3 ms·
Once we realized he got everything wrong, we went back to the material he used, the specimens he used, the thin sections he used, the maps he used. And we could
by shawn 8y ago
Once we realized he got everything wrong, we went back to the material he used, the specimens he used, the thin sections he used, the maps he used. And we could see that time and time again, he slightly changed this — or let's say he forgot," Ixer told Live Science.
One of these is a far more serious charge than the other. Scientists don’t fabricate data. At least, not if their work matters. And even then, the fabrications are usually discovered.
I guess the article feels strange because it’s stopping short of saying he was an outright fraud, but strongly hints at it. And that kind of conclusion seems to require more substantive evidence than they showed.
Old work is mistaken and superseded constantly. In physics, it’s only possible to falsify a theory, not to prove it’s true. So scientists can only be sure they’re wrong (or approximately correct, if you’re feeling glass-half-full about it).
But creating fake data reduces science to nothing more than an efficient method of converting money into mistaken ideas. It undermines everything science stands for.
Could anyone dig into the paper to find out whether he did in fact make changes to any data? Either he did and was lying, or didn’t and was mistaken. It’d be interesting to know precisely which.
- l0b0 8y agoUpvoted, but citation needed for "the fabrications are usually discovered." Basically the state of any research that nobody has tried to replicate yet is unknown.
- coldtea 8y agoIt's also a logical impossibility to really determine whether "fabrications are usually discovered" or not. We can only know about fabrications after they have been discovered -- so there could be 2x or even 10x as much that we don't know about and count among the "non fabricated" work.
- tlb 8y agoIt's not impossible. We know how many fabrications are discovered. You can take a random sample of papers and analyze them in depth to estimate the number of papers that are fabricated.
- coldtea 8y ago>You can take a random sample of papers and analyze them in depth to estimate the number of papers that are fabricated. That assumes that the fabrications in those papers will be revealed upon further analysis. And, what's worse, that such analysis is economically feasible. Most metastudies don't even verify the original results, just assume them as fine.
- tlb 8y agoThat's makes it merely expensive, not impossible. The Reproducibility Project got a long way on a modest budget. They replicated 100 studies, got similar results on only 35%, for $15M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project.
- l0b0 8y agoSince you're looking for a (presumably) small signal you need to analyse quite a lot of papers to determine anything. And of course, who can trust a giant analysis study without further analysis?
- rscho 8y ago>fabrications are usually discovered. I think you are being far too optimistic, here. It depends on your admittance threshold for "fabrication" but intentionally skewed interpretation of data seems to be the bread and butter of academic science in many fields.
- coldtea 8y ago>Scientists don’t fabricate data. At least, not if their work matters. Huh? Lots of prominent scientists have been found to do just that. >And even then, the fabrications are usually discovered. We only get to know about the ones that do get discovered, so there's no way to know if this happens "usually" rather than "rarely".