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My wife completed her PhD two years ago and she put a LOT of work into it. Many sleepless nights, and it almost destroyed our marriage. It took her about 6 year

My wife completed her PhD two years ago and she put a LOT of work into it. Many sleepless nights, and it almost destroyed our marriage. It took her about 6 years of non-stop madness and she didn’t even work during that time. She said that many of her colleagues engaged in fraudulent data generation and sometimes just complete forgery of anything and everything. It was obvious some people were barely capable of putting together coherent sentences in posts, but somehow they generated a perfect dissertation in the end. It was common knowledge that candidates often hired writers and even experts like statisticians to do most of the heavy lifting. I don’t know if this is the norm now, but I simultaneously have more respect and less respect for those doctoral degrees, knowing that some poured their heart and soul into it, while others essentially cheated their way through. OTOH, I also understand that there may be a lot of grey area. My eyes have been opened!

titzer 7mo ago
I found the article and your third-hand anecdotes troubling. The good news is that it does not match any of the years of experience in my field. Fraud is just not that rampant. At PhD-granting institutions, the level of fraud you describe here is very seriously punished. It's career-ending. The violations that you are serious enough that any institution would expel said students (or harshly punish faculty--probably firing them). She did no one any favors by not reporting them. Unfortunately I don't think a dialogue around vague anecdotes is going to be particularly enlightening. What matters is culture, but also process--mechanisms and checks--plus consequences. Consequences don't happen if everyone is hush-hush about it and no one wants to be a "rat".
- qsera 7mo ago
  >It's career-ending.. That is where being good at politics come into play. And if you are good at it, instead of being career-ending, fraud will put you in the highest of the positions! No one wants a "plant" who cannot navigate scrutiny!
- delichon 7mo ago
  > The good news is that it does not match any of the years of experience in my field. I worked for exactly one academic, and he indulged in impossible-to-detect research fraud. So in my own limited experience research fraud was 100%. It was a biology lab, and this was an extremely hard working man. 18 hours per day in the lab was the norm. But the data wasn't coming out the way he wanted, and his career was at stake, so he put his thumb on the scale in various ways to get the data he needed. E.g. he didn't like one neural recording, so he repeated it until he got what he wanted and ignored the others. You would have to be right in the middle of the experiment to notice anything, and he just waved me off when I did. This same professor was the loudest voice in the department when it came to critiquing experimental designs and championing rigor. I knew what he did was wrong, because he taught me that. And he really appeared to mean it, but when push came to shove, he fiddled, and was probably even lying to himself. So I came away feeling that academic fraud is probably rampant, because the incentives all align that way. Anyone with the extraordinary integrity to resist was generally self-curated out of the job.
  - dekhn 7mo ago
    I had a somewhat similar experience- was a postdoc for a pre-tenure professor at berkeley. after writing up a paper based on her methods, with poor results, I handed the draft to her. She rewrote it- basically adding carefully worded/presented results that made it look as good as possible. And then submitted it (to a niche conference where the editor was a buddy of hers). When I read her submission I asked her to remove my name from it and she immediately withdrew the submission. I left her lab shortly after because I am not going to tarnish my publication record with iffy papers like that. Over time I learned that most papers in my field (computational biology) are embellished to some extent or another (or cherry-picked/curated/structured for success) and often irreproducible- some key step is left out, or no code is provided that replicates the results, etc. I can see this from two perspectives: 1) science should be trivially reproducible; it should not require the smartest/most capable people in the field to read the paper and reproduce the results. This places a burden on the people who are at the state of the art of the field to make it easy for other folks, which slows them down (but presumably makes overall progress go faster). 2) science should be done by geniuses; the leaders in the field don't need to replicate their competitors paper. it's sufficient to read the paper, apply priors, and move on (possibly learning whatever novel method/technique the paper shows so they can apply it in their own hands). It allows the field innovators to move quickly and discover new things, but is prone to all sorts of reliability/reproducibility problems, and ideally science should be egalitarian, not credentials-based.
mistrial9 7mo ago
yeah - skeptical here. Among certain departments, at large schools, under certain leaders.. The combination of "my marriage almost crumbled" for motivated reasoning, and "I have never seen any of this before" total inexperience with actual process.. the post shows itself to be biased and unreliable. However, among certain departments, at large schools, under certain leaders.. yes, and growing $0.02
russdill 7mo ago
Fucking hilarious to me when people claim academics are motivated by the "money", eg, when claimed by climate deniers.
- 1234letshaveatw 7mo ago
  Undoubtably climate science is the exception and immune from fraudulent data generation and sometimes complete forgery
  - russdill 7mo ago
    I'm sure there's some, but the small point here is that it almost certainly is more motivated by factors other than financial gain. I'm sure it you search you can find such cases though. The much broader point though is the dismissal of the bulk consensus of academic research because academics are in it for the "money".
- renewiltord 7mo ago
  That's approximately 1 million people. Even a religious cult that size would have difficulty controlling motivations. As an example: > Petitioners also formed a variety of organizations to create what they termed "marketable science." Pet. App. 1687a. For example, through the Council for To bacco Research (CTR) and Lawyers' Special Accounts, petitioners jointly financed research programs that were directed by company lawyers and calculated to yield favorable results. Id. at 240a-275a. Petitioners regu larly cited the conclusions of the scientists funded through these programs as if they were the objective results of disinterested research, without revealing that the scientists had, in fact, been funded by the industry. Id. at 195a. That comes from here: https://www.justice.gov/osg/brief/philip-morris-usa-inc-v-united-states-opposition https://www.justice.gov/osg/brief/philip-morris-usa-inc-v-un... It's possible all the science was good but people were upset about who funded it.
suddenlybananas 7mo ago
What field? I am aware this kind of stuff happens, but I don't really see it among any of my colleagues.

titzer 7mo ago

I found the article and your third-hand anecdotes troubling. The good news is that it does not match any of the years of experience in my field. Fraud is just not that rampant. At PhD-granting institutions, the level of fraud you describe here is very seriously punished. It's career-ending. The violations that you are serious enough that any institution would expel said students (or harshly punish faculty--probably firing them). She did no one any favors by not reporting them. Unfortunately I don't think a dialogue around vague anecdotes is going to be particularly enlightening. What matters is culture, but also process--mechanisms and checks--plus consequences. Consequences don't happen if everyone is hush-hush about it and no one wants to be a "rat".

qsera 7mo ago
>It's career-ending.. That is where being good at politics come into play. And if you are good at it, instead of being career-ending, fraud will put you in the highest of the positions! No one wants a "plant" who cannot navigate scrutiny!
delichon 7mo ago
> The good news is that it does not match any of the years of experience in my field. I worked for exactly one academic, and he indulged in impossible-to-detect research fraud. So in my own limited experience research fraud was 100%. It was a biology lab, and this was an extremely hard working man. 18 hours per day in the lab was the norm. But the data wasn't coming out the way he wanted, and his career was at stake, so he put his thumb on the scale in various ways to get the data he needed. E.g. he didn't like one neural recording, so he repeated it until he got what he wanted and ignored the others. You would have to be right in the middle of the experiment to notice anything, and he just waved me off when I did. This same professor was the loudest voice in the department when it came to critiquing experimental designs and championing rigor. I knew what he did was wrong, because he taught me that. And he really appeared to mean it, but when push came to shove, he fiddled, and was probably even lying to himself. So I came away feeling that academic fraud is probably rampant, because the incentives all align that way. Anyone with the extraordinary integrity to resist was generally self-curated out of the job.
- dekhn 7mo ago
  I had a somewhat similar experience- was a postdoc for a pre-tenure professor at berkeley. after writing up a paper based on her methods, with poor results, I handed the draft to her. She rewrote it- basically adding carefully worded/presented results that made it look as good as possible. And then submitted it (to a niche conference where the editor was a buddy of hers). When I read her submission I asked her to remove my name from it and she immediately withdrew the submission. I left her lab shortly after because I am not going to tarnish my publication record with iffy papers like that. Over time I learned that most papers in my field (computational biology) are embellished to some extent or another (or cherry-picked/curated/structured for success) and often irreproducible- some key step is left out, or no code is provided that replicates the results, etc. I can see this from two perspectives: 1) science should be trivially reproducible; it should not require the smartest/most capable people in the field to read the paper and reproduce the results. This places a burden on the people who are at the state of the art of the field to make it easy for other folks, which slows them down (but presumably makes overall progress go faster). 2) science should be done by geniuses; the leaders in the field don't need to replicate their competitors paper. it's sufficient to read the paper, apply priors, and move on (possibly learning whatever novel method/technique the paper shows so they can apply it in their own hands). It allows the field innovators to move quickly and discover new things, but is prone to all sorts of reliability/reproducibility problems, and ideally science should be egalitarian, not credentials-based.

mistrial9 7mo ago

yeah - skeptical here. Among certain departments, at large schools, under certain leaders.. The combination of "my marriage almost crumbled" for motivated reasoning, and "I have never seen any of this before" total inexperience with actual process.. the post shows itself to be biased and unreliable. However, among certain departments, at large schools, under certain leaders.. yes, and growing $0.02

russdill 7mo ago

Fucking hilarious to me when people claim academics are motivated by the "money", eg, when claimed by climate deniers.

1234letshaveatw 7mo ago
Undoubtably climate science is the exception and immune from fraudulent data generation and sometimes complete forgery
- russdill 7mo ago
  I'm sure there's some, but the small point here is that it almost certainly is more motivated by factors other than financial gain. I'm sure it you search you can find such cases though. The much broader point though is the dismissal of the bulk consensus of academic research because academics are in it for the "money".
renewiltord 7mo ago
That's approximately 1 million people. Even a religious cult that size would have difficulty controlling motivations. As an example: > Petitioners also formed a variety of organizations to create what they termed "marketable science." Pet. App. 1687a. For example, through the Council for To bacco Research (CTR) and Lawyers' Special Accounts, petitioners jointly financed research programs that were directed by company lawyers and calculated to yield favorable results. Id. at 240a-275a. Petitioners regu larly cited the conclusions of the scientists funded through these programs as if they were the objective results of disinterested research, without revealing that the scientists had, in fact, been funded by the industry. Id. at 195a. That comes from here: https://www.justice.gov/osg/brief/philip-morris-usa-inc-v-united-states-opposition https://www.justice.gov/osg/brief/philip-morris-usa-inc-v-un... It's possible all the science was good but people were upset about who funded it.

suddenlybananas 7mo ago

What field? I am aware this kind of stuff happens, but I don't really see it among any of my colleagues.