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On the whole, all these scandals in manipulated research have deeply shaken my trust in many of our scientific institutions. It's clear by now this isn't the ca

On the whole, all these scandals in manipulated research have deeply shaken my trust in many of our scientific institutions. It's clear by now this isn't the case of a few bad apples - our scientific institutions are systemically broken in ways that promote spreading fraudulent results as established scientific truth.

downWidOutaFite 3y ago
It's the same everywhere not just science. The fake-it-till-you-make-it type-A charismatic bullshitters rise up the ranks in all organizations.
- akhayam 3y ago
  I feel this trend taking root in academia is still a new-ish thing. The boundaries of academia and research, especially for computer science, really started blending 15-20 years ago as Big Tech took over Oil for the best paying job / grant. The decay has been super fast though. Maybe some academics will find the courage to do a longitudinal study of this decay. Now that'll be an interesting paper to read.
  - bugglebeetle 3y ago
    It’s most certainly not a new trend, but is perhaps a quintessentially American disease. But one need only look at the so-called “luminaries” in many fields during the mid-20th century to see that this is not in anyway a novel phenomenon. Once you get slightly afield from the hard sciences, it’s charlatans all the way down, especially in fields like psychology and economics.
edgyquant 3y ago
Yep. After years of pushing back against claims that researchers skewed scientific results to fit their agenda this is a huge, demoralizing blow. Even if it isn’t widespread, how can you honestly blame anyone for being skeptical anymore.
- strangattractor 3y ago
  Wide spread? PI's are required to publish. It is impossible to maintain quality of papers via peer review at scale so bad papers usually get through simply because of the volume. Throw in a profit motive and people get creative about hiding it. See this recently published article https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w. One would think that clinical trials would be documented and scrutinized out the yin-yang but they are not.
zitterbewegung 3y ago
If you implement a strategy such as publish or perish exceedingly smart people will game the system to win. Any metric gets gamed. Look at papers that have real impact they get cited. Look at ones that don’t …
- akhayam 3y ago
  And you have some of the smartest brains gaming it too... Such a sad use of good neurons :(
  - bugglebeetle 3y ago
    I wouldn’t presume that the smartest brains are gaming the system. Most likely, it’s mediocre hucksters who have bullied and networked their way into a position of authority. Being good at social engineering != to being the best researcher.
    - patmorgan23 3y ago
      Being smarter doesn't make you more moral either.
      - waterhouse 3y ago
        It may enable you to do sufficiently well without resorting to immoral methods. Interesting how these things can go.
        hobomatic 3y ago
        It may, but it doesn't provide the motivation to bother, especially if you only ever get caught at the end of your career.
        P_I_Staker 3y ago
        I've seen this more often go in the other direction, but I think it can be either way.
matthewdgreen 3y ago
Alternatively there is a baseline of fraudulent behavior in any human organization of 1-5% and since there are tens of thousands of high-profile researchers this sort of thing is inevitable. The question you should be asking is whether the field is able to correct and address its mistakes. Ironically cases like this one are the success stories: we don’t have enough data to know how many cases we’re missing.
- panarky 3y ago
  The very fact that the fraud is discovered, that reporters amplify it, and that it can bring down the president of the university, is evidence to me that the system still works.
  - quickcheque 3y ago
    Sure, any system with a false negative and false positive rate 'works'.
  - wpietri 3y ago
    Maybe? I'd want to see a clear model of flows and selection biases before I concluded that. Another way to look at it: perhaps Tessier-Lavigne only got this scrutiny because he was president of the university. And the fact that they didn't guarantee anonymity when "not guaranteeing anonymity in an investigation of this importance is an 'extremely unusual move'" might be a sign that the scrutiny was politically diminished. So it could be that most of the equally dubious researchers don't get caught because not enough attention is paid to patterns like this except when it's somebody especially prominent. Or it could be that this one was not as well covered up, perhaps because of the sheer number of issues. Or that the cross-institution issues made Stanford more willing to note the wrongdoing. Or that Stanford is less likely to sweep things under the rug because of its prominence. Or just that there was some ongoing tension between the trustees and the president and that this was an opportunity to win a political fight.
    - nequo 3y ago
      These are good points and hard to know. But the Retraction Watch is tracking stories of both mistakes and fraud in published research, across universities: https://retractionwatch.com/ https://retractionwatch.com/
mistermann 3y ago
But it was caught, demonstrating that what we're constantly assured is true is actually true: science may not be perfect, but it catches all of its mistakes, therefore we should trust it above all(!) other disciplines.
dadrian 3y ago
The peer review system is not designed to catch fraud, it's designed to catch scientific or experimental errors. Giving up on science is such a vast overgeneralization. You could take your statement and replace "manipulated research", "scientific institutions" and "established scientific truth" with just about any negative article in any domain. You could just as easily make this statement about startups (Theranos, Juicero), or government, or religion, or suburbs, or cities...
- btheshoe 3y ago
  > The peer review system is not designed to catch fraud, it's designed to catch scientific or experimental errors. Yes. > Giving up on science is such a vast overgeneralization. You could take your statement and replace "manipulated research", "scientific institutions" and "established scientific truth" with just about any negative article in any domain. You could just as easily make this statement about startups (Theranos, Juicero), or government, or religion, or suburbs, or cities... Institutions go through similar cycles of breaking and systemic reform. Not surprised that you can see patterns in other domains.
- strangattractor 3y ago
  It often does neither:( The only real protection from fraud, mistakes and poor science is replication. If results can't be replicated by others it is not science.
huijzer 3y ago
I’ve come to believe that science is mostly about popularity and not about truth-finding. As long as peers like what you write, then you will get through the reviews and get cited. Feynman called this Cargo Cult Science. I think much of science is like this, see also Why Most Published Scientific Findings are False. Not much has changed since the publication of that paper. A few Open Science checks are not gonna solve the fundamental misalignment of incentives.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  Wholeheartedly agree, really a shame to see what it’s become. Wish I could still see research the way I dreamed it was as a child.
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago
  it is impossible for most scientists to understand / critically think about all the research coming out from so many institutions, so most of these academics mainly focus on research coming from someone they respect / institutions they respect, so yes it is kind of like a popularity contest but i would argue that most things in life are due to the limited nature of the human brain we cannot think independently about everything for ourselves and rely on external judgements to what is important / true etc...
  - rustymonday 3y ago
    It is absolutely a popularity contest. The biggest problem is that many academics are reluctant to deviate too far from current consensus in fear of damaging their reputation. The result is that research in many fields tends to stagnate and reinforce old ideas, regardless of whether they are right or wrong.
- arvinsim 3y ago
  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
tptacek 3y ago
A vast amount of "science" is being done at all times. You can likely count the scandals cognitively available to you on one hand; even if it took dozens of hands, you'd still be talking about an infinitesimal sliver of science on the whole. What's actually happening here is an availability bias: you remember scandals, because they're scandalous and thus memorable. You don't know anything about the overwhelming majority of scientific work that is being done, so you have no way of weighting it against the impression those scandals create in your mind.
- kansface 3y ago
  Via HN yesterday [1]- an editor of _Anaesthesia_ did a meta study of the papers he handled that conducted RCTs. He had data from 150 of them and concluded: > ...26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged — either because the authors were incompetent, or because they had faked the data. This is not a one off. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w
  - tptacek 3y ago
    I didn't say it was a one-off. But 150 papers is, to a first approximation, a one-off of all the science done in a given year. We produce millions of journal articles every year.
    - Auracle 3y ago
      Maybe we shouldn't. What's the point of all of that data if a good portion of it can't be trusted?
      - tptacek 3y ago
        Here we're talking about a proportion significantly less than 1%.
    - esyir 3y ago
      There's something to be said about a defense of this that doesn't account for random sampling. Assuming that they did a proper sample of said papers, that implies that for whatever domain they sampled, 26% is likely a decent estimate of actual issues. Increasing the scale doesn't make a proportional estimate any better.
blackbear_ 3y ago
I would like to point out that "scientific truth" does not really exist, or at least is far from straightforward to define and establish. Basically, you should see each piece of research as evidence for a certain hypothesis, and the more evidence is available, the more that hypothesis is believable. But the larger issue here is that all public institutions are, by that definition, broken. For example, businesses also won't hesitate to spread falsehoods to sell their stuff, governments will try to convince their people that they are needed through propaganda and policing, and so on. How do we solve these problems? We have laws to regulate what businesses can't do (nevermind lobbying), and we split governments' responsibility so that no single branch becomes too powerful. In general, we have several independent institutions that keep an eye on each other. In case of science, we trust other scientists to replicate and confirm previous findings. It is a self-correcting mechanism, whereby sloppy or fraudulent research is eventually singled-out, as it happened in this and many other cases. So I guess the gist of what I want to say is that you're right in not trusting a piece of research just because it was made by a reputable institute, but look for solid results that were replicated by independent researchers (and the gold standard here is replication, not peer review)
- sonicshadow 3y ago
  [flagged]
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  > businesses also won't hesitate to spread falsehoods to sell their stuff They do hesitate. It's quite hard to catch businesses openly lying about their own products because, as you observe, there are so many systems and institutions out there trying to get them. Regulators but also lawyers (class action + ambulance-chasers), politicians, journalists, activists, consumer research people. Also you can criticize companies all day and not get banned from social media. A good example of what happens when someone forgets this is Elizabeth Holmes. Exposed by a journalist, prosecuted, jailed. Public institutions are quite well insulated in comparison. Journalists virtually never investigate them, preferring to take their word as gospel. There are few crimes on the book that can jail them regardless of what they say or do, they are often allowed to investigate themselves, criticism is often branded misinformation and then banned, and many people automatically discard any accusation of malfeasance on the assumption that as the institutions claim to be non-profit, corruption is nearly impossible. > It is a self-correcting mechanism, whereby sloppy or fraudulent research is eventually singled-out, as it happened in this and many other cases. It's not self correcting sadly, far from it. If it were self-correcting then the Stanford President's fraud would have been exposed by other scientists years ago, it wouldn't be so easy to find examples of it and we wouldn't see editors of famous journals estimate that half or more of their research is bad. In practice cases where there are consequences are the exception rather than the norm, it's usually found by highly patient outsiders and it almost always takes years of effort by them to get anywhere. Even then the default expected outcome is nothing. Bear in mind that there had been many attempts to flag fraud at the MTL labs before and he had simply ignored them without consequence.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
Even, and especially fields that should be reproducable, like Machine Learning, are FULL of garbage: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/12/1011944/artificial-intelligence-replication-crisis-science-big-tech-google-deepmind-facebook-openai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/12/1011944/artifici... https://reproducible.cs.princeton.edu/ https://reproducible.cs.princeton.edu/ https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018Sci...359..725H/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018Sci...359..725H/abstra...
NeuroCoder 3y ago
I can't speak for other fields but in Neuro there's plenty of this but often one learns how to catch it before using it in your own research, even if it never becomes a matter of public scrutiny. Unfortunately, I can't reassure you that bad research gets caught all the time. However, there's usually at least a couple of experts in a given sub field of Neuro that quickly call BS before something goes too far.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  > in Neuro there's plenty of this but often one learns how to catch it before using it in your own research, even if it never becomes a matter of public scrutiny. And what happens when it is caught, it is just quietly ignored by the field, right? How often are there retractions?
  - NeuroCoder 3y ago
    Depends on the situation. If no one cites it then it drifts into obscurity quickly. If it was actually cited frequently it leads to an investigation of work by all authors on the paper along with a retraction.
- rgmerk 3y ago
  This is an excellent point. A lot of crappy research goes on, and nobody pays it any attention (except, occasionally, when cranks outside the field want to prove that "peer-reviewed research proves the Earth is flat). It's frankly not worth the effort to debunk a shitty piece of researchin a low-profile journal that's never been cited in a decade.
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chasing 3y ago
"A database of retractions shows that only four in every 10,000 papers are retracted." Every time a plane crashes it's international news. But just because you regularly hear about plane crashes doesn't mean flying is unsafe.
- btheshoe 3y ago
  do me a favor and look up all the papers in thinking fast and slow that failed to replicate
Veserv 3y ago
As a aside, the phrase "a few bad apples" is actually originally "a few bad apples spoil the barrel" referencing the fact that a bad/overripe apple causes nearby apples to quickly ripen and go bad which is now known to be due to ripe apples producing ethylene gas which accelerates the ripening of other nearby apples. The phrase originally meant that one bad thing corrupts and destroys all associated. The discovery of a bad apple actually means everything is already irrevocably destroyed and thus reason for not tolerating even a single bad apple. A modern metaphor with a somewhat similar meaning to the original is: "A fish rots from the head down." Pointing out that organizational failures are usually the result of bad leadership. A rotten leadership will quickly result in a rotten organization. Therefore, it is important to make sure the leadership is not rotten in a organization. It also points out that low-level failures indicate there are deeper high-level failures. If the line-level is screwed up, the leadership is almost certainly just as screwed up. The fix being replacing the rotten leadership with a new one as lower-level fixes will not fix the rotten head. Another, more direct equivalent metaphor is a Chinese saying translated as: "One piece of rat poop spoils the pot of soup." That is hopefully self-explanatory. We should probably use it instead of "a few bad apples" as nobody will reverse the meaning of that one.
- capableweb 3y ago
  As an aside to your aside, it's also the case that phrases/words change meaning over time, as usage in one grows above the usage in a different way. In this case, the "a few bad apples are not representative of a group" meaning have grown above the "One bad apple spoils the barrel" meaning, and so the phrase as changed, for better or worse. Maybe it would be best if everyone used the long version instead of the short one. When you say/write "A few bad apples", the meaning is ambiguous, but if you use the long version, it's not. Problem solved :)
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > In this case, the "a few bad apples are not representative of a group" meaning have grown above the "One bad apple spoils the barrel" meaning Most of the time when I hear the "only a few bad apples, the rest of us are fine" meaning it's coming right from the mouths of badly spoiled apples twisting the meaning of those words and popularizing that usage to suit their agendas. Generally, I think that there's nothing wrong with pushing back against words and phrases used incorrectly. We get to decide how words are used, and a large part of that decision making process involves social pressure and education. I think it's particularly useful to defend the meaning of words and phrases when they're being deceptively misused and promoted.
iancmceachern 3y ago
Especially that the folks that are committing the fraud are raising to high places. It goes to show that we have systemic problems. This isn't a failure of a few individuals but a failure of our institutions. Clearly our incentive structure is messed up if people like this are in positions like this. Clearly we need to not only address this individuals actions, but the systemic issues that led to his ability to do what he did and still rise to the position he did.
stillbourne 3y ago
But they got caught, they retracted, the system works. It's not a perfect system, in a perfect system people wouldn't be incentivized to publish publish publish or be damned to the back waters. The institution is broken, but the safety nets work.
callalex 3y ago
It should be noted that the volume of corruption coming out of state-run schools is much smaller than that from private institutions.
- piuantiderp 3y ago
  I'd wager it is just better covered up
cycomanic 3y ago
Is that the correct conclusion to draw? I mean there are definitely big problems on how we conduct and fund scientific research (which might also contribute to fraud), but the number of research scandals is a tiny fraction to the amount of research being done. Considering that we get fraud every time we have humans and prestige money, I would really like to see some statistics against other things human activities. I suspect science still has some of the lowest fraud rates and the strongest mechanisms to detect and deal with it.
- P_I_Staker 3y ago
  The problem is a tiny percentage gets any attention whatsoever. It's the same with police and doctoral abuse. These things are hugely prevalent with 30-80% of professionals engaging in some form of abuse... same with fraud. People know about police abuse. We don't talk about doctor abuse. I'm honestly not confident that there's any police/doctors that don't engage in abusive practices (or it's a tiny percentage of the population).
0xDEF 3y ago
>our scientific institutions are systemically broken in ways that promote spreading fraudulent results as established scientific truth Scientific consensus is still very reliable and if 95% of accredited scientists in a field say something is true it is in society's best interest to consider that to be the truth.
Apofis 3y ago
I truly hope they toss every single paper and citations to them that ever crossed this assholes desk. This misconduct literally should be treated the same as a dirty detectives cases being reviewed and tossed out since they are no longer trustworthy.
- robocat 3y ago
  I hope you are forced to live in an authoritarian situation: so you may truly learn what it is like to be punished for the mistakes of others. The point here is to save the good apples - not throw out the whole barrel for zero gain.
kansface 3y ago
The article from Nature yesterday came up with 26% of the peer reviewed published papers they examined (all RCT) were untrustworthy based on close examination of their data. They could only invalidate 2% without data. I personally believe this is an underestimate.
alfalfasprout 3y ago
A combination of "publish or perish" and papers not accepting "negative results" (which results in a ton of repeated research) has led to this.
janalsncm 3y ago
Scientific institutions aren’t perfect. They’re made up of people like anywhere else. And where there are people there will be politics and gamesmanship. That doesn’t mean science isn’t our best shot at figuring out how the world works. The fact that a Stanford president can be pushed out for bad research conducted before he was even there? It tells me there’s still some integrity left.
partomniscient 3y ago
One has to ask what there is left to trust at all?
throwaway4837 3y ago
How? Peer-review, re-review, journalism, and reproduction of results are the systems the scientific community is built upon. The system does its job of finding the bad apples, as it did here. Bad things are gonna happen in every single institution ever created. A better measure is how long those things persist. Science is about getting closer to "the truth". Sometimes science goes further away from the truth, sometimes it gets closer. Sometimes bad actors get us further away from the truth. It gets reconciled eventually.
stjohnswarts 3y ago
It strengthens mine. Science is self correcting in a way the religion and politics never can be, they keep making the same faith based mistakes over and over, while science continues to progress. Evidence of that is everywhere you look, whereas politics and religion have barely made any progress in hundreds of years.
rmbyrro 3y ago
To the contrary, it increases my trust. Just the fact that Stanford managed to conduct an independent investigation against its OWN PRESIDENT, tells very positive things about the University. After this episode, I might trust Stanford research even a bit more than any University that never caught fraudsters.
jonhohle 3y ago
You mean we can’t just Trust the Science™?! I completely agree. Seeing slack chats and emails regarding Proximal Origin and how researchers were disagreeing with it all the way until they published a paper that served what purpose are really disheartening. Instead of guiding future research toward preventing similar outcomes, countless scientists spent untold years of combined effort on a theory the authors didn’t even believe.
lynx23 3y ago
Agreed. The system is flawed. And as a result, many scientific "findings" simply can't be trusted. And there is no solution in sight.
wesleywt 3y ago
The problem is not with science, it is your science illiteracy. You never accept scientific research as "true" until it has been verify and repeated by independent sources. It has become the culture to glorify unexpected and "interesting" results in the media and society at large. But you should find these "interesting" but not necessary believe it to be true. We do get unbelievable findings such as CRISPR, but beware these will be very few and far between.

downWidOutaFite 3y ago

It's the same everywhere not just science. The fake-it-till-you-make-it type-A charismatic bullshitters rise up the ranks in all organizations.

akhayam 3y ago
I feel this trend taking root in academia is still a new-ish thing. The boundaries of academia and research, especially for computer science, really started blending 15-20 years ago as Big Tech took over Oil for the best paying job / grant. The decay has been super fast though. Maybe some academics will find the courage to do a longitudinal study of this decay. Now that'll be an interesting paper to read.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  It’s most certainly not a new trend, but is perhaps a quintessentially American disease. But one need only look at the so-called “luminaries” in many fields during the mid-20th century to see that this is not in anyway a novel phenomenon. Once you get slightly afield from the hard sciences, it’s charlatans all the way down, especially in fields like psychology and economics.

edgyquant 3y ago

Yep. After years of pushing back against claims that researchers skewed scientific results to fit their agenda this is a huge, demoralizing blow. Even if it isn’t widespread, how can you honestly blame anyone for being skeptical anymore.

strangattractor 3y ago
Wide spread? PI's are required to publish. It is impossible to maintain quality of papers via peer review at scale so bad papers usually get through simply because of the volume. Throw in a profit motive and people get creative about hiding it. See this recently published article https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w. One would think that clinical trials would be documented and scrutinized out the yin-yang but they are not.

zitterbewegung 3y ago

If you implement a strategy such as publish or perish exceedingly smart people will game the system to win. Any metric gets gamed. Look at papers that have real impact they get cited. Look at ones that don’t …

akhayam 3y ago
And you have some of the smartest brains gaming it too... Such a sad use of good neurons :(
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  I wouldn’t presume that the smartest brains are gaming the system. Most likely, it’s mediocre hucksters who have bullied and networked their way into a position of authority. Being good at social engineering != to being the best researcher.
  - patmorgan23 3y ago
    Being smarter doesn't make you more moral either.
    - waterhouse 3y ago
      It may enable you to do sufficiently well without resorting to immoral methods. Interesting how these things can go.
      - hobomatic 3y ago
        It may, but it doesn't provide the motivation to bother, especially if you only ever get caught at the end of your career.
      - P_I_Staker 3y ago
        I've seen this more often go in the other direction, but I think it can be either way.

matthewdgreen 3y ago

Alternatively there is a baseline of fraudulent behavior in any human organization of 1-5% and since there are tens of thousands of high-profile researchers this sort of thing is inevitable. The question you should be asking is whether the field is able to correct and address its mistakes. Ironically cases like this one are the success stories: we don’t have enough data to know how many cases we’re missing.

panarky 3y ago
The very fact that the fraud is discovered, that reporters amplify it, and that it can bring down the president of the university, is evidence to me that the system still works.
- quickcheque 3y ago
  Sure, any system with a false negative and false positive rate 'works'.
- wpietri 3y ago
  Maybe? I'd want to see a clear model of flows and selection biases before I concluded that. Another way to look at it: perhaps Tessier-Lavigne only got this scrutiny because he was president of the university. And the fact that they didn't guarantee anonymity when "not guaranteeing anonymity in an investigation of this importance is an 'extremely unusual move'" might be a sign that the scrutiny was politically diminished. So it could be that most of the equally dubious researchers don't get caught because not enough attention is paid to patterns like this except when it's somebody especially prominent. Or it could be that this one was not as well covered up, perhaps because of the sheer number of issues. Or that the cross-institution issues made Stanford more willing to note the wrongdoing. Or that Stanford is less likely to sweep things under the rug because of its prominence. Or just that there was some ongoing tension between the trustees and the president and that this was an opportunity to win a political fight.
  - nequo 3y ago
    These are good points and hard to know. But the Retraction Watch is tracking stories of both mistakes and fraud in published research, across universities: https://retractionwatch.com/ https://retractionwatch.com/

mistermann 3y ago

But it was caught, demonstrating that what we're constantly assured is true is actually true: science may not be perfect, but it catches all of its mistakes, therefore we should trust it above all(!) other disciplines.

dadrian 3y ago

The peer review system is not designed to catch fraud, it's designed to catch scientific or experimental errors. Giving up on science is such a vast overgeneralization. You could take your statement and replace "manipulated research", "scientific institutions" and "established scientific truth" with just about any negative article in any domain. You could just as easily make this statement about startups (Theranos, Juicero), or government, or religion, or suburbs, or cities...

btheshoe 3y ago
> The peer review system is not designed to catch fraud, it's designed to catch scientific or experimental errors. Yes. > Giving up on science is such a vast overgeneralization. You could take your statement and replace "manipulated research", "scientific institutions" and "established scientific truth" with just about any negative article in any domain. You could just as easily make this statement about startups (Theranos, Juicero), or government, or religion, or suburbs, or cities... Institutions go through similar cycles of breaking and systemic reform. Not surprised that you can see patterns in other domains.
strangattractor 3y ago
It often does neither:( The only real protection from fraud, mistakes and poor science is replication. If results can't be replicated by others it is not science.

huijzer 3y ago

I’ve come to believe that science is mostly about popularity and not about truth-finding. As long as peers like what you write, then you will get through the reviews and get cited. Feynman called this Cargo Cult Science. I think much of science is like this, see also Why Most Published Scientific Findings are False. Not much has changed since the publication of that paper. A few Open Science checks are not gonna solve the fundamental misalignment of incentives.

asynchronous 3y ago
Wholeheartedly agree, really a shame to see what it’s become. Wish I could still see research the way I dreamed it was as a child.
strikelaserclaw 3y ago
it is impossible for most scientists to understand / critically think about all the research coming out from so many institutions, so most of these academics mainly focus on research coming from someone they respect / institutions they respect, so yes it is kind of like a popularity contest but i would argue that most things in life are due to the limited nature of the human brain we cannot think independently about everything for ourselves and rely on external judgements to what is important / true etc...
- rustymonday 3y ago
  It is absolutely a popularity contest. The biggest problem is that many academics are reluctant to deviate too far from current consensus in fear of damaging their reputation. The result is that research in many fields tends to stagnate and reinforce old ideas, regardless of whether they are right or wrong.
arvinsim 3y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair

tptacek 3y ago

A vast amount of "science" is being done at all times. You can likely count the scandals cognitively available to you on one hand; even if it took dozens of hands, you'd still be talking about an infinitesimal sliver of science on the whole. What's actually happening here is an availability bias: you remember scandals, because they're scandalous and thus memorable. You don't know anything about the overwhelming majority of scientific work that is being done, so you have no way of weighting it against the impression those scandals create in your mind.

kansface 3y ago
Via HN yesterday [1]- an editor of _Anaesthesia_ did a meta study of the papers he handled that conducted RCTs. He had data from 150 of them and concluded: > ...26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged — either because the authors were incompetent, or because they had faked the data. This is not a one off. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02299-w
- tptacek 3y ago
  I didn't say it was a one-off. But 150 papers is, to a first approximation, a one-off of all the science done in a given year. We produce millions of journal articles every year.
  - Auracle 3y ago
    Maybe we shouldn't. What's the point of all of that data if a good portion of it can't be trusted?
    - tptacek 3y ago
      Here we're talking about a proportion significantly less than 1%.
  - esyir 3y ago
    There's something to be said about a defense of this that doesn't account for random sampling. Assuming that they did a proper sample of said papers, that implies that for whatever domain they sampled, 26% is likely a decent estimate of actual issues. Increasing the scale doesn't make a proportional estimate any better.

blackbear_ 3y ago

I would like to point out that "scientific truth" does not really exist, or at least is far from straightforward to define and establish. Basically, you should see each piece of research as evidence for a certain hypothesis, and the more evidence is available, the more that hypothesis is believable. But the larger issue here is that all public institutions are, by that definition, broken. For example, businesses also won't hesitate to spread falsehoods to sell their stuff, governments will try to convince their people that they are needed through propaganda and policing, and so on. How do we solve these problems? We have laws to regulate what businesses can't do (nevermind lobbying), and we split governments' responsibility so that no single branch becomes too powerful. In general, we have several independent institutions that keep an eye on each other. In case of science, we trust other scientists to replicate and confirm previous findings. It is a self-correcting mechanism, whereby sloppy or fraudulent research is eventually singled-out, as it happened in this and many other cases. So I guess the gist of what I want to say is that you're right in not trusting a piece of research just because it was made by a reputable institute, but look for solid results that were replicated by independent researchers (and the gold standard here is replication, not peer review)

sonicshadow 3y ago
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mike_hearn 3y ago
> businesses also won't hesitate to spread falsehoods to sell their stuff They do hesitate. It's quite hard to catch businesses openly lying about their own products because, as you observe, there are so many systems and institutions out there trying to get them. Regulators but also lawyers (class action + ambulance-chasers), politicians, journalists, activists, consumer research people. Also you can criticize companies all day and not get banned from social media. A good example of what happens when someone forgets this is Elizabeth Holmes. Exposed by a journalist, prosecuted, jailed. Public institutions are quite well insulated in comparison. Journalists virtually never investigate them, preferring to take their word as gospel. There are few crimes on the book that can jail them regardless of what they say or do, they are often allowed to investigate themselves, criticism is often branded misinformation and then banned, and many people automatically discard any accusation of malfeasance on the assumption that as the institutions claim to be non-profit, corruption is nearly impossible. > It is a self-correcting mechanism, whereby sloppy or fraudulent research is eventually singled-out, as it happened in this and many other cases. It's not self correcting sadly, far from it. If it were self-correcting then the Stanford President's fraud would have been exposed by other scientists years ago, it wouldn't be so easy to find examples of it and we wouldn't see editors of famous journals estimate that half or more of their research is bad. In practice cases where there are consequences are the exception rather than the norm, it's usually found by highly patient outsiders and it almost always takes years of effort by them to get anywhere. Even then the default expected outcome is nothing. Bear in mind that there had been many attempts to flag fraud at the MTL labs before and he had simply ignored them without consequence.

Der_Einzige 3y ago

Even, and especially fields that should be reproducable, like Machine Learning, are FULL of garbage: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/12/1011944/artificial-intelligence-replication-crisis-science-big-tech-google-deepmind-facebook-openai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/12/1011944/artifici... https://reproducible.cs.princeton.edu/ https://reproducible.cs.princeton.edu/ https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018Sci...359..725H/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018Sci...359..725H/abstra...

NeuroCoder 3y ago

I can't speak for other fields but in Neuro there's plenty of this but often one learns how to catch it before using it in your own research, even if it never becomes a matter of public scrutiny. Unfortunately, I can't reassure you that bad research gets caught all the time. However, there's usually at least a couple of experts in a given sub field of Neuro that quickly call BS before something goes too far.

jeremyjh 3y ago
> in Neuro there's plenty of this but often one learns how to catch it before using it in your own research, even if it never becomes a matter of public scrutiny. And what happens when it is caught, it is just quietly ignored by the field, right? How often are there retractions?
- NeuroCoder 3y ago
  Depends on the situation. If no one cites it then it drifts into obscurity quickly. If it was actually cited frequently it leads to an investigation of work by all authors on the paper along with a retraction.
rgmerk 3y ago
This is an excellent point. A lot of crappy research goes on, and nobody pays it any attention (except, occasionally, when cranks outside the field want to prove that "peer-reviewed research proves the Earth is flat). It's frankly not worth the effort to debunk a shitty piece of researchin a low-profile journal that's never been cited in a decade.

deleted 3y ago

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chasing 3y ago

"A database of retractions shows that only four in every 10,000 papers are retracted." Every time a plane crashes it's international news. But just because you regularly hear about plane crashes doesn't mean flying is unsafe.

btheshoe 3y ago
do me a favor and look up all the papers in thinking fast and slow that failed to replicate

Veserv 3y ago

As a aside, the phrase "a few bad apples" is actually originally "a few bad apples spoil the barrel" referencing the fact that a bad/overripe apple causes nearby apples to quickly ripen and go bad which is now known to be due to ripe apples producing ethylene gas which accelerates the ripening of other nearby apples. The phrase originally meant that one bad thing corrupts and destroys all associated. The discovery of a bad apple actually means everything is already irrevocably destroyed and thus reason for not tolerating even a single bad apple. A modern metaphor with a somewhat similar meaning to the original is: "A fish rots from the head down." Pointing out that organizational failures are usually the result of bad leadership. A rotten leadership will quickly result in a rotten organization. Therefore, it is important to make sure the leadership is not rotten in a organization. It also points out that low-level failures indicate there are deeper high-level failures. If the line-level is screwed up, the leadership is almost certainly just as screwed up. The fix being replacing the rotten leadership with a new one as lower-level fixes will not fix the rotten head. Another, more direct equivalent metaphor is a Chinese saying translated as: "One piece of rat poop spoils the pot of soup." That is hopefully self-explanatory. We should probably use it instead of "a few bad apples" as nobody will reverse the meaning of that one.

capableweb 3y ago
As an aside to your aside, it's also the case that phrases/words change meaning over time, as usage in one grows above the usage in a different way. In this case, the "a few bad apples are not representative of a group" meaning have grown above the "One bad apple spoils the barrel" meaning, and so the phrase as changed, for better or worse. Maybe it would be best if everyone used the long version instead of the short one. When you say/write "A few bad apples", the meaning is ambiguous, but if you use the long version, it's not. Problem solved :)
- autoexec 3y ago
  > In this case, the "a few bad apples are not representative of a group" meaning have grown above the "One bad apple spoils the barrel" meaning Most of the time when I hear the "only a few bad apples, the rest of us are fine" meaning it's coming right from the mouths of badly spoiled apples twisting the meaning of those words and popularizing that usage to suit their agendas. Generally, I think that there's nothing wrong with pushing back against words and phrases used incorrectly. We get to decide how words are used, and a large part of that decision making process involves social pressure and education. I think it's particularly useful to defend the meaning of words and phrases when they're being deceptively misused and promoted.

iancmceachern 3y ago

Especially that the folks that are committing the fraud are raising to high places. It goes to show that we have systemic problems. This isn't a failure of a few individuals but a failure of our institutions. Clearly our incentive structure is messed up if people like this are in positions like this. Clearly we need to not only address this individuals actions, but the systemic issues that led to his ability to do what he did and still rise to the position he did.

stillbourne 3y ago

But they got caught, they retracted, the system works. It's not a perfect system, in a perfect system people wouldn't be incentivized to publish publish publish or be damned to the back waters. The institution is broken, but the safety nets work.

callalex 3y ago

It should be noted that the volume of corruption coming out of state-run schools is much smaller than that from private institutions.

piuantiderp 3y ago
I'd wager it is just better covered up

cycomanic 3y ago

Is that the correct conclusion to draw? I mean there are definitely big problems on how we conduct and fund scientific research (which might also contribute to fraud), but the number of research scandals is a tiny fraction to the amount of research being done. Considering that we get fraud every time we have humans and prestige money, I would really like to see some statistics against other things human activities. I suspect science still has some of the lowest fraud rates and the strongest mechanisms to detect and deal with it.

P_I_Staker 3y ago
The problem is a tiny percentage gets any attention whatsoever. It's the same with police and doctoral abuse. These things are hugely prevalent with 30-80% of professionals engaging in some form of abuse... same with fraud. People know about police abuse. We don't talk about doctor abuse. I'm honestly not confident that there's any police/doctors that don't engage in abusive practices (or it's a tiny percentage of the population).

0xDEF 3y ago

>our scientific institutions are systemically broken in ways that promote spreading fraudulent results as established scientific truth Scientific consensus is still very reliable and if 95% of accredited scientists in a field say something is true it is in society's best interest to consider that to be the truth.

Apofis 3y ago

I truly hope they toss every single paper and citations to them that ever crossed this assholes desk. This misconduct literally should be treated the same as a dirty detectives cases being reviewed and tossed out since they are no longer trustworthy.

robocat 3y ago
I hope you are forced to live in an authoritarian situation: so you may truly learn what it is like to be punished for the mistakes of others. The point here is to save the good apples - not throw out the whole barrel for zero gain.

kansface 3y ago

The article from Nature yesterday came up with 26% of the peer reviewed published papers they examined (all RCT) were untrustworthy based on close examination of their data. They could only invalidate 2% without data. I personally believe this is an underestimate.

alfalfasprout 3y ago

A combination of "publish or perish" and papers not accepting "negative results" (which results in a ton of repeated research) has led to this.

janalsncm 3y ago

Scientific institutions aren’t perfect. They’re made up of people like anywhere else. And where there are people there will be politics and gamesmanship. That doesn’t mean science isn’t our best shot at figuring out how the world works. The fact that a Stanford president can be pushed out for bad research conducted before he was even there? It tells me there’s still some integrity left.

partomniscient 3y ago

One has to ask what there is left to trust at all?

throwaway4837 3y ago

How? Peer-review, re-review, journalism, and reproduction of results are the systems the scientific community is built upon. The system does its job of finding the bad apples, as it did here. Bad things are gonna happen in every single institution ever created. A better measure is how long those things persist. Science is about getting closer to "the truth". Sometimes science goes further away from the truth, sometimes it gets closer. Sometimes bad actors get us further away from the truth. It gets reconciled eventually.

stjohnswarts 3y ago

It strengthens mine. Science is self correcting in a way the religion and politics never can be, they keep making the same faith based mistakes over and over, while science continues to progress. Evidence of that is everywhere you look, whereas politics and religion have barely made any progress in hundreds of years.

rmbyrro 3y ago

To the contrary, it increases my trust. Just the fact that Stanford managed to conduct an independent investigation against its OWN PRESIDENT, tells very positive things about the University. After this episode, I might trust Stanford research even a bit more than any University that never caught fraudsters.

jonhohle 3y ago

You mean we can’t just Trust the Science™?! I completely agree. Seeing slack chats and emails regarding Proximal Origin and how researchers were disagreeing with it all the way until they published a paper that served what purpose are really disheartening. Instead of guiding future research toward preventing similar outcomes, countless scientists spent untold years of combined effort on a theory the authors didn’t even believe.

lynx23 3y ago

Agreed. The system is flawed. And as a result, many scientific "findings" simply can't be trusted. And there is no solution in sight.

wesleywt 3y ago

The problem is not with science, it is your science illiteracy. You never accept scientific research as "true" until it has been verify and repeated by independent sources. It has become the culture to glorify unexpected and "interesting" results in the media and society at large. But you should find these "interesting" but not necessary believe it to be true. We do get unbelievable findings such as CRISPR, but beware these will be very few and far between.