loathe to invest in biotech because they've been repeatedly burned by startups spending a few million to set up a lab and then failing to replicate the academic result they wanted to commercialize. Getting a startup to the point where you can find out you've been defrauded is expensive, so they prefer to focus on computing where this isn't an issue.
> It always amazes me how lazy and amateurish this type of fraud is.
You mean how lazy and amateurish the fraud that is caught is. I just generally assume most of it is complete bullshit, because you have a group of highly-paid professionals producing write-only documents that nobody gives a damn about. This is a recipe for a constant level of low-grade fraud because people are lazy.
This is insane. As a researcher I had to take research ethics course, and obviously we study some cases of research misconduct and fraud. But this kind of stuff is next-level.
I know Sweden launched a national board to investigate research misconduct [1], I hope more countries do the same.
Though many of them look like outright fraud (anytime photoshopping is involved), I think some could be honest mistakes. If you have dozens of images that are small variants of the same study, it's very easy to misname one of the files or pick the wrong one when loading it into the image editor.
Exactly, honests mistakes can be made (happens to me), and it happened that I spotted some in a paper and contacted the authors and they publish an erratum (or not).
But this kind of photoshopping, done over a period, really gets me.
All rankings that attempt to compare the academic quality of universities are self-fulfilling prophecies.
Rankings influence prestige. Prestige influences perception, even among experts. Is Nature really going to reject that paper? It was written by a Harvard guy, after all.
And next, the number of "high-impact" publications (such as in Nature) is used to rank universities. Good luck...
You can have double blind papers and double blind research funding I guess to help that a little?
Not sure what else you can do. Table rankings are actually only applicable for undergrads in practical terms. At research level, You have world leading experts at random universities often, and then people who worked in top universities who advanced the field by none after decades.
I wonder how many universities actually mega climbed ranks in the past decades though
> I wonder how many universities actually mega climbed ranks in the past decades though
I know of one, the University of Chicago. And it did so by gaming the ranking metrics. It dropped its long and idiosyncratic application and adopted the Common App. The admissions rate tanked from above 40% less than twenty years ago to about 5% now simply because more students applied. Did the quality of the education change? I doubt it.
P.S. Chicago recently dropped out of the top 10 this past year for the first time since adopting the Common App, due to a change in the ranking formula. Which says more about the inside baseball of rankings than it does about the education on offer.
As someone who attended before and after the change: there was certainly no immediate effect. The consensus at the time (at least amongst my little circle of friends) was that adopting the Common App was an obviously short-sighted metrics play.
It's definitely been superficially good for my social life, but I remain very sorry that the Uncommon App is no longer around. It played a nontrivial role in my decision to apply in the first place.
As someone who would have been of age to apply to Chicago 20 years ago, lived in Chicago, and went to a Chicago college prep high school, it surprises me to hear the suggestion that Chicago had an acceptance rate comparable to that of Madison today. That sounds pretty high! It was perceived as an Ivy-grade reach school back then, and that's at a school that sent lots of people to Ivies.
Isn’t the rankings mostly supposed to be about research quality? Or do metrics such as undergrad admission rates also play a part? Maybe there are multiple rankings out there?
Desk rejects also happen regularly from Editors (who are not blind to the author names and affiliations). Editors can also make final decisions to accept or reject when reviewers don't agree.
Even in a blind peer review, the subject of study introduces another layer of bias in the process. Let's say two economics papers are submitted that discusses how people spend their last part of their pay check. One studies a pool of people across United States and other studies of people across Nigeria. Which one do you think is going to get positive review from editors and reviewers? The Nigeria paper might not even go to review. The editor is going to say something on the lines of "the focus of the study is too narrow for the journal" but won't say the same when it is across US. This is in addition to the trust issues with any research conducted outside western countries.
For researchers from the "low ranked" universities, the game is rigged against them and there is nothing they can do to swing it to their favour.
The peer review process isn't actually blind in practice. The number of experts working in a given problem space is small enough that they know most of their peers, and usually can identify at a glance who the author of a paper is, from the topic, writing style, and experimental design, which they can recognize from previous publications and correspondence.
This is true to an extent, but also overblown. There have been a few experiments testing this and people wildly overestimate their ability to unblind paper authors correctly.
(Not to dis Northeastern. They have some great professors, and do some great teaching and research. And the faculty of a university don't necessarily agree with the businesspeople.)
But if you think that kind of college rankings climbing is a concern, the climbing demand that college has evolved for students is worse, and has implications for tech industry, as I asserted recently:
I’m not sure that you can. What I’ve read is that in a lot of fields, the community is small enough that you have a reasonable idea whose work you are reviewing even if the author’s name is redacted.
Yes, Nature is absolutely going to reject that paper. I went to grad school at one of the very best programs in the world and know a ton of people who attended programs of similar caliber and had world renowned faculty as authors on their papers. People got their shit rejected all the time.
Yes, the bias you describe that makes people respect papers from well known sources more than papers from outsiders is real. But it isn't nearly as extreme as you describe it.
Peer review is difficult and unpaid. Also there are quite a lot of corrupt bastards who do peer review specifically to approve their friends papers and to stop other peoples.
If you are in a specialist field you generally know who's paper you are looking at - shaping review is a good way of getting ahead.
Ralph Moss’s “Cancer Incorporated” is a must read. It details the deep corruption in the oncology industry. Oncologists are paid a lot of money for each prescription. Clinical trials for new cancer drugs are absolutely full of shenanigans, such as cherry picking test subjects. New breakthroughs are announced weekly, but death rates remain unchanged from 50 years ago (aside from lung cancer deaths, which decreased due to anti-smoking campaigns).
Depressing.
It’s a very profitable industry, and profits corrode science.
This looks systemic. Cheating like this is probably rampant by now. Fresh students watched carefully as others in the department did it, and got promoted, finished faster, got funding and good positions. This on top of minimal repercussions if anyone got caught. These students become department heads and then everyone under them start tolerating it.
It spreads like a cancer. Apologies for the pun but it fits aptly here.
Think about it the other way...what would happen if they didn't cheat? Imagine spending 6 of your prime years in a lab doing experiments that refused to work...your hypothesis is totally wrong, etc. It is not hard to imagine a student in this situation resorting to this option, because it is barely an exaggeration to say their life depends on it.
> Imagine spending 6 of your prime years in a lab doing experiments that refused to work...your hypothesis is totally wrong, etc. It is not hard to imagine a student in this situation resorting to this option, because it is barely an exaggeration to say their life depends on it.
Actually that might be ok if the system allowed just publishing the results and saying "I had this hypothesis and it didn't work, here are the experimental results".
However, the main problem is they watch others around them who bend the rules and get away with it and succeed. The system overall seems to reward cheating, so they get "on board" with it, thus perpetuation the system.
Even more, once it becomes pervasive, the standards are raised for everyone. Now those who don't cut corners, to put it very mildly, are not even able to compete. Honest works becomes impossible. The choice is either leave or start cheating.
Sure, the Harvard president might have misquoted something.
And social sciences have a lot of difficulty re-staging the same trials to replicated them, but aren't doing it nefariously.
But here, a hard science, with hard data, and blatantly falsifying it. This is pretty unforgivable.
Just goes to show that scientists are human too and are no more inherently virtuous than those in any other field. Replication, whilst unsexy, is one of the few checks against human venality.
Man what a mess. I guess if you give someone something to optimize (publications) they will do so.
Science has become distracted by celebrity and money.
What a waste of grant money. I hope the NCI, NSF and NIH fund a program to route out scientific fraud, it is clearly needed.
When I was in grad school some fellow students were admonished for plagiarism but allowed to stay. I always think of who was denied a place by these folks.
The US has a whole department that is supposed to police scientific fraud, the ORI. It was set up in the 70s after a series of fraudulent studies caught the attention of Congress.
Unfortunately after a few failed prosecutions early in its history the ORI now does very little, only a handful of cases per year. Compared to the scale of the problem which is often measured in something like 50%+ or more of papers, it's just irrelevant. There is no "police department" you could staff up that'd be big enough to get a handle on this problem.
Hot take, but if the FDA hadn't raised the bar for clinical trials to where it sits now (specifically with regard to the expenses associated with bureaucratic approval and regulatory compliance), I'd expect we'd see far fewer falsified studies. When it's impossible to test an idea in the real world, bias and whimsy run rampant, free to rule the printed page. In the absence of empiricism, passing the vibe check passes for peer review.
How cheaply do you think you can run a clinical trial with human patients in the absence of bureaucracy? I imagine increased insurance and recruitment costs would eat up the difference.
I expect we could empirically look at how much trials cost 50 years ago on the assumption there has been a regulatory ratchet effect. I don't know how to find that data though...
A confounder here is that diseases targeting common ailments (pain, colds, etc.) have already been developed. The FDA requires that new medications be better than the existing ones one some axis. So before, you had to find people with pain. Then, you had to find women with pain. Then, you have to find pregnant women with pain. Then, you have to find pregnant women also suffering from gestational diabetes with pain.
That’s hypothetical, but it’s a real trend. Costs go up based on the number of people you have to sift through to find someone eligible.
Things like viagra (10 years ago) or ozempic are still in the honeymoon period where inclusion/exclusion criteria are broad enough that you can enroll lots of people in any given place.
Huh, a blast from the past. After dropping out of high school and before getting into college I remember visiting the DFCI once or twice to talk with one of the PhDs in there about suffix trees in bioinformatics. I even recognize some of the names in this article.
Weird to think I could have ended up working there if I had cut getting my philosophical act together short and set myself to my education immediately. It was a really cool place right in the center of the city near my high school.
Suffix trees are still rad and any DSA-inclined teenager will benefit greatly from learning them :)
Imagine a machine learning paper that released no code, and no data, and was funded by public money, and the IP was owned by a startup that was also funded by public money, and the PI was on the payroll. Laughable, right?
Generally there is more trust when the theory, the data collection, the data analysis, the model development, the product, and the application, are all completely separate and open. It also advances the science much faster. However, it definitely kills a lot of those monopoly profits.
I propose that there’s really no reason that pharmaceuticals research can’t progress in this manner, with great public benefit. And it would be so simple to enforce: all public grants require everything to be developed in the open, not just data release at the time of publication, or pre-registration, but full release at each stage, no patents, and a preference for funding independent dataset production rather than results. As it is, we pay for the research, then we pay monopoly prices for the drug. It’s like these companies don’t really do anything but collect money.
Also, If anybody knows of a way to donate money to cancer research in a way that doesn’t feed directly into somebody’s profits, please let me know. I have recently become loosely connected to a foundation that has been dumping a lot of money into Dana Farber, and this is highlighting a lot of my concerns as I learn more about the industry.
I look forward to seeing the Gell-Mann amnesia the next time an obviously cooked climate study comes out and people get all worked up over nothing.
If reading that makes you upset, do you have a rational reason why? Can you explain how climate science is immune to the social dynamics at work here? Or is it just knee-jerk offense at having your religious beliefs questioned?
I've had several HS friends go to Harvard. They all said the same thing - its for networking post graduation, the education itself is all smoke and mirrors.
My buddy said he had to take a botany class as a filler for some academic requirement for graduation. He said the entire class was to pick a tree out on campus and then describe how it changed over the course of the semester.
He maintained he had more rigorous classes in HS then he had at Harvard and said the progressive politics were so pervasive, that as long as you towed the ideological line, then you got favorable grades.
It would appear not much as changed since he was there in the early aughts.
Oregon (kind of) dropped requirements for very basic reading, writing, and arithmetic to graduate high school because such skills were deemed racist.
I'm not a big fan of standardized tests, but they can identify serious issues to address especially as it pertains to geographical, ethnic, etc. groups and allocate funding accordingly. If we keep lowering bars instead of addressing the issues, this is going to get very bad.
> Oregon (kind of) dropped requirements for very basic reading, writing, and arithmetic to graduate high school because such skills were deemed racist.
It’s ironic that this stance is actually racist, since it implies certain races perform worse.
No, it acknowledges that some groups in a society perform worse in tests.
There are many reasons for this to be the case [1] not just the classic "this race is inferior at test taking".
[1] Pre WWI, WWII Germany famously tested students for acedemic performance. During WWII and times of food scarcity from Allied blockades test performance dropped by greater than 10%. Same students, same race, different conditions.
Typically well fed, well exercised, unstressed, groups with sound economic security, home ownership, etc perform very well on tests.
You spun up a 6 minute old meconium account for that?
Let's just point out that testing in question took place across all areas of Germany, not just those famously occupied by the elite intelligensia that were moved on, also the rural areas occupied by the beer swilling fraus and blue eyed leden hosen knee slappers, and that test results improved with food quality.
Properly executing statistical tests makes you basically an Einstein in today’s academic environment. I’d wager that over half of peer reviewed ph.d paper authors don’t even begin to know the difference between a one tailed and two tailed T test.
Welcome to the world of striving for equity over equality.
Lots of blame levied at a strawman white culture. If only there’d be a concomitant critique of the problematic groups at hand. Alas, that’s verboten under the current regime.
Lowering expectations for those under their patronage only makes advantage easier for me and mine. Good luck to them and their token positions.
It is not racist to make an observation about race. It is racist to believe that one race is superior to another and act accordingly. For example, it is not racist to acknowledge the frequently measured metric that African Americans on average score lower than other races on scholastic aptitude tests. It is what one does with that observation that can lead to racism.
It is useful to define terms. Merriam-Webster has what I believe is a quite useful definition of racism: "a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race".
That is a useful definition because it helps to separate a racist interpretation of test scores from a non-racist interpretation. The racist interpretation is to jump to a conclusion of fundamental inferiority in academics. The non-racist interpretation is to acknowledge and emphasize the environmental factors that can lead an historically oppressed/displaced/enslaved minority to underperform academically, to acknowledge that African-born immigrants do quite well on standardized testing, and also to understand that standardized tests are normed on academic success, which creates a causality issue when measuring groups that have historically not been allowed in academic institutions. Perhaps all of those arguments don't hold water: or at least the pitcher holding them has holes of its own. But it is quite erroneous to jump to a conclusion of racial biological determinism, and that is what the racist conclusion would be.
There is a particular kind of fallacy where a person can, seemingly unconsciously, take what are perfectly valid observations, like the test-taking disparities, and spin them into non-evidential overarching beliefs. This happens all too commonly when it comes to scientific (or at least metrical) observations and racism. People were all too eager to embrace phrenology, IQ testing, evolutionary biology, etc. when it confirmed their cultural preconception that their race was superior. All of those areas, even phrenology, had some scientific merit to them (and still do in the case of IQ testing and evolutionary biology), but that merit is lost when the conclusions get spun into non-evidential belief systems like racist ideology. Seemingly (I can't peer into their heads, really) skepticism is lost in a chase for the personal gratification of a belief of fundamental superiority.
Discussions around academic standards are a case in point. Academic standards change quite frequently. The Oregon requirement we're discussing was only instituted in the early 2010's. When race is not part of the discussion, it is entirely normal for educators to say that a new standardized test doesn't really have evidence it serves the population and to remove it. There is a very lively debate amongst educators about how excessive measurement, i.e. standardized test taking, can interfere with the normal give-and-take of teaching. But, if the evidence is that non-native-English speakers are underserved, or that African-Americans are underserved, suddenly it is 'racist' to remove a requirement or hurdle. What I saw in the two articles is that those in favor of removing the requirement saw a lack of evidence it was beneficial, and saw evidence that it was not beneficial; while those opposed had no evidence other than it would graduate 'dumber' students; ignoring the fact that presumably dumber students were being graduated before the 2010's when the program was instituted.
In short, it is often a smokescreen to say that observations about race are racist, because that makes it impossible to act against inequality, or sometimes even to act at all. Once again, racism is the belief of one race's inherent superiority over another.
Let's just hope China and Russia and the like will do the same, otherwise, in the long run, the Western world might fall behind in areas like science ...
Could this be because Harvard is increasingly desirable & hard to get into? From this, the average standard of students + their dedication to their work/GPA may well have steadily grown too.
From a quick google, the acceptance rate to Harvard was 20% higher in the 70's. In 1940 it had an absolute acceptance rate of 85%.
I dont actually know the answer, but from that graph only, the rising rate could be as much from a higher standard of student as lowering standards of marking.
In the past a university education was 100% optional - as was high school for that matter, and so the only people pursuing such tended to be exceptional academic/intellectual outliers. The pool of people interested was very low, and standards were exceptionally high. For instance, this [1] is a Harvard entrance exam from 1869!
We don't routinely teach Classics in high school, so it's not surprising that those sections would be beyond most students today.
The sections on that exam dealing with Mathematics seem appropriate or possibly slightly on the easy side; I would expect an equivalent exam today to include at least a bit of calculus, but over the past 150 years there has been a shift in pedagogy towards calculus and away from geometry so it's probably just a sign of the times.
Well no. Being wealthy doesn't make you an academic outlier, and education used to be extremely affordable for anybody so interested in pursuing such. Consequently, many of the greatest minds of the past came from very humble beginnings.
For instance Harvard's first black graduate graduated in 1870 [1] (meaning he would have passed a test near to exactly like the one shared), and he was a remarkable man. He was left supporting his family as a teenager after his father ran away for the Gold Rush, and was unable to attend public school due to his skin color. Yet, he persevered and lived one amazing life far above and beyond becoming Harvard's first black grad. But people like him are far and few between - and those were the sort of people applying.
Those were a tiny minority of the people applying.
Nothing in that entrance exam requires an academic outlier. All it requires is a classical liberal arts education (Latin, Greek, classic literature, history, geography, geometry)
Most people who attended higher education could do so because wealthy children received such an education above and beyond what the poor received (and because the could also afford college thanks to that wealth).
In the early 19th century Harvard cost a total (everything from tuition to clothes, housing, vacations, and servant) of about $8,400 inflation adjusted. [1] And in times before we turned the money printer on, inflation was very stable - even occasionally dipping into deflation, so that's going to be quite close to what it would have cost in the late 19th century as well. And there was no opaque system for admission. If you passed that test, you were in. Well at least until the early 20th century when Harvard decided too many Jews (who were anything but elite/rich at the time) were being admitted, so they created a racial quota system. The only requirement was academic excellence.
And on that note of excellence, that test is going to completely destroy most of anybody, let alone high school grads. The breadth of knowledge demanded paired with the extensive depth of such is something very few are practically capable of obtaining without an absolutely obscene amount of effort. Keep in mind this wasn't some sort of a take home exam or whatever, these exams were done on the spot - in an 8 hour window.
Today's high school grads wouldn't do well because their education covers entirely different topics. They don't learn Latin and Ancient Greek, and history and geography don't focus almost entirely on Ancient Greece and Rome (unlike 7/9 of the questions on that section of the test).
The math section has some hard wanky arithmetic and by-hand computations using logarithms. Modern students would struggle because that hasn't been a focus of math education since the invention of the calculator. Your average physics professor would struggle with that because no one needs to do that stuff by hand any more. A modern Harvard applicant would ace that algebra section. The geometry section is 50/50 - there's still plenty of geometry in modern education but it no longer involves memorising Euclid.
On the other hand there's no calculus/analysis which is probably the biggest focus of higher-level high school math - something an applicant of that era would be flummoxed because it wasn't part of classical math education. There's also a complete dearth of any of the natural sciences which was again neglected in a classical education.
I'm telling you that that's not an intrinsically difficult exam, it just covers areas that were the focus of an upper class classical education of the time. You're confusing a different educational focus with intrinsic difficulty. If your math education up to the age of 18 was 90% long-form manual computations and memorising Euclid's Elements you'd ace that section too.
You can't just take what you know about modern education and retrofit it into the past. The system was just so ridiculously different. To start with the overwhelming majority of people, low and high class alike, had very limited formal education.
I tried to find a list of Harvard graduates of the era to demonstrate this, but the best I could come up with is this [1] list of Harvard presidents who all tended to be distinguished graduates themselves. It's quite unfortunate, because these are ostensibly the cream of the crop - which kind of plays into your class stuff, but I think even this sample also works to largely reject it. In any case it's quite interesting to read their bios!
For instance check out guys like Thomas Hill [2]. He had very minimal formal education, yet was a sponge for knowledge, and learned what was necessary to achieve - and achieve he did. Another is Jared Sparks [3]. Educated in common schools (which most certainly were not teaching Latin/Greek and other advanced topics) before he went to work at a variety of trades and then (presumably after saving up some money) attended a private school at the age 20+, before finally making his way to Harvard.
Basically it's not like you just went to school, graduated, and then applied with the knowledge you'd gained - at least not in general. In a world where education was optional, those who pursued it tended to do so out of passion and from that passion exceptional competence also tended to emerge.
Without knowing the academic context the paper is a bit meaningless. Incoming students were obviously expected to have studied Greek and Latin, for example. And I doubt mathematical education was the same; the focus of teaching would have been different because calculators only sort-of existed which would radically change how much rote work was taught and practised.
Fully support the observation that university meant something different in those days though, the standards were much higher. Although I'm not sure if that would apply at Harvard since their class sizes probably haven't changed by all that much.
One thing is certain. I’d not get into Harvard in 1869.
Initially I thought it was all a rich kids game, but the later maths and geometry questions require you to know what you are doing. Of course thats easier with expensive tutors, but it’s entirely possible you’ll never grasp it.
Grade inflation has been happening at literally every institution. So you can't point just to Harvard. But a middle rated school can't take a stand, only the very top schools can start to, and they'd have to do it slowly to give employers and students time to adjust.
There are apparently advanced classes like Math 55 that had huge dropout rates that had to be cleaned up though. So those courses have been completely changed instead of just awarding higher marks I'd imagine.
There are plenty of 'middile rated schools, and even top 50' that have things like target average grades. It's also not uncommon across the world for entire programs to have dropout rates around 50%, it's just rare in reputable anglophone schools.
I would’ve preferred a less editorialized article about this. In particular, this article has left me wondering who’s actually written fraudulent articles and whose biggest mistake was trusting the wrong collaborators.
>biggest mistake was trusting the wrong collaborators.
This is no excuse, and allowing it to be an excuse is at the root of why things are going so wrong in Science. If your name is on the paper you 100% must own every word.
There should be some agreed sanctions for this kind of thing. I would recommend that if any paper is withdrawn all the authors should be prohibited from receiving government funding for 3 years, and they should be banned from publication & citation for 5 years.
I am thinking this would change the culture quite radically.
If researchers were unable to trust their collaborators, it would mean that they would have to master and oversee every step of every process. This would stop interdisciplinary research completely and massively reduce output.
In software, this would be the equivalent of not importing a package unless you first checked the code line by line.
The system works okay now, but there's a lot of room for improvement. I generally think the best way to improve it is to require more open data so that consumers of research can validate the findings of papers.
I think that you have to trust your collaborators, but that trust is being given far too easily at the moment because there is no consequence of it being betrayed.
In the old days a single dodgy paper meant ostracism. Literally - no meeting invites, no more grants, no promotion, no moves to another department. Nothing. You sat where you were in shame until you retired. You had to do a lot of teaching and admin as well.
I do not think that this is the case now, and folks know it and are acting that way.
Even the collaborators who did not engage in fraud show a shockingly low level of concern for correcting or retracting fraudulent papers their names are attached to. At this point, I think it is best to assume all involved are guilty and they should have to demonstrate their integrity by how proactively they work to correct the errors.
Not my field, but my understanding of how these things work in big medical research factories: first few authors tend to be young researchers (maybe med students or even undergrads) trying to match residency or get into grad school. They do much of the work actually assembling the submission. The later names on the author list (who this article is taking to task) run labs or oversee research groups. Should they correct the record when it's pointed out? Yes. (But the snark and tenor of the post doesn't exactly convince someone they can admit an oversight in good faith.)
Should they be vigilant enough to check and notice these things? Of course. Some of the fakes are not subtle. Others, like the copy-paste of empty space in the lane to cover some undesirable result? Way harder to spot with the naked eye. I don't think there was great automated tech to detect image duplication in the 00's when these were published.
So your med student fudges data on a paper. The ethical answer is to expel them—"the world needs plenty of bartenders." But it appears big institutions these days are pretty invested in the sunk costs of prestige, dislike admitting error in admission or hiring, and prioritize go-along-get-along environments. It could be career limiting if students don't get any/enough pubs working in your lab. It'd a lot of hearings and paperwork to report him, plus I heard his uncle's a donor. If she got kicked out she'd lose her visa. And if I reported them, I'd be obliged to report everyone, and I'd be sunk in discipline hearings three times a year. So much easier to just... not look very hard.
It's bad science and bad ethics, but if you want better, reform the incentives. "Public" shaming by a niche newsletter... might be better than nothing, but doesn't qualify as an incentive.
They won't correct the record because they "can't admit an oversight" due to the snark in a niche newsletter...a newsletter which you then say isn't important enough to serve as an incentive? So which is it, important or not?
I would think they can't admit an oversight due to the institutional incentives you mention; the snark is irrelevant. If anything, it encourages publicity for the oversight, which is the only thing that might change the incentive.
Different things. The snark plays to individual psychology in the moment. When someone comes at you in a way that's demeaning and clearly states that they think you shouldn't have the position you have, that's a bad way to start a conversation where you're supposed to admit error. More likely, you avoid them.
To the real brass tacks incentives: yeah, it's "someone is angry on the internet" vs, "I will have to deal with a discipline process with documentation and meetings and maybe depositions and adversarial lawyers. That's not my bag, I'm a scientist. There will be volatile young people and bad feelings communicated in person, plus gossip among my close coworkers. Also undesirable. If this becomes a repeated pattern, learners might start avoiding my lab, and deans/my superiors might start asking very awkward questions." Yeah, stacked against that, angry person on the internet is a weak incentive. Even if they're right.
And the snark does matter. Because this guy writes like a YouTube comments section, and that's not how you talk to adults or solve problems in elite institutions. So the contrast in styles draws lines of "us" vs "them." And it's natural to care more about the opinions and esteem of your in-group (who talk like you) than the out-group (who deride you).
I think the snark comes from having screamed about the situation for years and years and no one listening.
Let's all remember what we are talking about here: every single one of us will know someone who will die several years early because of scientific fraud. It is reasonable to be angry as hell.
> Because this guy writes like a YouTube comments section, and that's not how you talk to adults or solve problems in elite institutions
Indeed, we've seen how the polite approach is so hard to ignore/avoid that the adults in elite institutions solve problems before snarky folks wake up!
There’s no individual psychology at play here. It’s not a conversation between peers. This person is already in the out-group by bringing this subject up at all. They have no institutional power. It’s not as if they just have to act like an adult and file some paperwork to get this fixed. They need to make a lot of noise to embarrass people who do have power into asking those awkward questions. Being tweetable (X-able?) also makes it more likely those volatile young people will hear about it before they join the lab.
In medical research no, last authors usually know little about what's going on. There are entire departments where the head puts his/her name on everything that comes out. We're talking tens of papers a year...
I went into it way before I knew how well it would pay - in fact, back then (and there) it paid ok, but nothing like "unicorns" and Google's seven figure salaries were even remotely something you could conceptualize, let alone think it'd be reality someday. It's lucky in the US it pays really well, but I'd likely be doing it anyway if it paid less well. Don't generalize that readily and broadly.
I was so fortunate to get in at a startup paying $90k/y usd in 2004.
Now I’m poorly paid compared to the people I “mentor” at $160k + bonuses with no RSU. But at least I’m working on stuff I care about.
I hear these fresh college grads getting $300k offer that have the right university on their meaningless tech degree they drank 24/7 to achieve, and I just want to scream. In three years I’ll be rejecting them for positions writing the software that makes their current employer run.
I’ve nixed so many Amazon and Facebook employees in the interview process that couldn’t answer anything about basic programming skills. Their answers were just “I’d use this off the shelf solution”. Well sorry, but we create that off the shelf solution or an alternative. So you actually have to know how to use binary arithmetic. Bye bye brat.
Amazon has over 30k engineers. I'm sure there are mediocre ones among them - thousands probably. But for a lot of tasks in the company of Amazon's size, "I’d use this off the shelf solution" is exactly the right answer. Sometimes it isn't, but there would be thousands of places where it is.
> I hear these fresh college grads getting $300k offer that have the right university on their meaningless tech degree they drank 24/7 to achieve, and I just want to scream.
But why? Assume everything you say is right and somebody makes a lot of money undeservedly. Why should it make you scream? You're not paying that money. Some rich idiot does. Why be upset about it? Are you envious? Wasn't what you're doing your own choice?
This comment breaks the site guidelines, as have some others that you've been posting. Can you please not do this? We're trying for something other than slow internet degradation here.
You are of course welcome to administer this site as you wish. However: This site hasn’t represented balanced discourse or intellectual debate in at least a decade.
I’ve watched it become just yet another Ivy League and big tech echo chamber as YC has pursued its existing investments over its stated goals and creative ideals.
I don't think HN has changed that much, but perceptions differ. Perceivers also change, though—especially over a longish time frame like a decade.
I can tell you for sure that we don't run HN to "pursue YC's existing investments". We're trying to optimize for intellectual curiosity [1] because that's the way to maximize HN's value for YC [2, 3]. The point is that it's in YC's business interests to run HN this way, and the argument holds no matter how cynical one wants to be about it.
HN is an interesting corner case in internet economics. If we tried to optimize it for existing investments (or worse, tried to squeeze money out of it directly), its value would go down, because that would make it less interesting to the community, and HN's value comes from the interest and quality of the community. Basically: the more one tried to make money out of HN, the less it would be worth. That's interesting, no?
I suppose you could say HN's value comes more from future investments, not existing ones. We can optimize HN for that by having it be as interesting as possible, so people want to continue to hang out here. (Btw, that phrase "as possible" is important. There are limits on how good or interesting a large public internet forum can ever get. But we can try.)
And yet the world does in fact improve year over year. Kicking and screaming, but still moving forward. Technology and science improves and that compounds.
I don't know, it's another chip in the foundation, straw on the camel's back. While none of this is new to me, and was one of the reasons I left academia for industry a very long time ago, the general population are becoming increasingly distrustful of the academics, and trust once lost is very difficult to get back.
The "foundation" of Harvard is institutional power. Academic excellence is at best a consequence of that. I can guarantee that Harvard's many powerful alumni aren't going to let that institutional power be eroded, regardless of how bad academic standards ever become. And they control sufficiently many other institutions to ensure that Harvard retains its shine, at least to the outside world.
What’s the end state? Harvard eventually doesn’t even have to provide an education. It’s role is as a manufacturer of prestige. It selects N people a year, deems those people “elite,” and those people end up employed in elite investment banks and consulting companies because they were deemed elite by an institution with that power. Those elites then go on to recruit the next year worth of elites.
I mean, this already is happening in name brand education institutions. The value is all in the name and network of fellow elites, and the education itself is largely irrelevant. I’d name schools, but I bet a lot of HN readership got their first lucrative FAANG jobs based entirely on their attendance at one of these institutions…
The end state is very close to the starting state, unfortunately. Bureaucracies that select their own incoming ranks are very, very hard to reform from the outside. The liberal reforms of the 18th and 19th centuries such as checks and balances were devised to counteract this tendency. Many universities predate these reforms.
Yeah. While these specific professors or schools or research institutes may not see any immediate consequences, the general opinion of universities has been increasingly taking a beating. That's a dangerous thing in a place where there's an everpresent conservative drumbeat of anti-intellectualism in general and the liberal elites in their ivy towers. I'm not sure what the ultimate consequences will be for US universities might be if this course continues, but it won't be good.
The problem with the left having a stranglehold on culture, and especially academic culture, is that its sacred cows are left un molested to the point they forget they have any. Healthy at any size is a personal favorite because of how immediately obvious it is false to even the most causal of observers yet academics and doctors will line up to preach that ridiculous gospel. When people see those who have died from Covid while being clearly morbidly obese being described in the news media as perfectly healthy with no preexisting conditions - it does beg a few questions.
I guess you can choose between worrying about the influence all these corrupt, ivory tower intellectuals have on society, or worry about them getting caught for it…
Anti-intellectualism is a very real thing in this country, and mostly found in ultra conservative circles. For example, it is VERY popular at certain rallies to believe that 1) Obama is still running the show behind the scenes as a communist, AND 2) Donald won in 2020, AND 3) Donald is the current sitting prez, AND 4) that the January 6th hilarity was both 4a) a psy-ops by the then Speaker AND 4b) those brave patriots that were involved are political prisoners.
These are ANDs, not ORs. They are often all believed at once.
Anti-intellectualism and a distaste for upper education in general because it "indoctrinates" is not fringe. Keep in mind no one in power of any political party actually believes ANY of that but it is one of the popular drum beats.
Q Anon is a modern incarnation of the Soviet counter intelligence program ‘Operation Trust’ when combined with the deliberate Pied Piper strategy it should be understood that the craziness of these people is something that was intentionally done to them by cynical political operatives.
Painting all conservatives with the same brush as "ultra conservative" (whatever that means) is disingenuous. Idiots abound in all walks of life. Better to judge individuals than to judge a whole group by the actions of a few.
Really, it reads like you need to talk to more real people. If I were to watch videos of blue haired liberals all day I might get the impression that all liberals are that way. That just isn't true. It is an extreme that is not representative of the group as a whole. The liberal/conservative line isn't as distinct as media makes it out to be. Most people hold views that belong in both camps.
I agree, hence said "it is VERY popular at certain rallies". The "ultra-conservative" label = a huge % of that party. No assumptions whatsoever about people who believe in economic Darwinism, lower corporate taxes because the ultra ultra rich earned it, no welfare state because bootstraps, etc.
The other side of the aisle is rarely an opposing party. Outside USA it's common knowledge, inside USA they're communists somehow. The parties work hand-in-hand to protect the tippy top (remember the overlord unelected barely official Parliamentarian when the other side had House, Senate, Prez in 2020 who stopped any progress, similar in 2009). It's mostly for show.
The topic I brought up is _anti-intellectualism_ which is championed by one side far moreso than the other. We're speaking of the weight and desire and scandal around upper education devolving for various reasons. I mentioned one. What is your opinion?
