7 ms·

A Post Mortem on the Gino Case

194 points by MrBuddyCasino 2y ago

teddyh 2y ago
The_Secret_Ingredient_Is_Crime.gif
trilbyglens 2y ago
And similarly, corruption is a viable system of government.For a while...
- username332211 2y ago
  It's not even that bad of a system. The Roman Republic conquered the civilized world with a political system based on formalized clientelism. And anyone who's seen "honest" public procurement will see the benefit to a system where the governor can call his friend and have a railway built by the end of the year.
jmward01 2y ago
There is always a push to do original research. Maybe a partial solution here is that it is encouraged, even required, to take up a major and a minor specialty. The major one you do original research and the minor one you work to reproduce existing research. Building that in from the start would go a long way of creating a culture of trust but verify in these fields.
- pjdesno 2y ago
  Seems like wishful thinking, much like saying engineers at Amazon can do whatever they want despite what Bezos says. Yes, they can, but they'd get fired. And yes, incentives could be changed, but they won't, because the person running the organization doesn't want to. Research funding and research institutions are existing things, that operate in specific ways. One can lobby to change this, but unless you want to go back to the "gentleman scientist" model of the 1700s and 1800s, and a scientific establishment about 1% the size of the one today, you can't just buck the system.
- vikramkr 2y ago
  Not sure how it is in all fields but at least in the molecular bio world there's a lot more replication than meets the eye. Especially methods, it's just that there won't be a replication paper, it'll be in the methods/supplementary info of the new research paper ("we used xyz techniques as described in researcher et al"). Null publishing bias still exists and obviously it's not remotely a perfect system. However, it's not some sort of completely broken system where every paper is either fraud or replication, and interventions that start from that sort of an assumption (people are very aware of the need to trust but verify) are in my opinion unlikely to be useful. If the world is at a 60/100, you need to focus on things that get you from 60 to 80, not from 0 to 20
NanoYohaneTSU 2y ago
Fraud is basically the only career path in our current fake economy. Everyone is committing fraud on some form or another. Your company, you personally, your government, etc.
- asimpletune 2y ago
  As sensationalist as this sounds I agree. I think a major turning point was when tech became a big business by charging nothing. 1. It’s impossible to compete with free so business that do add real value are at a disadvantage 2. A future where tech adoption slowly was accepted and people eased into being comfortable actually paying for things the value never happened and now feels impossible, as free is expected. 3. It’s created bad incentives. Like keeping people on their devices as much as possible and only show them things that enrage them or confirm their prejudices. 4. None of it is really free because someone pays for it all and those costs are born by society anyways, while having less choice. 5. I think over time this ethos has become mainstream and it’s essentially a fraud mindset. Nothing matters as long as the line goes up. (This process and the end results are surprisingly similar to academic fraud. “Everything is free” is the same thing as inventing whatever results people want to hear. Both will ultimately lead to the same, unsustainable end result, as people will no longer trust research because everything is fake.)
- throwawaysleep 2y ago
  World leaders are casually scamming people for millions and nobody is batting an eye. Society has at large approved of fraud. I’m not being a lone holdout.
  - ashoeafoot 2y ago
    No it has not. It depends on sience to postpone its demise. Fraud may be internationally acceptable, but its still worse than worthless in the west.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      > Fraud may be internationally acceptable, but its still worse than worthless in the west. ? I thought OP was referring to things like the presidential cryptocurrency, the ultimate endorsement of pump-and-dump fraud.
dash2 2y ago
As ever I think the bigger problem is grey areas, fooling oneself, etc rather than outright fraud. If you really are self-interested and greedy, you’ll probably choose another career than academia.
- ttoinou 2y ago
  * You could be self interested & greedy and like to see yourself as a famous researcher * Some researchers make good money * You could start honest, then realize cheating is the only good way forward given the incentives
- gsf_emergency_2 2y ago
  Regarding 'cad-bloggers from Columbia: Woit does do a bit of grey area coverage. Likewise, his academic pubs are more interesting to me, personally! His reputation, however, is mixed at best. A real hero! Gelman: maybe he's trying to subdue the neuroticism*. I look forward to more compassionate, less overtly "curiosity"-driven grey-area coverage (not to mention stats papers) from him! Here is recent one, sadly also about psychologists (would be more interesting to do it to card carrying statisticians) http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/healing3.pdf http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/healing3... *Not many people describe themselves as an exponent of radical self-honesty since radicality isn't a palatable, much less enjoyable, thing. It takes a real saint (or logician) not to reflexively flinch from the imagined tsunami of incoming pity. Grey areas-- you can safely explore
  - senderista 2y ago
    Does Woit actually publish anything in well-regarded journals? My impression was that he wasn't really an active researcher at all.
    - gsf_emergency_2 2y ago
      Sorry, was trying to be generous with "mixed rep at best". He is reasonably active (on arxiv,say, which is a red flag I suppose). Just that his blog gets far more attention. I would say that anybody in theory more active than Woit would immediately arouse my suspicion :)
DeathArrow 2y ago
I clicked on the article hoping it's about economic fraud. /s Alas, fraud was always a viable path. The phrase "fake it till you make it" wasn't coined without reason.
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  I always understood and used that idiom a little differently. I think of it as more about appearances vs internals —- e.g. imposter syndrome and the time it takes to develop skills fully. Nobody knows what they are doing on their first day a new job, but they have the title already.
qwe----3 2y ago
Columbia is a bad school (barnard college being even worse).
- kittikitti 2y ago
  This article is ironic given the expulsion of many students who expressed support for Palestine. The article goes into why a student's dissertation needed another defense meanwhile they are arresting and banning students en masse.
rich_sasha 2y ago
Changing some details form obvious reasons: a friend was a postdoc in biology at a top tier UK university. Her boss was a hotshot professor, tons of revolutionary publications under his belt. Her first job when he hired her was to hammer into shape a paper one of his PhD students was writing. Normal stuff, right? Adding literature, polishing off rough edges etc. Except the PhD student seemed really uneasy about the paper, kept talking about issues with the data that needed fixing. At face value, all was great - nice small p-values, great effect sizes etc. Eventually it transpired the PhD student was doctoring the data (these were the issues), was deeply uncomfortable with it, but also understood this is what my friend will be helping her with. At this point my friend goes to the professor to inform him, nicely but firmly, of academic fraud. The prof comes down on my friend like a ton of bricks: who do you think you are, what do you know, I am the hotshot superstar and you are a no-name. All is well with the research and if you press on with the ridiculous accusations, she will be ruined in academia. Well, my friend is a feisty one. She complained of bullying to the university, as an employment thing. The university was desperate not to touch it and in fact encouraged her to lie low, but she wouldn't. The whole thing kept escalating in really nasty ways, but eventually wound its way to an employment tribunal. Notably, at this point this isn't even about the academic misconduct, it's about the professor bullying his employee. At the eleventh hour, the prof quits his job and goes to another, also top tier university. Since he is no longer my friend's boss, the case is dropped - no boss, no case. Still, however, no academic misconduct case! My friend, against all advice, wrote a letter to the new university, informing them verbatim of her findings. No response, to this day. The guy is still a top honcho there. Whereas my friend finished her postdoc, didn't get another academic position and got an industry job, where frankly, she seems happier.
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  The very last line of your story is why the “Market for Lemons” paper (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons) remains so powerful. If fraudsters cannot be found or punished, it is logical to assume that everyone in the field is a fraud.
  - 2y ago
fulafel 2y ago
See also: https://www.science.org/content/article/after-honesty-researcher-s-retractions-colleagues-expand-scrutiny-her-work https://www.science.org/content/article/after-honesty-resear... https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24107889/francesca-gino-lawsuit-harvard-dishonesty-researcher-academic-fraud https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24107889/francesca-gino-l... "In response, Gino — who has maintained her innocence — sued Harvard and the bloggers who first published the allegations, claiming she’d been defamed. "
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  Thankfully it appears the judge tossed out her lawsuit.
irrational 2y ago
> The incentives to investigate and call out fraud are non-existent. In fact, the opposite is true: If you find something fishy in a paper, your mentor, colleagues, and friends will most likely suggest that you keep quiet and move on (or as I have learned the hard way, they might even try to bully you into silence). I can’t help but wonder if these mentors are also guilty of fabricating data and don’t want to cause issues that might lead to people looking at their own work more closely.
- odyssey7 2y ago
  Interpersonal connections can matter more than results for one’s career. Spotting an influencer’s error risks closing important doors.
  - OfCounsel 2y ago
    Looking too closely has zero upside and plenty of downside. If you’re wrong and the result was legitimate, you’ve developed a reputation as a pain in the ass. If you’re right, the researcher will say it was an honest mistake (maybe a clerical error) to absolve themselves modulo retraction, which happens all the time. Nothing of significance comes of it, but an “influencer” may well have other, above board, programs of research on which you could have collaborated and made a real name for yourselves.
    - matthewdgreen 2y ago
      I'm a researcher and I'm heavily dependent on inputs from my students. If one of them is falsifying data, that's my entire career gone. I know the usual line is "no big deal, another University will just hire the PI" but I don't believe that for a second. Even if it somehow did turn out to be true, I'm going to uproot my family and go through hell because of something I could now avoid? There are crazy people in the world. But if someone comes to me and says "here is a thing that could end, or at least seriously screw up your career" I'm going to take them very, very seriously. Even if it is incredibly horrifying to contemplate.
    - MarcoZavala 2y ago
StefanBatory 2y ago
Example on a smaller scale - I remember how at uni people who did none of the work could end up with better grades. I remember toiling weeks on a hard "group" project alone, and then my groupmates who contributed nothing got better grades - because from project we all got the same one, and from exams I got worse ones as I had no time to study well.
BoredPositron 2y ago
Always has been.
scotty79 2y ago
Wasn't science supposed to be a set of tools for avoiding lying to yourself about reality, on individual level and as a community? What's missing from the toolbox?
- mettamage 2y ago
  Science still works if the newly found knowledge can somehow be transformed into technology. Technology is perhaps the strongest form of reproducibility there is. This is true for even social science as it will make its way into novel marketing approaches that clearly generate more revenue
  - scotty79 2y ago
    Same could be said about pre-scientific ideas. It's a bit of a copout to judge science by such a low bar.
    - o11c 2y ago
      I'm not sure "pre-scientific" is a meaningful distinction. Maybe "pre-scientific-method"? Certainly one major problem is: although we live after the scientific method was developed, things can still be done without actually following its principles.
- lazide 2y ago
  The Scientific method exists because of fraud, confusion, and other issues. Like any set of tools, it has to be actually applied. There is a long and storied history of scientific advances and discoveries being fraudulent, because there are many incentives for fraud - or just plain delusion. Delulu is the solulu has always been tempting. There is nothing missing from the toolbox here. It just has to be applied.
- karmakurtisaani 2y ago
  Funding, probably.
- vacuity 2y ago
d--b 2y ago
Not only academic. Look at the 2008 crisis. Only one banker went to jail. Look at Binance’s Zhao. Look at - ahem - Trump.
- bboreham 2y ago
  Here’s six jailed bankers named in two stories: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68595204 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68595204 https://www.cityam.com/former-barclays-trader-jay-merchant-jailed-libor-rigging/ https://www.cityam.com/former-barclays-trader-jay-merchant-j...
  - d--b 2y ago
    This is related to the libor rigging case, not the 2008 financial crisis. Thankfully in some cases, people do actually go to jail.
hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
Maybe for the top 1 or 10% folks out there who are good enough at fraud to actually reliably get away with it. For the rest of us, I don't think this is true.
- xondono 2y ago
  That’s the saddest part, you’d think that, but the fraud here (and other similar cases) is so blatant it’s painful. Modern academia has terrible incentives. The easy path to success comes from not rocking the boat, even the guys at Data colada (who did the leg work to prove the case) have made a lot of enemies in the field. I’m willing to bet there’s a large amount of less significant fraud that gets better defended, it’s only the people who are so successful they let they guard down that get caught in this silliness.
scotty79 2y ago
Maybe science should be anonymous? Somehow? Or maybe we are gonna be saved by more and more of science getting depersonalized by the virtue of being created by AI?
- evanb 2y ago
  Good luck making your tenure case!
  - scotty79 2y ago
    Should tenure even be a thing?
prof-dr-ir 2y ago
The New Yorker article from 2023 about this saga is worth a read: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-dishonesty-was-their-work-a-lie https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-d... Technical details of the fraud can be found in four famous-ish blog posts of the Data Colada group, also from 2023, beginning with: https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/109
scotty79 2y ago
Maybe we should modernize the publishing system for information age. So papers are no longer published in a sense of permanent fixed event but rather tentatively put up online, from where they can be taken down at any point autonomusly by third parties, if they can't be replicated, without any say of the original "publisher". Realying on potentially fraudulent originator that put up the thing to take it down is apparently too much.
Yoric 2y ago
Friend of mine was working in cryptography. His PhD topic was about proving that a cryptographic scheme was secure (for some definition). It took him two months to break the scheme. Sadly, said scheme was key to the funding of his PhD advisor, so the advisor tried to prevent him from publishing findings. Things end mostly well, with my friend publishing, then restarting his PhD with a different advisor, then leaving academia entirely.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  So it didn't end well. Your friend had no career in academia because he criticized his master's work
  - Yoric 2y ago
    He seems happy with his current work, so I'd say it ends well for him. Academia did lose one (more) brilliant researcher, though, so it doesn't end well for academia.
cainxinth 2y ago
Humans are much, much better at lying than detecting lies. Hence, fraud is a universal problem.
xtiansimon 2y ago
Not in academia— I’m curious but not invested. > “I formed the opinion that I shouldn’t use this paper as a building block in my research. […] However, my advisor had a different view…” > “…scientific criticism of a published paper had no place in a dissertation…” Are these dissertation catechism? Or clash of personalities?
npvrite 2y ago
I think we all realize this is true since a current cult leader is president. With three letters scripting his act. Fraud.
pjdesno 2y ago
Perhaps relevant to a lot of HN readers - the culture of conference publishing in much of CS (I'm in computer systems myself) seems to result in significantly different dynamics. Journal papers are single-blind, i.e. the reviewers know the names of the authors and can make decisions based on reputation, so if you publish great (e.g. faked) results once, it becomes progressively easier to do it again. Reviewing for conference papers is typically double-blind - we don't know the identity of the authors, and although we can try to guess, a couple of studies show we're wrong most of the time. Most papers (65-85% at good conferences) get rejected, so it's easy to flush something that looks fishy. (then again, it's hard to tell the difference between someone playing games with their numbers and someone who just has the typical crappy CS systems understanding of statistics) The addition of artifact evaluation to a lot of conferences provides another avenue to flush out faked results, too. However conference reviewing is vulnerable to reviewing fraud, since reviewers and authors typically come from the same relatively small community - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459978, or just google for the words "computer science reviewing cabal". Reviewing fraud might not be quite as destructive in the long term, as the papers that get published through such fraud are probably more crappy than faked, and will hopefully not get cited. In addition, when reviewing fraud is uncovered it's much more of an open-and-shut case - a single person can fake data and make it look a lot like good data, but review fraud requires communication between people who are explicitly barred from communicating on that topic. A lot of it depends on the community, and the size of the community. When you have 1000+ reviewers for a conference things will always get out of hand - I know of someone who got his cat registered as a reviewer for a particular SIG conference that he hated, just to make a point. I assume one could get a lot of fraudulent research published in that particular conference.
- raphman 2y ago
  Sometimes, even a whole conference gets compromised, see e.g. ICIMTECH '21 [1]: "NOTICE OF RETRACTION: While investigating potential publication-related misconduct in connection with the ICIMTech 2021 Conference Proceedings, serious concerns were raised that cast doubt on the integrity of the peer-review process and all papers published in the Proceedings of this Conference. The integrity of the entire Conference has been called into question. As a result, of its investigation, ACM has decided to retract the Entire Conference Proceedings and all related papers from the ACM Digital Library. None of the papers from this Proceeding should be cited in the literature because of the questionable integrity of the peer review process for this Conference." [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3465631 https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3465631
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
I'm so glad that Zoe Ziani essentially has the last word on this subject. For what it's worth, while I'm sure that her advisors are known within that research community, I believe they deserve to be named and shamed. Their behavior, IMO, is almost as bad as the original fraud to begin with. It was classic "circling the wagons" bullying, and their scientific reputations absolutely deserve the hit that their atrocious behavior warrants. I want to emphasize that this isn't about "retribution" or getting back at these people, it's about publicizing that their behavior was wrong, the antithesis of what scientific inquiry is about, and was fundamentally rooted in a cowardice that put professional standing on a higher pedestal than scientific integrity. Actions have consequences, and these advisors should face consequences for their abhorrent actions.
kittikitti 2y ago
"enuf" I don't think this is incorrect but it's definitely a grey area to spell it this way. It would be ironic to be downvoted for pointing it out based on the intent of the article.
bonzini 2y ago
Better link (the actual post mortem): https://www.theorgplumber.com/posts/statement/ https://www.theorgplumber.com/posts/statement/
mirawelner 2y ago
I have always wondered if the threshold for 'number of papers published' to get a professorship is higher than the number of high quality papers that can reasonably published in that amount of time. So, people cut corners and publish bad papers or commit outright fraud. Because they do that, this keeps the required number of publications unreasonably high.
- firefax 2y ago
  Peter Higgs would agree: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-... >Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today's academic system because he would not be considered "productive" enough. >The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964. >He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964." >Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.
- pjc50 2y ago
  Yes. The bureaucratic systems put into place to increase "quality" and "output" are incoherent, so they create even more incentives for fraud. It's paper Stakhanovism.
rendall 2y ago
Aviation once had a culture of strict deference to senior pilots, leading to fatal mistakes when juniors hesitated to question decisions. This changed with Crew Resource Management (CRM), which institutionalized open communication and made questioning a normal part of operations. Perhaps academia could benefit from a similar culture shift that actively invites scrutiny to improve science overall? The article implies a deference and bullying problem in research, where junior scholars hesitate to challenge authority, even when they notice flaws. Fraud wouldn't be the direct focus of such a shift, but in an environment where questioning is encouraged, it would naturally be harder to commit, with fewer places for bad actors to hide.
jancsika 2y ago
> Instead, they repeatedly suggested that a scientific criticism of a published paper had no place in a dissertation Why not a) finish the dissertation as soon as humanly possible, and b) now that you're bona fide, publish a separate paper disputing the famous paper which your dissertation didn't rely on? Instead, it sounds like the student and committee advisors were a bad fit and spent most the time in a pissing contest.
- xondono 2y ago
  > Why not a) finish the dissertation as soon as humanly possible, and b) now that you're bona fide, publish a separate paper disputing the famous paper which your dissertation didn't rely on? The last thing you want to do before pointing out that the emperor has no clothes is get a job at the palace.
  - jancsika 2y ago
    (Re)-Read their story[1]-- they were fighting to publish the refutation as the first chapter of their dissertation. They wanted to publish no matter what. Given that, choose your sword: 1. Grad Sword that must be approved by a dissertation committee 2. Master (well, PhD) Sword where you choose your own adventure If you reply #1 then I'm logged in to a fake HN site. 1: https://www.theorgplumber.com/posts/statement/ https://www.theorgplumber.com/posts/statement/
- LittleTimothy 2y ago
  That's not really possible. If you're writing a dissertation and find that some of the important foundational work you're building upon is wrong you can't just ignore it. If it's wrong, you need to say it's wrong in order to justify why you've chosen not to consider it in your dissertation. If you can't claim it's wrong, then you have to use it in your dissertation otherwise you're going to leave yourself open to criticsm that your dissertation ignores important prior work in the field. So the only choice you have left is to write your dissertation built upon work that you know is trash, and then if you do later choose to publish criticism of that work you're essentially trashing your own dissertation. And of course, none of that matters, because you're still going to face professional consequences when you choose to write the separate paper disputing the famous paper.
cvwright 2y ago
There’s a lot that sucks about publishing in security and privacy. But wow this article makes me super grateful that we are still allowed to write attack papers and critique famous works.
econ 2y ago
Maybe do a series of awards for greatest academic fraud mimicking the Nobel prize. Having a jury dig thought the submissions and scoring everything should be hilarious.
foobarbecue 2y ago
unrelicable! I guess it won't become a religious artifact

194 points by MrBuddyCasino 2y ago

teddyh 2y ago

The_Secret_Ingredient_Is_Crime.gif

trilbyglens 2y ago

And similarly, corruption is a viable system of government.For a while...

username332211 2y ago
It's not even that bad of a system. The Roman Republic conquered the civilized world with a political system based on formalized clientelism. And anyone who's seen "honest" public procurement will see the benefit to a system where the governor can call his friend and have a railway built by the end of the year.

jmward01 2y ago

There is always a push to do original research. Maybe a partial solution here is that it is encouraged, even required, to take up a major and a minor specialty. The major one you do original research and the minor one you work to reproduce existing research. Building that in from the start would go a long way of creating a culture of trust but verify in these fields.

pjdesno 2y ago
Seems like wishful thinking, much like saying engineers at Amazon can do whatever they want despite what Bezos says. Yes, they can, but they'd get fired. And yes, incentives could be changed, but they won't, because the person running the organization doesn't want to. Research funding and research institutions are existing things, that operate in specific ways. One can lobby to change this, but unless you want to go back to the "gentleman scientist" model of the 1700s and 1800s, and a scientific establishment about 1% the size of the one today, you can't just buck the system.
vikramkr 2y ago
Not sure how it is in all fields but at least in the molecular bio world there's a lot more replication than meets the eye. Especially methods, it's just that there won't be a replication paper, it'll be in the methods/supplementary info of the new research paper ("we used xyz techniques as described in researcher et al"). Null publishing bias still exists and obviously it's not remotely a perfect system. However, it's not some sort of completely broken system where every paper is either fraud or replication, and interventions that start from that sort of an assumption (people are very aware of the need to trust but verify) are in my opinion unlikely to be useful. If the world is at a 60/100, you need to focus on things that get you from 60 to 80, not from 0 to 20

NanoYohaneTSU 2y ago

Fraud is basically the only career path in our current fake economy. Everyone is committing fraud on some form or another. Your company, you personally, your government, etc.

asimpletune 2y ago
As sensationalist as this sounds I agree. I think a major turning point was when tech became a big business by charging nothing. 1. It’s impossible to compete with free so business that do add real value are at a disadvantage 2. A future where tech adoption slowly was accepted and people eased into being comfortable actually paying for things the value never happened and now feels impossible, as free is expected. 3. It’s created bad incentives. Like keeping people on their devices as much as possible and only show them things that enrage them or confirm their prejudices. 4. None of it is really free because someone pays for it all and those costs are born by society anyways, while having less choice. 5. I think over time this ethos has become mainstream and it’s essentially a fraud mindset. Nothing matters as long as the line goes up. (This process and the end results are surprisingly similar to academic fraud. “Everything is free” is the same thing as inventing whatever results people want to hear. Both will ultimately lead to the same, unsustainable end result, as people will no longer trust research because everything is fake.)
throwawaysleep 2y ago
World leaders are casually scamming people for millions and nobody is batting an eye. Society has at large approved of fraud. I’m not being a lone holdout.
- ashoeafoot 2y ago
  No it has not. It depends on sience to postpone its demise. Fraud may be internationally acceptable, but its still worse than worthless in the west.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    > Fraud may be internationally acceptable, but its still worse than worthless in the west. ? I thought OP was referring to things like the presidential cryptocurrency, the ultimate endorsement of pump-and-dump fraud.

dash2 2y ago

As ever I think the bigger problem is grey areas, fooling oneself, etc rather than outright fraud. If you really are self-interested and greedy, you’ll probably choose another career than academia.

ttoinou 2y ago
* You could be self interested & greedy and like to see yourself as a famous researcher * Some researchers make good money * You could start honest, then realize cheating is the only good way forward given the incentives
gsf_emergency_2 2y ago
Regarding 'cad-bloggers from Columbia: Woit does do a bit of grey area coverage. Likewise, his academic pubs are more interesting to me, personally! His reputation, however, is mixed at best. A real hero! Gelman: maybe he's trying to subdue the neuroticism*. I look forward to more compassionate, less overtly "curiosity"-driven grey-area coverage (not to mention stats papers) from him! Here is recent one, sadly also about psychologists (would be more interesting to do it to card carrying statisticians) http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/healing3.pdf http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/healing3... *Not many people describe themselves as an exponent of radical self-honesty since radicality isn't a palatable, much less enjoyable, thing. It takes a real saint (or logician) not to reflexively flinch from the imagined tsunami of incoming pity. Grey areas-- you can safely explore
- senderista 2y ago
  Does Woit actually publish anything in well-regarded journals? My impression was that he wasn't really an active researcher at all.
  - gsf_emergency_2 2y ago
    Sorry, was trying to be generous with "mixed rep at best". He is reasonably active (on arxiv,say, which is a red flag I suppose). Just that his blog gets far more attention. I would say that anybody in theory more active than Woit would immediately arouse my suspicion :)

DeathArrow 2y ago

I clicked on the article hoping it's about economic fraud. /s Alas, fraud was always a viable path. The phrase "fake it till you make it" wasn't coined without reason.

shermantanktop 2y ago
I always understood and used that idiom a little differently. I think of it as more about appearances vs internals —- e.g. imposter syndrome and the time it takes to develop skills fully. Nobody knows what they are doing on their first day a new job, but they have the title already.

qwe----3 2y ago

Columbia is a bad school (barnard college being even worse).

kittikitti 2y ago
This article is ironic given the expulsion of many students who expressed support for Palestine. The article goes into why a student's dissertation needed another defense meanwhile they are arresting and banning students en masse.

rich_sasha 2y ago

Changing some details form obvious reasons: a friend was a postdoc in biology at a top tier UK university. Her boss was a hotshot professor, tons of revolutionary publications under his belt. Her first job when he hired her was to hammer into shape a paper one of his PhD students was writing. Normal stuff, right? Adding literature, polishing off rough edges etc. Except the PhD student seemed really uneasy about the paper, kept talking about issues with the data that needed fixing. At face value, all was great - nice small p-values, great effect sizes etc. Eventually it transpired the PhD student was doctoring the data (these were the issues), was deeply uncomfortable with it, but also understood this is what my friend will be helping her with. At this point my friend goes to the professor to inform him, nicely but firmly, of academic fraud. The prof comes down on my friend like a ton of bricks: who do you think you are, what do you know, I am the hotshot superstar and you are a no-name. All is well with the research and if you press on with the ridiculous accusations, she will be ruined in academia. Well, my friend is a feisty one. She complained of bullying to the university, as an employment thing. The university was desperate not to touch it and in fact encouraged her to lie low, but she wouldn't. The whole thing kept escalating in really nasty ways, but eventually wound its way to an employment tribunal. Notably, at this point this isn't even about the academic misconduct, it's about the professor bullying his employee. At the eleventh hour, the prof quits his job and goes to another, also top tier university. Since he is no longer my friend's boss, the case is dropped - no boss, no case. Still, however, no academic misconduct case! My friend, against all advice, wrote a letter to the new university, informing them verbatim of her findings. No response, to this day. The guy is still a top honcho there. Whereas my friend finished her postdoc, didn't get another academic position and got an industry job, where frankly, she seems happier.

shermantanktop 2y ago
The very last line of your story is why the “Market for Lemons” paper (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons) remains so powerful. If fraudsters cannot be found or punished, it is logical to assume that everyone in the field is a fraud.
- 2y ago

fulafel 2y ago

See also: https://www.science.org/content/article/after-honesty-researcher-s-retractions-colleagues-expand-scrutiny-her-work https://www.science.org/content/article/after-honesty-resear... https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24107889/francesca-gino-lawsuit-harvard-dishonesty-researcher-academic-fraud https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24107889/francesca-gino-l... "In response, Gino — who has maintained her innocence — sued Harvard and the bloggers who first published the allegations, claiming she’d been defamed. "

amanaplanacanal 2y ago
Thankfully it appears the judge tossed out her lawsuit.

irrational 2y ago

> The incentives to investigate and call out fraud are non-existent. In fact, the opposite is true: If you find something fishy in a paper, your mentor, colleagues, and friends will most likely suggest that you keep quiet and move on (or as I have learned the hard way, they might even try to bully you into silence). I can’t help but wonder if these mentors are also guilty of fabricating data and don’t want to cause issues that might lead to people looking at their own work more closely.

odyssey7 2y ago
Interpersonal connections can matter more than results for one’s career. Spotting an influencer’s error risks closing important doors.
- OfCounsel 2y ago
  Looking too closely has zero upside and plenty of downside. If you’re wrong and the result was legitimate, you’ve developed a reputation as a pain in the ass. If you’re right, the researcher will say it was an honest mistake (maybe a clerical error) to absolve themselves modulo retraction, which happens all the time. Nothing of significance comes of it, but an “influencer” may well have other, above board, programs of research on which you could have collaborated and made a real name for yourselves.
  - matthewdgreen 2y ago
    I'm a researcher and I'm heavily dependent on inputs from my students. If one of them is falsifying data, that's my entire career gone. I know the usual line is "no big deal, another University will just hire the PI" but I don't believe that for a second. Even if it somehow did turn out to be true, I'm going to uproot my family and go through hell because of something I could now avoid? There are crazy people in the world. But if someone comes to me and says "here is a thing that could end, or at least seriously screw up your career" I'm going to take them very, very seriously. Even if it is incredibly horrifying to contemplate.
  - MarcoZavala 2y ago

StefanBatory 2y ago

Example on a smaller scale - I remember how at uni people who did none of the work could end up with better grades. I remember toiling weeks on a hard "group" project alone, and then my groupmates who contributed nothing got better grades - because from project we all got the same one, and from exams I got worse ones as I had no time to study well.

BoredPositron 2y ago

Always has been.

scotty79 2y ago

Wasn't science supposed to be a set of tools for avoiding lying to yourself about reality, on individual level and as a community? What's missing from the toolbox?

mettamage 2y ago
Science still works if the newly found knowledge can somehow be transformed into technology. Technology is perhaps the strongest form of reproducibility there is. This is true for even social science as it will make its way into novel marketing approaches that clearly generate more revenue
- scotty79 2y ago
  Same could be said about pre-scientific ideas. It's a bit of a copout to judge science by such a low bar.
  - o11c 2y ago
    I'm not sure "pre-scientific" is a meaningful distinction. Maybe "pre-scientific-method"? Certainly one major problem is: although we live after the scientific method was developed, things can still be done without actually following its principles.
lazide 2y ago
The Scientific method exists because of fraud, confusion, and other issues. Like any set of tools, it has to be actually applied. There is a long and storied history of scientific advances and discoveries being fraudulent, because there are many incentives for fraud - or just plain delusion. Delulu is the solulu has always been tempting. There is nothing missing from the toolbox here. It just has to be applied.
karmakurtisaani 2y ago
Funding, probably.
vacuity 2y ago

d--b 2y ago

Not only academic. Look at the 2008 crisis. Only one banker went to jail. Look at Binance’s Zhao. Look at - ahem - Trump.

bboreham 2y ago
Here’s six jailed bankers named in two stories: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68595204 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68595204 https://www.cityam.com/former-barclays-trader-jay-merchant-jailed-libor-rigging/ https://www.cityam.com/former-barclays-trader-jay-merchant-j...
- d--b 2y ago
  This is related to the libor rigging case, not the 2008 financial crisis. Thankfully in some cases, people do actually go to jail.

hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago

Maybe for the top 1 or 10% folks out there who are good enough at fraud to actually reliably get away with it. For the rest of us, I don't think this is true.

xondono 2y ago
That’s the saddest part, you’d think that, but the fraud here (and other similar cases) is so blatant it’s painful. Modern academia has terrible incentives. The easy path to success comes from not rocking the boat, even the guys at Data colada (who did the leg work to prove the case) have made a lot of enemies in the field. I’m willing to bet there’s a large amount of less significant fraud that gets better defended, it’s only the people who are so successful they let they guard down that get caught in this silliness.

scotty79 2y ago

Maybe science should be anonymous? Somehow? Or maybe we are gonna be saved by more and more of science getting depersonalized by the virtue of being created by AI?

evanb 2y ago
Good luck making your tenure case!
- scotty79 2y ago
  Should tenure even be a thing?

prof-dr-ir 2y ago

The New Yorker article from 2023 about this saga is worth a read: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-dishonesty-was-their-work-a-lie https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-d... Technical details of the fraud can be found in four famous-ish blog posts of the Data Colada group, also from 2023, beginning with: https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/109

scotty79 2y ago

Maybe we should modernize the publishing system for information age. So papers are no longer published in a sense of permanent fixed event but rather tentatively put up online, from where they can be taken down at any point autonomusly by third parties, if they can't be replicated, without any say of the original "publisher". Realying on potentially fraudulent originator that put up the thing to take it down is apparently too much.

Yoric 2y ago

Friend of mine was working in cryptography. His PhD topic was about proving that a cryptographic scheme was secure (for some definition). It took him two months to break the scheme. Sadly, said scheme was key to the funding of his PhD advisor, so the advisor tried to prevent him from publishing findings. Things end mostly well, with my friend publishing, then restarting his PhD with a different advisor, then leaving academia entirely.

aprilthird2021 2y ago
So it didn't end well. Your friend had no career in academia because he criticized his master's work
- Yoric 2y ago
  He seems happy with his current work, so I'd say it ends well for him. Academia did lose one (more) brilliant researcher, though, so it doesn't end well for academia.

cainxinth 2y ago

Humans are much, much better at lying than detecting lies. Hence, fraud is a universal problem.

xtiansimon 2y ago

Not in academia— I’m curious but not invested. > “I formed the opinion that I shouldn’t use this paper as a building block in my research. […] However, my advisor had a different view…” > “…scientific criticism of a published paper had no place in a dissertation…” Are these dissertation catechism? Or clash of personalities?

npvrite 2y ago

I think we all realize this is true since a current cult leader is president. With three letters scripting his act. Fraud.

pjdesno 2y ago

Perhaps relevant to a lot of HN readers - the culture of conference publishing in much of CS (I'm in computer systems myself) seems to result in significantly different dynamics. Journal papers are single-blind, i.e. the reviewers know the names of the authors and can make decisions based on reputation, so if you publish great (e.g. faked) results once, it becomes progressively easier to do it again. Reviewing for conference papers is typically double-blind - we don't know the identity of the authors, and although we can try to guess, a couple of studies show we're wrong most of the time. Most papers (65-85% at good conferences) get rejected, so it's easy to flush something that looks fishy. (then again, it's hard to tell the difference between someone playing games with their numbers and someone who just has the typical crappy CS systems understanding of statistics) The addition of artifact evaluation to a lot of conferences provides another avenue to flush out faked results, too. However conference reviewing is vulnerable to reviewing fraud, since reviewers and authors typically come from the same relatively small community - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459978, or just google for the words "computer science reviewing cabal". Reviewing fraud might not be quite as destructive in the long term, as the papers that get published through such fraud are probably more crappy than faked, and will hopefully not get cited. In addition, when reviewing fraud is uncovered it's much more of an open-and-shut case - a single person can fake data and make it look a lot like good data, but review fraud requires communication between people who are explicitly barred from communicating on that topic. A lot of it depends on the community, and the size of the community. When you have 1000+ reviewers for a conference things will always get out of hand - I know of someone who got his cat registered as a reviewer for a particular SIG conference that he hated, just to make a point. I assume one could get a lot of fraudulent research published in that particular conference.

raphman 2y ago
Sometimes, even a whole conference gets compromised, see e.g. ICIMTECH '21 [1]: "NOTICE OF RETRACTION: While investigating potential publication-related misconduct in connection with the ICIMTech 2021 Conference Proceedings, serious concerns were raised that cast doubt on the integrity of the peer-review process and all papers published in the Proceedings of this Conference. The integrity of the entire Conference has been called into question. As a result, of its investigation, ACM has decided to retract the Entire Conference Proceedings and all related papers from the ACM Digital Library. None of the papers from this Proceeding should be cited in the literature because of the questionable integrity of the peer review process for this Conference." [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3465631 https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3465631

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

I'm so glad that Zoe Ziani essentially has the last word on this subject. For what it's worth, while I'm sure that her advisors are known within that research community, I believe they deserve to be named and shamed. Their behavior, IMO, is almost as bad as the original fraud to begin with. It was classic "circling the wagons" bullying, and their scientific reputations absolutely deserve the hit that their atrocious behavior warrants. I want to emphasize that this isn't about "retribution" or getting back at these people, it's about publicizing that their behavior was wrong, the antithesis of what scientific inquiry is about, and was fundamentally rooted in a cowardice that put professional standing on a higher pedestal than scientific integrity. Actions have consequences, and these advisors should face consequences for their abhorrent actions.

kittikitti 2y ago

"enuf" I don't think this is incorrect but it's definitely a grey area to spell it this way. It would be ironic to be downvoted for pointing it out based on the intent of the article.

bonzini 2y ago

Better link (the actual post mortem): https://www.theorgplumber.com/posts/statement/ https://www.theorgplumber.com/posts/statement/

mirawelner 2y ago

I have always wondered if the threshold for 'number of papers published' to get a professorship is higher than the number of high quality papers that can reasonably published in that amount of time. So, people cut corners and publish bad papers or commit outright fraud. Because they do that, this keeps the required number of publications unreasonably high.

firefax 2y ago
Peter Higgs would agree: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-... >Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today's academic system because he would not be considered "productive" enough. >The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964. >He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964." >Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.
pjc50 2y ago
Yes. The bureaucratic systems put into place to increase "quality" and "output" are incoherent, so they create even more incentives for fraud. It's paper Stakhanovism.

rendall 2y ago

Aviation once had a culture of strict deference to senior pilots, leading to fatal mistakes when juniors hesitated to question decisions. This changed with Crew Resource Management (CRM), which institutionalized open communication and made questioning a normal part of operations. Perhaps academia could benefit from a similar culture shift that actively invites scrutiny to improve science overall? The article implies a deference and bullying problem in research, where junior scholars hesitate to challenge authority, even when they notice flaws. Fraud wouldn't be the direct focus of such a shift, but in an environment where questioning is encouraged, it would naturally be harder to commit, with fewer places for bad actors to hide.

jancsika 2y ago

> Instead, they repeatedly suggested that a scientific criticism of a published paper had no place in a dissertation Why not a) finish the dissertation as soon as humanly possible, and b) now that you're bona fide, publish a separate paper disputing the famous paper which your dissertation didn't rely on? Instead, it sounds like the student and committee advisors were a bad fit and spent most the time in a pissing contest.

xondono 2y ago
> Why not a) finish the dissertation as soon as humanly possible, and b) now that you're bona fide, publish a separate paper disputing the famous paper which your dissertation didn't rely on? The last thing you want to do before pointing out that the emperor has no clothes is get a job at the palace.
- jancsika 2y ago
  (Re)-Read their story[1]-- they were fighting to publish the refutation as the first chapter of their dissertation. They wanted to publish no matter what. Given that, choose your sword: 1. Grad Sword that must be approved by a dissertation committee 2. Master (well, PhD) Sword where you choose your own adventure If you reply #1 then I'm logged in to a fake HN site. 1: https://www.theorgplumber.com/posts/statement/ https://www.theorgplumber.com/posts/statement/
LittleTimothy 2y ago
That's not really possible. If you're writing a dissertation and find that some of the important foundational work you're building upon is wrong you can't just ignore it. If it's wrong, you need to say it's wrong in order to justify why you've chosen not to consider it in your dissertation. If you can't claim it's wrong, then you have to use it in your dissertation otherwise you're going to leave yourself open to criticsm that your dissertation ignores important prior work in the field. So the only choice you have left is to write your dissertation built upon work that you know is trash, and then if you do later choose to publish criticism of that work you're essentially trashing your own dissertation. And of course, none of that matters, because you're still going to face professional consequences when you choose to write the separate paper disputing the famous paper.

cvwright 2y ago

There’s a lot that sucks about publishing in security and privacy. But wow this article makes me super grateful that we are still allowed to write attack papers and critique famous works.

econ 2y ago

Maybe do a series of awards for greatest academic fraud mimicking the Nobel prize. Having a jury dig thought the submissions and scoring everything should be hilarious.

foobarbecue 2y ago

unrelicable! I guess it won't become a religious artifact