Curiously, Stanford excels at poor research methodology these days, with MIT a close second. It turns out that faculty positions are competitive enough at the e

Curiously, Stanford excels at poor research methodology these days, with MIT a close second. It turns out that faculty positions are competitive enough at the elites that few make it in without cheating. There has been a steady decline in research integrity (with a parallel incline in research impact) as competition went up. I'm not sure what to do about it. I know MIT better than Stanford, and fixing the culture would involve firing a big chunk of the faculty. You can't fire tenured faculty, even if you could get people to acknowledge the problem. Integrity at 2nd and 3rd tier schools is still a lot higher, but we do need to fix incentive structures, or the rot will take over academia. Softer disciplines (like social sciences) are way ahead of harder disciplines like CS on the rot curve. In CS, it's a lot harder to bake data.