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PI's have a lot to do, she admits that she wasn't focusing enough on the work that was being developed. I think you are making a good point though (she does as

by sgt101 3y ago

PI's have a lot to do, she admits that she wasn't focusing enough on the work that was being developed. I think you are making a good point though (she does as well), science as we currently understand it works on the basis of trust. This is because it's highly competitive and highly compelling. Compelling in the sense that people believe that their contributions may make significant contributions to wider society and other people, competitive in that the winners get the spoils. I think we need to moderate both of these pressures. We need to stop the valourization of potentially high impact work - until it is high impact, and we need to emphasize the long value chains and problems with exploitation as well. A good example is the recent talk from John Burke about Quantum Computing and Quantum Clocks [1]. In terms of to the winners the spoils we have to develop a funding system that recognizes that people who make a single significant impact on a field early in their career are no more likely than anyone else to make further impacts. Indeed the more I hang around the edges of the research community the more I am convinced that there is a very weak correlation between any prior success and any future impact if you account for the funding that early winners receive. I feel that there are very many truly outstanding but unlucky researchers who are culled after 3 post-docs. I think that population is basically the same in capability as the folks who get tenure. We need to stop selecting so randomly - it's not working and it has bad effects (see this article). In the past the way things worked was a "good fellows" club - where connections and patronage were what counted. In some parts of the world (Europe and Asia) this still has a massive effect. I think it's dissipated in North America and the UK but what's replaced it (savage competition) isn't really better - it just suits the political biases of the people funding the system. [1] https://www.hpcwire.com/2023/12/19/dod-takes-a-long-view-of-quantum-computing/ https://www.hpcwire.com/2023/12/19/dod-takes-a-long-view-of-...

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> PI's have a lot to do, she admits that she wasn't focusing enough on the work that was being developed. Her name was on the papers and she presented the work at conferences. If she was not really involved in the work, then it was scientific fraud to have presented it as if it were hers. If you were so out of the loop as to not realize that no experiments were being performed and the data was being fabricated wholesale, then it is fraudulent to put her name on the scientific paper as an author and to present as an author. She is not conducting research but is a renting out a paper mill. That kind of behavior needs to be strictly condemned
- whatyesaid 3y ago
  That's not false authorship. You can get authorship just for getting funding to allow the paper to exist (researchers, reagants and equipment aren't free). You should still read and verify. False authorship definitely happens a lot though but mostly with papers when 1-2 guys did the real work but 10 people are listed. Very common in many big departments.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  This is not false authorship at all. Many modern scientific works are too big for a single individual to implement themselves: it’s much like modern software development in that sense. Hence the project is a team effort: there are people who are responsible for the design of the experiments, and then specific subtasks are handled by different team members, often with some review. When the work is presented, it’s presented with a complete author list. The presenter is not claiming full credit for the work.
  - sgt101 3y ago
    I agree with this - but so long as it's not used as an excuse when a problem arises.
    - matthewdgreen 3y ago
      The challenge with malicious team-members in science is the same one you face in software. As another person in the thread said, how do you safely develop programs when one contributor is adding “Underhanded C contest”-level backdoors to the code? You can architect your development processes to defend against this threat, but in practice very few software development teams do this because it devours limited resources. Resources in science are even more limited than those in for-profit software development firms, and often involve taxpayer funds. The instinct on HN is to approach this as an angry blame game. But successful industries don’t do this: for example, the aviation industry performs root-cause analysis after each air disaster and then makes intelligent cost/benefit decisions about how to update processes to avoid future occurrences. In science it’s not clear what the right approach is on a cost/benefit level. Should we reduce scientific output by 50% to catch fraud in the first instance, rather than later on when important studies fail to replicate? Is that a good use of society’s limited resources? I don’t know the answer to this, I just want people to behave effectively rather than grinding an axe. We’re not getting out of the messes we’ve made on this planet without a whole lot of science.

by sgt101 3y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> PI's have a lot to do, she admits that she wasn't focusing enough on the work that was being developed. Her name was on the papers and she presented the work at conferences. If she was not really involved in the work, then it was scientific fraud to have presented it as if it were hers. If you were so out of the loop as to not realize that no experiments were being performed and the data was being fabricated wholesale, then it is fraudulent to put her name on the scientific paper as an author and to present as an author. She is not conducting research but is a renting out a paper mill. That kind of behavior needs to be strictly condemned

whatyesaid 3y ago
That's not false authorship. You can get authorship just for getting funding to allow the paper to exist (researchers, reagants and equipment aren't free). You should still read and verify. False authorship definitely happens a lot though but mostly with papers when 1-2 guys did the real work but 10 people are listed. Very common in many big departments.
matthewdgreen 3y ago
This is not false authorship at all. Many modern scientific works are too big for a single individual to implement themselves: it’s much like modern software development in that sense. Hence the project is a team effort: there are people who are responsible for the design of the experiments, and then specific subtasks are handled by different team members, often with some review. When the work is presented, it’s presented with a complete author list. The presenter is not claiming full credit for the work.
- sgt101 3y ago
  I agree with this - but so long as it's not used as an excuse when a problem arises.
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    The challenge with malicious team-members in science is the same one you face in software. As another person in the thread said, how do you safely develop programs when one contributor is adding “Underhanded C contest”-level backdoors to the code? You can architect your development processes to defend against this threat, but in practice very few software development teams do this because it devours limited resources. Resources in science are even more limited than those in for-profit software development firms, and often involve taxpayer funds. The instinct on HN is to approach this as an angry blame game. But successful industries don’t do this: for example, the aviation industry performs root-cause analysis after each air disaster and then makes intelligent cost/benefit decisions about how to update processes to avoid future occurrences. In science it’s not clear what the right approach is on a cost/benefit level. Should we reduce scientific output by 50% to catch fraud in the first instance, rather than later on when important studies fail to replicate? Is that a good use of society’s limited resources? I don’t know the answer to this, I just want people to behave effectively rather than grinding an axe. We’re not getting out of the messes we’ve made on this planet without a whole lot of science.