5 ms·

As someone who works in Data Science at FAANG - if you look hard enough - there is something questionably wrong in every step of the data funnel. And that's wh

As someone who works in Data Science at FAANG - if you look hard enough - there is something questionably wrong in every step of the data funnel. And that's when I believe people do have a somewhat best effort to maximize profits. There are plenty of people that only care about career progression and think they can get away with lying and cheating their way to the top. They wouldn't believe that if it didn't work sometimes. These medical studies are also run mainly to maximize profits, also by some career climbers. They are not run virtuously for the betterment of society. So I would be astounded if they are as reliable as people might like to believe. Maybe I'm just being grossly skeptical. Actually, I'd feel better if someone could convince me I'm completely unfounded here.

shaburn 3y ago
Really curious how a profitable industry like medical research ranks against less profitible.
verisimi 3y ago
I don't think that's skeptical. I do think there is an even worse issue - which is funding. The money incentive means you can fund studies that support whatever you want.
ancorevard 3y ago
"And that's when I believe people do have a somewhat best effort to maximize profits." Nope. I actually think that if you do scientific research as a company (profit) it may make you less bad/less likely to do fraud compared to academia (non-profit). Reason is that there are more ways to punish you, employees, board, investors, etc in a profit seeking vehicle, and as a profit seeking vehicle being caught must be part of the profit seeking calculation – in the end, the world of reality/physics will weigh your contribution. I believe there is evidence that there is more fraudulent scientific research happening in non-profit vehicles/academia. Take for example an area where there are fewer profit seeking companies participating - social sciences. It's dominated by academia. Now look at the replication rate of social sciences.
- spicymapotofu 3y ago
  All three points in last paragraph seem wholy unrelated to each other and your larger point. I agreed with first half.
- screye 3y ago
  I have a simpler reason for the same belief. You can fake everything except a well designed A/B test. At FAANG scale, a statistically significant A/B test requirement will stop the worst fraud before it hits the user.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    And also - you can somewhat take care of bugs by evenly distributing them to your test & control group.
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
    FAANG engineers: “hold my beer” Seriously though, as a person who has built related systems at FAANG, yes this problem exists there. Your beautiful cathedral of an A/B testing framework is covered in knobs that are just perfect for p-hacking.
- muzani 3y ago
  I used to work data entry as a research assistant, for some non-profit academia. We saw flaws in the data collection - basically the people tasked to collect data were being lazy and some were making stuff up. We know the made up stuff when we see it. Outliers are fine and some groups do better than expected, but an entire group from one data collecter shouldn't be 100% outliers. But we had to enter the data anyway. We were told to smooth the bad data to what was expected. So the outliers that were low were smoothed high, the high outliers were left alone because they seemed right. But those of us who were spending hundreds of hours on data entry had an intuitive feel of what an outlier looked like. IMO everything should have been entered as is and the computer data would just be filtered out if it was deemed from a corrupt source. But the data in the computer was biased to match what the research wanted to prove. So I agree that non-profits can be corrupt too, just because of the incentives each part of the way. We were being paid about half a cent per column of data. So some assistants were lazy and filling in data that could be right, or skimming on fields like address which are longer and less likely to be flagged.
hackncheese 3y ago
Objectivity and honesty can be hard to find if all someone cares about is their reputation as a competent researcher or climbing the ladder. What do you think a potential solution would be for this? I feel like even in my own experience, trying something out and it not working feels like failure, when in fact to proclaim it a success or "fix" it is truly what harms both the endeavor for truth and the people reliant on the outcomes of these surveys
- autoexec 3y ago
  > Objectivity and honesty can be hard to find if all someone cares about is their reputation as a competent researcher or climbing the ladder. It seems like destroying the reputation and career of people who fake science would be a great start. If you're willing to fake data and lie to get results, there will always be an industry who'd love to hire you no matter how tarnished your reputation is. We need a better means to hold researchers accountable and we need to stop putting any amount of faith in any research that hasn't been independently verified through replication. Today the lobby for orange juice manufactures can pay a scientist to fake research which shows that drinking orange juice makes you more attractive, and then pay publications to broadcast that headline to the world to increase sales. We should have some means to hold publications responsible for this as well.
  - cutemonster 3y ago
    > destroying the reputation and career of people who fake science would be a great start When so many reports are faulty and fraudulent, that might instead be the great start of destroying the careers of those who would have revealed the fraudulent research? I wonder what'd happen if researchers got compensated and funding based on other things, unrelated to papers published. But what would that be
    - eru 3y ago
      > I wonder what'd happen if researchers got compensated and funding based on other things, unrelated to papers published. But what would that be See what they do in the parts of industry where they need their research to work. Eg how do battery manufacturers compensate and incentives their researchers that are aiming to improve various characteristics of batteries? How do steel mills manage and reward their metallurgists? How does Intel's research work?
JacobThreeThree 3y ago
>Actually, I'd feel better if someone could convince me I'm completely unfounded here. Unfortunately, your skepticism is not unfounded. Those in the industry conclude the same. Take, for instance, the editor in chief of The Lancet: >The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
hotnfresh 3y ago
I’ve literally never seen data-driven business decisions that weren’t using fatally flawed datasets or methods so bad that you’d be a fool to believe you were getting anything but gibberish out of them, except in trivial cases. You quickly learn not to be the guy pointing out the problem that means we’ll need several people and months or years to gather and analyze data that would allow them to (maybe) support or disprove their conclusion, though. Nobody wants to hear it… because they don’t actually care, they just want to present themselves as doing data-driven decision making, for reasons of ego or for (personal, or company) marketing. It’s all gut feelings and big personalities pushing companies this way and that, once you cut through the pretend-science shit. “Yeah, that graph looks great (soul dies a little) let’s do it”
- geoduck14 3y ago
  >Nobody wants to hear it… because they don’t actually care, they just want to present themselves as doing data-driven decision making Oh, that hits home
lettergram 3y ago
I know someone who’s fabricated almost all their work. Their lab leads always cover it up and don’t retract their work. The crazy part is this person has failed upwards and is currently a senior researcher at a major research institution. They’ve been at UCLA and UCSF for medical research. Absolutely insane to watch.

shaburn 3y ago

Really curious how a profitable industry like medical research ranks against less profitible.

verisimi 3y ago

I don't think that's skeptical. I do think there is an even worse issue - which is funding. The money incentive means you can fund studies that support whatever you want.

ancorevard 3y ago

"And that's when I believe people do have a somewhat best effort to maximize profits." Nope. I actually think that if you do scientific research as a company (profit) it may make you less bad/less likely to do fraud compared to academia (non-profit). Reason is that there are more ways to punish you, employees, board, investors, etc in a profit seeking vehicle, and as a profit seeking vehicle being caught must be part of the profit seeking calculation – in the end, the world of reality/physics will weigh your contribution. I believe there is evidence that there is more fraudulent scientific research happening in non-profit vehicles/academia. Take for example an area where there are fewer profit seeking companies participating - social sciences. It's dominated by academia. Now look at the replication rate of social sciences.

spicymapotofu 3y ago
All three points in last paragraph seem wholy unrelated to each other and your larger point. I agreed with first half.
screye 3y ago
I have a simpler reason for the same belief. You can fake everything except a well designed A/B test. At FAANG scale, a statistically significant A/B test requirement will stop the worst fraud before it hits the user.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  And also - you can somewhat take care of bugs by evenly distributing them to your test & control group.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
  FAANG engineers: “hold my beer” Seriously though, as a person who has built related systems at FAANG, yes this problem exists there. Your beautiful cathedral of an A/B testing framework is covered in knobs that are just perfect for p-hacking.
muzani 3y ago
I used to work data entry as a research assistant, for some non-profit academia. We saw flaws in the data collection - basically the people tasked to collect data were being lazy and some were making stuff up. We know the made up stuff when we see it. Outliers are fine and some groups do better than expected, but an entire group from one data collecter shouldn't be 100% outliers. But we had to enter the data anyway. We were told to smooth the bad data to what was expected. So the outliers that were low were smoothed high, the high outliers were left alone because they seemed right. But those of us who were spending hundreds of hours on data entry had an intuitive feel of what an outlier looked like. IMO everything should have been entered as is and the computer data would just be filtered out if it was deemed from a corrupt source. But the data in the computer was biased to match what the research wanted to prove. So I agree that non-profits can be corrupt too, just because of the incentives each part of the way. We were being paid about half a cent per column of data. So some assistants were lazy and filling in data that could be right, or skimming on fields like address which are longer and less likely to be flagged.

hackncheese 3y ago

Objectivity and honesty can be hard to find if all someone cares about is their reputation as a competent researcher or climbing the ladder. What do you think a potential solution would be for this? I feel like even in my own experience, trying something out and it not working feels like failure, when in fact to proclaim it a success or "fix" it is truly what harms both the endeavor for truth and the people reliant on the outcomes of these surveys

autoexec 3y ago
> Objectivity and honesty can be hard to find if all someone cares about is their reputation as a competent researcher or climbing the ladder. It seems like destroying the reputation and career of people who fake science would be a great start. If you're willing to fake data and lie to get results, there will always be an industry who'd love to hire you no matter how tarnished your reputation is. We need a better means to hold researchers accountable and we need to stop putting any amount of faith in any research that hasn't been independently verified through replication. Today the lobby for orange juice manufactures can pay a scientist to fake research which shows that drinking orange juice makes you more attractive, and then pay publications to broadcast that headline to the world to increase sales. We should have some means to hold publications responsible for this as well.
- cutemonster 3y ago
  > destroying the reputation and career of people who fake science would be a great start When so many reports are faulty and fraudulent, that might instead be the great start of destroying the careers of those who would have revealed the fraudulent research? I wonder what'd happen if researchers got compensated and funding based on other things, unrelated to papers published. But what would that be
  - eru 3y ago
    > I wonder what'd happen if researchers got compensated and funding based on other things, unrelated to papers published. But what would that be See what they do in the parts of industry where they need their research to work. Eg how do battery manufacturers compensate and incentives their researchers that are aiming to improve various characteristics of batteries? How do steel mills manage and reward their metallurgists? How does Intel's research work?

JacobThreeThree 3y ago

>Actually, I'd feel better if someone could convince me I'm completely unfounded here. Unfortunately, your skepticism is not unfounded. Those in the industry conclude the same. Take, for instance, the editor in chief of The Lancet: >The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

hotnfresh 3y ago

I’ve literally never seen data-driven business decisions that weren’t using fatally flawed datasets or methods so bad that you’d be a fool to believe you were getting anything but gibberish out of them, except in trivial cases. You quickly learn not to be the guy pointing out the problem that means we’ll need several people and months or years to gather and analyze data that would allow them to (maybe) support or disprove their conclusion, though. Nobody wants to hear it… because they don’t actually care, they just want to present themselves as doing data-driven decision making, for reasons of ego or for (personal, or company) marketing. It’s all gut feelings and big personalities pushing companies this way and that, once you cut through the pretend-science shit. “Yeah, that graph looks great (soul dies a little) let’s do it”

geoduck14 3y ago
>Nobody wants to hear it… because they don’t actually care, they just want to present themselves as doing data-driven decision making Oh, that hits home

lettergram 3y ago

I know someone who’s fabricated almost all their work. Their lab leads always cover it up and don’t retract their work. The crazy part is this person has failed upwards and is currently a senior researcher at a major research institution. They’ve been at UCLA and UCSF for medical research. Absolutely insane to watch.