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In other fields where there is a chance for fraud, the honor system is not used. In academia, the attitude is just 'the honor system is good enough, WINK' as it

In other fields where there is a chance for fraud, the honor system is not used. In academia, the attitude is just 'the honor system is good enough, WINK' as it relates to data. In other fields where there are opportunities for embezzlement or other abuses of trust everything is monitored, only some employees are authorized to do certain transactions, and many of those employees are bound by law and oath to not do things like embezzle or falsify records. This doesn't always work but having the capacity to disbar lawyers for, say, embezzling trust accounts or remove a CPA's license and put them in prison for falsifying records, it certainly has a deterrent effect on similar crimes of trust. How much worse would white collar crime be if everything was on the 'honor system' and there was no prison time for stealing from customers/clients/shareholders? That's what we have in academia: crime won, so now syndicates of crooks run the system. With other abuses of trust the material consequences are more readily apparent: someone's bank account is empty that should not be. With this abuse of trust, the damage is more to the integrity of the purportedly rational knowledge base. It's more of a 'reign of error' than a reign of terror.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> With this abuse of trust, the damage is more to the integrity of the purportedly rational knowledge base It corrodes trust in our scientific institutions. When that pop something talk by an acclaimed psychologist turns out to be not only bullshit but outright fraud, it’s not a huge leap to project that mistrust onto e.g. the medical establishment or climate scientists.
matthewdgreen 5y ago
Everything is a cost/benefit tradeoff. We devote more resources to securing your bank account against fraud because we (as a society) think that it’s worth spending the money — on the theory that recovering your money after it’s stolen is very hard and because we think it’s acceptable to cause legitimate transactions to undergo some inconvenience. We devote fewer resources to verifying every social sciences experiment because society doesn’t want to spend the money to reduce a presumably already-low fraud rate and because the worst case outcome is usually articles like this one. And yet despite these decisions, white collar financial fraud occurs all the time and plenty of lawyers stretch their profession to (or beyond) the ethical breaking point — with devastating impacts on real people.
elliekelly 5y ago
I think the damage is much more than just the integrity of the knowledge base. There are people who spend years focusing their (very expensive!) academic pursuits in reliance on these studies. They spend years of their lives researching and trying to replicate in vain. The damage to our collective knowledge is costly and unacceptable but there are also real people who are real victims of this fraud. It’s not just some theoretical cost borne by society at large.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> With this abuse of trust, the damage is more to the integrity of the purportedly rational knowledge base It corrodes trust in our scientific institutions. When that pop something talk by an acclaimed psychologist turns out to be not only bullshit but outright fraud, it’s not a huge leap to project that mistrust onto e.g. the medical establishment or climate scientists.

matthewdgreen 5y ago

Everything is a cost/benefit tradeoff. We devote more resources to securing your bank account against fraud because we (as a society) think that it’s worth spending the money — on the theory that recovering your money after it’s stolen is very hard and because we think it’s acceptable to cause legitimate transactions to undergo some inconvenience. We devote fewer resources to verifying every social sciences experiment because society doesn’t want to spend the money to reduce a presumably already-low fraud rate and because the worst case outcome is usually articles like this one. And yet despite these decisions, white collar financial fraud occurs all the time and plenty of lawyers stretch their profession to (or beyond) the ethical breaking point — with devastating impacts on real people.

elliekelly 5y ago

I think the damage is much more than just the integrity of the knowledge base. There are people who spend years focusing their (very expensive!) academic pursuits in reliance on these studies. They spend years of their lives researching and trying to replicate in vain. The damage to our collective knowledge is costly and unacceptable but there are also real people who are real victims of this fraud. It’s not just some theoretical cost borne by society at large.