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Why fake research is rampant in China
- helsinkiandrew 3y agohttps://archive.ph/RcDXB https://archive.ph/RcDXB
- frozenport 3y agoRather poor article because it doesn’t answer the question of why fake research is so prevalent in China. There are a few reasons but they include 1) almost everybody is committing massive fraud making actual policing difficult (are you going to fire everybody ?) 2) strong incentives to publish papers without quality (in the us judging aspiring faculty applicants on total papers is taboo)
- resolutebat 3y agoSame reason why all sorts of gnarly scams (melamine milk, gutter oil, etc) are/were so prevalent in China: there were no consequences. But some of the melamine people were sentenced to death, and the article notes that the government is starting to clamp down on fake research too.
- SomeoneFromCA 3y agoIt feels that Chinese govt. is complacent in that scheme however: allowing scientific scams have helped to increase interest in science domestically and create illusion of productivity internationally. Now it has began hurting, so they are cracking down.
- lostlogin 3y agoI might be a bit too cynical, but isn’t this how usually regulation usually works? It’s all fun and games until someone goes too far.
- SomeoneFromCA 3y agoNo, I do not think so. Not in the scale Chinese govt. does this, anyway.
- frozenport 3y agoArticle mentions it was the guy’s employer who fired him. Rather than the government.
- chrisjj 3y ago> it doesn’t answer the question of why fake research is so prevalent in China. "Bad incentives are a big part of the problem."
- frozenport 3y agoImagine reading the entire article, subscribing to the Economist, and only getting this tiny fragment that could be otherwise found on a passing HN comment.
- chrisjj 3y agoI am trying... nope. Too far-fetched.
- jszymborski 3y agoHonestly, I agree that the article doesn't do a satisfactory job of answering "why?". Simply stating that researchers have an incentive to is true of everywhere.
- SomeoneFromCA 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- meindnoch 3y ago[flagged]
- drones 3y agoWhat "Bad Incentives" are unique to China, distinct from those in the West?
- epolanski 3y agoI know everywhere it holds a lot of weight, but I think that in Europe/US an additional huge factor for academic career is the ability to raise funding. Maybe in China there's less need to find private funding for research thus scientific impact based on papers may hold more weight. But I'm 100% that fake research and cheating is rampant in all of natural science everywhere in the world, and I myself had spent 6 months of my life in a lab trying to reproduce fake results from a previous researcher in my lab. We only caught up it was fake data way later, when we spotted one single outlier number, an impossibly high voltage generated by his system (a 5/10% open current voltage that compounded all the other results).
- chrisjj 3y ago> we spotted one single outlier number, an impossibly high voltage generated by his system Surely the outlier could have been an innocent digital capture error.
- epolanski 3y agoYou're supposed to publish results that can be reproduced as you describe. And it wasn't an outlier. The simplest comparison I can make to illustrate the point without boring you is measuring the power of a car engine. Imagine that you get a very high torque number, but horsepower doesn't match. Issue is: torque and horsepower are linearly dependent torque = HP * RMP / 5252 Measurements that linerarly correlated with the voltage published were all consistent with a number 10/15% lower.
- chrisjj 3y ago> You're supposed to publish results that can be reproduced as you describe. You are supposed to try. Whether you succeed is necessarily subject to any measurement issues. > And it wasn't an outlier. You said it was.
- amriksohata 3y agoWhilst I have no doubt in the truth of this claim, the fact is all over the west we have research conducted by businesses for business benefit, whether its big corps telling you why their products are healthy for you or even in the 60s when there was research conducted that claims "smoking was good for you" and it took years for research to prove it actually causes cancer.
- HPsquared 3y agoThere's a big difference between "private research intended for public consumption" (marketing / PR / legal), and "private research for private consumption" (R&D / engineering / product development). Companies usually keep the latter to themselves, and the public space gets filled with the former. (To be fair, it's quite possible the first type also has bigger budgets, unfortunately).
- questinthrow 3y agoI am by no means a china fanboy but there is a replication crisis across all countries and all disciplines, one example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39098780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39098780 This is a generalized problem because back in the "good old days" science was done by a select elite of passionate individuals (think physics between 1900-1950). Nowadays science is dominated by midwits that were forced to do "science" because of societal expectations that everyone needs to go to university and become "educated". The end result is an endless tsunami of grifters and people who cargo cult science by making a few pretty graphs and dropping some massaged data sets so that they can get their pretty baubles and titles. This is the full extent of modern scientific thought for 99% of people doing "science". Of course the passionate 1% are still there pushing the envelope further but more often than not they are inconvenienced by the modern academic system and all that it entails (think Grigori Perelman or others like him)
- hiddencost 3y agoLol. The history of science is one of extreme graft. The idealized old days you present bear no relationship to what happened.
- questinthrow 3y agoYou might need to take another humanities major before understanding why I put the good old days in quotes, dont forget to publish a few papers on it to get that citation count up though!
- tgv 3y agoUnfortunately, you're not wrong. Since a long time, I'm convinced universities need to scale down, and quite a lot too. Higher education, as far as it's needed, should be relegated to schools without a research function. Universities should be primarily research facilities, only training those students who can become good researchers. That doesn't solve the publication treadmill, but it would expect it to be a step forward.
- jltsiren 3y agoThat's survivorship bias. Of course the results that have survived a century of scrutiny look better than the average high-profile research published today. But there were also plenty of unremarkable and outright false results back in the "good old days", as well as ideologically motivated garbage such as scientific racism. Or Lysenkoism, which killed millions.
- jowdones 3y ago[flagged]
- userbinator 3y agoLooking at that graph, I'm more curious to know why fake research is rampant in Saudi Arabia.
- noitpmeder 3y agoSimilarly bad incentives?
- thelastgallon 3y agoMeanwhile in the US ... a) Real economic research funded by Koch brothers and other fossil fuel companies write all policy: trickle down economics, no taxes on rich people, billionaires must become trillionaires first for us to see the trickle down effects. b) Tobacco cartels funding scientific research purporting the health benefits of tobacco[1], a playbook now employed by all industries. c) Lead is a gift of God and is healthy funded by auto, fossil and chemical companies which poisoned the world from early 1920s to early 2000s[2]. Though its banned now, there is lead everywhere on the planet now and is only banned because of the work of Claire Patterson[3]. "After Patterson completed his work with calculating the age of the Earth, he turned his attention to a problem he had discovered during his research. He was perplexed at the amount of lead contamination in the atmosphere. Furthermore, he was surprised that the general population was not aware of the effects of lead on the human body. This was mainly because for the last forty years, all studies done on the effects of lead had been done by doctors with no specialized training in chemical pathology and who were primarily funded by the manufacturers of lead additives, notably the Ethyl Corporation. One of these doctors hired by the Ethyl Corporation was a man named Robert Kehoe. His job was to perform scientific research to raise doubt in the public that lead was poisonous. Some of his reports stated that there was no evidence that lead was toxic, that since it was naturally occurring it could not be deadly, and that if workers are overexposed to it, then it is simply an issue of regulations within a company. Kehoe was able to persuade the public that lead poisoning should not be seen as an issue.": https://publish.illinois.edu/clair-patterson/fighting-for-a-clean-earth/ https://publish.illinois.edu/clair-patterson/fighting-for-a-... d) All chemicals are healthy until proven harmful, anything can be added to food, and the environment polluted with no consequences. And there is always industry sponsoring research that whatever substance is in question is in fact healthy. Well know harmful substances take at least 3 - 5 decades (or never!) to be banned or regulated! (a) above gives the foundational basis to let rich people (aka companies) do whatever they want with the same playbook employed by tobacco and lead. Europe is better in terms of food regulations compared to US: https://wellwithrae.com/food-chemicals-in-america-vs-europe/ https://wellwithrae.com/food-chemicals-in-america-vs-europe/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c25mqFtg6AA&t=218s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c25mqFtg6AA&t=218s [2] all research on TEL’s health impact would be underwritten by GM, Standard Oil, Du Pont, Ethyl and lead-industry trade associations: https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2000/03/02/secret-history-lead/ https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2000/03/02/... [3] Clair Cameron Patterson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson [4] Lead a gift of God: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2023/jan/12/the-gift-of-god-that-has-poisoned-american-kids-for-100-years https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2023/jan/12/the-gi... [5] The Secret History of Lead: https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2000/03/02/secret-history-lead/ https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2000/03/02/...
- living_room_pc 3y agoWhy are all of these comments about China vs the West (whatever that means) Who brought up the "west" in this context? and why is it so important? There are some interesting points about academic motivation here, I dont see why we have to make this a red vs blue issue. Are people offended we are talking about a particular nation? Are shills or bots steering the conversation?
- luplex 3y agoGood observation! I think we generally imagine China as an adversary too often. Instead, we should sometimes think of it as a neighbor country, where people that are similar to us are faced with an interesting system. But I think even then, the best way to understand would be to make comparisons to your own culture.
- bartekpacia 3y agoIndeed, totalitarian dictatorship is a very interesting system.
- woooooo 3y agoThe article itself already brought that comparison, it's a pro-western outfit dumping on what they consider our adversary. We could ask why articles like this have multiplied in recent years and that's interesting, but people here are just running with the implied comparison.
- kelipso 3y agoWhat's the point of saying country X has for example vehicle accident rate of y if you don't compare it to other countries? Comparisons are important, otherwise what are you even discussing in a void.
- ametrau 3y agoAny number of vehicles accidents are bad in any country.
- tshirttime 3y ago[flagged]
- arp242 3y agoSomewhat related: Scientists aghast at AI rat with genitals in peer-reviewed article - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39391034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39391034 - Feb 2024 (67 comments) No title could have prepared me for that image.
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoYeah I'm just not going to look....
- srean 3y agoThis makes me think that .con would make for a fine domain.
- the88doctor 3y agoIncentivizing quality over quantity always leads to more fraud. It happens in academia, and it happens in sales (e.g. Bank of America scandal). If I need more of X to get promoted or to get my bonus, then it's easiest to just create fake X.