12 ms·

I have a slightly inside opinion on this - before I became a Software Engineer, I got an MSc in a mostly unrelated field, and am a co-author on work published i

by yashap 3y ago

I have a slightly inside opinion on this - before I became a Software Engineer, I got an MSc in a mostly unrelated field, and am a co-author on work published in a few (very middling) peer reviewed journals. My gut feel from what I saw is that outright fraud is rare, but bias seeping into the study is common. Researchers invest a huge amount of effort into a study, they really want the hypothesis to be true. A lot of studies have steps that are pretty susceptible to bias, like maybe you’re classifying results and there’s a bit of a judgement call there. It’s human nature to make biased decisions in these situations, and make enough of these biased decisions, and statistically insignificant results become statistically significant. Some people might not see a difference between bias and fraud, but I personally do. I think of fraud as a very intentional deception, straight up falsifying numbers in a conscious attempt to deceive. While I see bias as more, you’ve got a borderline case, and you view it in the light you want to see it in, even somewhat unconsciously. Like the difference between unconscious racial bias, and overt hateful racism. I think the best approach to combatting this is to spend a lot less of the overall $$ in science on novel research, and a lot more on attempting to independently reproduce results. Papers should be seen as meaningless until their results can be independently reproduced, and universities/colleges should reward reproduction studies as much as novel research. It’s kind of crazy that the system almost completely lacks these checks and balances right now - peer review is more like an editor, it’s just a very different thing than reproduction. Bishop here is suggesting a data sleuthing approach to root out fraudsters, but I dunno if that’d be effective, as I think the main issue is subtle but pervasive bias seeping into studies by most researchers, vs. a smaller number of heavy fraudsters. Independent reproduction of results, while expensive, is the only effective approach I can think of to combat this.

hyperthesis 3y ago
Feynman has a bit where empirixal measurements of some universal constant (electron charge?) slowly crept up to the now-accepted true value. He said scientists are a little bit ashamed of this, because it showed that higher estimates were discarded and not published - bias. BTW scientists get no upvotes for merely reproducing "known" results. Is there a way to see natural merit/discovery in reproducing (not an artificial incentive, like grants for repeating studies). Perhaps analogous to how teaching helps your own understanding?
- dekhn 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's_experiment_as_an_example_of_psychological_effects_in_scientific_methodology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...
brnaftr361 3y ago
Replication is kind of fuzzy though. A lot of things are replicated, just indirectly, building on suppositions supported by but not directly reproducing the study. The problem here is perhaps one of reporting negative results. It'd be very easy to rationalize that a secondary study didn't work because, hey it's not direct reproduction and this use case is invalid or the equipment available wasn't the same and etc...). And between the rationalizations and the lack of incentive to submit and publish negative results it's easy to extrapolate that an indirect challenge may take a really long time to be put forward. Something kin to a bug report section might be in order. A "Works on my machine." regime isn't acceptable in the empirical domain. This would help prune dead ends in both primary and secondary+ research, one would hope, without necessitating direct redundancy. Of course this may run against the grain, fears of getting scooped or IP challenges and etc...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kukkeliskuu 3y ago
Starting point of the article appears to be that this gut feeling you mention, that there is very little outright fraud, is not completely right. It appears to me that he claims that there is more outright fraud than we believe.
dilawar 3y ago
As a sociologist put it, it is human nature to mislead other humans, sometimes knowingly.
Fomite 3y ago
One of the first things a professor taught me on a class on the design of experiments is "Never doom yourself to success." The experiment shouldn't inherently be designed to confirm your biases. I've carried that with me ever since. I agree with you - I suspect bias, judgement calls that favor what you want, looking for errors intensively when you get weird results and not when you get expected ones, etc. are far more common than outright fraud.
yodsanklai 3y ago
> My gut feel from what I saw is that outright fraud is rare, but bias seeping into the study is common There's also a grey area between fraud and not checking your work as thoroughly as you should. For instance, I've witnessed a highly regarded researcher (Turing award) telling his co-author not to bother about some proof because nobody would read it.
- yashap 3y ago
  Yeah totally, good example of the somewhat subtle ways bias seeps in.
AussieWog93 3y ago
>My gut feel from what I saw is that outright fraud is rare, but bias seeping into the study is common. I have a similar experience and opinion (started a PhD, quit when I lost faith in the institution). In our field in particular, it seemed to be an open secret that our current paradigm was a dead end, and this had been apparent for almost a decade by the time I joined the university. Yet, in spite of this fact that we were going nowhere, there was extreme pressure to continue to toe the line. You couldn't just try something new based on a hunch, but instead had to perform fruitless experiments that were "guided by the literature" and therefore easier to justify to the people funding your endeavour. The whole institution of academia is rotten, and going on a witch hunt like the article suggests ignores several massive elephants in the room.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tppiotrowski 3y ago
> Some people might not see a difference between bias and fraud, but I personally do. I think of fraud as a very intentional deception, straight up falsifying numbers in a conscious attempt to deceive. Lets say you do three runs of the same psychology experiment and only publish the results from the one where results are most significant. I think most researchers would not consider this fraud. You are publishing data that's absolutely true. It's the selective cherry picking of data in order to produce novel results that's rotting the field. This is how I think researchers can sleep sound at night while faith in science continues to erode.
- Fomite 3y ago
  Given we teach that in our biomedical ethics course as fraud, I think your "most researchers..." statement is not necessarily supportable.
- Ar-Curunir 3y ago
  Erosion of faith in science (whatever that means) is not due to research fraud lol.
  - globalnode 3y ago
    whats it due to then in your opinion?
    - Ar-Curunir 3y ago
      There are many reasons, including continuous attacks by politicians on scientists and the scientific endeavour, inaccessibility of modern research to the average person, (seemingly) diminishing returns from scientific research, to name just a few.
      - kukkeliskuu 3y ago
        Do you think there is anything wrong within the scientific community, or do you think the diminishing trust is completely caused by outside forces?

by yashap 3y ago

hyperthesis 3y ago

Feynman has a bit where empirixal measurements of some universal constant (electron charge?) slowly crept up to the now-accepted true value. He said scientists are a little bit ashamed of this, because it showed that higher estimates were discarded and not published - bias. BTW scientists get no upvotes for merely reproducing "known" results. Is there a way to see natural merit/discovery in reproducing (not an artificial incentive, like grants for repeating studies). Perhaps analogous to how teaching helps your own understanding?

dekhn 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's_experiment_as_an_example_of_psychological_effects_in_scientific_methodology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...

brnaftr361 3y ago

Replication is kind of fuzzy though. A lot of things are replicated, just indirectly, building on suppositions supported by but not directly reproducing the study. The problem here is perhaps one of reporting negative results. It'd be very easy to rationalize that a secondary study didn't work because, hey it's not direct reproduction and this use case is invalid or the equipment available wasn't the same and etc...). And between the rationalizations and the lack of incentive to submit and publish negative results it's easy to extrapolate that an indirect challenge may take a really long time to be put forward. Something kin to a bug report section might be in order. A "Works on my machine." regime isn't acceptable in the empirical domain. This would help prune dead ends in both primary and secondary+ research, one would hope, without necessitating direct redundancy. Of course this may run against the grain, fears of getting scooped or IP challenges and etc...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

kukkeliskuu 3y ago

Starting point of the article appears to be that this gut feeling you mention, that there is very little outright fraud, is not completely right. It appears to me that he claims that there is more outright fraud than we believe.

dilawar 3y ago

As a sociologist put it, it is human nature to mislead other humans, sometimes knowingly.

Fomite 3y ago

One of the first things a professor taught me on a class on the design of experiments is "Never doom yourself to success." The experiment shouldn't inherently be designed to confirm your biases. I've carried that with me ever since. I agree with you - I suspect bias, judgement calls that favor what you want, looking for errors intensively when you get weird results and not when you get expected ones, etc. are far more common than outright fraud.

yodsanklai 3y ago

> My gut feel from what I saw is that outright fraud is rare, but bias seeping into the study is common There's also a grey area between fraud and not checking your work as thoroughly as you should. For instance, I've witnessed a highly regarded researcher (Turing award) telling his co-author not to bother about some proof because nobody would read it.

yashap 3y ago
Yeah totally, good example of the somewhat subtle ways bias seeps in.

AussieWog93 3y ago

>My gut feel from what I saw is that outright fraud is rare, but bias seeping into the study is common. I have a similar experience and opinion (started a PhD, quit when I lost faith in the institution). In our field in particular, it seemed to be an open secret that our current paradigm was a dead end, and this had been apparent for almost a decade by the time I joined the university. Yet, in spite of this fact that we were going nowhere, there was extreme pressure to continue to toe the line. You couldn't just try something new based on a hunch, but instead had to perform fruitless experiments that were "guided by the literature" and therefore easier to justify to the people funding your endeavour. The whole institution of academia is rotten, and going on a witch hunt like the article suggests ignores several massive elephants in the room.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

tppiotrowski 3y ago

> Some people might not see a difference between bias and fraud, but I personally do. I think of fraud as a very intentional deception, straight up falsifying numbers in a conscious attempt to deceive. Lets say you do three runs of the same psychology experiment and only publish the results from the one where results are most significant. I think most researchers would not consider this fraud. You are publishing data that's absolutely true. It's the selective cherry picking of data in order to produce novel results that's rotting the field. This is how I think researchers can sleep sound at night while faith in science continues to erode.

Fomite 3y ago
Given we teach that in our biomedical ethics course as fraud, I think your "most researchers..." statement is not necessarily supportable.
Ar-Curunir 3y ago
Erosion of faith in science (whatever that means) is not due to research fraud lol.
- globalnode 3y ago
  whats it due to then in your opinion?
  - Ar-Curunir 3y ago
    There are many reasons, including continuous attacks by politicians on scientists and the scientific endeavour, inaccessibility of modern research to the average person, (seemingly) diminishing returns from scientific research, to name just a few.
    - kukkeliskuu 3y ago
      Do you think there is anything wrong within the scientific community, or do you think the diminishing trust is completely caused by outside forces?