6 ms·

The Academic Culture of Fraud

42 points by Michelangelo11 2y ago

xqcgrek2 2y ago
[flagged]
puttycat 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
__gcd 2y ago
Most of the negative examples are med/bio-related (including psychology here), whereas the single positive example is in CS/Engineering. Systematically med is dealing with a harder replication problem. Moreover, "light involvement from the academic system " is a significant stretch. Not all but most of the people doing the work have been trained within academia instead of within industry and the work has been from an academia-industry collaboration. Thinking about the proportion of people that go into academia vs industry makes the ratio more meaningful as well. The replication crisis is clearly a big issue, but the conclusions I would draw from the examples presented are more difference between fields than a condemnation of academia. To just say "move it to private instituions" is shortsighted.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
smeej 2y ago
Every day it gets harder for me to believe that the medical and pharmaceutical industrial system's configuration of incentives can ever lead to improvements in health for people. I don't doubt there are many, many researchers and physicians who genuinely want to help people. It's possible to me that virtually everyone does. But if that's the case, the incentive structure has apparently gotten away from everyone and become some sort of monster working at cross-purposes toward them at all times, keeping them from succeeding. I don't know the specific numbers, but what fraction of the U.S. workforce and economy is involved in medical/pharmaceutical or related insurance research, treatment, or administration? It has to be well into the double digits. If people started actually being cured of things, actually being well, whole segments of this structure would collapse--and if that percentage figure is high enough, so would the economy. I don't think we even need to posit that there are actually malevolent people involved who are trying to keep people sick. It could all just be a consequence of a whole system that depends on it to keep operating, and consequentially nudges just enough of every benevolent, neutral, or merely self-interested person's work in a direction that keeps it from making people well.
- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  Do you think that people that are bullied by their parents to become doctors are doing medicine to help people?
  - smeej 2y ago
    Maybe. Or at least it's probably one of the factors that helps them sleep at night and get up in the morning. I don't really see what that has to do with my point, though. I'm saying we don't have to assume anyone has ill will to explain why the system is failing. I'm not saying it's impossible that some people do.
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  Healthy people tend to be more productive - so the net effect of having a lot of non-healthy people being treated might well be economically negative. Moving 5-10% of the GDP into something else is disruptive (overall total healthcare is more like 18% GDP in the US, I think), but nothing that didn't happen before. Also, curing people is hard in a lot cases.
- FredPret 2y ago
  Instead of pontificating on the efficacy of the healthcare system, why not just look at the actual outcome? Lifespans are going up, including the length of time spent being relatively healthy; infant mortality is down; cancers are getting healed; there’s even a miracle cure for obesity.
  - smeej 2y ago
    Lifespans were going up, for older generations who were raised under different conditions than we have today. Today's young people are much more sickly than their forebears.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  I have been training myself to call it the medical industry, not the health or healthcare industry. It does very little to promote and preserve health. E.g., There was some noise a few years ago about the obstacles Louisiana faced in changing the medicine for hep C from the expensive lifetime subscription model to a cure. https://www.nola.com/news/healthcare_hospitals/louisiana-offers-treatment-to-more-hepatitis-c-patients-than-ever-before-even-as-some-gaps/article_ddf84210-a8d4-11e9-ae1b-b7037c312d9a.html https://www.nola.com/news/healthcare_hospitals/louisiana-off...
matthewdgreen 2y ago
My mother has Alzheimer’s and I would love to be able to blame her condition and lack of treatment on anyone at all. It would be immensely, primally satisfying - which to me is a warning flag for cognitive bias. I think the logical pathway between “two 20 year old papers that ‘sparked’ the Amyloid hypothesis are responsible for the entire research agenda and billions spent on ineffective drugs” is strained. “Sparked” may be true, but the idea that a few twenty-year old fraudulent images tricked Big Pharma into spending two decades chasing this hypothesis and developing drugs, and all along the way the whole thing was based on fake data that nobody every bothered to test in a subsequent experiment? That seems deeply unlikely to me. If true I would like to see that case made with evidence. TL;DR What I am not saying: fraud is acceptable. What I am saying is that there are many replication and error correction systems in science, and people with an axe to grind really don’t want to understand that.
dash2 2y ago
I wouldn't be as pessimistic as this. Having been in relatively low-pressure parts of academia (polisci, behavioural economics, behavioural genetics), I can't say I've ever seen clear fraud or direct pressure to commit fraud. Bad research, bullshit, politics, yes... but those are maybe not unique to academia. Anyway, quite a wake-up call to be told we should model ourselves on finance. Ow.
- jbullock35 2y ago
  > Having been in relatively low-pressure parts of academia (polisci, behavioural economics, behavioural genetics), I can't say I've ever seen clear fraud LaCour? Gino? The Ariely study mentioned in the article?
  - dash2 2y ago
    I don't mean I've never heard of clear fraud. I mean I've never seen it myself among colleagues.
    - trte9343r4 2y ago
      That is what "culture of fraud" means. Everyone just turns blind eye to fraud, any dissident is removed and promptly forgotten. It is deeply embedded in system. Opposition is not possible, there is not even "correct" language to express dissident.
corimaith 2y ago
Well that's the long term consequence of treating academia as a means of social mobility; a gravy train, rather than a dispassionate search for the truth and knowledge.
agarsev 2y ago
disclaimer: I'm a university professor, though in a european country and not in health-rrlated area The article is excessively negative in tone, and very dramatic and aggressive. I have found many people adjacent to academia, drop outs, or even some inside, very disenchanted and angry at how it works. And it's true, the sets of incentives, structures and political organisation in academia don't relate at all to academic excellence, and are something we have to "suffer". I wish we could come up with a better set of incentives, but it's very hard to do in a mostly vocational and passion-based activity. So what people have come up is structure the incentives along the chores (eg teaching) and easily measurable results (eg publications). And whenever you come up with an incentive structure, some people will game it. And the current state of publication stress (publish or perish) is extreme and counterproductive. But please note that these measurement requirements and incentives are imposed from outside academia. Of course, I'm not saying leave us to our devices, academia is nepotistic and political enough. But the system sure could use some overhaul. Suggestions welcome. On the other hand, this "fraud" is incentive fraud, but not "truth" fraud. The way science Truth works is by accumulation of imperfect, even erroneous results, leading to an ever more refined understanding of the world. Scientists don't just blindly trust others, even if they cite each other (nowadays, citations are a political and incentive-gaming tool more than actual references). So these massive scale frauds don't bother us so much because they don't make understanding necessarily go backwards. Of course the payer feels it's a waste of money, but in academia we see money as support for research, which is mostly failed anyways because you only make discoveries by failing and failing again. And progress in knowledge is nowadays still going on, even in the medical fields. And academia still works, much as healthcare and compulsory education, becausemany people feel a calling to do these professions properly, even if it doesn't seem so from outside. So let's be optimistic, even while trying to come up with improvements to the current model. PS: So sorry for the wall of text
- armitron 2y ago
  I'm afraid it's not simply a matter of wasted money but one of profound institutional rot that drives away large numbers of the best and brightest. The article outlines this by focusing on the proto-scientist archetype and the spiritual, uncompromising pursuit of Truth. Today's academic culture is for the most part completely antithetical to a person possessing these attributes. That some can endure the suffering and keep working in this sort of environment does not reflect well on today's institutions and doesn't inspire much optimism for the future of academia.
Sniffnoy 2y ago
> The most influential philosopher of recent times is Eliezer Yudkowsky ... The adoption of his thinking contributed to the formation of major AI labs such as OpenAI and later Anthropic. Minor point, but I don't think one can reasonably credit Yudkowsky with this. Yudkowsy was no booster of neural nets and was quite surprised by their recent success. He's certainly said a lot of important things about artificial intelligence (mostly regarding the potential dangers of such), but his ideas haven't really contributed to current methods of constructing them. (And yes you could say that Yudkowsky's ideas about the dangers of AI were influential on Anthropic specifically, but this quote is obviously not referring to that.)
joeatwork 2y ago
Palladium magazine is published by The American Governance Foundation. I couldn’t find out much about it by Googling, does anybody know what its deal is?
- DisgracePlacard 2y ago
  IIRC Palladium is mainly run by the more libertarian-oriented rationalist/lesswrong types. Or at least, I've only seen it recommended by those types. I think it's funded by Peter Thiel.
- newzisforsukas 2y ago
  Looks like it is something run by Wolf Tivy https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/823895681/202303199349331835/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/823... https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/01/06/quit-your-job/ https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/01/06/quit-your-job/
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mensetmanusman 2y ago
Disclaimer: have a PhD, went to industry I think the biggest institutional mistake of the academic system is the over-production of academic bound PhDs. People are strung along for years thinking they have a shot at some professorship, so they work for low pay over their prime societal contribution years before realizing there are no spots left. Academics afraid of their future security will be more prone to fraud, and more of them need enough FU money to try things that go against the grain. If we pre-filtered academics half way through their training based on the number of faculty positions that are available it could help curtail the fraud ridden rat race.
- MaxBarraclough 2y ago
  > If we pre-filtered academics half way through their training based on the number of faculty positions that are available Meaning what? Kick out students despite that they're on track to graduate? Plenty of people get a PhD with no intent of going into academia.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Not kick out, explicitly filter for academia.
    - MaxBarraclough 2y ago
      Again, meaning what?
      - mensetmanusman 2y ago
        A two+ track system, one focused on being a prof with grant writing and ethics, the other on being an R&D wizard for the tech economy.
obsoletehippo 2y ago
A real model of rigorous analytical thinking here: there are cases of fraud in academia, therefore all of academia is entirely fraudulent and should be dispensed with. Or it should take lessons from... the financial sector?! Yes, there should be effort to address academic fraud. But no, we should not buy into conservative propaganda and torch our institutions of higher education.
marcusford01 2y ago
Cryptocurrency Scam/Fraud Tracing & Recovery I never thought I will get scammed of all my assets on this exchange which I was warned by friends not to invest online or apply for exchange from unknown online investors, they stole all my life savings ranging to a total sum of $68k [sixty eight thousand dollars] worth of bitcoin, I started regretting my life until I came across some article online about jamesmckaywizard a genuine hacker who is into any kind of hacking and helping people recover their lost funds via online scam, I still didn't believe bitcoin can ever be recovered, but had to once again trust my guts and instincts. To my greatest surprise Mr. James was able to carry out the job neatly without any traces or complications all thanks to him and his team for offering me a top notch services. To that one person or persons out there who really need a true and efficient hacker l would advice you to contact: Email: jamesmckaywizard at gmail dot com or WhatsApp +31622647750.

xqcgrek2 2y ago

[flagged]

puttycat 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

__gcd 2y ago

Most of the negative examples are med/bio-related (including psychology here), whereas the single positive example is in CS/Engineering. Systematically med is dealing with a harder replication problem. Moreover, "light involvement from the academic system " is a significant stretch. Not all but most of the people doing the work have been trained within academia instead of within industry and the work has been from an academia-industry collaboration. Thinking about the proportion of people that go into academia vs industry makes the ratio more meaningful as well. The replication crisis is clearly a big issue, but the conclusions I would draw from the examples presented are more difference between fields than a condemnation of academia. To just say "move it to private instituions" is shortsighted.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

smeej 2y ago

Every day it gets harder for me to believe that the medical and pharmaceutical industrial system's configuration of incentives can ever lead to improvements in health for people. I don't doubt there are many, many researchers and physicians who genuinely want to help people. It's possible to me that virtually everyone does. But if that's the case, the incentive structure has apparently gotten away from everyone and become some sort of monster working at cross-purposes toward them at all times, keeping them from succeeding. I don't know the specific numbers, but what fraction of the U.S. workforce and economy is involved in medical/pharmaceutical or related insurance research, treatment, or administration? It has to be well into the double digits. If people started actually being cured of things, actually being well, whole segments of this structure would collapse--and if that percentage figure is high enough, so would the economy. I don't think we even need to posit that there are actually malevolent people involved who are trying to keep people sick. It could all just be a consequence of a whole system that depends on it to keep operating, and consequentially nudges just enough of every benevolent, neutral, or merely self-interested person's work in a direction that keeps it from making people well.

29athrowaway 2y ago
Do you think that people that are bullied by their parents to become doctors are doing medicine to help people?
- smeej 2y ago
  Maybe. Or at least it's probably one of the factors that helps them sleep at night and get up in the morning. I don't really see what that has to do with my point, though. I'm saying we don't have to assume anyone has ill will to explain why the system is failing. I'm not saying it's impossible that some people do.
RandomLensman 2y ago
Healthy people tend to be more productive - so the net effect of having a lot of non-healthy people being treated might well be economically negative. Moving 5-10% of the GDP into something else is disruptive (overall total healthcare is more like 18% GDP in the US, I think), but nothing that didn't happen before. Also, curing people is hard in a lot cases.
FredPret 2y ago
Instead of pontificating on the efficacy of the healthcare system, why not just look at the actual outcome? Lifespans are going up, including the length of time spent being relatively healthy; infant mortality is down; cancers are getting healed; there’s even a miracle cure for obesity.
- smeej 2y ago
  Lifespans were going up, for older generations who were raised under different conditions than we have today. Today's young people are much more sickly than their forebears.
readthenotes1 2y ago
I have been training myself to call it the medical industry, not the health or healthcare industry. It does very little to promote and preserve health. E.g., There was some noise a few years ago about the obstacles Louisiana faced in changing the medicine for hep C from the expensive lifetime subscription model to a cure. https://www.nola.com/news/healthcare_hospitals/louisiana-offers-treatment-to-more-hepatitis-c-patients-than-ever-before-even-as-some-gaps/article_ddf84210-a8d4-11e9-ae1b-b7037c312d9a.html https://www.nola.com/news/healthcare_hospitals/louisiana-off...

matthewdgreen 2y ago

My mother has Alzheimer’s and I would love to be able to blame her condition and lack of treatment on anyone at all. It would be immensely, primally satisfying - which to me is a warning flag for cognitive bias. I think the logical pathway between “two 20 year old papers that ‘sparked’ the Amyloid hypothesis are responsible for the entire research agenda and billions spent on ineffective drugs” is strained. “Sparked” may be true, but the idea that a few twenty-year old fraudulent images tricked Big Pharma into spending two decades chasing this hypothesis and developing drugs, and all along the way the whole thing was based on fake data that nobody every bothered to test in a subsequent experiment? That seems deeply unlikely to me. If true I would like to see that case made with evidence. TL;DR What I am not saying: fraud is acceptable. What I am saying is that there are many replication and error correction systems in science, and people with an axe to grind really don’t want to understand that.

dash2 2y ago

I wouldn't be as pessimistic as this. Having been in relatively low-pressure parts of academia (polisci, behavioural economics, behavioural genetics), I can't say I've ever seen clear fraud or direct pressure to commit fraud. Bad research, bullshit, politics, yes... but those are maybe not unique to academia. Anyway, quite a wake-up call to be told we should model ourselves on finance. Ow.

jbullock35 2y ago
> Having been in relatively low-pressure parts of academia (polisci, behavioural economics, behavioural genetics), I can't say I've ever seen clear fraud LaCour? Gino? The Ariely study mentioned in the article?
- dash2 2y ago
  I don't mean I've never heard of clear fraud. I mean I've never seen it myself among colleagues.
  - trte9343r4 2y ago
    That is what "culture of fraud" means. Everyone just turns blind eye to fraud, any dissident is removed and promptly forgotten. It is deeply embedded in system. Opposition is not possible, there is not even "correct" language to express dissident.

corimaith 2y ago

Well that's the long term consequence of treating academia as a means of social mobility; a gravy train, rather than a dispassionate search for the truth and knowledge.

agarsev 2y ago

disclaimer: I'm a university professor, though in a european country and not in health-rrlated area The article is excessively negative in tone, and very dramatic and aggressive. I have found many people adjacent to academia, drop outs, or even some inside, very disenchanted and angry at how it works. And it's true, the sets of incentives, structures and political organisation in academia don't relate at all to academic excellence, and are something we have to "suffer". I wish we could come up with a better set of incentives, but it's very hard to do in a mostly vocational and passion-based activity. So what people have come up is structure the incentives along the chores (eg teaching) and easily measurable results (eg publications). And whenever you come up with an incentive structure, some people will game it. And the current state of publication stress (publish or perish) is extreme and counterproductive. But please note that these measurement requirements and incentives are imposed from outside academia. Of course, I'm not saying leave us to our devices, academia is nepotistic and political enough. But the system sure could use some overhaul. Suggestions welcome. On the other hand, this "fraud" is incentive fraud, but not "truth" fraud. The way science Truth works is by accumulation of imperfect, even erroneous results, leading to an ever more refined understanding of the world. Scientists don't just blindly trust others, even if they cite each other (nowadays, citations are a political and incentive-gaming tool more than actual references). So these massive scale frauds don't bother us so much because they don't make understanding necessarily go backwards. Of course the payer feels it's a waste of money, but in academia we see money as support for research, which is mostly failed anyways because you only make discoveries by failing and failing again. And progress in knowledge is nowadays still going on, even in the medical fields. And academia still works, much as healthcare and compulsory education, becausemany people feel a calling to do these professions properly, even if it doesn't seem so from outside. So let's be optimistic, even while trying to come up with improvements to the current model. PS: So sorry for the wall of text

armitron 2y ago
I'm afraid it's not simply a matter of wasted money but one of profound institutional rot that drives away large numbers of the best and brightest. The article outlines this by focusing on the proto-scientist archetype and the spiritual, uncompromising pursuit of Truth. Today's academic culture is for the most part completely antithetical to a person possessing these attributes. That some can endure the suffering and keep working in this sort of environment does not reflect well on today's institutions and doesn't inspire much optimism for the future of academia.

Sniffnoy 2y ago

> The most influential philosopher of recent times is Eliezer Yudkowsky ... The adoption of his thinking contributed to the formation of major AI labs such as OpenAI and later Anthropic. Minor point, but I don't think one can reasonably credit Yudkowsky with this. Yudkowsy was no booster of neural nets and was quite surprised by their recent success. He's certainly said a lot of important things about artificial intelligence (mostly regarding the potential dangers of such), but his ideas haven't really contributed to current methods of constructing them. (And yes you could say that Yudkowsky's ideas about the dangers of AI were influential on Anthropic specifically, but this quote is obviously not referring to that.)

joeatwork 2y ago

Palladium magazine is published by The American Governance Foundation. I couldn’t find out much about it by Googling, does anybody know what its deal is?

DisgracePlacard 2y ago
IIRC Palladium is mainly run by the more libertarian-oriented rationalist/lesswrong types. Or at least, I've only seen it recommended by those types. I think it's funded by Peter Thiel.
newzisforsukas 2y ago
Looks like it is something run by Wolf Tivy https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/823895681/202303199349331835/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/823... https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/01/06/quit-your-job/ https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/01/06/quit-your-job/

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mensetmanusman 2y ago

Disclaimer: have a PhD, went to industry I think the biggest institutional mistake of the academic system is the over-production of academic bound PhDs. People are strung along for years thinking they have a shot at some professorship, so they work for low pay over their prime societal contribution years before realizing there are no spots left. Academics afraid of their future security will be more prone to fraud, and more of them need enough FU money to try things that go against the grain. If we pre-filtered academics half way through their training based on the number of faculty positions that are available it could help curtail the fraud ridden rat race.

MaxBarraclough 2y ago
> If we pre-filtered academics half way through their training based on the number of faculty positions that are available Meaning what? Kick out students despite that they're on track to graduate? Plenty of people get a PhD with no intent of going into academia.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Not kick out, explicitly filter for academia.
  - MaxBarraclough 2y ago
    Again, meaning what?
    - mensetmanusman 2y ago
      A two+ track system, one focused on being a prof with grant writing and ethics, the other on being an R&D wizard for the tech economy.

obsoletehippo 2y ago

A real model of rigorous analytical thinking here: there are cases of fraud in academia, therefore all of academia is entirely fraudulent and should be dispensed with. Or it should take lessons from... the financial sector?! Yes, there should be effort to address academic fraud. But no, we should not buy into conservative propaganda and torch our institutions of higher education.

marcusford01 2y ago

Cryptocurrency Scam/Fraud Tracing & Recovery I never thought I will get scammed of all my assets on this exchange which I was warned by friends not to invest online or apply for exchange from unknown online investors, they stole all my life savings ranging to a total sum of $68k [sixty eight thousand dollars] worth of bitcoin, I started regretting my life until I came across some article online about jamesmckaywizard a genuine hacker who is into any kind of hacking and helping people recover their lost funds via online scam, I still didn't believe bitcoin can ever be recovered, but had to once again trust my guts and instincts. To my greatest surprise Mr. James was able to carry out the job neatly without any traces or complications all thanks to him and his team for offering me a top notch services. To that one person or persons out there who really need a true and efficient hacker l would advice you to contact: Email: jamesmckaywizard at gmail dot com or WhatsApp +31622647750.