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One of the many troubling things about recently exposed patterns of fraudulent science: every dishonest scientist or professor is taking up a position and fundi

by neilv 3y ago

One of the many troubling things about recently exposed patterns of fraudulent science: every dishonest scientist or professor is taking up a position and funding that could've instead gone to any of surely numerous people with much more integrity. Permit all the cronyism and gaming around university hiring and admissions, and don't hold universities responsible for unethical behavior of their faculty and graduates, then maybe this is what you get. And since this is HN casting stones in glass houses: Permit all tech industry fratbro conventions around hiring (e.g., some that originated as naive and classist "did you take the same Stanford classes that I did", then were cargo-culted), and don't hold the companies responsible for the growth pump&exit investment scams, nor the criminal incompetence around infosec and correctness, then maybe that's what you get there.

NiloCK 3y ago
> every dishonest scientist or professor is taking up a position and funding that could've instead gone to any of surely numerous people with much more integrity. Maybe, maybe not. It feels possible at this point that the entire top of the competitive curve is actively juicing. Ie, with such fierce competition, there could be a vanishingly small cohort of researchers who both operate with integrity and whose CVs are competitive for faculty positions. At best, we might expect a removed fraud to be replaced with someone marginally more honest.
- medstrom 3y ago
  To get more good research done, there are at least two different fronts we could fight on. The straightforward one is to reduce incentive to fake at the "top of the competitive curve", somehow. But the total population of researchers is still so small, it might not be the most important front. The other front is to let the fakers keep faking, but change society so that everyone who wants to research out of personal interest has the free time to do so. They'll have less incentive to fake.
- neilv 3y ago
  > there could be a vanishingly small cohort of researchers who both operate with integrity and whose CVs are competitive for faculty positions. I think it's fallacious to compare the CV "competitiveness" of a falsifying 'scientist' with a legitimate scientist. Not that that's what you were suggesting, but maybe we haven't fully accepted what it means to combine the typical daisy-chained/chain-reaction growth of CV opportunities (one prestigious-looking line item opens a door to one or more others), with cheating offering additional boosts as needed at each step. When an athlete "juices", they can perform with greater strength or endurance. But when a scientist falsifies research, they aren't performing greater science -- they're performing greater CV (and terrible science). Competition for faculty positions shouldn't be CV, but the potential for great science. If an institution wants to use CV as the proxy for science potential, then they have to address that the CV metric is being gamed like crazy, including by falsifying (i.e., terrible) scientists.
- gmd63 3y ago
  Just as everyone in the Tour de France was doping during the Lance Armstrong era, the concentration of cheaters increases the higher up the "success" metrics you go. Because cheating without getting caught will always be the "best" strategy within the confines of the game alone. However, that's likely the worst strategy for society as a whole.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
> growth pump&exit investment scams I'd go so far as to say that the mere existence of an "exit plan" is an indicator that the purported product may be flawed (the business may not be flawed, from an investor's PoV, but to them, the "product" is actually the business, itself, as opposed to what the business says is their product). IMO: Real businesses are meant to be ongoing enterprises. Being sold to others, is supposed to be an unplanned (possibly fortunate and hoped-for) event. It shouldn't be an inevitable business plan milestone.
- gmd63 3y ago
  Agreed. The idea that financial engineering is somehow necessary to "promote liquidity" in facilitating the changing of ownership of a business is completely arbitrary, and not inherently good as far as I'm concerned. Sure, rules that make it harder to buy companies might slow down the volume of businesses being created due to less investor interest, but I'm not sure that decline would surpass the slowdown in fradulent exit schemes.
achillesheels 3y ago
Except that HN does not subsist off of non-volition* fnding towards subject matters which don’t benefit human life. And the ones that purportedly do are so off, we have the evidence of the genetic regression to the mean in the randomly sampled scientists heredity vis-a-vis independence in free will power, I.e. they come from peasants and slaves and lack original insight such as perceiving the world entirely electromagnetically. The lack of training social scientists in cell life for a bachelors, or the biological sciences in electrical signaling, or the physical scientists in their necessary inferior perspective of natural changes because of measurement imperfections by their instruments and their body’s senses, is all telling for a community which has been avoiding the successes of electrical engineering for over a century, likely because they don’t want to do that math ;)

by neilv 3y ago

NiloCK 3y ago

> every dishonest scientist or professor is taking up a position and funding that could've instead gone to any of surely numerous people with much more integrity. Maybe, maybe not. It feels possible at this point that the entire top of the competitive curve is actively juicing. Ie, with such fierce competition, there could be a vanishingly small cohort of researchers who both operate with integrity and whose CVs are competitive for faculty positions. At best, we might expect a removed fraud to be replaced with someone marginally more honest.

medstrom 3y ago
To get more good research done, there are at least two different fronts we could fight on. The straightforward one is to reduce incentive to fake at the "top of the competitive curve", somehow. But the total population of researchers is still so small, it might not be the most important front. The other front is to let the fakers keep faking, but change society so that everyone who wants to research out of personal interest has the free time to do so. They'll have less incentive to fake.
neilv 3y ago
> there could be a vanishingly small cohort of researchers who both operate with integrity and whose CVs are competitive for faculty positions. I think it's fallacious to compare the CV "competitiveness" of a falsifying 'scientist' with a legitimate scientist. Not that that's what you were suggesting, but maybe we haven't fully accepted what it means to combine the typical daisy-chained/chain-reaction growth of CV opportunities (one prestigious-looking line item opens a door to one or more others), with cheating offering additional boosts as needed at each step. When an athlete "juices", they can perform with greater strength or endurance. But when a scientist falsifies research, they aren't performing greater science -- they're performing greater CV (and terrible science). Competition for faculty positions shouldn't be CV, but the potential for great science. If an institution wants to use CV as the proxy for science potential, then they have to address that the CV metric is being gamed like crazy, including by falsifying (i.e., terrible) scientists.
gmd63 3y ago
Just as everyone in the Tour de France was doping during the Lance Armstrong era, the concentration of cheaters increases the higher up the "success" metrics you go. Because cheating without getting caught will always be the "best" strategy within the confines of the game alone. However, that's likely the worst strategy for society as a whole.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

> growth pump&exit investment scams I'd go so far as to say that the mere existence of an "exit plan" is an indicator that the purported product may be flawed (the business may not be flawed, from an investor's PoV, but to them, the "product" is actually the business, itself, as opposed to what the business says is their product). IMO: Real businesses are meant to be ongoing enterprises. Being sold to others, is supposed to be an unplanned (possibly fortunate and hoped-for) event. It shouldn't be an inevitable business plan milestone.

gmd63 3y ago
Agreed. The idea that financial engineering is somehow necessary to "promote liquidity" in facilitating the changing of ownership of a business is completely arbitrary, and not inherently good as far as I'm concerned. Sure, rules that make it harder to buy companies might slow down the volume of businesses being created due to less investor interest, but I'm not sure that decline would surpass the slowdown in fradulent exit schemes.

achillesheels 3y ago

Except that HN does not subsist off of non-volition* fnding towards subject matters which don’t benefit human life. And the ones that purportedly do are so off, we have the evidence of the genetic regression to the mean in the randomly sampled scientists heredity vis-a-vis independence in free will power, I.e. they come from peasants and slaves and lack original insight such as perceiving the world entirely electromagnetically. The lack of training social scientists in cell life for a bachelors, or the biological sciences in electrical signaling, or the physical scientists in their necessary inferior perspective of natural changes because of measurement imperfections by their instruments and their body’s senses, is all telling for a community which has been avoiding the successes of electrical engineering for over a century, likely because they don’t want to do that math ;)