16 ms·

We're Incentivizing Bad Science

341 points by slowhand09 7y ago

WhompingWindows 7y ago
First issue: publications. I think this is not a big problem in the USA relative to China. Is there evidence of American scientists who have greatly benefited in reputation and prestige, despite doing very shoddy work? Many scientists have been rebuffed and rejected from grants/awards due to not having enough publications. American scientists, though, are more attuned to the quality and integrity of journals in which publications appear. Whether for tenure or grants, a Nature or Science or Cell paper will mean a LOT, and many scientists evaluating other scientists wouldn't care much about a journal publication with Impact Factor under 1.0. Meanwhile in China, there are numerous article-factory-journals that are pay to publish, you can put your shoddy work in those and amp up your publication count easily. Surely, these exist in the USA, but are career scientists at major institutions utilizing these shady Chinese journals? There is evidence that some of these Chinese journals are publishing straight up BS, which is especially easy to do with data analysis where you could "clean" your data easily. Perhaps it is a cultural or political difference, but I don't see nearly as much rigorous self-reflection of Chinese scientists on this front? Second issue, grants: publications are a small slice of this story. Science departments (not humanities) in universities are MAJOR revenue generators for the University. My university took 1/3 of your grant straight off the bat, to cover overheads like shiny facilities and administration and marketing. Meanwhile, the scientists themselves may make huge salary bonuses or advance their tech/staff substantially when they have substantial grants. So, getting a grant is great for you personally, and improves your chances of further grants. So, is it really that surprising that there may be pressure to publish at all costs, to p-hack, to reach for those low-impact journals despite their lower reputation/impact, given both universities and scientists are BOTH massively financially benefited from this incrementalism? Does it really pay to reach for pie-in-the-sky, fundamental sea-changes in your field? It seems like a high variance, high risk strategy that only very bold, well-funded, devil-may-care scientists would employ.
- rocketflumes 7y ago
  I can't comment on China and other fields, but in the US for AI and robotics, in which I do research / publish in, there is definitely a growing trend of an over-emphasis on novelty research that disregards reproducibility in favor of "wow" factors and fancy demo videos. A lot of highly cited research papers/labs tend to be the most heavily promoted ones (on Twitter, in the press, etc), and they're not necessarily impactful/useful for the rest of the field.
  - K0SM0S 7y ago
    Amidst this worrying trend of shallow research, begging for petty cred and grants more than knowledge, you have to wonder what has become of ethics, of integrity in science. Globalized academia needs some soul-searching, IMHO.
    - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
      " you have to wonder what has become of ethics, of integrity in science" When was there any more ethics or integrity in science than any other time? The AIDS crisis was a shitshow of choosing prestige and recognition over the lives of a generation. The discovery of DNA was off a woman who was hardly recognized. Henrietta Lacks' cells. The syphilis experiments.
      - dekhn 7y ago
        The discovery of DNA was done by Friedrich Meischer, a brilliant Swiss biologist. At the time, nobody knew what the nuclein he purified did (and, the results were considered so surprising that his own thesis advisor redid all the experiments manually before letting the data be published). What you are referring to is the use of Rosalind Franklin's X-ray fibre diffraction images by Watson and Crick to elucidate the 3D structure of DNA, and, depending on the accounts you read, whether she got due credit is arguable. She did publish in the same Nature journal issue as W&C (https://www.nature.com/articles/171740a0.pdf https://www.nature.com/articles/171740a0.pdf), she got credit for the photos (see the acknowledgements in the W&C paper, http://www.nature.com/genomics/human/watson-crick/ http://www.nature.com/genomics/human/watson-crick/), and she was dead by the time the Nobel Prize decision was made (so she could not have received the prize). I understand many feel very strongly that she was cheated, and while I do believe she was definitely slighted and not given enough credit, the underlying story is fairly complicated. I recommend reading both Dark Lady and Eighth Day of Creation and then forming your own opinion. personally I thought her personal diaries, which she willed to Aaron Klug and were used in the writing of Eighth Day, were really illuminating.
Vaslo 7y ago
I agree with this article and have always thought about this but never voiced it. I think a few things could improve the quality and discovery of published papers: -After so many publications, could it be mandatory for random samples in that author’s publication be tested? I get that there is a limit on resources, but some advanced undergrads could do this with guidance. -I would love to see some version of a journal of failures. That is, well intentioned research that had poor outcomes. It was so frequently in Chemistry research that my compounds were useless or the methods to synthesize them did not work, and it would be helpful to document that. Unfortunately, there is no “Journal of Failed Chemistry.” Only research that ostensibly make a contribution with a clear outcome get published. So much time wasted experimenting where you could save another scientist time and encourage them down another path.
- djtango 7y ago
  >It was so frequently in Chemistry research that my compounds were useless or the methods to synthesize them did not work, and it would be helpful to document that. This mirrors my experience where a lot of the post-docs carried war stories of things like lab/country-specific humidity playing a role in synthetic methods succeeding (or failing). There were a lot of dark arts/tricks of the trade that people carried around with them: stuff like going that extra mile to dry things of water super thoroughly (even if it was not mentioned in the paper we were referencing).
  - ISL 7y ago
    Many "dark arts" aren't known as dark arts to the people who know them. They're just the things you always do, because if you don't do them, nothing works. An approximate CS analog: Writing great commit messages, and using an SCM. You don't have to do them, nobody writes it up because those who know regard it as trivial, but if you don't do them, almost nothing works. Everyone who knows what they're doing does it.
    - djtango 7y ago
      >An approximate CS analog: Writing great commit messages, and using an SCM. This is definitely not the analogue. The analogue is always doing a clean install of the OS before running your experiment. Or only ever using Arch version x.y.z for replicating lab 1 and maybe a.b.c for replicating lab 2. It's knowing all the magic undocumented JVM flags ahead of running the application. Some you know to use as part of war scars/best practices. Some are just pure inside information from working in that lab or having a personal relationship with people in that lab.
SirLuxuryYacht 7y ago
How do you quantify rigor?
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  In mortises?
knzhou 7y ago
I don't want to sound too triumphant, but over here in fundamental physics we have decades-old safeguards in place against all these problems. The big experiments don't have publication bias: they proudly say exactly what they did, even if 90% of the time there are only negative results, because exclusions are important too. Experiments are inherently replicated, with multiple independent simultaneous experiments (LHC) or multiple independent analyses (EHT), data blinding throughout, and even occasionally a further layer of blinding using decoy signals (LIGO). The statistical standards for discovery are, in terms of p-values, about 10,000 times more stringent, and even still people are moving away from p-values entirely. The resulting publications are put out for free, publicly, on the ArXiv. Later they are submitted to a relatively small family of low-cost journals, which everybody knows the reputations of. Hopefully some of these lessons can be adapted to other fields.
- SiempreViernes 7y ago
  cought 750 GeV cough... ahem. Let me sing you an OPERA about a how Andrei Linde was astonished by the biggest BICEP you've ever seen! It belonged to a LIBRA* that was faster than light and could fly trough walls! * Couldn't get DAMA to work :(
  - knzhou 7y ago
    Sure, but there's a difference between the accuracy of speculative theory and experiment. Experiment is very reliable -- they never called the 750 GeV bump a discovery of anything, because it didn't meet the statistical standards. Even things that do meet the statistical standards are often not called discoveries, because the experimentalists think they are systematic errors at play, as we see with MiniBooNE and DAMA. Speculative theory is not reliable, which is why all the papers on the 750 GeV bump were wrong. But it has never been reliable, because, well, it's speculative! For each new phenomenon there's probably only one right explanation, but far more than one paper. Being 99% wrong has been par for the course for almost a century.
    - SiempreViernes 7y ago
cde-v 7y ago
Market demands Bad Science, market supplies Bad Science. I do not see a problem here.
- buboard 7y ago
  Most of it is being funded by public means. Industries such as pharma, which rely on that science did point out the replication crisis in medicine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine
- glofish 7y ago
  A cynical view - alas it captures the truth. It is very easy to point fingers, to blame it on funding, blame it on journals, blame it on media, but in the end: - scientists decide who gets funded - scientists decide who gets published - scientists make exaggerated claims in the media The source of the problem is the scientists, not understanding the damage they are doing to themselves. I do foresee downvotes, because scientists do not like this idea at all :-)
majos 7y ago
It's worth distinguishing between different types of bad science. 1. The first and most egregious type is outright fraud. This is when you intentionally manipulate or fake data. Everyone agrees this is bad, and honest actors are enough to prevent it. In some cases, other honest actors are sufficient to determine if the claims are fishy. 2. The second more subtle type is not paying attention to adaptivity. For example, maybe an investigator wants to look at the data before coming up with a hypothesis to test. This is dangerous because the investigator is already overfitting, so any p-values the investigator computes afterward do not mean what they're supposed to mean. This is less egregious because it's easy to do this just by not being careful or not knowing your statistics very well. A scientist can be honest, but imperfect, and do this. It's also not easy to sniff this out as a reviewer -- the scientist might just omit all the stuff that didn't work. But there appears to be growing awareness of this kind of problem. 3. The third, and hardest to solve, problem is not factoring in the whole population of experiments. This is where 100 labs independently try an idea and one of them gets a genuine (from their limited view) result with a genuine p-value. It's novel and that lab has (in the limited view) been careful about adaptivity and keeping their hypotheses carefully generated. Maybe they've even used carefully generated noise to ensure their conclusions generalize [1] (which would definitely cut down on this problem). So it's pretty much impossible for a reviewer to tell there's a problem, because they don't know about the 100 other people that tried this and failed because the randomness didn't go their way. Short of a public experiment registry, this one is hard to fix, especially because it may be that nobody's being malicious or ignorant. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2664 https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2664
- marcus_holmes 7y ago
  >> Short of a public experiment registry, this one is hard to fix, especially because it may be that nobody's being malicious or ignorant. That seems like a really good idea, that would solve a lot of problems. Can we do that, please?
  - ars 7y ago
    There is: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ https://clinicaltrials.gov/ I have a vague memory or reading somewhere that if you don't register your desired success condition in the trial ahead of time, even if you find something it's not considered a real result.
dr-detroit 7y ago
Applied research has always been in fashion. Theoretical is always rare and underfunded. Many books on this subject have been written I recommend "A University for the 21st Century" People in glass offices run everything in 2019 and the more of an expert you become in your field the more professional managers will feel you are a pest to be silenced/hated/removed.
buboard 7y ago
I think we also need to facilitate the work of reviewers. With so many papers and vast literature, reviewing is a PITA and errors keep slipping through the cracks. I d like to use a simple wiki of "argument refutations" , where we can look up previous objections to arguments being made. This is useful work that is currently being lost in the email archives of journal editors. It would also help if we could open up science to people outside the academia, and begin the process of de-pedestalization of academia altogether, but not in an unregulated, completely flat way - academic discourse cannot be done in facebook. We know it has to happen and it will happen but we pretend the current situation can last forever. Academia is turning to a place that sells indulgences.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
From a previous HN comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14022158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14022158 by dasmoth “If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it." -- Attributed to J.J. Thomson (although I've not been able to turn up a definitive citation -- anyone know where it comes from?)
- itcrowd 7y ago
  The quote is part of a speech given by J.J. Thomson in 1916. The speech is partially reproduced (including your part) in the book "The life of Sir J.J. Thomson, O. M. : sometime master of Trinity College Cambridge" by Lord Rayleigh (1942). The original book is on the Internet Archive [1]. The speech is given at pages 198-200 and your quote appears approximately halfway in the quoted part of the speech [see 2]. [1] Full biography: https://archive.org/details/b29932208 https://archive.org/details/b29932208 [2] Screenshot of relevant quote: https://imgur.com/a/qicgorD https://imgur.com/a/qicgorD
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
    Thank you so much for finding this. I am so happy to know that this is a real quote and not a mis-attribution to a famous person. "Not all famous quotes are by famous people" - Abraham Lincoln
    - stjohnswarts 7y ago
      "Those who would give up essential control, to purchase a little temporary memory safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" --Ben Franklin
DayDollar 7y ago
Actually, i think some part this bad science and low innovation rate- is conciousness. Goverments everywhere realized, that unless they have total social control, people can not be trusted with exponential powerfull technology of all kinds. So, i predict, that unless we as humans are not totally surveilanced and controlled- we will not see great leaps of technology in the forseeable future.
- rapjr9 7y ago
  When I was doing laser spectroscopy research as an undergrad my prof said there was an informal physics "association" that had taken an oath not to develop anything like another atomic bomb. He asked if I wanted to join and I said yes. So I certainly see some basis for people being scared of fundamental advances in science and technology and wanting to control and place limits on what is developed. There have been a lot of advances in astrophysics (little potential harm to things here on Earth) and not much research in gravity (big consequences if we could actually control gravity.) That doesn't require "total social control", just a strong influence at key checkpoints (like funding). Whether there is an active effort to reduce investigation in specific areas of science might be discoverable by a meta-analysis of papers showing what areas of research tend to not get funding and see if there is a correlation with the potential for social disruption.
rwj 7y ago
There are other ways in which the incentives are misaligned. Granting agencies that prefer to fund researchers who nearly always "succeed" in proving their hypothesis will find that research proposals are low-risk and low-information. At in at least one sense, the ideal experiment is one with a 50/50 chance of failing. Disconfirmation is also important.
klyrs 7y ago
I've always found it distasteful that the Clay Math Prize offers a million dollar reward for proving that P=NP but nothing for revealing the truth should it be otherwise.
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  I think you misunderstood something. The problem itself is sometimes referred to as the "P=NP" problem, but that's just a name, it is also called the "P vs. NP" problem. If you can prove either P!=NP or P==NP, you get the prize. Can you give a reference to back up your interpretation?
  - majos 7y ago
    Your interpretation is correct. The official problem statement [1] is "does P = NP?", so either "P = NP" or "P != NP" is a valid answer. [1] https://www.claymath.org/sites/default/files/pvsnp.pdf https://www.claymath.org/sites/default/files/pvsnp.pdf
  - klyrs 7y ago
    > Can you give a reference to back up your interpretation? Alas, no. I do recall being astonished at my claim, and then being convinced by a colleague (which was backed up by plain language on the CMI page, in my memory...) but now that I'm re-reading (current and archive.org'd) I cannot find such a thing. Disturbing. Yet relieving. Fuck my memory.
Allower 7y ago
And its been obvious for decades, when are we going to hold folks accountable?
hardtke 7y ago
I've noticed a trend across many scientific fields where publications are basically irrelevant since nobody reads them. Status is conferred by high profile talks, which tend to be invited. The material discussed in high profile talks is eventually published in a journal or conference proceeding (in the case of CS) and will get citations, but ideas only spread if they are picked by the program committees. The academics who publish many low impact papers are not really relevant.
- Fomite 7y ago
  This is not applicable to a lot of fields. Generally, only CS and ancillary fields are ones I've encountered where talks and conferences are the primary "currency". In biomedicine, talks will only follow after publications, and are often intentionally paired.
notadoc 7y ago
Not surprising when science has become a tool for political and industrial purposes.
JackRabbitSlim 7y ago
ctrl+f "capitalism" 0 results. Come on now, your cognitive dissonance is showing. A few comments mention it without explicitly implicating it. We all know damn well this is exactly what can be expected, and predicted, with (modern) capitalism in the drivers seat.
- buboard 7y ago
  This is absolutely false. It's exactly because of competition that we can trust the journals of elsevier, even if they are ... elsevier. Nothing could be worse than a government-owned journal where only the connected ones could publish.
glofish 7y ago
The real problem with science is the same as in politics. We, the other scientists (just like the voters) incentivize certain behaviors and with that favor a certain type of scientists (and politician) to prosper. There are all kinds of scientists (and politicians) competing for your trust (and votes). There are good and bad among them. As long as we reward the bullshitters more, they are the ones that will outcompete the others. All these rules and regulations that people propose are ineffectual, as long as a certain level of self-criticism is not being applied: - Stop believing and propagating the bullshit even if it seems to support your preconceived notions (or even the truth). This is very hard to do in practice. As sad as it sounds: the greatest enemy of good science are the other scientists. feels like some sort of prisoners's dilemma, it only works if all do it, otherwise, it is best to just not admit anything
- leftyted 7y ago
  A different framing of this is that politics is, more and more, intruding into science. Paul Romer: > Politics does not lead to a broadly shared consensus. It has to yield a decision whether or not a consensus prevails. As a result, political institutions create incentives for participants to exaggerate disagreements between factions. Words that are evocative and ambiguous better serve factional interests than words that are analytical and precise. > Science is a process that does lead to a broadly shared consensus. It is arguably the only social process that does. Consensus forms around theoretical and empirical statements that are true. In making these statements, a combination of words from natural language and tightly linked symbols from the formal language of mathematics encourages the use of words that are analytical and precise. from https://paulromer.net/mathiness/Mathiness.pdf https://paulromer.net/mathiness/Mathiness.pdf
  - tobias3 7y ago
    He also left as World Bank chief economist after he complained that the "Ease of doing Business" index suspiciously went down for Chile while a socialist party was in power.
Dowwie 7y ago
Every time an arxiv paper gets published to HN, I wonder whether it's even worth reading until findings are peer reviewed..
- enjoyyourlife 7y ago
  *worth
  - Dowwie 7y ago
    thx
jplayer01 7y ago
At this point, what even is the point of good science if nobody believes it?
- tasty_freeze 7y ago
  If what you said was literally true, that nobody believes it, then there would be little point. But "nobody" is an exaggeration. Scientists are likely to believe it, or at least are in a much better position to evaluate the truth and utility of it, and build upon it. When it comes to abstract science, eg, the ultimate origin of the universe, it doesn't materially affect anything if it is believed or not. But if someone produces a cheaper or longer lasting battery, the proof is in the pudding, and that basic research will have made a difference. Then there is the category of hard science which is disbelieved because moneyed interests wish to discredit it, and/or it has become a political shibboleth to discredit the science. Those aren't due to bad science.
  - jplayer01 7y ago
    The problem is that significant portions of the population refuse to believe anything that comes out of science. This directly affects what politics decides to do about real problems like climate change. This isn't some abstract issue, it's something that's affecting us on an everyday level because people are unwilling to listen to the evidence.
- buboard 7y ago
  People are dying to believe in science , even when it fails repeatedly or drags on for decades - or else the BBC would have stopped reporting on new cancer cures, because people have had enough. They re moslty disbelieving of big narratives built on the science and things that look like FUD, and even more when emotional argumentation blankets the scientific arguments.
stevenwliao 7y ago
We need to incentivize thorough reviews as well.
Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
I agree with everything except for the jab at (paid) open access, which looks quite gratuitous to me. It may be true that "authors are willing to pay more to get their articles published in more prestigious journals. So, the more exciting the findings a journal publishes, the more references, the higher the impact the journal, the more submissions they get, the more money they make". But this is also true of non-open-access journals. Journals live off their prestige, and before paid open access was a thing, publishers still wanted to have high-impact journals so that university libraries would subscribe to them. It was a very distorted market (as it is now), but a market nevertheless. While I often bash for-profit journals for being parasites that do little actual work and profit from withholding access to science that should be public, and for this I would open a bottle of champagne if they disappeared, I don't think journals have much to do with this particular problem of incentivization of bad science. Journals just respond to the demand of publishing more, and shallower, papers. That demand comes from hypercompetitivity in academia, where researchers need to fight for scarce positions and scraps of funding, often paired with too much bureaucratization (selection processes that look at "objective" and "verifiable" metrics like number of papers published at a given impact factor quartile, etc., instead of just asking a bunch of neutral experts whether the person is doing good research, which may be more opaque but also much more meaningful). As evidence that journals are not the problem in this particular case, in fields like machine learning, where publication happens mostly in arXiv and conferences that don't charge for publishing or reading papers, the problems pointed out in the post also exist. Published models that only beat previous ones because they were lucky with random seeds or data splits are widespread.
- gowld 7y ago
  > researchers need to fight for scarce positions and scraps of funding there is quite a lot of funding > often paired with too much bureaucratization (selection processes that look at "objective" and "verifiable" metrics this is the problem. The whole OP reads like a bizarre hit piece on open access. How could scientists paying to publish their work incentivize them to publish more? How would spamming the world with more publications inflate a scientist's impact factor? (It wouldn't -- impact factor would be diluted by the spam) It was always possible to self-publish and to cite self-published work, and even without journals, a modern scientist can publish on a free webhost for even cheaper than an open-access journal.
ipsa 7y ago
Television incentivizes forgetable reality TV, the radio incentivizes meaningless poppy music, social media incentivizes bickering about the controversies of today. But, nowadays, you can also use your TV to watch a French arthouse film, to go to Youtube and be recommended a Japanese jazz album from 1974, to join the conversation on Twitter and ask questions to leaders in their respective fields. Now you can swim against the current: Force all these power - and money - hungry institutions to fundamentally change their tune. Or you can find one of the many new waves to surf. Life is good, science is good, progress is good. The choice, as a scientist, is up to you. Can't write one groundbreaking paper a year? Write two or three mediocre ones. No amount of foundational change is going to make you a groundbreaking scientist. And change the channel once in while: the world is only getting bigger and more connected.
Gatsky 7y ago
Yes well every solution we come up with invariably favours well established scientists... how can a new scientist get anywhere if it takes 10 years to produce substantive work? There is a conceit in the final paragraph, where it is implied that we are missing out on cures for diseases etc due to wasteful scientific endeavours. This is not necessarily true. There have been many successes in the current era of medical science. Generally these are driven by technological advances such as monoclonal antibodies or next-generation sequencing.
cbkeller 7y ago
The article makes some fair points, but strangely seems to imply that open access is somehow opposed to rigorous peer review, which certainly leaves an odd taste in my mouth. > Of course, scientific publication is subjected to a high degree of quality control through the peer-review process, which despite the political and societal factors that are ineradicable parts of human interaction, is one of the “crown jewels” of scientific objectivity. However, this is changing. The very laudable goal of “open access journals” is to make sure that the public has free access to the scientific data that its tax dollars are used to generate.
xvilka 7y ago
Partially can be solved with technology - all data and programs should be self-contained, interactive, edition and modification process should be visible for general public, better connections between papers rather than current citation mechanism.
angry_octet 7y ago
A previous Great Leader decided that he would improve our research output in a simple way: we should stop doing humdrum work, and only do work which would succeed famously. Of course, there is some difficulty in determining which work is going to be brilliant before it is done. But he decided that he could do that, seemingly based on how PR worthy the proposal was. At any rate it did immense damage and set back deep research by years. Naturally he left when he could wangle a better job elsewhere.
rblion 7y ago
> Self-regulation by scientists of decades and centuries past has created modern science with all its virtues and triumphs. However, much like the bankers of the early 21st century, we risk allowing new incentives to erode our self-regulation and skew our perceptions and behavior; similar to the risky loans underlying mortgage-backed securities, faulty scientific observations can form a bubble and an unstable edifice. As science is ultimately self-correcting, faulty conclusions are remedied with ongoing study, but this takes a great deal of time. > Unless and until leadership is taken at a structural and societal level to alter the incentive structure present, the current environment will continue to encourage and promote wasting of resources, squandering of research efforts and delaying of progress; such waste and delay is something that those suffering diseases for which we have inadequate therapy, and those suffering conditions for which we have inadequate technological remedies, can ill afford and should not be forced to endure. I agree.

341 points by slowhand09 7y ago

First issue: publications. I think this is not a big problem in the USA relative to China. Is there evidence of American scientists who have greatly benefited in reputation and prestige, despite doing very shoddy work? Many scientists have been rebuffed and rejected from grants/awards due to not having enough publications. American scientists, though, are more attuned to the quality and integrity of journals in which publications appear. Whether for tenure or grants, a Nature or Science or Cell paper will mean a LOT, and many scientists evaluating other scientists wouldn't care much about a journal publication with Impact Factor under 1.0. Meanwhile in China, there are numerous article-factory-journals that are pay to publish, you can put your shoddy work in those and amp up your publication count easily. Surely, these exist in the USA, but are career scientists at major institutions utilizing these shady Chinese journals? There is evidence that some of these Chinese journals are publishing straight up BS, which is especially easy to do with data analysis where you could "clean" your data easily. Perhaps it is a cultural or political difference, but I don't see nearly as much rigorous self-reflection of Chinese scientists on this front? Second issue, grants: publications are a small slice of this story. Science departments (not humanities) in universities are MAJOR revenue generators for the University. My university took 1/3 of your grant straight off the bat, to cover overheads like shiny facilities and administration and marketing. Meanwhile, the scientists themselves may make huge salary bonuses or advance their tech/staff substantially when they have substantial grants. So, getting a grant is great for you personally, and improves your chances of further grants. So, is it really that surprising that there may be pressure to publish at all costs, to p-hack, to reach for those low-impact journals despite their lower reputation/impact, given both universities and scientists are BOTH massively financially benefited from this incrementalism? Does it really pay to reach for pie-in-the-sky, fundamental sea-changes in your field? It seems like a high variance, high risk strategy that only very bold, well-funded, devil-may-care scientists would employ.

rocketflumes 7y ago
I can't comment on China and other fields, but in the US for AI and robotics, in which I do research / publish in, there is definitely a growing trend of an over-emphasis on novelty research that disregards reproducibility in favor of "wow" factors and fancy demo videos. A lot of highly cited research papers/labs tend to be the most heavily promoted ones (on Twitter, in the press, etc), and they're not necessarily impactful/useful for the rest of the field.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  Amidst this worrying trend of shallow research, begging for petty cred and grants more than knowledge, you have to wonder what has become of ethics, of integrity in science. Globalized academia needs some soul-searching, IMHO.
  - SolaceQuantum 7y ago
    " you have to wonder what has become of ethics, of integrity in science" When was there any more ethics or integrity in science than any other time? The AIDS crisis was a shitshow of choosing prestige and recognition over the lives of a generation. The discovery of DNA was off a woman who was hardly recognized. Henrietta Lacks' cells. The syphilis experiments.
    - dekhn 7y ago
      The discovery of DNA was done by Friedrich Meischer, a brilliant Swiss biologist. At the time, nobody knew what the nuclein he purified did (and, the results were considered so surprising that his own thesis advisor redid all the experiments manually before letting the data be published). What you are referring to is the use of Rosalind Franklin's X-ray fibre diffraction images by Watson and Crick to elucidate the 3D structure of DNA, and, depending on the accounts you read, whether she got due credit is arguable. She did publish in the same Nature journal issue as W&C (https://www.nature.com/articles/171740a0.pdf https://www.nature.com/articles/171740a0.pdf), she got credit for the photos (see the acknowledgements in the W&C paper, http://www.nature.com/genomics/human/watson-crick/ http://www.nature.com/genomics/human/watson-crick/), and she was dead by the time the Nobel Prize decision was made (so she could not have received the prize). I understand many feel very strongly that she was cheated, and while I do believe she was definitely slighted and not given enough credit, the underlying story is fairly complicated. I recommend reading both Dark Lady and Eighth Day of Creation and then forming your own opinion. personally I thought her personal diaries, which she willed to Aaron Klug and were used in the writing of Eighth Day, were really illuminating.

Vaslo 7y ago

I agree with this article and have always thought about this but never voiced it. I think a few things could improve the quality and discovery of published papers: -After so many publications, could it be mandatory for random samples in that author’s publication be tested? I get that there is a limit on resources, but some advanced undergrads could do this with guidance. -I would love to see some version of a journal of failures. That is, well intentioned research that had poor outcomes. It was so frequently in Chemistry research that my compounds were useless or the methods to synthesize them did not work, and it would be helpful to document that. Unfortunately, there is no “Journal of Failed Chemistry.” Only research that ostensibly make a contribution with a clear outcome get published. So much time wasted experimenting where you could save another scientist time and encourage them down another path.

djtango 7y ago
>It was so frequently in Chemistry research that my compounds were useless or the methods to synthesize them did not work, and it would be helpful to document that. This mirrors my experience where a lot of the post-docs carried war stories of things like lab/country-specific humidity playing a role in synthetic methods succeeding (or failing). There were a lot of dark arts/tricks of the trade that people carried around with them: stuff like going that extra mile to dry things of water super thoroughly (even if it was not mentioned in the paper we were referencing).
- ISL 7y ago
  Many "dark arts" aren't known as dark arts to the people who know them. They're just the things you always do, because if you don't do them, nothing works. An approximate CS analog: Writing great commit messages, and using an SCM. You don't have to do them, nobody writes it up because those who know regard it as trivial, but if you don't do them, almost nothing works. Everyone who knows what they're doing does it.
  - djtango 7y ago
    >An approximate CS analog: Writing great commit messages, and using an SCM. This is definitely not the analogue. The analogue is always doing a clean install of the OS before running your experiment. Or only ever using Arch version x.y.z for replicating lab 1 and maybe a.b.c for replicating lab 2. It's knowing all the magic undocumented JVM flags ahead of running the application. Some you know to use as part of war scars/best practices. Some are just pure inside information from working in that lab or having a personal relationship with people in that lab.

SirLuxuryYacht 7y ago

How do you quantify rigor?

dredmorbius 7y ago
In mortises?

knzhou 7y ago

I don't want to sound too triumphant, but over here in fundamental physics we have decades-old safeguards in place against all these problems. The big experiments don't have publication bias: they proudly say exactly what they did, even if 90% of the time there are only negative results, because exclusions are important too. Experiments are inherently replicated, with multiple independent simultaneous experiments (LHC) or multiple independent analyses (EHT), data blinding throughout, and even occasionally a further layer of blinding using decoy signals (LIGO). The statistical standards for discovery are, in terms of p-values, about 10,000 times more stringent, and even still people are moving away from p-values entirely. The resulting publications are put out for free, publicly, on the ArXiv. Later they are submitted to a relatively small family of low-cost journals, which everybody knows the reputations of. Hopefully some of these lessons can be adapted to other fields.

SiempreViernes 7y ago
cought 750 GeV cough... ahem. Let me sing you an OPERA about a how Andrei Linde was astonished by the biggest BICEP you've ever seen! It belonged to a LIBRA* that was faster than light and could fly trough walls! * Couldn't get DAMA to work :(
- knzhou 7y ago
  Sure, but there's a difference between the accuracy of speculative theory and experiment. Experiment is very reliable -- they never called the 750 GeV bump a discovery of anything, because it didn't meet the statistical standards. Even things that do meet the statistical standards are often not called discoveries, because the experimentalists think they are systematic errors at play, as we see with MiniBooNE and DAMA. Speculative theory is not reliable, which is why all the papers on the 750 GeV bump were wrong. But it has never been reliable, because, well, it's speculative! For each new phenomenon there's probably only one right explanation, but far more than one paper. Being 99% wrong has been par for the course for almost a century.
  - SiempreViernes 7y ago

cde-v 7y ago

Market demands Bad Science, market supplies Bad Science. I do not see a problem here.

buboard 7y ago
Most of it is being funded by public means. Industries such as pharma, which rely on that science did point out the replication crisis in medicine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine
glofish 7y ago
A cynical view - alas it captures the truth. It is very easy to point fingers, to blame it on funding, blame it on journals, blame it on media, but in the end: - scientists decide who gets funded - scientists decide who gets published - scientists make exaggerated claims in the media The source of the problem is the scientists, not understanding the damage they are doing to themselves. I do foresee downvotes, because scientists do not like this idea at all :-)

majos 7y ago

It's worth distinguishing between different types of bad science. 1. The first and most egregious type is outright fraud. This is when you intentionally manipulate or fake data. Everyone agrees this is bad, and honest actors are enough to prevent it. In some cases, other honest actors are sufficient to determine if the claims are fishy. 2. The second more subtle type is not paying attention to adaptivity. For example, maybe an investigator wants to look at the data before coming up with a hypothesis to test. This is dangerous because the investigator is already overfitting, so any p-values the investigator computes afterward do not mean what they're supposed to mean. This is less egregious because it's easy to do this just by not being careful or not knowing your statistics very well. A scientist can be honest, but imperfect, and do this. It's also not easy to sniff this out as a reviewer -- the scientist might just omit all the stuff that didn't work. But there appears to be growing awareness of this kind of problem. 3. The third, and hardest to solve, problem is not factoring in the whole population of experiments. This is where 100 labs independently try an idea and one of them gets a genuine (from their limited view) result with a genuine p-value. It's novel and that lab has (in the limited view) been careful about adaptivity and keeping their hypotheses carefully generated. Maybe they've even used carefully generated noise to ensure their conclusions generalize [1] (which would definitely cut down on this problem). So it's pretty much impossible for a reviewer to tell there's a problem, because they don't know about the 100 other people that tried this and failed because the randomness didn't go their way. Short of a public experiment registry, this one is hard to fix, especially because it may be that nobody's being malicious or ignorant. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2664 https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2664

marcus_holmes 7y ago
>> Short of a public experiment registry, this one is hard to fix, especially because it may be that nobody's being malicious or ignorant. That seems like a really good idea, that would solve a lot of problems. Can we do that, please?
- ars 7y ago
  There is: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ https://clinicaltrials.gov/ I have a vague memory or reading somewhere that if you don't register your desired success condition in the trial ahead of time, even if you find something it's not considered a real result.

dr-detroit 7y ago

Applied research has always been in fashion. Theoretical is always rare and underfunded. Many books on this subject have been written I recommend "A University for the 21st Century" People in glass offices run everything in 2019 and the more of an expert you become in your field the more professional managers will feel you are a pest to be silenced/hated/removed.

buboard 7y ago

I think we also need to facilitate the work of reviewers. With so many papers and vast literature, reviewing is a PITA and errors keep slipping through the cracks. I d like to use a simple wiki of "argument refutations" , where we can look up previous objections to arguments being made. This is useful work that is currently being lost in the email archives of journal editors. It would also help if we could open up science to people outside the academia, and begin the process of de-pedestalization of academia altogether, but not in an unregulated, completely flat way - academic discourse cannot be done in facebook. We know it has to happen and it will happen but we pretend the current situation can last forever. Academia is turning to a place that sells indulgences.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

From a previous HN comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14022158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14022158 by dasmoth “If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it." -- Attributed to J.J. Thomson (although I've not been able to turn up a definitive citation -- anyone know where it comes from?)

itcrowd 7y ago
The quote is part of a speech given by J.J. Thomson in 1916. The speech is partially reproduced (including your part) in the book "The life of Sir J.J. Thomson, O. M. : sometime master of Trinity College Cambridge" by Lord Rayleigh (1942). The original book is on the Internet Archive [1]. The speech is given at pages 198-200 and your quote appears approximately halfway in the quoted part of the speech [see 2]. [1] Full biography: https://archive.org/details/b29932208 https://archive.org/details/b29932208 [2] Screenshot of relevant quote: https://imgur.com/a/qicgorD https://imgur.com/a/qicgorD
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  Thank you so much for finding this. I am so happy to know that this is a real quote and not a mis-attribution to a famous person. "Not all famous quotes are by famous people" - Abraham Lincoln
  - stjohnswarts 7y ago
    "Those who would give up essential control, to purchase a little temporary memory safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" --Ben Franklin

DayDollar 7y ago

Actually, i think some part this bad science and low innovation rate- is conciousness. Goverments everywhere realized, that unless they have total social control, people can not be trusted with exponential powerfull technology of all kinds. So, i predict, that unless we as humans are not totally surveilanced and controlled- we will not see great leaps of technology in the forseeable future.

rapjr9 7y ago
When I was doing laser spectroscopy research as an undergrad my prof said there was an informal physics "association" that had taken an oath not to develop anything like another atomic bomb. He asked if I wanted to join and I said yes. So I certainly see some basis for people being scared of fundamental advances in science and technology and wanting to control and place limits on what is developed. There have been a lot of advances in astrophysics (little potential harm to things here on Earth) and not much research in gravity (big consequences if we could actually control gravity.) That doesn't require "total social control", just a strong influence at key checkpoints (like funding). Whether there is an active effort to reduce investigation in specific areas of science might be discoverable by a meta-analysis of papers showing what areas of research tend to not get funding and see if there is a correlation with the potential for social disruption.

rwj 7y ago

There are other ways in which the incentives are misaligned. Granting agencies that prefer to fund researchers who nearly always "succeed" in proving their hypothesis will find that research proposals are low-risk and low-information. At in at least one sense, the ideal experiment is one with a 50/50 chance of failing. Disconfirmation is also important.

klyrs 7y ago

I've always found it distasteful that the Clay Math Prize offers a million dollar reward for proving that P=NP but nothing for revealing the truth should it be otherwise.

bonoboTP 7y ago
I think you misunderstood something. The problem itself is sometimes referred to as the "P=NP" problem, but that's just a name, it is also called the "P vs. NP" problem. If you can prove either P!=NP or P==NP, you get the prize. Can you give a reference to back up your interpretation?
- majos 7y ago
  Your interpretation is correct. The official problem statement [1] is "does P = NP?", so either "P = NP" or "P != NP" is a valid answer. [1] https://www.claymath.org/sites/default/files/pvsnp.pdf https://www.claymath.org/sites/default/files/pvsnp.pdf
- klyrs 7y ago
  > Can you give a reference to back up your interpretation? Alas, no. I do recall being astonished at my claim, and then being convinced by a colleague (which was backed up by plain language on the CMI page, in my memory...) but now that I'm re-reading (current and archive.org'd) I cannot find such a thing. Disturbing. Yet relieving. Fuck my memory.

Allower 7y ago

And its been obvious for decades, when are we going to hold folks accountable?

hardtke 7y ago

I've noticed a trend across many scientific fields where publications are basically irrelevant since nobody reads them. Status is conferred by high profile talks, which tend to be invited. The material discussed in high profile talks is eventually published in a journal or conference proceeding (in the case of CS) and will get citations, but ideas only spread if they are picked by the program committees. The academics who publish many low impact papers are not really relevant.

Fomite 7y ago
This is not applicable to a lot of fields. Generally, only CS and ancillary fields are ones I've encountered where talks and conferences are the primary "currency". In biomedicine, talks will only follow after publications, and are often intentionally paired.

notadoc 7y ago

Not surprising when science has become a tool for political and industrial purposes.

JackRabbitSlim 7y ago

ctrl+f "capitalism" 0 results. Come on now, your cognitive dissonance is showing. A few comments mention it without explicitly implicating it. We all know damn well this is exactly what can be expected, and predicted, with (modern) capitalism in the drivers seat.

buboard 7y ago
This is absolutely false. It's exactly because of competition that we can trust the journals of elsevier, even if they are ... elsevier. Nothing could be worse than a government-owned journal where only the connected ones could publish.

glofish 7y ago

The real problem with science is the same as in politics. We, the other scientists (just like the voters) incentivize certain behaviors and with that favor a certain type of scientists (and politician) to prosper. There are all kinds of scientists (and politicians) competing for your trust (and votes). There are good and bad among them. As long as we reward the bullshitters more, they are the ones that will outcompete the others. All these rules and regulations that people propose are ineffectual, as long as a certain level of self-criticism is not being applied: - Stop believing and propagating the bullshit even if it seems to support your preconceived notions (or even the truth). This is very hard to do in practice. As sad as it sounds: the greatest enemy of good science are the other scientists. feels like some sort of prisoners's dilemma, it only works if all do it, otherwise, it is best to just not admit anything

leftyted 7y ago
A different framing of this is that politics is, more and more, intruding into science. Paul Romer: > Politics does not lead to a broadly shared consensus. It has to yield a decision whether or not a consensus prevails. As a result, political institutions create incentives for participants to exaggerate disagreements between factions. Words that are evocative and ambiguous better serve factional interests than words that are analytical and precise. > Science is a process that does lead to a broadly shared consensus. It is arguably the only social process that does. Consensus forms around theoretical and empirical statements that are true. In making these statements, a combination of words from natural language and tightly linked symbols from the formal language of mathematics encourages the use of words that are analytical and precise. from https://paulromer.net/mathiness/Mathiness.pdf https://paulromer.net/mathiness/Mathiness.pdf
- tobias3 7y ago
  He also left as World Bank chief economist after he complained that the "Ease of doing Business" index suspiciously went down for Chile while a socialist party was in power.

Dowwie 7y ago

Every time an arxiv paper gets published to HN, I wonder whether it's even worth reading until findings are peer reviewed..

enjoyyourlife 7y ago
*worth
- Dowwie 7y ago
  thx

jplayer01 7y ago

At this point, what even is the point of good science if nobody believes it?

tasty_freeze 7y ago
If what you said was literally true, that nobody believes it, then there would be little point. But "nobody" is an exaggeration. Scientists are likely to believe it, or at least are in a much better position to evaluate the truth and utility of it, and build upon it. When it comes to abstract science, eg, the ultimate origin of the universe, it doesn't materially affect anything if it is believed or not. But if someone produces a cheaper or longer lasting battery, the proof is in the pudding, and that basic research will have made a difference. Then there is the category of hard science which is disbelieved because moneyed interests wish to discredit it, and/or it has become a political shibboleth to discredit the science. Those aren't due to bad science.
- jplayer01 7y ago
  The problem is that significant portions of the population refuse to believe anything that comes out of science. This directly affects what politics decides to do about real problems like climate change. This isn't some abstract issue, it's something that's affecting us on an everyday level because people are unwilling to listen to the evidence.
buboard 7y ago
People are dying to believe in science , even when it fails repeatedly or drags on for decades - or else the BBC would have stopped reporting on new cancer cures, because people have had enough. They re moslty disbelieving of big narratives built on the science and things that look like FUD, and even more when emotional argumentation blankets the scientific arguments.

stevenwliao 7y ago

We need to incentivize thorough reviews as well.

Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago

I agree with everything except for the jab at (paid) open access, which looks quite gratuitous to me. It may be true that "authors are willing to pay more to get their articles published in more prestigious journals. So, the more exciting the findings a journal publishes, the more references, the higher the impact the journal, the more submissions they get, the more money they make". But this is also true of non-open-access journals. Journals live off their prestige, and before paid open access was a thing, publishers still wanted to have high-impact journals so that university libraries would subscribe to them. It was a very distorted market (as it is now), but a market nevertheless. While I often bash for-profit journals for being parasites that do little actual work and profit from withholding access to science that should be public, and for this I would open a bottle of champagne if they disappeared, I don't think journals have much to do with this particular problem of incentivization of bad science. Journals just respond to the demand of publishing more, and shallower, papers. That demand comes from hypercompetitivity in academia, where researchers need to fight for scarce positions and scraps of funding, often paired with too much bureaucratization (selection processes that look at "objective" and "verifiable" metrics like number of papers published at a given impact factor quartile, etc., instead of just asking a bunch of neutral experts whether the person is doing good research, which may be more opaque but also much more meaningful). As evidence that journals are not the problem in this particular case, in fields like machine learning, where publication happens mostly in arXiv and conferences that don't charge for publishing or reading papers, the problems pointed out in the post also exist. Published models that only beat previous ones because they were lucky with random seeds or data splits are widespread.

gowld 7y ago
> researchers need to fight for scarce positions and scraps of funding there is quite a lot of funding > often paired with too much bureaucratization (selection processes that look at "objective" and "verifiable" metrics this is the problem. The whole OP reads like a bizarre hit piece on open access. How could scientists paying to publish their work incentivize them to publish more? How would spamming the world with more publications inflate a scientist's impact factor? (It wouldn't -- impact factor would be diluted by the spam) It was always possible to self-publish and to cite self-published work, and even without journals, a modern scientist can publish on a free webhost for even cheaper than an open-access journal.

ipsa 7y ago

Television incentivizes forgetable reality TV, the radio incentivizes meaningless poppy music, social media incentivizes bickering about the controversies of today. But, nowadays, you can also use your TV to watch a French arthouse film, to go to Youtube and be recommended a Japanese jazz album from 1974, to join the conversation on Twitter and ask questions to leaders in their respective fields. Now you can swim against the current: Force all these power - and money - hungry institutions to fundamentally change their tune. Or you can find one of the many new waves to surf. Life is good, science is good, progress is good. The choice, as a scientist, is up to you. Can't write one groundbreaking paper a year? Write two or three mediocre ones. No amount of foundational change is going to make you a groundbreaking scientist. And change the channel once in while: the world is only getting bigger and more connected.

Gatsky 7y ago

Yes well every solution we come up with invariably favours well established scientists... how can a new scientist get anywhere if it takes 10 years to produce substantive work? There is a conceit in the final paragraph, where it is implied that we are missing out on cures for diseases etc due to wasteful scientific endeavours. This is not necessarily true. There have been many successes in the current era of medical science. Generally these are driven by technological advances such as monoclonal antibodies or next-generation sequencing.

cbkeller 7y ago

The article makes some fair points, but strangely seems to imply that open access is somehow opposed to rigorous peer review, which certainly leaves an odd taste in my mouth. > Of course, scientific publication is subjected to a high degree of quality control through the peer-review process, which despite the political and societal factors that are ineradicable parts of human interaction, is one of the “crown jewels” of scientific objectivity. However, this is changing. The very laudable goal of “open access journals” is to make sure that the public has free access to the scientific data that its tax dollars are used to generate.

xvilka 7y ago

Partially can be solved with technology - all data and programs should be self-contained, interactive, edition and modification process should be visible for general public, better connections between papers rather than current citation mechanism.

angry_octet 7y ago

A previous Great Leader decided that he would improve our research output in a simple way: we should stop doing humdrum work, and only do work which would succeed famously. Of course, there is some difficulty in determining which work is going to be brilliant before it is done. But he decided that he could do that, seemingly based on how PR worthy the proposal was. At any rate it did immense damage and set back deep research by years. Naturally he left when he could wangle a better job elsewhere.

rblion 7y ago

> Self-regulation by scientists of decades and centuries past has created modern science with all its virtues and triumphs. However, much like the bankers of the early 21st century, we risk allowing new incentives to erode our self-regulation and skew our perceptions and behavior; similar to the risky loans underlying mortgage-backed securities, faulty scientific observations can form a bubble and an unstable edifice. As science is ultimately self-correcting, faulty conclusions are remedied with ongoing study, but this takes a great deal of time. > Unless and until leadership is taken at a structural and societal level to alter the incentive structure present, the current environment will continue to encourage and promote wasting of resources, squandering of research efforts and delaying of progress; such waste and delay is something that those suffering diseases for which we have inadequate therapy, and those suffering conditions for which we have inadequate technological remedies, can ill afford and should not be forced to endure. I agree.