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These sorts of articles raise so many thoughts and emotions in me. I was trained as a computational biologist with a little lab work and ran gels from time to

by dekhn 2y ago

These sorts of articles raise so many thoughts and emotions in me. I was trained as a computational biologist with a little lab work and ran gels from time to time. Personally, I hated gels- they're finicky, messy, ugly, and don't really tell you very much. But molecular biology as a field runs on gels- it's the priimary source of results for almost everything in molbio. I have seen more talks and papers that rested entirely a single image of a gel which is really just some dark bands. At the same time, I was a failed scientist: my gels weren't as interesting, or convincing compared to the ones done by the folks who went on to be more successful. At the time (20+ years ago) it didn't occur to me that anybody would intentionally modify images of gels to promote the results they claimed, although I did assume that folks didn't do a good job of organizing their data, and occasionally published papers that were wrong simply because they confused two images. Would I have been more successful if fewer people (and I now believe this is a common occurrence) published fraudulent images of gels? Maybe, maybe not. But the more important thing is that everybody just went along with this. I participated in many journal clubs where folks would just flip to Figure 3, assume the gel was what the authors claimed, and proceed to agree with (or disagree with) the results and conclusions uncritically. Whereas I would spend a lot of time trying to understand what experiment was actually run, and what th e data showed.

Lionga 2y ago
Don't hate the player hate the game. Governments made scientist only survive if they show results and specifically the results they want to see. Otherwise no anymore grants and you are done. Whether the results are fake or true does not matter "Science" nowadays is mostly BS, while the scientific method (hardly ever used in "science" nowadays) is still gold.
- MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
  Do hate the player. People are taught ethics for a reason: no set of rules and laws are sufficient to ensure integrity of the system. We rely on personal integrity. This is why we teach it to our children.
  - dhruvkar 2y ago
    When everything is a commodity (nothing runs outside of the market economy), the incentives are skewed to this type of behavior. 'Hate' the player' and 'hate' the game. Some things shouldn't be part of the market economy - education, health and food.
  - hacksoi 2y ago
    If people can get away with it, they will do it. Rules and punishments for breaking them exist for a reason.
    - pmarreck 2y ago
      My sole rational argument for Christianity is that it has made the societies that it is, or was, infused with, more honest than the ones that were not.
      - Lionga 2y ago
        We should really do some more honest crusades to export our honest values to the non believers to make the world a better, more honest place.
        pmarreck 2y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41684157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41684157 also the crusades were in significant part a competitive reaction to Islamic "proselytization via violence" so you're placing the blame on the wrong religion, there
      - ksenzee 2y ago
        I’m not sure there are any rational arguments for Christianity. I say that as a practicing Christian. Either it meets a spiritual need in you, or it’s not very valuable. I imagine that belief in a God who punishes evildoers has kept some people honest throughout history, but the value of that is surely outweighed by the evil done in the name of that God. I also don’t believe Christian societies are more honest than others. Every religion I know of teaches honesty, as does every non-religious ethical framework I can think of.
- Spivak 2y ago
  You are clearly deeply disconnected from the actual practice of research. The best you can really say is that the statistics chops of most researchers is lacking and that someone researching say caterpillars is likely to not really understand the maths behind the tests they're performing. It's not an ideal solution by any means but universities are starting to hire stats and cs department grads to handle that part.
- ljosifov 2y ago
  You have agency. Yes - the system provides incentives. However, you are not some pass-through nothingness to just accept any incentives. You can chose to not accept the incentives. You can leave the system. You're lucky - it's not a totalitarian system. There will be another area of life and work where the incentives align with your personal morals. Once you bend your spine and kneel to bad incentives - you can never walk completely upright again. You may think and convince yourself that you can stay in the system with bad incentives, play the game, but still somehow you the player remain platonically unaffected. This is a delusion, and at some level you know it too. Who knows? If everyone left the system with bad incentives, it maybe that the bad system collapses even. It's a problem of collective action. The chances are against a collapse, that it will continue to go on for some time. So don't count on collapse. And even if one was to happen in your time, it will be scorched earth post collapse for some time. Think as an individual - it's best to leave if you possibly can.
- greenavocado 2y ago
  A true scientist never says, "trust me" or even worse, "trust the science." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnPFL0Dr34c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnPFL0Dr34c
  - vostrocity 2y ago
    Reminds me of this tweet that calls out the problem of the popular position "science is real" "Science isn’t real - that’s terrible epistemology. It’s a process or method to generate and verify hypotheses and provisional knowledge, using replicable experiments and measurements. We don’t really know the real - we just have some current non-falsified theories and explanations that fit data decently, till we get better ones. The “science is real” crowd generally haven’t done much science and take it on faith." [1] https://x.com/rao_hacker_one/status/1811295722760982939 https://x.com/rao_hacker_one/status/1811295722760982939
    - dekhn 2y ago
      It's probably better to say that engineering based on science is usually real. Engineering cares a lot less about falsifying theories and more on what existing theories seem to have general predictive value, and can be used to do stuff, including things where human lives are at risk (tall buildings, fire reduction materials, airplanes). And if there are failures out in the field, they're inspected, and those results are fed back to update both the practices, and the theories. Personally I believe we live in an objective universe that can be understood by human brains (possibly using AI augmentation) and that our currently most advanced experimentally verified theories correspond to some actual true aspect of our universe. In that sense, science is real when the current theories match those aspects well enough to make generalizable predictions (general relativity and quantum mechanics).
      - greenavocado 2y ago
        I think you've hit on an important point. Science isn't about finding absolute truth, but rather about generating testable hypotheses that can be validated through experimentation and observation. This is why it's so crucial for scientists to follow the scientific method - they need to be willing to revise their theories based on new evidence. Your comparison between science and engineering is a good one. Engineering is often more focused on practical application, whereas science is more about understanding the underlying mechanisms that govern our world.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  "Nobody is ever responsible for their own actions. Economics predicting the existence of bad actors makes them not actually bad."
- vanderZwan 2y ago
  > Don't hate the player hate the game. When the game is designed by the most succesful players you absolutely should hate the players for creating a shitty game.
nonrandomstring 2y ago
> Would I have been more successful What are you talking about? You _are_ successful. You're not a fraud like all those other tossers.
- dekhn 2y ago
  To me, at the time, successful would have been getting a tenure-track position at a Tier 1 university, discovering something important, and never publishing anything that was intentional fraud (I'm OK with making some level of legitimate errors that could need to be retracted). Of those three, I certainly didn't achieve #1 or #2, but did achieve #3, mainly because I didn't write very much and obsessed over what was sent to the editor. Merely being a non-fraud is only part of success. (note: I've changed my definition of success, I now realize that I never ever really wanted to be a tenured professor at a Tier 1 university, because that role is far less fulfilling that I thought it would be).
  - epistasis 2y ago
    Most often #1 is sought after as the prerequisite for achieving #2. And due to the structural factors on the number of positions available, funding available, and supply of new PhDs and postdocs, it's most often a really good idea to avoid #1 these days.
    - circus1540 2y ago
      PhDs and postdocs aren’t fungible. The ones worth working with go to the same top 20-40 programs in their field. Even finding PhDs that have the bare minimum qualification of “caring about the field” can be tough as there are all sorts of weird incentives pushing people towards PhDs. Applies for most other things in science as well. Number of papers has greatly increased. Number of papers worth reading has not increased nearly as much.
  - SamPatt 2y ago
    The older I get the more sympathy I have for people who claim they didn't become traditionally successful due to adhering to ethical principles. I used to think that was just cope. But now I've been in a few situations where there's fairly clear opportunities to profit from shady behavior, and seen colleagues that I formerly respected jump at the chance. Thanks for not being a fraud.
testfoobar 2y ago
Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud. As I've gotten older, I understand that Charlie Munger's observation "“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” is applicable everywhere - including science. Academic scientists' careers are driven by publishing, citations and impact. Arguably some have figured how to game the system to advance their careers. Science be damned.
- nextos 2y ago
  Lots of people doing research find this depressing to the point of quitting. Many of my peers left research as they couldn't stomach all this nonsense. In experimental fields, the current academic system rewards dishonesty so much that ugly things have become really common. In my relatively short career, I have been asked to manipulate results several times. I refused, but this took an immense toll, especially on two occasions. Some people working with me wanted to support me fighting dishonesty. But guess what, they all had families and careers and were ultimately not willing to do anything as this could jeopardize their position. I've also witnessed first-hand how people that manage to publish well adopt monopolistic strategies, sabotaging interesting grant proposals from other groups or stalling their article submissions while they copy them. This is a problem that seldomly gets discussed. The current review system favors mono-cultures and winner-takes-it-all scenarios. For these reasons, I think industrial labs will be doing much better. Incentives there are not that perverse.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    So do you believe the author of the OP could honestly omit from their article the things you (and many others here) talk about? Could they be naive?
    - nextos 2y ago
      Nah, I think the article has good intentions. And rampant fraud is important to address. But as others said, addressing smaller shenanigans is also crucial to steer things in the right direction.
schmidtleonard 2y ago
Similar story: computational biologist, my presentations involved statistics so people would come to me for help, and it often ended in the disappointing news of a null result. I noticed that it always got published anyway at whichever stage of analysis showed "promise." The day I saw someone P-hack their way to the front page of Nature was the day I decided to quit biology. I still feel that my bio work was far more important than anything I've done since, but over here the work is easier, the wages are much better, and fraud isn't table stakes. Frankly in exchange for those things I'm OK with the work being less important (EDIT: that's not a swipe at software engineering or my niche in it, it's a swipe at a system that is bad at incentives). Oh, and it turns out that software orgs have exactly the same problem, but they know that the solution is to pay for verification work. Science has to move through a few more stages of grief before it accepts this.
dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
> At the time (20+ years ago) it didn't occur to me that anybody would intentionally modify images of gels to promote the results they claimed Fraud I suspect is only tip of the iceberg, worse still is delusion that what is taught is factually correct. A large portion of mainstream knowledge that we call 'science' is incorrect. While fraudulent claims are relatively easy to detect, claims that are backed up by ignorance/delusion are harder to detect and challenge because often there is collective ignorance. Quote 1: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" Quote 2:"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts" Side note: I will not offer to back up my above statements, since these are things that an individual has to learn it on their own, through healthy skepticism, intellectual integrity and inquiry.
- owenpalmer 2y ago
  > A large portion of mainstream knowledge that we call 'science' is incorrect. How do you know that? Can you prove it scientifically? > claims that are backed up by ignorance/delusion In that case, they are not "backed up" > I will not offer to back up my above statements > an individual has to learn it on their own, through ... inquiry May I "inquire" about your reasoning?
  - dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
    owenpalmer, as I stated in my side note I will not be explaining myself, my sincere apologies for this. You see there are some things that cannot be taught, or it cannot be easily taught more so for adults i.e healthy skepticism and questioning of statements/facts that come from authority figures ( example:science/religion etc). A person will have to make his or her own effort. External influences especially debates from the heretics will generally only delay that progress. Now, if you're already open to the possibility that mainstream science could be very wrong, I can possibly nudge you in the correct direction. I have explored certain areas of biology (especially nutrition) but not all, each sub area of biology (or any of the sciences really) is vast, I have to rely on heretics who are 'experts' in their areas of specialization.
    - 2y ago
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
It becomes a survival bias: if people can cheat at a competitive game (or research field) and get away with it, then at the end you'll wind up with only cheaters left (everyone else stops playing).
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  You could improve the situation by incentivizing people to identify cheaters and prove their cheating. If being a successful cheater-hunter was a good career, the field would become self-policing. This approach opens its own can of worms (you don't want to overdo it and create a paranoid police-state-like structure), but so far, we have way too little self-policing in science, and the first attempts (like Data Colada) are very controversial among their peers.
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  As they say: the scum rises to the top, true for academia, politics etc, any organization really. Quote: "The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing" My own nuanced take on it: Incompetent people are quick to grab authority and power. On the other hand principled, competent people are reluctant to take on positions of authority and power even when offered. For these people positions of power a)have connotations of a tyrant b) are uninteresting. (i.e technical problems are more interesting) . Also the reluctance of principled people to form coalitions to keep out the cheaters, because they are a divided bunch themselves exacerbates the problem, where as the cheaters often can collude together (temporarily) to achieve their nefarious goals.
  - atmavatar 2y ago
    Those you'd want to lead recognize leadership is a responsibility often times marked by personal sacrifice. Those you'd never want to lead mostly regard leadership as a privilege used for personal gain.
    - dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
      > Those you'd want to lead recognize leadership is a responsibility often times marked by personal sacrifice. True. It's not a coincidence that they say: it's very lonely* up there. There are some ways around this, but they are not easy, and perhaps even impossible. (*=ironically and paradoxically,the cruelest dictator is also a very lonely person)
asdf123qweasd 2y ago
At some point, the good scientists leave and the fraudsters start to filter for more fraudsters. If that goes on, its over- the academia has gone. Entirely. It can not grow back. Its just a building with conman in labcoats. My suggestion stands: Give true scientists the ability to hunt fraudsters for budgets. If you hunt and nail down a fraudster, you get his funding for your research.
- Balgair 2y ago
  I mean, the replication crisis had come and gone, about 5 years now. The fraudsters are running the place and have been for at least the last half decade, full stop.
  - searine 2y ago
    That is a ridiculous exaggeration. Yes, like in every walk of life, fraud happens. However, the extreme success of academic science shows that most of it is real, honest, work.
    - lupire 2y ago
      How so? The fraction of academic science that is applied to anything, anywhere, with clearly identifiable impact is both a tiny fraction of academic science, and also often detrimental quality of impact.
      - asdf123qweasd 2y ago
        Thats not true entirely. There is research, with huge impacts and the money leveraging- keeps it brutally honest. Nothing makes it out of a lab and into a fab, without certainty of the method working at least in lab conditions reproduceable. There are many billions, but not that many billions.
        fluidcruft 2y ago
        > nothing makes it out of a lab and into a fab, without certainty of the method working at least in lab conditions reproducible. The article describes multiple full clinical drug trials both completed (inconclusive==can't prove harm, effect is so small that benefit cannot be excluded) and ongoing that are fundamentally built on the fabricated results which literally do represent many billions of private investment. Ultimately research falsification is a con game, and you seem to have faith in something magical about "money leveraging" that smokes out cons. I do think shit eventually hits the fan in the market since reality affects the market, but it's not because the market is more rigorous than "science". Ultimately, investors are not experts and the are listening to the same people who do "peer review" and didn't notice (or ignored) the fraud in the first place.
pbreit 2y ago
As long as it's all peer reviewed!!
- DigitalPaladin 2y ago
  I'm assuming /s above. Because the amount of pencil-whipped "peer review" feedback I've received could fit in a shoe box, because many "reviewers" are looking for the CV credit for their role and not so much the actual effort of reviewing. And there's no way to call them out on their laziness except maybe to not submit to their publication again and warn others against it too. And, to defend their lack of review, all they need to say to the editor anyway is: "I didn't see it that way."
  - dasudasu 2y ago
    I never understood how peer reviewers are supposed to "validate" a paper and how they’re tacitly thought to be doing so by the general public. Authors make claims based on data reviewers don’t have direct access to, from experiments they obviously can’t supervise the execution. They’re forced to accept the claims at face value. In my experience (and I’ve been on both sides), it’s more about overall quality and impact. Journals don’t want badly written papers on unremarkable topics. It’s closer to being a harsh anonymous editor than a real safeguard of “science™.”
    - pbreit 2y ago
      I would say peer review is guaranteed to have major problems either with researchers writing what their peers will approve and reviewers being afraid to diverge from the party lines.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
> raise so many... emotions in me... and I now believe [faking gels] is a common occurrence On the other hand, shysters always project, and this thread is full of cringe vindications about cheating or faking or whatever. As your "emotions" are probably telling you, that kind of generalization does not feel good, when it is pointed at you, so IMO, you can go and bash your colleagues all you want, but odds are the ones who found results did so legitimately.
- smolder 2y ago
  Regarding "shysters always project": it rings true to me, but given the topic, I'm primed to wonder how you could show that empirically, and if there's any psychology literature to that effect.
TheMagicHorsey 2y ago
This is why institutions break down in the long run in any civilization. People like you, people of principle are drown out my agents acting exclusively in their own interest without ethics. It happens everywhere. The only solution to this is skin in the game. Without skin in the game the fraudsters fraud, the audience just naively goes along with it, and the institution collapses under the weight of lies.
- Balgair 2y ago
  The iron laws of bureaucracy are: 1) Nothing else matters but the budget 2) Over the long run, the people invested in the bureaucracy always win out over the people invested in the mission/point Science is just as susceptible to 2) as anything else.
- worik 2y ago
  > The only solution to this is skin in the game. Another solution is the opposite, no skin in the game Remove cocrete incentives and pay salaries
  - TheMagicHorsey 2y ago
    Salaries without skin in the game leads to failure. People just trade for their own benefit within and outside the system.
j-wags 2y ago
I'm mostly out now, but I would love to return to a more accountable academia. Often in these discussions it's hard to say "we need radical changes to publicly funded research and many PIs should be held accountable for dishonest work" without people hearing "I want to get rid of publicly funded research altogether and destroy the careers of a generation of trainees who were in the wrong place at the wrong time". Even in my immediate circles, I know many industry scientists who do scientific work beyond the level required by their company, fight to publish it in journals, mentor junior colleagues in a very similar manner to a PhD advisor, and would in every way make excellent professors. There would be a stampede if these people were offered a return to a more accountable academia. Even with lower pay, longer hours, and department duties, MORE than enough highly qualified people would rush in. A hypothetical transition to this world should be tapered. But even at the limit where academia switched overnight, trainees caught in such a transition could be guaranteed their spots in their program, given direct fellowships to make them independent of their advisor's grants, given the option to switch advisor, and have their graduation requirements relaxed if appropriate. It's easy to hem and haw about the institutional knowledge and ongoing projects that would invariably be lost in such a transition, even if very carefully executed. But we have to consider the ongoing damage being done when, for example, biogen spends thousands of scientist-years and billions of dollars failing to make an alzheimers drug because the work was dishonest to begin with, or when generations of trainees learn that bending the truth is a little more OK each year.
itronitron 2y ago
I used to work with someone up until the point I realized they were so distant from any form of reality that they couldn't distinguish between fact or fiction. Naturally, they are now the head of AI where they work.
- wredue 2y ago
  Hacker news is completely flooded with “AI learns just like humans do” and “AI models the human brain” despite neither of these things having any concrete evidence at all. Unfortunately it isn’t just bosses being fooled by this. Scores of people push this crap. I am not saying AI has no value. I am saying that these idiots are idiots.
  - echoangle 2y ago
    What evidence for „AI models the human brain“ do you want? Isn’t a neural network pretty clearly a simplified model of the working of the human brain? What is there to prove?
    - benlivengood 2y ago
      One clear piece of evidence would be ruling out "AI models the corvid brain" or "AI models the cephalopod brain" which might narrow it toward the human brain. That it's functionally impossible to do either leads me to believe that "it models some form of intelligence" is about the best we can prove.
      - echoangle 2y ago
        I don’t understand the standard of modeling you seem to assume. Modeling a human brain, a cephalopod brain and a corvid brain aren’t even mutually exclusive if your model is abstract enough. When I say „a neural network models a human brain“, I’m talking about the high level concept, not the specific structure of a human brain compared to other brains. You could also say that it models a dogs brain if you wanted to. It’s just the general working principle that is kind of similar. Does that not count as a model to you? Edit: Here’s a simple example: I would say that a simple SIR model „models COVID infection in humans“. But that doesn’t mean it can’t also model Pig Flu in Pigs. It’s a very abstract model so it applies to a lot of situations, just like a neural network basically models the brain of every reasonably advanced animal.
throwaway14356 2y ago
Then hiring the uninteresting gel seems preferable.
RunSet 2y ago
Calls to mind Isaac Asimov's "shotgun curve". https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v056n06_1979-06_Lenny_Silv3r/page/n129/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v056n06_...
- rcxdude 2y ago
  That story reminds me of this gem: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html
mfld 2y ago
Re: the role of (gel) images as the key aspect of a publication. To me this is very understandable, as they convey the information in the most succinct way and also constitute the main data & evidence. Faking this is so bold that it seemed unlikely. The good news IMO: more recent MolBio methods produce data that can be checked more rigorously than a gel image. A recent example where the evidence in form of DNA sequencing data is contested: https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.01607-23 https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.01607-23
nordsieck 2y ago
What's amazing to me is that journals don't require researchers to submit their raw data. At least, as far as I know. The only option for someone who wants to double check research is to completely replicate a study, which is quite a bit more expensive than double checking the researcher's work.
- frickinLasers 2y ago
  Journals are incentivized to publish fantastic results. Organizing raw data in a way that the uninitiated can understand presents serious friction in getting results out the door. The organizations who fund the research are (finally) beginning to require it [0][1], and some journals encourage it, but a massive cultural shift is required and there will be growing pains. You could also try emailing the corresponding authors. Any good-faith scientist should be happy to share what they have, assuming it's well organized/legible. [0] https://new.nsf.gov/public-access https://new.nsf.gov/public-access [1] https://sharing.nih.gov/ https://sharing.nih.gov/
  - ClumsyPilot 2y ago
    > The organizations who fund the research are (finally) beginning to require it [0][1], and some journals encourage it Feels like wrong way round - organisations paying for journals should be demanding it as proof?
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Replicating the results from someone's original data is difficult and time consuming, and other researchers aren't getting paid to do that (they're getting paid to do new research). And of course the (unpaid) reviewers don't have time either.
- gvurrdon 2y ago
  It's becoming more common for journals to have policies which require that raw data be made available. Here's some background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAIR_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAIR_data One of the purposes of a site on which I work (https://fairsharing.org https://fairsharing.org) is to assist researchers in finding places where they might upload their data (usually to comply with publishers' requirements).
busyant 2y ago
> don't really tell you very much ??? I think this statement is either meaningless or incorrect. At the very least your conclusion is context dependent. That being said, I ran gels back in the stone ages when you didn't just buy a stack of pre-made gels that slotted into a tank. I had to clean my glass plates, make the polyacrylamide solution, clamp the plates together with office binder clips and make sure that the rubber gasket was water tight. So many times, the gasket seal was poor and my polyacrylamide leaked all over the bench top. I hated running them. But when they worked, they were remarkably informative.
enugu 2y ago
Many solutions involving posting data in repositories or audits are being discussed in the comments. But given that many people are saying that they noticed and quit academia, how about also creating a more direct 'whistleblower' type of system, where complaints (with detailed descriptions of the fraud or a general view on what one sees in terms of loose practices) goes to some research monitoring team which can then come in and verify the problems.
- cwalv 2y ago
  > how about also creating a more direct 'whistleblower' type of system There needs to first be a system of checks and balances for this to work. The people at the top already know and condone the behavior; who are the whistleblowers reporting to? "We represent the top scientists in our field; these are a group of grad students. Who are you going to believe?" And of course they can easily shut anyone down with two words: "science denier"
bafe 2y ago
Count me in the club of failed scientists. In my case it was the geosciences, I would spend hours trying to make all my analysis reproducible and statistically sound while many colleagues just published preliminary simulation results obtaining much more attention and even academic jobs. On the flip side, the time spent improving my data processing workflows led to good engineering jobs so the time wasn't entirely wasted
BobbyTables2 2y ago
I feel this way about every flashy startup with billion dollar valuations. It seems amazing that they are pulling off what seems impossible. Years later, we learn they really aren’t. They unjustifiably made a name for themselves by burning VC money instead of running a successful business.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
Gels tell you quite a lot, its what question you are asking that is more relevant to the results being useful over the technique. Of course people lie and cheat in science. Wet lab and dry lab. So many dry lab papers for example are out there where code are supposedly available “by request” and we take the figures on faith.

by dekhn 2y ago

Lionga 2y ago

Don't hate the player hate the game. Governments made scientist only survive if they show results and specifically the results they want to see. Otherwise no anymore grants and you are done. Whether the results are fake or true does not matter "Science" nowadays is mostly BS, while the scientific method (hardly ever used in "science" nowadays) is still gold.

MetaWhirledPeas 2y ago
Do hate the player. People are taught ethics for a reason: no set of rules and laws are sufficient to ensure integrity of the system. We rely on personal integrity. This is why we teach it to our children.
- dhruvkar 2y ago
  When everything is a commodity (nothing runs outside of the market economy), the incentives are skewed to this type of behavior. 'Hate' the player' and 'hate' the game. Some things shouldn't be part of the market economy - education, health and food.
- hacksoi 2y ago
  If people can get away with it, they will do it. Rules and punishments for breaking them exist for a reason.
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    My sole rational argument for Christianity is that it has made the societies that it is, or was, infused with, more honest than the ones that were not.
    - Lionga 2y ago
      We should really do some more honest crusades to export our honest values to the non believers to make the world a better, more honest place.
      - pmarreck 2y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41684157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41684157 also the crusades were in significant part a competitive reaction to Islamic "proselytization via violence" so you're placing the blame on the wrong religion, there
    - ksenzee 2y ago
      I’m not sure there are any rational arguments for Christianity. I say that as a practicing Christian. Either it meets a spiritual need in you, or it’s not very valuable. I imagine that belief in a God who punishes evildoers has kept some people honest throughout history, but the value of that is surely outweighed by the evil done in the name of that God. I also don’t believe Christian societies are more honest than others. Every religion I know of teaches honesty, as does every non-religious ethical framework I can think of.
Spivak 2y ago
You are clearly deeply disconnected from the actual practice of research. The best you can really say is that the statistics chops of most researchers is lacking and that someone researching say caterpillars is likely to not really understand the maths behind the tests they're performing. It's not an ideal solution by any means but universities are starting to hire stats and cs department grads to handle that part.
ljosifov 2y ago
You have agency. Yes - the system provides incentives. However, you are not some pass-through nothingness to just accept any incentives. You can chose to not accept the incentives. You can leave the system. You're lucky - it's not a totalitarian system. There will be another area of life and work where the incentives align with your personal morals. Once you bend your spine and kneel to bad incentives - you can never walk completely upright again. You may think and convince yourself that you can stay in the system with bad incentives, play the game, but still somehow you the player remain platonically unaffected. This is a delusion, and at some level you know it too. Who knows? If everyone left the system with bad incentives, it maybe that the bad system collapses even. It's a problem of collective action. The chances are against a collapse, that it will continue to go on for some time. So don't count on collapse. And even if one was to happen in your time, it will be scorched earth post collapse for some time. Think as an individual - it's best to leave if you possibly can.
greenavocado 2y ago
A true scientist never says, "trust me" or even worse, "trust the science." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnPFL0Dr34c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnPFL0Dr34c
- vostrocity 2y ago
  Reminds me of this tweet that calls out the problem of the popular position "science is real" "Science isn’t real - that’s terrible epistemology. It’s a process or method to generate and verify hypotheses and provisional knowledge, using replicable experiments and measurements. We don’t really know the real - we just have some current non-falsified theories and explanations that fit data decently, till we get better ones. The “science is real” crowd generally haven’t done much science and take it on faith." [1] https://x.com/rao_hacker_one/status/1811295722760982939 https://x.com/rao_hacker_one/status/1811295722760982939
  - dekhn 2y ago
    It's probably better to say that engineering based on science is usually real. Engineering cares a lot less about falsifying theories and more on what existing theories seem to have general predictive value, and can be used to do stuff, including things where human lives are at risk (tall buildings, fire reduction materials, airplanes). And if there are failures out in the field, they're inspected, and those results are fed back to update both the practices, and the theories. Personally I believe we live in an objective universe that can be understood by human brains (possibly using AI augmentation) and that our currently most advanced experimentally verified theories correspond to some actual true aspect of our universe. In that sense, science is real when the current theories match those aspects well enough to make generalizable predictions (general relativity and quantum mechanics).
    - greenavocado 2y ago
      I think you've hit on an important point. Science isn't about finding absolute truth, but rather about generating testable hypotheses that can be validated through experimentation and observation. This is why it's so crucial for scientists to follow the scientific method - they need to be willing to revise their theories based on new evidence. Your comparison between science and engineering is a good one. Engineering is often more focused on practical application, whereas science is more about understanding the underlying mechanisms that govern our world.
BobaFloutist 2y ago
"Nobody is ever responsible for their own actions. Economics predicting the existence of bad actors makes them not actually bad."
vanderZwan 2y ago
> Don't hate the player hate the game. When the game is designed by the most succesful players you absolutely should hate the players for creating a shitty game.

nonrandomstring 2y ago

> Would I have been more successful What are you talking about? You _are_ successful. You're not a fraud like all those other tossers.

dekhn 2y ago
To me, at the time, successful would have been getting a tenure-track position at a Tier 1 university, discovering something important, and never publishing anything that was intentional fraud (I'm OK with making some level of legitimate errors that could need to be retracted). Of those three, I certainly didn't achieve #1 or #2, but did achieve #3, mainly because I didn't write very much and obsessed over what was sent to the editor. Merely being a non-fraud is only part of success. (note: I've changed my definition of success, I now realize that I never ever really wanted to be a tenured professor at a Tier 1 university, because that role is far less fulfilling that I thought it would be).
- epistasis 2y ago
  Most often #1 is sought after as the prerequisite for achieving #2. And due to the structural factors on the number of positions available, funding available, and supply of new PhDs and postdocs, it's most often a really good idea to avoid #1 these days.
  - circus1540 2y ago
    PhDs and postdocs aren’t fungible. The ones worth working with go to the same top 20-40 programs in their field. Even finding PhDs that have the bare minimum qualification of “caring about the field” can be tough as there are all sorts of weird incentives pushing people towards PhDs. Applies for most other things in science as well. Number of papers has greatly increased. Number of papers worth reading has not increased nearly as much.
- SamPatt 2y ago
  The older I get the more sympathy I have for people who claim they didn't become traditionally successful due to adhering to ethical principles. I used to think that was just cope. But now I've been in a few situations where there's fairly clear opportunities to profit from shady behavior, and seen colleagues that I formerly respected jump at the chance. Thanks for not being a fraud.

testfoobar 2y ago

Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud. As I've gotten older, I understand that Charlie Munger's observation "“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” is applicable everywhere - including science. Academic scientists' careers are driven by publishing, citations and impact. Arguably some have figured how to game the system to advance their careers. Science be damned.

nextos 2y ago
Lots of people doing research find this depressing to the point of quitting. Many of my peers left research as they couldn't stomach all this nonsense. In experimental fields, the current academic system rewards dishonesty so much that ugly things have become really common. In my relatively short career, I have been asked to manipulate results several times. I refused, but this took an immense toll, especially on two occasions. Some people working with me wanted to support me fighting dishonesty. But guess what, they all had families and careers and were ultimately not willing to do anything as this could jeopardize their position. I've also witnessed first-hand how people that manage to publish well adopt monopolistic strategies, sabotaging interesting grant proposals from other groups or stalling their article submissions while they copy them. This is a problem that seldomly gets discussed. The current review system favors mono-cultures and winner-takes-it-all scenarios. For these reasons, I think industrial labs will be doing much better. Incentives there are not that perverse.
- mmooss 2y ago
  So do you believe the author of the OP could honestly omit from their article the things you (and many others here) talk about? Could they be naive?
  - nextos 2y ago
    Nah, I think the article has good intentions. And rampant fraud is important to address. But as others said, addressing smaller shenanigans is also crucial to steer things in the right direction.

schmidtleonard 2y ago

Similar story: computational biologist, my presentations involved statistics so people would come to me for help, and it often ended in the disappointing news of a null result. I noticed that it always got published anyway at whichever stage of analysis showed "promise." The day I saw someone P-hack their way to the front page of Nature was the day I decided to quit biology. I still feel that my bio work was far more important than anything I've done since, but over here the work is easier, the wages are much better, and fraud isn't table stakes. Frankly in exchange for those things I'm OK with the work being less important (EDIT: that's not a swipe at software engineering or my niche in it, it's a swipe at a system that is bad at incentives). Oh, and it turns out that software orgs have exactly the same problem, but they know that the solution is to pay for verification work. Science has to move through a few more stages of grief before it accepts this.

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago

> At the time (20+ years ago) it didn't occur to me that anybody would intentionally modify images of gels to promote the results they claimed Fraud I suspect is only tip of the iceberg, worse still is delusion that what is taught is factually correct. A large portion of mainstream knowledge that we call 'science' is incorrect. While fraudulent claims are relatively easy to detect, claims that are backed up by ignorance/delusion are harder to detect and challenge because often there is collective ignorance. Quote 1: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" Quote 2:"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts" Side note: I will not offer to back up my above statements, since these are things that an individual has to learn it on their own, through healthy skepticism, intellectual integrity and inquiry.

owenpalmer 2y ago
> A large portion of mainstream knowledge that we call 'science' is incorrect. How do you know that? Can you prove it scientifically? > claims that are backed up by ignorance/delusion In that case, they are not "backed up" > I will not offer to back up my above statements > an individual has to learn it on their own, through ... inquiry May I "inquire" about your reasoning?
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  owenpalmer, as I stated in my side note I will not be explaining myself, my sincere apologies for this. You see there are some things that cannot be taught, or it cannot be easily taught more so for adults i.e healthy skepticism and questioning of statements/facts that come from authority figures ( example:science/religion etc). A person will have to make his or her own effort. External influences especially debates from the heretics will generally only delay that progress. Now, if you're already open to the possibility that mainstream science could be very wrong, I can possibly nudge you in the correct direction. I have explored certain areas of biology (especially nutrition) but not all, each sub area of biology (or any of the sciences really) is vast, I have to rely on heretics who are 'experts' in their areas of specialization.
  - 2y ago

seanmcdirmid 2y ago

It becomes a survival bias: if people can cheat at a competitive game (or research field) and get away with it, then at the end you'll wind up with only cheaters left (everyone else stops playing).

inglor_cz 2y ago
You could improve the situation by incentivizing people to identify cheaters and prove their cheating. If being a successful cheater-hunter was a good career, the field would become self-policing. This approach opens its own can of worms (you don't want to overdo it and create a paranoid police-state-like structure), but so far, we have way too little self-policing in science, and the first attempts (like Data Colada) are very controversial among their peers.
dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
As they say: the scum rises to the top, true for academia, politics etc, any organization really. Quote: "The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing" My own nuanced take on it: Incompetent people are quick to grab authority and power. On the other hand principled, competent people are reluctant to take on positions of authority and power even when offered. For these people positions of power a)have connotations of a tyrant b) are uninteresting. (i.e technical problems are more interesting) . Also the reluctance of principled people to form coalitions to keep out the cheaters, because they are a divided bunch themselves exacerbates the problem, where as the cheaters often can collude together (temporarily) to achieve their nefarious goals.
- atmavatar 2y ago
  Those you'd want to lead recognize leadership is a responsibility often times marked by personal sacrifice. Those you'd never want to lead mostly regard leadership as a privilege used for personal gain.
  - dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
    > Those you'd want to lead recognize leadership is a responsibility often times marked by personal sacrifice. True. It's not a coincidence that they say: it's very lonely* up there. There are some ways around this, but they are not easy, and perhaps even impossible. (*=ironically and paradoxically,the cruelest dictator is also a very lonely person)

asdf123qweasd 2y ago

At some point, the good scientists leave and the fraudsters start to filter for more fraudsters. If that goes on, its over- the academia has gone. Entirely. It can not grow back. Its just a building with conman in labcoats. My suggestion stands: Give true scientists the ability to hunt fraudsters for budgets. If you hunt and nail down a fraudster, you get his funding for your research.

Balgair 2y ago
I mean, the replication crisis had come and gone, about 5 years now. The fraudsters are running the place and have been for at least the last half decade, full stop.
- searine 2y ago
  That is a ridiculous exaggeration. Yes, like in every walk of life, fraud happens. However, the extreme success of academic science shows that most of it is real, honest, work.
  - lupire 2y ago
    How so? The fraction of academic science that is applied to anything, anywhere, with clearly identifiable impact is both a tiny fraction of academic science, and also often detrimental quality of impact.
    - asdf123qweasd 2y ago
      Thats not true entirely. There is research, with huge impacts and the money leveraging- keeps it brutally honest. Nothing makes it out of a lab and into a fab, without certainty of the method working at least in lab conditions reproduceable. There are many billions, but not that many billions.
      - fluidcruft 2y ago
        > nothing makes it out of a lab and into a fab, without certainty of the method working at least in lab conditions reproducible. The article describes multiple full clinical drug trials both completed (inconclusive==can't prove harm, effect is so small that benefit cannot be excluded) and ongoing that are fundamentally built on the fabricated results which literally do represent many billions of private investment. Ultimately research falsification is a con game, and you seem to have faith in something magical about "money leveraging" that smokes out cons. I do think shit eventually hits the fan in the market since reality affects the market, but it's not because the market is more rigorous than "science". Ultimately, investors are not experts and the are listening to the same people who do "peer review" and didn't notice (or ignored) the fraud in the first place.

pbreit 2y ago

As long as it's all peer reviewed!!

DigitalPaladin 2y ago
I'm assuming /s above. Because the amount of pencil-whipped "peer review" feedback I've received could fit in a shoe box, because many "reviewers" are looking for the CV credit for their role and not so much the actual effort of reviewing. And there's no way to call them out on their laziness except maybe to not submit to their publication again and warn others against it too. And, to defend their lack of review, all they need to say to the editor anyway is: "I didn't see it that way."
- dasudasu 2y ago
  I never understood how peer reviewers are supposed to "validate" a paper and how they’re tacitly thought to be doing so by the general public. Authors make claims based on data reviewers don’t have direct access to, from experiments they obviously can’t supervise the execution. They’re forced to accept the claims at face value. In my experience (and I’ve been on both sides), it’s more about overall quality and impact. Journals don’t want badly written papers on unremarkable topics. It’s closer to being a harsh anonymous editor than a real safeguard of “science™.”
  - pbreit 2y ago
    I would say peer review is guaranteed to have major problems either with researchers writing what their peers will approve and reviewers being afraid to diverge from the party lines.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

> raise so many... emotions in me... and I now believe [faking gels] is a common occurrence On the other hand, shysters always project, and this thread is full of cringe vindications about cheating or faking or whatever. As your "emotions" are probably telling you, that kind of generalization does not feel good, when it is pointed at you, so IMO, you can go and bash your colleagues all you want, but odds are the ones who found results did so legitimately.

smolder 2y ago
Regarding "shysters always project": it rings true to me, but given the topic, I'm primed to wonder how you could show that empirically, and if there's any psychology literature to that effect.

TheMagicHorsey 2y ago

This is why institutions break down in the long run in any civilization. People like you, people of principle are drown out my agents acting exclusively in their own interest without ethics. It happens everywhere. The only solution to this is skin in the game. Without skin in the game the fraudsters fraud, the audience just naively goes along with it, and the institution collapses under the weight of lies.

Balgair 2y ago
The iron laws of bureaucracy are: 1) Nothing else matters but the budget 2) Over the long run, the people invested in the bureaucracy always win out over the people invested in the mission/point Science is just as susceptible to 2) as anything else.
worik 2y ago
> The only solution to this is skin in the game. Another solution is the opposite, no skin in the game Remove cocrete incentives and pay salaries
- TheMagicHorsey 2y ago
  Salaries without skin in the game leads to failure. People just trade for their own benefit within and outside the system.

j-wags 2y ago

I'm mostly out now, but I would love to return to a more accountable academia. Often in these discussions it's hard to say "we need radical changes to publicly funded research and many PIs should be held accountable for dishonest work" without people hearing "I want to get rid of publicly funded research altogether and destroy the careers of a generation of trainees who were in the wrong place at the wrong time". Even in my immediate circles, I know many industry scientists who do scientific work beyond the level required by their company, fight to publish it in journals, mentor junior colleagues in a very similar manner to a PhD advisor, and would in every way make excellent professors. There would be a stampede if these people were offered a return to a more accountable academia. Even with lower pay, longer hours, and department duties, MORE than enough highly qualified people would rush in. A hypothetical transition to this world should be tapered. But even at the limit where academia switched overnight, trainees caught in such a transition could be guaranteed their spots in their program, given direct fellowships to make them independent of their advisor's grants, given the option to switch advisor, and have their graduation requirements relaxed if appropriate. It's easy to hem and haw about the institutional knowledge and ongoing projects that would invariably be lost in such a transition, even if very carefully executed. But we have to consider the ongoing damage being done when, for example, biogen spends thousands of scientist-years and billions of dollars failing to make an alzheimers drug because the work was dishonest to begin with, or when generations of trainees learn that bending the truth is a little more OK each year.

itronitron 2y ago

I used to work with someone up until the point I realized they were so distant from any form of reality that they couldn't distinguish between fact or fiction. Naturally, they are now the head of AI where they work.

wredue 2y ago
Hacker news is completely flooded with “AI learns just like humans do” and “AI models the human brain” despite neither of these things having any concrete evidence at all. Unfortunately it isn’t just bosses being fooled by this. Scores of people push this crap. I am not saying AI has no value. I am saying that these idiots are idiots.
- echoangle 2y ago
  What evidence for „AI models the human brain“ do you want? Isn’t a neural network pretty clearly a simplified model of the working of the human brain? What is there to prove?
  - benlivengood 2y ago
    One clear piece of evidence would be ruling out "AI models the corvid brain" or "AI models the cephalopod brain" which might narrow it toward the human brain. That it's functionally impossible to do either leads me to believe that "it models some form of intelligence" is about the best we can prove.
    - echoangle 2y ago
      I don’t understand the standard of modeling you seem to assume. Modeling a human brain, a cephalopod brain and a corvid brain aren’t even mutually exclusive if your model is abstract enough. When I say „a neural network models a human brain“, I’m talking about the high level concept, not the specific structure of a human brain compared to other brains. You could also say that it models a dogs brain if you wanted to. It’s just the general working principle that is kind of similar. Does that not count as a model to you? Edit: Here’s a simple example: I would say that a simple SIR model „models COVID infection in humans“. But that doesn’t mean it can’t also model Pig Flu in Pigs. It’s a very abstract model so it applies to a lot of situations, just like a neural network basically models the brain of every reasonably advanced animal.

throwaway14356 2y ago

Then hiring the uninteresting gel seems preferable.

RunSet 2y ago

Calls to mind Isaac Asimov's "shotgun curve". https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v056n06_1979-06_Lenny_Silv3r/page/n129/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v056n06_...

rcxdude 2y ago
That story reminds me of this gem: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html

mfld 2y ago

Re: the role of (gel) images as the key aspect of a publication. To me this is very understandable, as they convey the information in the most succinct way and also constitute the main data & evidence. Faking this is so bold that it seemed unlikely. The good news IMO: more recent MolBio methods produce data that can be checked more rigorously than a gel image. A recent example where the evidence in form of DNA sequencing data is contested: https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.01607-23 https://doi.org/10.1128/mbio.01607-23

nordsieck 2y ago

What's amazing to me is that journals don't require researchers to submit their raw data. At least, as far as I know. The only option for someone who wants to double check research is to completely replicate a study, which is quite a bit more expensive than double checking the researcher's work.

frickinLasers 2y ago
Journals are incentivized to publish fantastic results. Organizing raw data in a way that the uninitiated can understand presents serious friction in getting results out the door. The organizations who fund the research are (finally) beginning to require it [0][1], and some journals encourage it, but a massive cultural shift is required and there will be growing pains. You could also try emailing the corresponding authors. Any good-faith scientist should be happy to share what they have, assuming it's well organized/legible. [0] https://new.nsf.gov/public-access https://new.nsf.gov/public-access [1] https://sharing.nih.gov/ https://sharing.nih.gov/
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  > The organizations who fund the research are (finally) beginning to require it [0][1], and some journals encourage it Feels like wrong way round - organisations paying for journals should be demanding it as proof?
insane_dreamer 2y ago
Replicating the results from someone's original data is difficult and time consuming, and other researchers aren't getting paid to do that (they're getting paid to do new research). And of course the (unpaid) reviewers don't have time either.
gvurrdon 2y ago
It's becoming more common for journals to have policies which require that raw data be made available. Here's some background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAIR_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAIR_data One of the purposes of a site on which I work (https://fairsharing.org https://fairsharing.org) is to assist researchers in finding places where they might upload their data (usually to comply with publishers' requirements).

busyant 2y ago

> don't really tell you very much ??? I think this statement is either meaningless or incorrect. At the very least your conclusion is context dependent. That being said, I ran gels back in the stone ages when you didn't just buy a stack of pre-made gels that slotted into a tank. I had to clean my glass plates, make the polyacrylamide solution, clamp the plates together with office binder clips and make sure that the rubber gasket was water tight. So many times, the gasket seal was poor and my polyacrylamide leaked all over the bench top. I hated running them. But when they worked, they were remarkably informative.

enugu 2y ago

Many solutions involving posting data in repositories or audits are being discussed in the comments. But given that many people are saying that they noticed and quit academia, how about also creating a more direct 'whistleblower' type of system, where complaints (with detailed descriptions of the fraud or a general view on what one sees in terms of loose practices) goes to some research monitoring team which can then come in and verify the problems.

cwalv 2y ago
> how about also creating a more direct 'whistleblower' type of system There needs to first be a system of checks and balances for this to work. The people at the top already know and condone the behavior; who are the whistleblowers reporting to? "We represent the top scientists in our field; these are a group of grad students. Who are you going to believe?" And of course they can easily shut anyone down with two words: "science denier"

bafe 2y ago

Count me in the club of failed scientists. In my case it was the geosciences, I would spend hours trying to make all my analysis reproducible and statistically sound while many colleagues just published preliminary simulation results obtaining much more attention and even academic jobs. On the flip side, the time spent improving my data processing workflows led to good engineering jobs so the time wasn't entirely wasted

BobbyTables2 2y ago

I feel this way about every flashy startup with billion dollar valuations. It seems amazing that they are pulling off what seems impossible. Years later, we learn they really aren’t. They unjustifiably made a name for themselves by burning VC money instead of running a successful business.

kjkjadksj 2y ago

Gels tell you quite a lot, its what question you are asking that is more relevant to the results being useful over the technique. Of course people lie and cheat in science. Wet lab and dry lab. So many dry lab papers for example are out there where code are supposedly available “by request” and we take the figures on faith.