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It seems surprisingly hard to counter scientific fraud via a system change. The incentives are messed up all the way around. If the older author is your adviso
by creer 2y ago
It seems surprisingly hard to counter scientific fraud via a system change. The incentives are messed up all the way around.
If the older author is your advisor and you feel one of their juniors is cutting corners or the elder is cutting corners, you better think twice about what move will help your career. If confirming a recent result counts toward tenure, then presto you have an incentive for fraudulent replication (what's the chance it's incorrect anyway? The original author is a big shot.) Going against the previous acclaimed result takes guts especially in a small field where it might kill your career if YOU got it wrong somehow - So you need to have much stronger results than the original research, and good luck with that. We might say "this is perfect work for aspiring student researchers, and done all the time" - to reimplement some legendary science experiment - but no, not when it's a leading edge poorly understood experiment, and not when that same grad student is already running to try and produce original research themselves.
The big funders might dedicate money to replicated research that everybody is enthusiastic about (before everyone relies on it). But some research takes years to run. Other research is at the edge of what's possible. Other research is led by a big shot nobody dares to take on. Etc etc. So where is the incentive then? The incentive might be to take the money, fully intending to return an inconclusive result.
Some research is taken on now. But only AFTER it's relied on by lots of people. Or much later when better ideas had the time to emerge on how to test the idea more cleverly i.e. cheaper and faster. And that's not great because costly in all the wasted effort by others, based on a fraudulent result. And all the mindshare the bad result now has.
This is messed up.