5 ms·

This is such a beautiful theoretical idea (a type of "natural" error correction which protects the qubits without having to deal with the exorbitant overhead of

This is such a beautiful theoretical idea (a type of "natural" error correction which protects the qubits without having to deal with the exorbitant overhead of error correcting codes). It is very disheartening and discouraging and just plain exhausting that there has been so much "data manipulation" in this subfield (see all the other retracted papers from the last 5 years mentioned in the article). I can only imagine how hard this must be on the junior scientists on the team who have been swept into it without much control.

pc86 1y ago
Hopefully people are keeping lists of the PIs on these redacted papers and keeping that in mind for future grants, hiring, etc. I know almost nobody is, but one can hope. Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others. This chip is an extreme example, but potentially millions of dollars of productivity, hundreds or even thousands of people spending months or years on something based in a fabrication. The person or people directly responsible for this should never work again.
- jakobgm 1y ago
  Totally agree! As with any behavior which is difficult to detect and often goes by unnoticed; the punishment should be large enough for the expected value of fraud being clearly net negative for those that might feel tempted at "tweaking some numbers". In case anybody else also isn't familiar with "PI" as an abbreviation in this context: > In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  >Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others. That might actually be a perverse incentive. If you've already nuked your career with some fraud, you can't make it worse by extra fraud... why ever stop? People inclined to do this sort of thing, when faced with that deterrent just double down and commit even more fraud, they figure the best that can be hoped for is to do it so much and so perfectly that they're never discovered. The trouble is that the system for science worked well when there exists only some tiny number of scientists, but now we're a planet of 8 billion and where people tell their children they have to go to college and get a STEM degree. Hell, you can only become a scientist by producing new research, even if there's not much left to research in your field. And the only way to maintain that position as a scientist is "to publish or perish". We have finite avenues of research with an ever-growing population of scientists, bullshit is inevitable.
  - dullcrisp 1y ago
    You stop because you can’t get a job?
  - pc86 1y ago
    Even if "bullshit is inevitable" is true -- I don't think it is -- that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who make up data, who steal others' work, who steal grant money by using their fake data to justify future grants. "Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification. You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate. That happens in part because you choose not to punish people who violate that trust in the first place.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
      >that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who make up data, I am not wishy-washy on punishment. A part of me that I do not deny nor suppress wants punishment for those who do wrong. But sometimes punishments are counter-productive. The easiest example is the death penalty for heinous, non-murder crimes. This incentivizes the rapist or child molester (or whatever) to kill the victim. You can't execute them twice, after all, so if they're already on the hook for a death penalty crime, murdering their victim also gets rid of a prime witness who could get them the death penalty by testifying, but without increasing the odds of the death penalty. "Career death penalty" here is like that. >"Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification. It wasn't meant to be a justification. It was an explanation of the problem, and (in part, at least) and attempt to show that things need to change if we want the fraud to go away. >You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate We've been a low trust society for a long time now. People need to start thinking about how to accomplish the long, slow process of changing a low trust society to a high trust one.
      - hollerith 1y ago
        >We've been a low trust society for a long time now. Although trust has been decreasing, the US remains a high-trust society compared to the global average.
- nextos 1y ago
  > Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others. Sadly, the system is often rewarding fake or, especially, exaggerated/misrepresented data and conclusions. I think that a significant proportion of articles exaggerate findings and deliberately cherry-pick data. It's a market of lemons. Proving misrepresentation is really hard, and the rewards for doing so are immense. Publishing an article in Nature, Science, or Cell is a career-defining moment.
  - pc86 1y ago
    Yeah I agree it's not an easy problem to solve by any stretch. I'm not a professor or scientist so I won't pretend to understand the intricacies of journal publication and that sort of thing. But I do wonder when someone's PhD thesis gets published and it turns out they plagiarized large parts of it, why isn't their degree revoked? When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year?
    - nextos 1y ago
      Serious universities do often revoke doctoral degrees if plagiarism is proven. I've seen Oxford University going as far as demanding someone to issue a correction of a journal article to cite prior work because they were making some claims of novelty that were not true. > When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year? Internal politics. Committees judging potential misconduct are not independent. If you are sufficiently high up in the ladder, you can get away with many things. Sweden recently created a Swedish National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct (Npof) to address this problem. I think this is a step in the right direction. But, ultimately, I think academic fraud should be judged in court. However, e.g. Leonid Schneider (forbetterscience.com) has been taken to court several times for reporting fraud, including fraud that led to patient death, and some judges didn't seem to care much about data fabrication / misrepresentation.
- MeteorMarc 1y ago
  Or get rehabilitated, like Leo Kouwenhoven, see https://delta.tudelft.nl/article/gerehabiliteerde-kouwenhoven-keert-terug-naar-tu-delft https://delta.tudelft.nl/article/gerehabiliteerde-kouwenhove...
  - 77pt77 1y ago
    I missed the redemption.
- mensetmanusman 1y ago
  This would be half of the nsf grants according to the replication crisis work.

pc86 1y ago

Hopefully people are keeping lists of the PIs on these redacted papers and keeping that in mind for future grants, hiring, etc. I know almost nobody is, but one can hope. Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others. This chip is an extreme example, but potentially millions of dollars of productivity, hundreds or even thousands of people spending months or years on something based in a fabrication. The person or people directly responsible for this should never work again.

jakobgm 1y ago
Totally agree! As with any behavior which is difficult to detect and often goes by unnoticed; the punishment should be large enough for the expected value of fraud being clearly net negative for those that might feel tempted at "tweaking some numbers". In case anybody else also isn't familiar with "PI" as an abbreviation in this context: > In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
>Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others. That might actually be a perverse incentive. If you've already nuked your career with some fraud, you can't make it worse by extra fraud... why ever stop? People inclined to do this sort of thing, when faced with that deterrent just double down and commit even more fraud, they figure the best that can be hoped for is to do it so much and so perfectly that they're never discovered. The trouble is that the system for science worked well when there exists only some tiny number of scientists, but now we're a planet of 8 billion and where people tell their children they have to go to college and get a STEM degree. Hell, you can only become a scientist by producing new research, even if there's not much left to research in your field. And the only way to maintain that position as a scientist is "to publish or perish". We have finite avenues of research with an ever-growing population of scientists, bullshit is inevitable.
- dullcrisp 1y ago
  You stop because you can’t get a job?
- pc86 1y ago
  Even if "bullshit is inevitable" is true -- I don't think it is -- that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who make up data, who steal others' work, who steal grant money by using their fake data to justify future grants. "Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification. You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate. That happens in part because you choose not to punish people who violate that trust in the first place.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    >that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who make up data, I am not wishy-washy on punishment. A part of me that I do not deny nor suppress wants punishment for those who do wrong. But sometimes punishments are counter-productive. The easiest example is the death penalty for heinous, non-murder crimes. This incentivizes the rapist or child molester (or whatever) to kill the victim. You can't execute them twice, after all, so if they're already on the hook for a death penalty crime, murdering their victim also gets rid of a prime witness who could get them the death penalty by testifying, but without increasing the odds of the death penalty. "Career death penalty" here is like that. >"Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification. It wasn't meant to be a justification. It was an explanation of the problem, and (in part, at least) and attempt to show that things need to change if we want the fraud to go away. >You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate We've been a low trust society for a long time now. People need to start thinking about how to accomplish the long, slow process of changing a low trust society to a high trust one.
    - hollerith 1y ago
      >We've been a low trust society for a long time now. Although trust has been decreasing, the US remains a high-trust society compared to the global average.
nextos 1y ago
> Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others. Sadly, the system is often rewarding fake or, especially, exaggerated/misrepresented data and conclusions. I think that a significant proportion of articles exaggerate findings and deliberately cherry-pick data. It's a market of lemons. Proving misrepresentation is really hard, and the rewards for doing so are immense. Publishing an article in Nature, Science, or Cell is a career-defining moment.
- pc86 1y ago
  Yeah I agree it's not an easy problem to solve by any stretch. I'm not a professor or scientist so I won't pretend to understand the intricacies of journal publication and that sort of thing. But I do wonder when someone's PhD thesis gets published and it turns out they plagiarized large parts of it, why isn't their degree revoked? When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year?
  - nextos 1y ago
    Serious universities do often revoke doctoral degrees if plagiarism is proven. I've seen Oxford University going as far as demanding someone to issue a correction of a journal article to cite prior work because they were making some claims of novelty that were not true. > When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year? Internal politics. Committees judging potential misconduct are not independent. If you are sufficiently high up in the ladder, you can get away with many things. Sweden recently created a Swedish National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct (Npof) to address this problem. I think this is a step in the right direction. But, ultimately, I think academic fraud should be judged in court. However, e.g. Leonid Schneider (forbetterscience.com) has been taken to court several times for reporting fraud, including fraud that led to patient death, and some judges didn't seem to care much about data fabrication / misrepresentation.
MeteorMarc 1y ago
Or get rehabilitated, like Leo Kouwenhoven, see https://delta.tudelft.nl/article/gerehabiliteerde-kouwenhoven-keert-terug-naar-tu-delft https://delta.tudelft.nl/article/gerehabiliteerde-kouwenhove...
- 77pt77 1y ago
  I missed the redemption.
mensetmanusman 1y ago
This would be half of the nsf grants according to the replication crisis work.