15 ms·
Nature retracts controversial superconductivity paper by embattled physicist
- xeckr 3y agoThe silver lining is that the media hype probably got a lot of people interested in physics and materials science. Some of them will undoubtedly go on to make great discoveries and contributions to the field in the future.
- Loughla 3y agoI like that take and I appreciate you for putting forward optimism instead of (all too common) cynical sniping. Thank you. Listening to someone who plainly had no idea what they were talking about is what got me interested in the field of education.
- tareqak 3y agoI remembered the account of developers committing bugs so that reviewers were forced to find something instead of just giving the all clear. Maybe there should be a group of researchers that submit papers that seem believable with known issues to avoid scientific journals stagnating. Maybe the names and institutions of the group submitting papers should be hidden so that more reputable/famous people and institutions get the same level of scrutiny as everyone else.
- vkou 3y agoYou want to solve reproducibility? Apply forensic scrutiny to every publication? That's a great idea, but who is going to pay for it? Every scientist knows that it's more than possible to publish deliberately fraudulent work. Every non-scientist thinks that detecting this fraud is easy.
- _jal 3y ago> Every non-scientist thinks that detecting this fraud is easy. Eh, this working engineer doesn't think so. Freeform fraud detection is a hard problem in general, and when you're talking about (apparent) cutting-edge research, the pool of people who might spot specific details is tiny. A low probability of detection does suggest that the penalty should be relatively high to have a deterrent effect.
- armchairhacker 3y agoGreat way to test peer-review: submit a bunch of BS articles, particularly with big words and notable authors, and see which ones get published where In fact I know for a fact this has been done at least once before (at least with the big words): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen But it should be done in every field, regularly
- vouaobrasil 3y agoA better way would be to change the system so that publications in big-name journals are not important for career advancement.
- fooker 3y agoWhat is your alternative solution?
- MarkusQ 3y agoSeems clear to me: "change the system so that publications in big-name journals are not important for career advancement." There are many fields that don't have this requirement, or anything like it, and the suggestion is that academia join their ranks. The "alternative solution" to having a thing that wacks people on the head every Tuesday is...not having it.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y agoBusinesses have money. Governments have votes. What measurable quantity do you propose for scientific work? Votes of colleagues? It's even more corrupt.
- fooker 3y agoAre you familiar with the concept of Chesterton’s fence?
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
- jghn 3y ago> developers committing bugs so that reviewers were forced to find something This assumes code review's key purpose is to find bugs. I always wonder about this when I review something, but at the end of the day there are many other things I'm looking more at than "is this a bug"
- iamthepieman 3y agoAgreed. I probably won't catch a bug that the tests wouldn't also catch unless it's obvious. I'm looking for things like: -Is this duplicating something else? -Should this be part of this object? -if I come back in a year, will it take me 10 minutes or an hour to understand it? -is this necessary? -should I approve this but add a task to the tracking board to figure out if this should be done in the service instead of the client? -etc
- shusaku 3y agoIf my understanding of the timeline is right, Dias already had a retraction when this was sent in. I don’t think reputation is to blame here, the reviewers just weren’t up to the task.
- Laforet 3y agoIt might be worth pointing out that reviewers are only on board to offer their opinion with the material given at face value. After all they are probably not in a position to experimentally verify whether the results are reproducible. The editor always has the final word on whether a manuscript gets accepted.
- TehCorwiz 3y agoThis reminded me of this apocryphal story. "Just one thing - get rid of the duck." https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/ https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
- peeters 3y agoFunny, I always heard this anecdote in the context of adding hair to Mickey Mouse's arms. Apocryphal indeed, I guess: https://www.npr.org/2014/11/17/364760847/whats-with-all-of-the-hairy-arms-in-graphic-design https://www.npr.org/2014/11/17/364760847/whats-with-all-of-t... In terms of function though, the "hairy arm" is the complete opposite though: it's not to make sure reviewers are paying attention, it's to distract meddling reviewers from the changes you don't want them to veto.
- saghm 3y agoFrom the linked article on the duck: > A feature added for no other reason than to draw management attention and be removed, thus avoiding unnecessary changes in other aspects of the product. Sounds like it was for the same reason
- peeters 3y agoYes, sorry what I meant was opposite to the reason that started this thread (to ensure review participation)
- xoxxala 3y agoI worked at Interplay at the time and can confirm the duck story.
- vsareto 3y ago> I remembered the account of developers committing bugs so that reviewers were forced to find something instead of just giving the all clear. You'd be better off pair programming everything and forgoing code reviews. Sometimes I think the people that come up with this shit are sociopaths.
- atrettel 3y agoWeird, I was peer reviewing a manuscript earlier today and actually thought of something similar. The manuscript needs some work to improve its English and I wondered if some of the broken English passages were a test to see what nonsense a referee like me would put up with. I don't think it is a test but the thought did occur to me.
- golergka 3y ago> Maybe there should be a group of researchers that submit papers that seem believable with known issues to avoid scientific journals stagnating. There was. People were not very pleased. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
- ttldr 3y agodepends how you do it? good idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair bad idea: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/22/22398156/university-minnesota-linux-kernal-ban-research https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/22/22398156/university-minne...
- WhitneyLand 3y ago“…submit papers that seem believable with known issues to avoid scientific journals stagnating…” It’s called a scholarly hoax, and it’s been done more than once: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_stings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing...
- dotnet00 3y agoYears before this current trend of LLM generated papers, there was a tool IIRC by some MIT students which would generate plausible looking papers which when actually read were obviously garbage. The title and abstract would have the sort of words you would expect of a research paper, but the resulting sentences would be nonsense. The idea being that if the submission got published, the review process was obviously a total joke. I think they even had some examples that had actually been published. Edit, Link: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/ https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/
- agileAlligator 3y agoI'm having a hard time believing those papers weren't written by humans after a cursory glance
- m463 3y agoA more benign example was the college professor who started each lecture saying he was going to say one wrong thing. (it would keep the students alert) or maybe Van Halen's "CRC check", where their venue contract would ask for a bunch of things set up in advance, including a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones removed. (it was a test of diligence, that they read the contract and knew the requirements)
- 3seashells 3y agoMaybe the review institution of a paper should always add one known flaw that peer review must find to ensure a quality control of the process?
- Nican 3y agoCareful not to repeat what the University of Minnesota did to the Linux kernel, when willing submitting security bugs to write out a paper about trust.
- tedunangst 3y agoThe duality of HN. I want other people to be forced to filter out bullshit, but I only want to receive forthright submissions myself.
- cobbal 3y agoIt's really weird. I'm starting to suspect hacker news isn't a single person.
- sltkr 3y agoI'm pretty sure I'm you.
- dllthomas 3y agoWho am us, anyway?
- Regnore 3y agoThen why is it called the singular “Hacker” news?
- golergka 3y agoBecause there's only one intended reader who is sufficiently educated and smart. All others of us are impostors who should not have pursued this career at all.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoIf only the Hackers Knew..
- Mistletoe 3y agoAs a scientist I see it the other way, where people will just ignore future discoveries and science and this goes on the trash pile with other bad science that makes the public distrust science. We saw the endgame of that with Covid and it was really ugly. The public doesn't understand the minutiae of each study and just gets really tired with "Carbs are bad" and "Now carbs are good again" headlines.
- whycome 3y agoWhen it's "not even wrong" it's easy to dismiss something. But if it takes some work to disprove, there can be some cool insights and knowledge (and new avenues of exploration).
- darklycan51 3y agoThe problem is when too much fake stuff comes out (example: health/climate) to the point where average people cannot see what is real or not anymore.
- furyofantares 3y agoAre you talking about the hype around LK-99, which this article is not about?
- d3w4s9 3y agoNah. The reality is that very very few people will "make great discoveries and contributions" even for graduate students in those fields or after getting a PhD degree, and many people who are good enough to become professors do mostly mediocre research or publish papers that have very little impact. For this LK-99 thing, I doubt more than 5 people of all those that are interested will be making any significant contributions in 10 to 20 years.
- zwieback 3y agoScience working as intended.
- golly_ned 3y agoIt really isn't. This paper was accepted and published in a peer-reviewed journal. Research could already be underway based on the results of this paper. The paper was retracted because the other co-authors raised concerns, not based on experiment or observation. Science working as intended would mean this paper wasn't published in the first place, nor would a researcher like this have his own lab.
- zwieback 3y agoSecond order science working as intended.
- greentea23 3y agoScience historically works on the time scale of decades and centuries, not months and years imo. So I think it's working faster and better than ever before. Journals are not science, just a small tool for slightly better communication between scientists. I think/hope we'll make them obsolete in favor of something that looks more like git repos with lots of automated analysis of logic and tests etc eventually.
- hackerlight 3y agoPeer review is a modern invention, so benchmarking whether or not science is working based on peer review is a bizarre notion. What we're seeing is indeed old-school science working as it always has.
- fooker 3y agoWhy are you conflating peer review with science? Peer review is a relatively modern invention. A vast majority of important 20th century physics, for example was pre-peer review.
- dilawar 3y agoMore like science self-correcting itself. But nonetheless there should be controls on such nonsense. The ease with which many academics get away with all this will make even a seasoned politician jealous.
- wly_cdgr 3y ago"The Nature news team is independent from its journals team" lollll
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- d3w4s9 3y agoWhat's the problem? Lots of newspapers have separate news and editorial teams who don't talk to each other and only learn about what the other team is doing when the paper comes out. Nature may well be doing the same thing. I don't know if there is anything funny here
- wly_cdgr 3y agoIt is structurally impossible for these teams to actually be independent. All claims to the contrary are risibly and offensively false and should always be met with vocal contempt lest they start to sound credible to too many people.
- KingLancelot 3y ago[dead]
- jspann 3y agoThe disappointing part of this is the large parts of the population who will look at this and other recent cases (see: Francesca Gino) and think that "academia is broken" or "scientists can't be trusted". That narrative will even be amplified by many YouTubers and periodicals who were quick with those headlines. However, as soon as this work came out, multiple scientists voiced concerns, several even filed complaints with the journal. Those in the field even took steps to reproduce the work found in the paper. The fact that this error was caught and several were skeptical enough to comment is how the system should work. Arguing over results that are too good to be true, taking steps to try to reproduce it independently, and publicly taking it down is why science can be trusted. Research isn't going to be perfect every time but peer review and reproduction should weed out the less than credible.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yieldcrv 3y agothey could have argued quietly if there were challenges in getting people to care enough about reproducibility then we should address that because the tabloid fanfare rightly deserves all the criticism it got and all the blemish to “science” if thats what people’s takeaway was
- whelp_24 3y agoAcademia is broken, and for deeper reasons than the occasional implausible result. Indeed it's the papers that don't make waves that are dangerous. As well as the papers that don't get written.
- dboreham 3y ago> large parts of the population... They're not paying attention to this.
- ajross 3y ago> The disappointing part of this is the large parts of the population who will look at this and other recent cases (see: Francesca Gino) and think that "academia is broken" or "scientists can't be trusted". No, sorry. Just no. Stop. "Scientists" were clear, loud, and nearly unanimous in their calls for caution about these results. People on this very site were in these threads saying "we should wait a few weeks, guys" and getting downvoted into gray oblivion for their trouble by a horde of kids hopped up on "proof" they saw via (and I'm not kidding about this) a multimeter screen on TikTok. You can't fix that with science. Science did everything right here. We had a tantalizing result reported, investigated, and disposed.
- twiddling 3y agoJust file it with the table top fusion one
- HideousKojima 3y agoA fusion reactor is easy enough for high schoolers to make, is there a particular one you're referencing?
- jfengel 3y agoPresumably this: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01673-x https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01673-x Pons and Fleischman set off a very similar hype cycle about cold fusion in the late 80s.
- chasil 3y agoPhilo T. Farnsworth actually burned up all of his wealth in the 1960s in trying to build his fusor into a power generation device. It does trigger nuclear fusion, but the design cannot break even. "No fusor has ever come close to break-even energy output and it appears it is unable to ever do so." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
- Elena120 3y ago[dead]
- superconduct123 3y agoFound this bizarre: the authors response has a whole section that reads like an ad for MATLAB: https://twitter.com/dangaristo/status/1707165711427063902 https://twitter.com/dangaristo/status/1707165711427063902 Not sure what the point of that is, it almost sounds like ChatGPT
- snewman 3y agoGood grief! At a guess, it is copy/paste from MATLAB marketing materials, intended as a sort of appeal to authority – "we used MATLAB so our results must be good".
- queuebert 3y agoThat's absolutely hilarious. It must be either ChatGPT or some copy pasta.
- hshsbs84848 3y ago“Speaking of discrepancies in our figures, we’d like to shoutout today’s sponsor: MATLAB”
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- starcraft2wol 3y agoIt does read like middle school writing.
- hex4def6 3y ago100% a ChatGPT copy paste. Here's what I got when I asked it to finish the paragraph "In summary Matlab's rich set of features, mathematical capabilities ...": "In summary, Matlab's versatile capabilities, including robust mathematical functions, extensive libraries, Simulink for dynamic system modeling, support for diverse data types, and its user-friendly programming language, collectively create an environment conducive to efficient numerical computations, effective data visualization, and the seamless handling of complex scientific and engineering tasks. Its popularity in both academic and industrial settings, coupled with an active user community, cross-platform compatibility, and support for parallel computing, positions Matlab as a top choice for professionals and researchers seeking a powerful and adaptable tool for their computational and analytical requirements." "diverse data types", "user-friendly programming language" are exact matches in the linked snippet, and the rest of it is very similar in tone ("strong community support" vs "active user community"). ChatGPT also likes to end on "In Summary"; when I asked it to list Matlab features it did just that.
- civilized 3y agoThis guy is now known beyond reasonable doubt to have committed research fraud multiple times. Why does he still have a job?
- sigmoid10 3y agoThe real question is why Nature keeps publishing this guy without any scrutiny. They really should have learned their lesson after the fiasco that was their last paper on superconductivity.
- geophile 3y ago… and why he keeps getting past reviewers, who must know his reputation.
- bhelkey 3y agoIn an ideal world, the peer reviewers wouldn't know the author of the paper, right?
- mjoin 3y agothey really know when reading the paper. small world, everyone PI knows who is working on what
- jessriedel 3y agoThe vast majority of academic journal review is single-blind (reviewers are anonymous, but not authors). Double-blind review can be requested by authors submitting to Nature Journals, but it's rare. https://www.science.org/content/article/few-authors-choose-anonymous-peer-review-massive-study-nature-journals-shows https://www.science.org/content/article/few-authors-choose-a...
- subarctic 3y agoMy guess is being a good scientist is less important for keeping his job than, say, not doing anything political controversial
- setgree 3y agoSo here I'm learning that Nature published their paper, which claimed an absolutely world-changing breakthrough, after the lead authors had already had two papers retracted? the Springer Nature Group has a profit margin of 26% on annual revenue of ~€1.7bn [0]. If they were keen to publish this paper, they could have afforded to send an expert to the lab to actually see the process for themselves. But that's not the kind of thing you do if your core business model is to publish splashy headlines... [0] https://group.springernature.com/gp/group/media/press-releases/springer-nature-releases-annual-progress-report/23572562 https://group.springernature.com/gp/group/media/press-releas...
- chii 3y ago> a profit margin of 26% that seems entirely too high for merely hosting and publishing papers. They don't do verification themselves, since scientific papers are meant to be peer reviewed (and unpaid peers, for that matter).
- 4death4 3y agoReally? That seems insanely low to me. Where is the other $1.26 billion going?
- UnlockedSecrets 3y agoExecutives.
- slavboj 3y agoSpringer is a huge publishing conglomerate that also deals in physical books, besides the payroll for editing and typesetting, the cut from retail channels, etc.
- a_bonobo 3y agoThe scientific publishing industry is ridiculously profitable. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b... > In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year. It's the perfect rent-seeking business: grant bodies and governments judge scientists by approval of journals, scientists need to play the game of getting into 'reputable' journals, journals sit in the middle, outsource most of their work into unpaid work to scientists, and laugh all the way to the bank. Then governments introduced mandatory open access for scientific research, for a moment it looked like journals' chokehold might fail, but they just adjusted: Nature journals charge authors ~$10,000 per open access paper. That's all taxpayer money going to for-profit organisations with little justification for the price.
- Nition 3y agoNote: This is not about LK-99.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nus07 3y agoHe also featured in Time - https://time.com/collection/time100-next-2021/5937727/ranga-dias/ https://time.com/collection/time100-next-2021/5937727/ranga-... And he falsely claimed that his company had funding from OpenAI and Spotify.
- gautamcgoel 3y agoWow, didn't realize he was selected as part of the Times 100. Also, is there a reference for the OpenAI claim? It's a bizarre claim to make.
- BS_Alarm 3y agoJust this one? Only the beginning...! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03544-w#change-history https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03544-w#change-hi...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bada-boom 3y agoWhat does Nature have to lose from publishing hype? If there's enough pushback, they retract it six years later and wash their hands.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Arnold07 3y ago[dead]