6 ms·
> published in Nature in 2006 So around 18 years ago. That’s a long time for researchers that believed in this papar's conclusions to be going down the wrong r
by kristianp 2y ago
> published in Nature in 2006
So around 18 years ago. That’s a long time for researchers that believed in this papar's conclusions to be going down the wrong rabbit hole. What a huge waste of effort and the lives of those with Alzheimer's.
- wang_li 2y agoThis kind of fraud should carry a prison sentence.
- datahack 2y agoAbsolutely. It’s not just a bad path, it’s taken researchers down a road that robbed approaches that could have helped people of resources because they lied.
- hangonhn 2y agoI wonder what the effects on retractions would be though. Some researchers might go down fighting or refuse to cooperate with investigators.
- docbrown 2y agoRetracted and sham papers is actually a major problem. Estimated 10,000 papers were retracted in 2023 (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situation-has-become-appalling-fake-scientific-papers-push-research-credibility-to-crisis-point https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situatio...) and that is thought to be only a small percentage.
- rowanG077 2y agoThat's kinda misleading. Not every retracted paper contains doctored results. There just a ton of mistakes as well.
- eviks 2y agothis isn't a big deal since no one reads most of those papers, it's mostly invisible sacrifice to the metrics gods. Very prominent papers like the one discussed, on the other hand, have much bigger consequences
- btilly 2y agoSome other fraud in the same subfield lead to an amoral douchebag becoming President of Stanford, where he destroyed the campus culture (read https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-life/ https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-soc... to verify) and then supported DEI run amok (read https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/01/11/amid-backlash-stanford-removes-harmful-language-list https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2023/01/11/amid-backlash... to see some of the fallout from that). This is in addition to wasting a big chunk of the billions spent each year on Alzheimer's research on false leads (see https://www.alz.org/news/2024/congress-bipartisan-funding-alzheimers-research https://www.alz.org/news/2024/congress-bipartisan-funding-al... for a source on the billions). Yes, very serious consequences indeed. (Note, I did my best to back up my statements with high quality unbiased factual references. Please read them before disagreeing with my description of the result.)
- marginalia_nu 2y agoNot everything gets retracted either. There's a surprisingly deep rot in many parts of science. There are strong incentives to publish, and a lot of the methods you can use to inflate statistical significance (i.e. p-hacking) are hard to distinguish from publication bias and other innocent explanations for falling outside of statistical expectations. Preregistration might help, but it doesn't really address the misaligned incentives that are at the heart of academic fraud.
- nextos 2y agoEven articles that publish legit findings tend to embellish data. I do this for a living, I often try to reproduce prominent results, and I regularly see things that are too good to be true. This is bad because it pushes everyone to do the same, as reviewers are now used to seeing perfect and pristine data. I have been asked to manipulate data a few times in my career. I have always refused, but this came at the cost of internal fights, getting excluded from other projects for being "too idealistic", or missed promotions. Incentives are just perverse. Fraud and dishonesty are rewarded, pretty depressing.
- thwarted 2y agoTragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me. Everyone wants answers, so anyone that provides an answer is elevated, independent of if the answer is right or not. To wit: the current AI push. Clips from The Big Short surfaced in my YouTube feed recently, and they way you worded this reminded me of the scene with the rating agency. Is scientific research and publishing headed for it's own CDS/MBS-esque implosion?
- nextos 2y agoI think academic research is becoming very inefficient, and traditional Academia might eventually become stagnant. If you don't play the game I described above, it is really hard to stay afloat. I guess industrial labs, where incentives are better aligned, might become more attractive. I have seen lots of prominent scientists moving into industrial labs recently, which would be something hard to imagine even a few years back.
- blackbear_ 2y agoThat number alone doesn't say much. Yes it sounds like a lot in absolute terms, but consider that four million papers were published in 2023 alone, and a bit less than 70 millions since 1996 [1]. [1] https://www.scimagojr.com/worldreport.php https://www.scimagojr.com/worldreport.php
- scotty79 2y agoMaybe retraction is something that should be something done in competitive fashion with negatve points awarded to researchers, universities and journals.
- p00dles 2y agoI’m 100% in agreement that there is a massive reproducibility crisis in science and that the publish-or-perish model is broken. But, for completeness, paper retractions can happen for many reasons, not all of them nefarious, though it could be that most retractions are from authors trying to game the system and getting called out. For example, if the terms of using a certain data set change, you could be required to retract your paper and remove that data from the analysis.
- nxobject 2y agoNot only effort: millions and millions of public and private dollars wasted on followup research on a false premise, all so that an author could get citations. What a cost.
- xnickb 2y agoPlaying devil's advocate: perhaps the authors strongly believed in the method but have failed to produce strong enough evidence. Then the goal was to renew financing in hopes of getting somewhere with the research, not to just get citations. This of course is pure speculation
- akoboldfrying 2y agoI think the point you're making is that there need not have been any malicious intent, and I accept that, but I don't really consider this a devil's advocate position, since strongly believing something will work is still not grounds enough to lie about outcomes.
- gorlilla 2y agoFraud is still fraud no matter what color you paint it.
- bigbacaloa 2y ago[dead]
- nxobject 2y agoI'm sympathetic to that: the pressure to have produced results must have been very, very heavy.
- misnome 2y agoI don't think "Fraud" counts as a devil's advocate position?
- nkrisc 2y agoWhat’s the difference?
- tommiegannert 2y agoGoogle Scholar says it's been cited 3,455 times. (Having a quick look at the top three results showed the paper was cited together with other papers in the same area, though.) https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=16215134208420421569&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1621513420842042156...
- zosima 2y agoThis paper is certainly shameful. But one should not exaggerate the impact it had. The strongest support for the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's comes from multiple sources of evidence that are completely unrelated to this paper.
- mike_hearn 2y agoThe problem is we don't know how many of those other lines of evidence are also fraudulent. What we do know is that finding academic fraud is like shooting fish in a barrel. It's way too easy even for totally unfunded volunteers. The situation in science right now is reminiscent of the situation in computer security circa 1999. Back then there were so many easily exploited RCE vulns in foundational infrastructure that "hacked by teenagers" became a TV trope. Almost anyone could sit down and find a way to hack into a network without much effort. Vendors engaged in a lot of screaming and denial, sometimes even attacking the people who found exploits for them. But, the industry changed. White hats became widespread, companies hired those ex-teenage hackers in their thousands. They put every employee through trainings. Then when that wasn't enough they started paying out millions in bug bounties, buying sandboxing companies (like Google did for Chrome) and more. Companies did this because bad security was hurting their reputations and in a competitive market that is an exploitable weakness. It was a form of self defense. Academic science is excluded from market mechanisms by legal fiat, supposedly on the basis that this will yield better research outcomes. What it's actually done is shield universities from any need to make hard changes. Their reputation is tanking but they just don't seem to care and why should they? They'll get grants from the NIH anyway because they're all as bad as each other, and nobody in politics is talking about a total defunding of the sector yet. Unfortunately even if the grants were cut off tomorrow they probably would still find it hard to change. It's becoming apparent that if a culture tolerates fraud for decades then eventually the leadership of these institutions are people who got there through fraud. How are universities or journals going to reform when the people who run them know full well they can't crack down on fraud without exposing their own career to audit risk?
- dbspin 2y agoYou've diagnosed the issue then recommended leaches and bleeding. 'Market mechanisms' already exist - no company is precluded from doing research. We can discuss the deficit in research investment that short termist 'market mechanisms' have led to in contemporary corporations, but its absurd to claim that the market can or should replace academic research. It's pretty clear that in practice the 'publish or perish' academic culture fostered by the financialisation of the university, the rise of the adjunct and the death of tenure have contributed heavily to the falsification of research. In practice encouraging replication, self directed research and significantly more 'pure' 'blue sky' research than governments and universities are inclined to do, would significantly alleviate this problem. Academia needs far less exposure to 'market mechanisms'. They're perverse incentives for good science.
- kylebenzle 2y agoA lot of science is fake, if not most of it. I learned the hard way in academia that it really seems the majority of PhD level researchers are there because they are willing to stretch the truth to "tell a good story".
- eigenschwarz 2y agoTalk about a sweeping conclusion based on n=1! Very unscientific ;)
- Fatnino 2y agoSounds ready to publish