4 ms·

(Not an excuse in any way) This data was so shoddily faked that I have a hard time believing someone did this with an intention to deceive. Uniform distributio

by tqi 3y ago

(Not an excuse in any way) This data was so shoddily faked that I have a hard time believing someone did this with an intention to deceive. Uniform distribution with a hard cutoff at 50K??

bombcar 3y ago
If you fake and get away with it you’re already admitting to a type of laziness, so it expands y til finally you are faking it so lazily that you get caught. Faking data realistically is almost as hard as getting it honestly. I know, I “expanded the data pool” for my eight grade science project.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  That somehow loops around to becoming an interesting 8’th grade science project. Do an easy experiment once correctly, then again with falsified data. Present the results side-by-side. Ask people if they can tell you which is which. Present have a bit on what sort of statistics could catch your faked data set.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Yeah, I did the simplistic thing of decide a question and an answer that sounded good; ran five or so tests, and then extrapolated additional sets based on that. In my defense I would have run more tests had I started when I should have :)
- bonoboTP 3y ago
  Except the "it" in "getting it" is a significant or even bombastic and sexy finding. There's no reliable way to generate those, it's not just about hardness. The more correct and meticulous you are with your data, the more it will generally tell you that the bombastic claim is false. The more meticulous and effortful you are about faking, the likelier it will slip by. Your suggestion only works in the simulated science, like school projects where you are retracing the footsteps of past successful scientists, to verify an already known result. There putting in more work will reveal that effect more and cleaner, because your teacher already knew how the thing works in the first place. This is totally unlike real science where we confront the frontier of the unknown.
- tqi 3y ago
  Yeah that is fair, but it's mind bogglingly lazy/brazen. How much more effort is it have taken to just take an average of a few RAND calls to get a normal distribution instead of a uniform one? Did they not know the central limit theorem??
- User23 3y ago
  > I “expanded the data pool” for my eight grade science project. My teachers warned against this and told us they would catch us if we tried.
77pt77 3y ago
Amazing that whoever faked this data was ever able to get to harvard let alone get tenure. It's just so laughably faked it's not even funny.
a_bonobo 3y ago
In science we only catch the sloppy fakers, we don't catch the 'good' fakers. There was a similar case a while ago in spider biology: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02156-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02156-2 Pruitt had several influential spider biology papers out and when others failed to replicate and dug into the Supplementary Data, they also found lazy patterns. >When Laskowski dug into data sets that Pruitt had provided for the study, she was shocked to find stretches of data that seemed to have been duplicated, to represent findings for multiple spiders. This questionable data helped to bolster a long-unproven theory that repeated social interactions in a group of spiders cause individuals to behave predictably. So yeah, who knows how much scientific fraud there actually is; I haven't seen a case of fraud where the data was convincingly faked, which means that these cases are hard to detect or hard to prove.

by tqi 3y ago

(Not an excuse in any way) This data was so shoddily faked that I have a hard time believing someone did this with an intention to deceive. Uniform distribution with a hard cutoff at 50K??

bombcar 3y ago

If you fake and get away with it you’re already admitting to a type of laziness, so it expands y til finally you are faking it so lazily that you get caught. Faking data realistically is almost as hard as getting it honestly. I know, I “expanded the data pool” for my eight grade science project.

bee_rider 3y ago
That somehow loops around to becoming an interesting 8’th grade science project. Do an easy experiment once correctly, then again with falsified data. Present the results side-by-side. Ask people if they can tell you which is which. Present have a bit on what sort of statistics could catch your faked data set.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Yeah, I did the simplistic thing of decide a question and an answer that sounded good; ran five or so tests, and then extrapolated additional sets based on that. In my defense I would have run more tests had I started when I should have :)
bonoboTP 3y ago
Except the "it" in "getting it" is a significant or even bombastic and sexy finding. There's no reliable way to generate those, it's not just about hardness. The more correct and meticulous you are with your data, the more it will generally tell you that the bombastic claim is false. The more meticulous and effortful you are about faking, the likelier it will slip by. Your suggestion only works in the simulated science, like school projects where you are retracing the footsteps of past successful scientists, to verify an already known result. There putting in more work will reveal that effect more and cleaner, because your teacher already knew how the thing works in the first place. This is totally unlike real science where we confront the frontier of the unknown.
tqi 3y ago
Yeah that is fair, but it's mind bogglingly lazy/brazen. How much more effort is it have taken to just take an average of a few RAND calls to get a normal distribution instead of a uniform one? Did they not know the central limit theorem??
User23 3y ago
> I “expanded the data pool” for my eight grade science project. My teachers warned against this and told us they would catch us if we tried.

77pt77 3y ago

Amazing that whoever faked this data was ever able to get to harvard let alone get tenure. It's just so laughably faked it's not even funny.

a_bonobo 3y ago

In science we only catch the sloppy fakers, we don't catch the 'good' fakers. There was a similar case a while ago in spider biology: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02156-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02156-2 Pruitt had several influential spider biology papers out and when others failed to replicate and dug into the Supplementary Data, they also found lazy patterns. >When Laskowski dug into data sets that Pruitt had provided for the study, she was shocked to find stretches of data that seemed to have been duplicated, to represent findings for multiple spiders. This questionable data helped to bolster a long-unproven theory that repeated social interactions in a group of spiders cause individuals to behave predictably. So yeah, who knows how much scientific fraud there actually is; I haven't seen a case of fraud where the data was convincingly faked, which means that these cases are hard to detect or hard to prove.