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All the concerns are valid, of course, but there's one important caveat to cheating in academia: Your career is a path dependency, and by cheating now, you may
by uniqueuid 3y ago
All the concerns are valid, of course, but there's one important caveat to cheating in academia:
Your career is a path dependency, and by cheating now, you may be brought down at any point in the future. In other words, cheaters need to make sure that their misconduct is detection-proof for a long time. That's not trivial. And once your career is tarnished, it's not easy to remain in academia, so your whole life concept is sabotaged.
Of course, some big players managed to weather scandals, but they arguably still took a serious hit to their credibility. For example, TED-famous psychologist Dan Ariely, who was the co-author of a paper with spectacularly forged data [1], and had to do an embarrassing public apology.
[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/08/19/a-scandal-in-tedhemia-noted-study-in-psychology-first-fails-to-replicate-but-is-still-promoted-by-npr-then-crumbles-with-striking-evidence-of-data-fraud/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/08/19/a-scandal-...
- epups 3y agoAs someone with an academic background, I would say it is very easy to forge results without anyone knowing it, at least in the biomedical field. The cases being caught are usually lazy like literally copying and pasting bands, if even a medíocre attempt to cheat was made it would have been undetectable. In many cases the professors involved in outright fraud don't even lose their career.
- uniqueuid 3y agoOf course it's a dire problem which is not nearly taken serious enough. Interestingly enough, some fields seem to have some intrinsic motivation to replicate, e.g. biology [1]. I hope we can create similar incentives for all sorts of science. (caveat emptor: I don't know anything about biology) [1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/03/04/biology-as-a-cumulative-science-and-the-relevance-of-this-idea-to-replication/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/03/04/biology-as...
- jfoutz 3y agoI grinned when I saw "biomedical". For some reason my mind always connects to grand old Gregor Mendel, and the Mendel Fisher controversy. I thought you might be subtly trolling, in a really clever way. I believe your comment was made in earnest. Trusting results it tough, and only tougher with scale. Regardless, brilliant comment even if the link was unintentional.
- epups 3y agoHonestly I wasn't thinking about Mendel here. That's a big exception of course. I feel that at least some people who cheat imagine themselves to be doing something similar, cleaning up data to show a deeper truth. In reality, they cost science and individual researchers a lot of time and money.
- yawnxyz 3y agoCrazy that we only have Elizabeth Bik as the one person who tackles this kind of fraud. You’d think NIH would care more about where their billions of dollars go every year
- derbOac 3y agoAlso, forging results is just one variety of unethical practice that is incentivized in academics today, out of many possibilities. There are many other things to do that involve greater degrees of plausible deniability.
- barry-cotter 3y agoIf you have backing at your institution you can get away with no consequences like Kevin Kruse at Princeton. https://philmagness.com/2022/10/kevin-kruses-plagiarism-scandal-evaluating-the-evidence/ https://philmagness.com/2022/10/kevin-kruses-plagiarism-scan...