7 ms·

I'm the furthest thing from a scientist unless you count 3,000 hours of PBS spacetime, but I love science and so science/academia fraud to me, feels kinda like

• mhh__ 2y ago
  Scientific fraud can also compound really badly because people will try to replicate it, and the easiest results to fake are usually the most expensive...
• wredue 2y ago
  Can you go to jail for knowingly defrauding another entity out of money (such as grants). Yes. Absolutely. Are you going to go to jail for fudging some numbers on your paper, not likely.
  • pclmulqdq 2y ago
    IMO faking a paper and then sticking that in your CV on a grant application is fraud enough to be worthy of jail.
• dghlsakjg 2y ago
  It is the same flavor of fraud as financial fraud. It is about personal gain, and avoiding loss. This kind of fraud happens because scientists are rewarded greatly for coming up with new, publishable, interesting results. They are punished severely for failing to do that. You could be the department's best professor in terms of teaching, but if you aren't publishing, your job is at risk at many universities. Scientists in Academia are incentivized to publish papers. If they can take shortcuts, and get away with it, they will. That's the whole problem, that's human nature. This is why you don't nearly as many industry scientists coming out with fraudulent papers. If Shell's scientists publish a paper, they aren't rewarded for that, if they come up with some efficient new way to refine oil they are rewarded, and they also might publish a paper if they feel like it.
  • janice1999 2y ago
    > If Shell's scientists publish a paper A lot of companies reward employees for publications. Mine certainly does. Also an oil company may not be such a great example since they directly and covertly rewarded scientists for publishing papers undermining climate change research.
    • dghlsakjg 2y ago
      Ok. Bad example using Shell, but the point is that Industry scientists do not have publication in journals as a primary incentive. A scientist can work in industry research and NEVER publish, and still have a career where they make money, and don't worry about losing their job.
• madmask 2y ago
  I agree with you, science fraud is terrible. It pollutes and breaks the scientific method. Enormous resources are wasted, not just by the fraudster but also by all the other well meaning scientists who base their work on that. In my experience no, most fraudsters are not evil people, they just follow the incentives and almost non-existent disincentives. Scientist has become just a job, you find all kinds of people there. As far as I know no-one goes to jail, worst thing possible (and very rare) is losing the job, most likely just the reputation.
  • mden 2y ago
    "most fraudsters are not evil people, they just follow the incentives and almost non-existent disincentives" Maybe I'm too idealistic but why does following incentives with no regard for secondary consequences not evil?
    • layer8 2y ago
      IMO “evil” is a misconception. People have different beliefs and psychological needs, and placed in certain incentive structures that has the outcomes that we see. You can call certain behaviors “evil”, but that doesn’t explain anything about why the behaviors occur.
      • ARandomerDude 2y ago
        If someone raped your wife and set your children on fire, you would probably rethink your stance on evil.
        • layer8 2y ago
          Nope. “Evil” still provides no explanation and no understanding of why and how things happen there. It’s the same thing as believing in miracles created by a god.
          • badpun 2y ago
• Electricniko 2y ago
  It seems like this could ultimately fall under the category of financial fraud, since the allegations are that he may have favorably misrepresented the results of drug trials where he was credited as an inventor of the drug that's now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
• tppiotrowski 2y ago
  There was a period of time when science was advanced by the aristocrats who were self funded and self motivated. Once it became a distinguished profession the incentives changed. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
  • hilux 2y ago
    Goodhart's Law!
  • biorach 2y ago
    > There was a period of time when science was advanced by the aristocrats who were self funded and self motivated. From a distance the practice of science in early modern and Enlightenment times might look like the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. If you read the detailed history of the times you'll see that the reality was much more messy.
    • animal_spirits 2y ago
      Do you have any examples you know of or can share? I am curious this
      • biorach 2y ago
        Today we only remember the great thinkers of these times, and tend to see a linear accumulation of knowledge. If you look at the history of the times you realise that at the time there was a vast and confusing babble, it was very hard at the time to distinguish the valid science from the superstition, the blind regurgitation of classical authority, the soothsayers and yes, the fraudsters. For example Kepler considered his work on the Music of the Spheres (google it) to be more important than, and the ultimate goal of, his research on the mechanics of planetary motion. Newton dabbled in alchemy, and his dispute with Leibnitz was very very bitchy with some dubious jostling for priority. And there was no end of dubious research and outright fraud going on at the time. So no, it was not a golden era of disinterested research. See for example the wikipedia articles on Phlogiston, The Music of the Spheres, the long and hard fought battle over Epicycles etc
• vasco 2y ago
  Pick up an old engineering book at some point, something from mid 1800's or early 1900's and you'll quickly realize that the trust people put on science isn't what it should be. The scientific method works over a long period of time, but to blindly trust a peer review study that just came out, any study, is almost as much faith as religion, specially if you're not a high level researcher in the same field and have spent a good amount of time reading their methodology yourself. If you go to the social sciences then the amount of crock that gets published is incredible. As a quick example, any book about electricity from the early 1900's will include quite serious sections about the positive effects of electromagnetic radiation (or "EM field therapies"), teach you about different frequencies and modulations for different illnesses and how doctors are applying them. Today these devices are peddled by scammers of the same ilk as the ones that align your shakras with the right stone on your forehead.
  • momoschili 2y ago
    Going to need some citations here since the texts that I'm familiar with from that time period are "A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism" by Maxwell (mid-late 1800s) and "A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity" by E. T. Whittaker, neither of which mentions anything of the sort. I suspect you are choosing from texts that at the time likely would not have been considered academic or standard.
    • jvanderbot 2y ago
      Your points of memory are not counterpoints. Those are the ones that lived - and are not indicative of the general quality of science during those times. Obvious survivor bias. The fact that you can recall those reinforces the point that the value is determined by how long it is useful and remembered, not the fact that it was published.
      • momoschili 2y ago
        Indeed, but you are clearly missing the historical context as these were two highly celebrated and referenced texts of the time period by leading scientists. However, it appears that the leading scientific minds (of which Maxwell and Whittaker are) did not include these uses in their texts. I do not dispute that science can be wrong (in fact it is almost always 'wrong' in the end) nor do I dispute that there could have been published research in those applications. I would argue that these applications were likely fringe at best within the scientific community by the mid 1800s. There are of course incredible scientists that went down disappointing paths (eg Shockley, Dyson, Pauling) in terms of their research output later on, though one must remember that typically this occurs outside their original field of expertise. If you read my comment you will see that I am asking for the references to the claims the previous author made. I simply provided my own references which werew written at the time and are representative of the times that do not corroborate the tall tale of the previous author. If you have any references to support their claim I would be interested in perusing them.
• jimbokun 2y ago
  I think the error is putting trust in scientists as people, instead of putting trust in science as a methodology. The methodology is designed to rely on trusting a process, not trusting individuals, to arrive at the truth. I guess it also reinforces the supreme importance of reproducibility. Seems like no research result should be taken seriously until at least one other scientist or group of scientists are able to reproduce the result. And if the work isn't sufficiently defined to the point of being reproducible, it should be considered a garbage study.
  • drpossum 2y ago
    There is no way to do any kind of science without putting trust in people. Science is not the universe as it is presented. Science is the human interpretation of observation. People are who carry out and interpret experiments. There is no set of methodology you can adopt that will ever change that. "Reproducibility" is important, but it is not a silver bullet. You cannot run any experiment exactly in the same way ever. If you have independent measurements you cannot rule out bias from prior results. Look at the error bars here on published values of the electron charge and tell me that methodology or reproducibility shored up the result. https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/264/timeline-of-measurements-of-the-electrons-charge https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/264/timeline-of-meas...
    • sesm 2y ago
      What you can do is separate interpretation from observation as much as possible.
      • matthewdgreen 2y ago
        TFA is about a person who literally faked the observations. Everyone on this sub is trying to shoehorn in their preferred view of "how to fix science" when the problem here has nothing to do with any of it.
        • theultdev 2y ago
• LeifCarrotson 2y ago
  You're far from a scientist, so it's easy for you to put scientists/academia on a pedestal. For most of the people who end up in these scandals, this is just the day job that their various choices and random chance led up to. they're just ordinary humans responding to ordinary incentives in light of whatever consequences and risks they may or may not have considered. Other careers, like teaching, medicine, and engineering have similar problems.
  • smolder 2y ago
    And management consulting. But probably not plumbing, where the work product is very concrete and easy to judge.
    • pclmulqdq 2y ago
      Plenty of plumbers cut corners, too. Their work gets judged by non-experts, so the bad ones will try to pass off a bad job.
      • smolder 2y ago
        Perhaps, but the "does it leak?" bar is at least easy to qualify.
• photochemsyn 2y ago
  It's complicated. Historically scientific fraud could be construed as 'good-intentioned' - typically a researcher in a cutting edge field might think they understood how a system worked, and wanting to be first to publish for reasons of career advancement, would cook up data so they could get their paper into print before anyone else. Indeed, I believe many academic careers were kicked off in this manner. Where it all goes wrong is when other more diligent researchers fail to reproduce said fraudulent research - this is what brought down famous fraudster Jan Hendrik Schön in the field of plastic-based organic electronics, which involved something like 9 papers in Science and Nature. There are good books and documentaries on that one. This will only be getting worse with AI data generation, as most of those frauds were detected by banal data replication, obvious cuts and pastes, etc. However, when you add a big financial driver, things really go off the rails. A new pharmaceutical brings investors sniffing for a big payout, and cooking data to make the patentable 'discovery' look better than it is is a strong incentive to commit egregious fraud. Bug-eyed greed makes people do foolish things.
  • pclmulqdq 2y ago
    People like us think scientists care about big-money things, but they largely don't care about that stuff as much as they care about prestige in their field. Prominent scientists get huge rewards of power and influence, as well as indirect money from leveraging that influence. When you start to think that way, the incentives for fraud become very "minor" and "petty" compared to what you are thinking of.
• transcranial 2y ago
  As a collective endeavor to seek out higher truth, maybe some amount of fraud is necessary to train the immune system of the collective body, so to speak, so that it's more resilient in the long-term. But too much fraud, I agree, could tip into mistrust of the entire system. My fear is that AI further exacerbates this problem, and only AI itself can handle wading through the resulting volume of junk science output.
• kzz102 2y ago
  In my view, prosecuting the bad actors alone will not fix science. Science is by its own nature a community because only a small number of people have the expertise (and university positions) to participate. A healthy scientific discipline and a healthy community are the same thing. Just like the "tough on crime" initiative alone often does not help a problematic community, just punish scientific fraud harshly will not fix the problem. Because the community is small, to catch the bad actors, you will either have insiders policing themselves, or have an non-expert outsiders rendering judgements. It's easy for well-intention-ed policing effort to turn into power struggles. This is why I think the most effective way is to empower good actors. Ensure open debate, limit the power of individuals, and prevent over concentration of power in a small group. These efforts are harder to implement than you think because they run against our desire to have scientific superstars and celebrities, but I think they will go a long way towards building a healthy community.
  • pclmulqdq 2y ago
    "Broken windows" policing has been shown to work, which I think is what you mean by "tough on crime."
• edem 2y ago
  I also watched almost all episodes of PBS Spacetime. Some of them multiple times. I'm so happy that Spacetime exists and also that Matt was recruited as a host (in place of Gabe). Highly recommended channel, superb content!
• mistercheph 2y ago
  Evil is a much simpler explanation than recognizing that if you were in the same position with the same incentives, you would do the same thing. It's not just one event, it's a whole career of normalizing deviation from your values. Maybe you think you'd have morals that would have stopped you, maybe those same morals would have ensured you were never in a position to PI research like that.
• regus 2y ago
  This is pretty funny. I usually hear this kind of language when a religious person is so devastated when their priest or pastor does something wrong that it causes them to leave their religion altogether. Are you going to do the same thing for scientism?
  • neom 2y ago
    I'm not a particularly religious person, I didn't realize what you described is something that happens with any great frequency. Never the less, I suppose one is able to leave a particular place of worship and not leave a religion, as it is with any way people form their views on something societal like this, it's on a spectrum? Religion, Politics, Science, Sex, Education, whatever.
• Balgair 2y ago
  Generally, the fields that have a Nobel in them attract the glory hounds and therefore the fraudsters. The ones that don't, like geology or archeology for example, don't get the glory hounds. Anytime you see champagne bottles up on a professor's top shelf with little tags for Nature publications (or something like that), then you know they are a glory hound. When you see beer bottles in the trash, then you know they're in it for more than themselves.
• jessriedel 2y ago
  As a scientist, I agree, although for not quite the reason you gave. Scientists are given tremendous freedom and resources by society (public dollars, but also private dollars like at my industry research lab). I think scientists have a corresponding higher duty for honesty. Jobs at top institutions are worth much more than their nominal salary, as evidenced by how much those people could be making in the private sector. (They are compensated mostly in freedom and intellectual stimulation.) Unambiguously faking data, which is the sort of thing a bad actor might do to get a top job, should be considered at least as bad a moral transgression as stealing hundreds of thousands or perhaps a few million dollars. (What is the downside? I have never once heard a researcher express feeling threatened or wary of being falsely/unjustly accused of fraud.)
• andrewflnr 2y ago
  > Stuff like this seems to bother me more than it rationally should. It's bothering you a rational amount, actually. These people have done serious damage to lots of lives and humanity in general. Society as a whole has at least as much interest in punishing them as it does for financial fraudsters. They should burn.
• brightball 2y ago
  How this happens given the near reverence provided to “peer review” is another question.
• xnx 2y ago
  Science is the search for truth. Lying is anthemic to that.