4 ms·

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 n

by 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.
- renewiltord 7mo ago
  My cousin (with whom I am very close) had a similar experience that I posted about years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32969092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32969092 I have repeated it many times on this site but here’s the reality of human experience: if the rate of fraudulent labs is even as high as 10% you should expect that any viewpoint that it’s widespread would be drowned out by views that it’s not real. Also, the phenomenon you observed where people are champions till the rubber meets the road is more common than one thinks.
  - Noumenon72 7mo ago
    > if the rate of fraudulent labs is even as high as 10% you should expect that any viewpoint that it’s widespread would be drowned out by views that it’s not real. If "it" is fraud here I would expect the viewpoint that it's widespread to be less and less drowned out as it approached 10% since everyone would know that it's real. I think I'm misunderstanding the sentence.

by titzer 7mo ago

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.
renewiltord 7mo ago
My cousin (with whom I am very close) had a similar experience that I posted about years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32969092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32969092 I have repeated it many times on this site but here’s the reality of human experience: if the rate of fraudulent labs is even as high as 10% you should expect that any viewpoint that it’s widespread would be drowned out by views that it’s not real. Also, the phenomenon you observed where people are champions till the rubber meets the road is more common than one thinks.
- Noumenon72 7mo ago
  > if the rate of fraudulent labs is even as high as 10% you should expect that any viewpoint that it’s widespread would be drowned out by views that it’s not real. If "it" is fraud here I would expect the viewpoint that it's widespread to be less and less drowned out as it approached 10% since everyone would know that it's real. I think I'm misunderstanding the sentence.