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> Most research is flawed or useless, but published anyway because it's expedient for the authors to do so. For the record I now know a professor at one of the

• BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
  > Along the way, everyone knew and when people tried to bring up concerns higher ups in the institution suppressed the knowledge. As you are doing here. I don't see a name or any specifics anywhere in your comment. Of course not including any names or specifics also means you could be making it up for a good story. We have no way of knowing.
  • lettergram 5y ago
    Much of this was told to me in confidence (via their lab-mates, etc) I’m not going to betray their trust.
    • slg 5y ago
      Your first comment was effectively "Everyone knows this person is a fraud and no one is willing to stand up and put a stop to it". Your second comment was effectively "Well I don't know they are a fraud and I'm not going to be the one who upsets people by trying to put a stop to it". I don't say this as a criticism of you. I say this a defense of the people you are criticizing. Stopping people like this takes a lot of work and often some personal risk. Most of us aren't willing to do it despite us pretending otherwise.
      • Infernal 5y ago
        >Stopping people like this takes a lot of work and often some personal risk. I don't recall where I first heard it, but the principle that it takes 10x the amount of energy to refute bullshit as it does to generate it certainly seems to apply in this case.
        • acidburnNSA 5y ago
          Bullshit Asymmetry Principle. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bullshit%20asymmetry%20principle https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bullshit%20a...
          • WaitWaitWha 5y ago
            It is easier to fool people then to convince them they have been fooled - Mark Twain
        • kristopolous 5y ago
          And often it doesn't actually matter. How many times have you seen people who use citations and references get harassed by some bloviating hoard? Reality is almost irrelevant in the face of ideology, dogma, and all the other forces that keep counterintuitive or uncomfortable reality out.
        • AllegedAlec 5y ago
          A post-doc of a collaborator of a professor of mine was once found to have doctored data. The professor and her collabs only found out when they looked at the images and found out that there were sections that seemed to have been copy/pasted. Getting the papers retracted was a gruelling process that (iirc) took over 3 years.
  • sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Well yes. It’s not cool to out someone in front of millions of people. Feel free to dismiss the claim if you wish.
    • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
      People on HN are so odd sometimes. Ah yes, I must be a liar if I don't want to spill all the details my friends told me in confidence and ruin our relationship. Sure, sometimes people lie on the internet but this is not an outlandish story.
      • lettergram 5y ago
        Imagine I did out someone? “Best case” scenario everyone loses their funding, including the colleagues who did report this stuff. The institution, the lab, etc would lose their funding. Those wanted to get PhDs in those labs will lose theirs. It’ll have a serious negative impact on everyone, even those who did the correct thing. This is why academia is as corrupt as it is. They all evaluate each other’s paper, give each other grants and anyone who exposes anything loses their entire careers.
  • mistrial9 5y ago
    the two parent comments speak to me (uninvolved) as wholly throwing all people, institutions, grant selection and everything else, under the bus without distinction. The drivers for that are unknowable, but I guarantee that neither these statements, NOR their complete compliment, are Truth. Proof is that without sufficient distinction, nothing claimed is distinguishable enough to even weigh. Add that the selection pressure in many institutions is many orders of magnitude more than ideal, and the consequences of the outcomes, similar.
    • Dylan16807 5y ago
      > wholly throwing all people, institutions, grant selection and everything else, under the bus without distinction That's an odd way of reading a post about "a professor" that contrasts them against the rest of their lab.
  • throwawayacc2 5y ago
    Presumably OP does not have hard evidence and is only relating an anecdote. There isn’t much of an incentive to waste time and resources fighting for academic integrity or some other high minded concept like this. Baring those incentives we’ll be left with anecdotes on forums and a continued sense of a diminished trust in academia.
    • BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
      Op sounded very confident that the persons allegedly involved _are_, in no uncertain terms, not just definitely total frauds but also definitely engaged in a giant fraud conspiracy that definitely goes all the way to the top. If what they meant was "someone told me once that..." they could have said that instead, but they've chosen to word things very very differently. At best they've drastically overstepped reasonable limits of what claims one is able to rightly make, and that assessment feels extremely generous.
      • 3pt14159 5y ago
        Yes. Exactly. Thank you for sharing what I was going to share. Corruption exists where it is allowed by the people who act out of cowardice. As an aside, I've worked with plenty of academics and while I sometimes thought their research area was stupidly low stakes, the only researchers that I thought were truly wasting time were the ones that had to do research for a medical degree. Basically forced research. Now I went to a premier university and I'm friends with some smart cookies, but I don't buy for a second the overall theme of this comment chain. There is a reason the West is incredibly wealthy and it isn't because our best and brightest are faking it.
        • pomdapi 5y ago
          > There is a reason the West is incredibly wealthy and it isn't because our best and brightest are faking it. The reasons for that can be myriad. Actual or false scientific success of the last 30 years is not necessarily it. Also, don't you feel the ship has kind of been slowly going down during the last 10 years, wealth-wise ?
  • Dylan16807 5y ago
    They brought it up. That's not how suppression works.
    • BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
      What exactly did they bring up? Against whom?
      • Dylan16807 5y ago
        > What exactly did they bring up? Academic misconduct. > Against whom? I don't know, which puts me exactly where I was ten minutes ago. They have no control over the situation, and if they hadn't posted I would know even less, so it's not suppression.
        • BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
          > They have no control over the situation They have complete control over how complicit they are in preserving the coverup of acts they allege to know are definitely true. > and if they hadn't posted I would know even less The reality is that right now you know exactly as much as before they posted because what they posted was unsubstantiated. They may as well have said that their name is Princess Peach and that they're pregnant with the mustached child of a certain Italian plumber for all the good it does you. One of three things must be true: 1) They have real firsthand knowledge that the claims are true and they're actively deciding to protect the identity(ies) of a conspiracy of rampant fraudsters whose actions are so egregious that they tarnish the very essence of the scientific academy itself. 2) They don't have any real knowledge that the claims are true, and the story is rumormongering. 3) I swear I had a third one, but now that I've written those two I can't think of what it was. I'll leave this placeholder here in case it comes to me.
          • Crye 5y ago
            The third is right out malice towards the institute they criticize and are using this platform to spread misinformation.
  • kitd 5y ago
    Tbf, putting any names in that comment would almost certainly land HN with a lawsuit.
    • rossmohax 5y ago
      When content is not provided by HN itself, HN is not liable: https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230
• maximus-decimus 5y ago
  > I just throw out papers that don’t publish datasets and code There was an interesting research paper that claimed you could up your IQ with a computer game called dual n back and a lot of paper tried to replicate it, but my mind was blown when I realized none of them used the same code. None of them actually shared the code they used for their research and then they all claimed they were testing the same thing when they obviously weren't. To me, refusing to share the source code to a program that could be used to replicate your research seems like a big middle finger to science itself. It shows a total disregard to study replication.
  • bikingbismuth 5y ago
    I have been adjacent to industrial and academic partnerships where both the university and company wanted to maintain the IP of the work and in their minds that extended to the software. Paper was published and the source code was closely guarded. I wondered how people could replicate the findings without the fairly complex system the researchers used.
  • judge2020 5y ago
    Exactly, it'd be like omitting the "methodology" section of the paper. There's no way to verify or prove wrong a paper if you don't know how they reached their conclusions.
    • swayvil 5y ago
      Remove description of methodology and science becomes mere dogma.
      • 6510 5y ago
        and dogma science!
    • nextos 5y ago
      Even more than sharing code, I think the key is to share raw data, postprocessed data and describe methods as exceptionally clear equations and pseudocode. Some well intentioned papers share code which is hard to run years afterwards. It's sometimes much simpler to reimplement things that to get the code to run if they are described accurately. Besides, some articles hide ugly things, nasty tricks and lies in the code, which make their results a lot less believable and valid. Being super upfront about models in terms of equations and pseudocode is important. Of course, we should also have standards to make code reproducible. Perhaps depositing a VM with everything ready to run.
• kingTug 5y ago
  Incredible that you cite Brett and Eric Weinstein as credible sources of information. Those guys are charlatans through and through.
  • ummonk 5y ago
    Yes, it’s incredibly ironic to be recommending Brett and Eric Weinstein in a comment about fraudulent researchers.
    • freedomben 5y ago
      Source? I'm not trying to be a dick, I'm legitimately interested in seeing some substance to backup these charges, which are pretty serious.
      • tripletao 5y ago
        Eric seems lightly inclined to fringe theories and self-importance, but nothing I'd call fraud. Bret has been pushing some pretty unfortunate stuff though, including prophylactic ivermectin as a superior alternative to vaccination: https://quillette.com/2021/07/06/looking-for-covid-19-miracle-drugs-we-already-have-them-theyre-called-vaccines/ https://quillette.com/2021/07/06/looking-for-covid-19-miracl... https://www.wweek.com/news/2021/09/15/a-progressive-biologist-from-portland-is-one-of-the-nations-leading-advocates-for-ivermectin/ https://www.wweek.com/news/2021/09/15/a-progressive-biologis... > “I am unvaccinated, but I am on prophylactic ivermectin,” Weinstein said on his podcast in June. “And the data—shocking as this will be to some people—suggest that prophylactic ivermectin is something like 100% effective at preventing people from contracting COVID when taken properly.” He wasn't just claiming that ivermectin might have some efficacy against SARS-CoV-2 (possible, though I doubt it), or that the risks of the vaccine were understated to the public (basically true; but it's a great tradeoff for adults, and probably still the right bet for children). Bret was clearly implying that for many people--including himself, and he's not young--the risk/benefit for prophylactic ivermectin was more favorable than for the vaccine. There was no reasonable basis for such a belief, and the harm to those who declined vaccination based on such beliefs has become obvious in the relative death rates. The first article I've linked above is by Yuri Deigin, who had appeared earlier on Bret's show to discuss the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 arose unnaturally, from an accident in virological research. This was back when that was a conspiracy theory that could get you banned from Facebook, long before mainstream scientists and reporters discussed that as a reasonable (but unproven) hypothesis like now. So I don't think Bret's services as a contrarian are entirely bad, but they're pretty far from entirely good.
• ensan 5y ago
  Of course, there are frauds in any industry/profession. But in my experience (math, science, & engineering), it is actually far less prevalent than in other places. Forget the overzealous #sciencetwitter people. I have found that academia is one of the rare places where people the absolute top of their field who are often actually modest & aware of their ignorance about most things.
  • moonchrome 5y ago
    >I have found that academia is one of the rare places where people the absolute top of their field who are often actually modest & aware of their ignorance about most things. This view doesn't really align with designing public policy - while those people exist - they aren't the problem (or are insofar they aren't voicing their positions loud enough). Coming from a place of modesty and acknowledging limitations is not the "believe science" movement.
    • ensan 5y ago
      Agreed. But I wanted to point out that the “believe science” people are not actually representative of most researchers in academic institutions.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mendercap 5y ago
  That's terrible. Here's a recent example from a credible source that does name names: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-31/on-the-trail-of-dodgy-academic-research/100788052 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-31/on-the-trail-of-dodgy...
• stereoradonc 5y ago
  Thanks for the book suggestion! Going to read it soon.
• msie 5y ago
  Let us know their name.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• AussieWog93 5y ago
  >There are many examples, at the end of the day... the people in the institutions will protect themselves. This extends well beyond the science itself, for what it's worth. It's an open secret in every department that professors X, Y and Z have the same level of sexual restraint as Harvey Weinstein. It doesn't stop the "woke" institutions doing everything they can to protect these professors' reputations, though.
• rdtsc 5y ago
  > Their lab mates tried to raise concerns and nothing happened. That person graduated, with everyone on the committee knowing the issues. I understand after some time it would be an embarrassment for the department because they hired, vetted them, etc. But why did that get tolerated initially, was it a case of nepotism? It seems they must have had some kind of a special privilege or status to skate by so easily despite the accusations.
• ta988 5y ago
  Now think about research on chemicals, everybody has a different source, different quality control (most academic labs do 0 qc on incoming chemicals). I have bought chemicals from major and minor vendors and I could tell you all kind of horror stories... Wrong molecule, inert powders added to increase weight, highly toxic impurities... Now you add that to assays and academics that have been optimized for years to scream "I HAVE A NEW DRUG AGAINST X" anytime they stare too long at the test tube...
  • murphyslab 5y ago
    This is absolute baloney. I've ordered numerous research grade chemicals from multiple suppliers and not once has any of them been the wrong one nor outside of stated purity grade — and I regularly checked, since it's standard practice. If a solid organic material is in a lower grade of purity it is typically recrystallized. Now, yes, impurities — even minor ones — can have significant effects. But that tends to be in rare circumstances and chemists are quite aware of the need to check for it where it's most needed such as catalysis research. No one is going to scream "I have a new drug" for something for which the composition is unclear. I don't know what world you live in, but it isn't one of a typical North American nor European university research lab.
    • ta988 5y ago
      This was my work to check for quality of chemicals entering the lab. NMR, MS, IR... And over 15 years I have seen dozens and dozens of cases. Now most labs call HPLC with UV sufficient for quality analysis. Lots of things looked "fine" that way that's for sure. Note that I was in the drug discovery world not in the inorganic chemistry world where things are ususally of much better quality.
• ta988 5y ago
  You can throw away every drug discovery paper that do not check quality and purity of reagents or even worse give no source.
• VieEnCode 5y ago
  Bret and Eric Weinstein are ... to put it politely, utter narcissistic charlatans themselves.
  • Gareth321 5y ago
    I've got not dog in the fight, but I've listened to some podcasts by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, and compared to the absolute nonsense I see on TV today, it is a breath of fresh air. They're reading scientific articles, discussing implications in long form, and have been open and honest about their mistakes. I have not seen or heard of Eric Weinstein so I can't comment. I'm not sure what kind of bar you're using to compare your chosen media, but it seems extremely high, and I'd like to know what you consider to be suitably informative.
    • dskloet 5y ago
      When did you listen? They used to be OK but then went completely down the conspiracy rabbit hole.
    • kuhewa 5y ago
      > have been open and honest about their mistakes They really haven't. They continued to double-down on ivermectin and other COVID era flim flam as it came to light more studies were dodgy or outright fraudulent. It's pretend science theatre from a former small university lecturer who managed a couple research papers in 20 years. For example, telling the audience with a straight face that it doesn't matter if the studies going into a metaanalysis are biased because the errors will cancel out.
      • VieEnCode 5y ago
        Not sure why you're being downvoted: your comment is spot on.
• teekert 5y ago
  it's almost like our fav person Ayn Rand got that right [0]. Wat is pure science? It's little without a consciousness and there are a lot of perverse stimuli. For one, I found the requirement to publish (something "worthwhile", which is subjective) during my PhD so stupid. You can work hard and cleverly in science for 4 years yet only debunk stuff or not even find anything at all (but that by itself should be publishable!) or you can get lucky and publish a lot. All the publish-or-perish pressure does is force subpar stuff into the community. Like you two, I also got a bit disillusioned with non-applied science as we have it. Edit: I don't want to say (like Ayn Rand, who can be pretty black and white) that it is all bad and we should do away with it, but it's something we should be very aware of and try to build in mechanisms to protect ourselves from these effects. [0]: https://www.conservapedia.com/State_Science_Institute#Typology https://www.conservapedia.com/State_Science_Institute#Typolo...
  • pastacacioepepe 5y ago
    I wonder how many people actually believe Ayn Rand to be "their favorite person", after having met her. I believe one could count them on one hand.
    • teekert 5y ago
      Probably, I was being sarcastic, if you've been on HN for some time, you know that Ayn is not universally loved here. At times this is ironic because she matches quite well the opinions of people here wrt government involvement in the market, love, and now indeed state sponsored science.
• jl6 5y ago
  In what field is this fraud occurring? Are we talking about a hard science?
• guerrilla 5y ago
  > Most cs work is equally useless. It’s all a farce. Hey careful there, it must depend on the area because all the type theory and functional programming research comes with and always came with proofs and working code. It couldn't be more rigorous and useful.
• rapind 5y ago
  I agree that there is an integrity problem in some areas of research (due to incentives), however the Eric Weinstein reference is laughable. I'd consider him a prime example of pseudo science for dollars / influence with zero credibility. Not saying he can't be on the right side of an issue some times, just that he's a particularly untrustworthy source, and the way he gets to his conclusions is just... wow. https://youtu.be/0TI0jtr6APw https://youtu.be/0TI0jtr6APw