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There is a scientific fraud epidemic — and we are ignoring the cure
- Thread starter Sly Saint
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rvallee
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Oh it's definitely not a disaster in waiting. It's been disastrous for decades.
And whenever someone comes out saying that it's worse than people know, in reality it's always so far worse than even they think it is. To really see the breadth and scope of it you have to look at it from the outside, away from the places where things have been patched up to hide all the giant cracks and entire collapsed structures, and from a position where it can be said without ending one's career.
And wow is it rotten whole in some places. And it's probably worst in medicine, because the consequences go far deeper., whereas in most disciplines it's simply that progress takes longer. Once AIs gain that ability, and it will likely be next year, it will make it impossible to go on without giant reforms. There will be massive loss of trust in experts, and sadly it will be justified. Even worse is that bad actors will capitalize on it, abuse that loss of trust and cause even more chaos.
And of course it has to happen while medicine has basically reached peak pseudoscience with their damn biopsychosocial ideology, and just as they encouraged mass illness as being good for one's health. The consequences of this will be felt for generations. Taking longer to build stronger materials or faster electronics is nothing compared to the complete fuck-up over the pandemic.
And whenever someone comes out saying that it's worse than people know, in reality it's always so far worse than even they think it is. To really see the breadth and scope of it you have to look at it from the outside, away from the places where things have been patched up to hide all the giant cracks and entire collapsed structures, and from a position where it can be said without ending one's career.
And wow is it rotten whole in some places. And it's probably worst in medicine, because the consequences go far deeper., whereas in most disciplines it's simply that progress takes longer. Once AIs gain that ability, and it will likely be next year, it will make it impossible to go on without giant reforms. There will be massive loss of trust in experts, and sadly it will be justified. Even worse is that bad actors will capitalize on it, abuse that loss of trust and cause even more chaos.
And of course it has to happen while medicine has basically reached peak pseudoscience with their damn biopsychosocial ideology, and just as they encouraged mass illness as being good for one's health. The consequences of this will be felt for generations. Taking longer to build stronger materials or faster electronics is nothing compared to the complete fuck-up over the pandemic.
As the Oxford university psychologist Dorothy Bishop has written, we only know about the ones who get caught. In her view, our “relaxed attitude” to the scientific fraud epidemic is a “disaster-in-waiting”.
Too late. Waaaaaay too late. The fact that it has taken so long to even start recognising there is a serious problem here, is the problem.
(No disrespect to Bishop. Appreciate her speaking out. Just noting that this is a broader and deeper systems problem, and can ultimately only be properly dealt with at that level.)
The microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, a data sleuth who specialises in spotting suspect images, might argue the disaster is already here: her Patreon-funded work has resulted in over a thousand retractions and almost as many corrections.
If one person can find that many in her spare time, imagine what a dedicated, resourced, and competent professional team, with adequate legal and political protections, could find.
Maybe not. Probably worse now with publish or perish pressure. Creates inappropriate incentives.
Sanger won 2 Nobel prizes but had less than 70 publications.
https://www.kingsreview.co.uk/inter...innovation-a-conversation-with-sydney-brenner
In the UK I think the change from the RAE - where papers (and therefore academics and eg that time research assessments were basically the main thing that mattered for their reputation/career) were assessed predominantly on independent quality of method criteria
to REF which shifted importance to adding in ‘impact’ and unleashed the ‘citations’ malarkey where there was advantage in developing a clique who cited each others work etc because ‘number of times’ cited git listed as a measure as if it meant something objective that couldn’t be played.
there were other big differences but its intention to shift to work being ‘applicable’ and ‘sellable’ rather than ‘internally sound/robust’ would represent a huge shift in what the aims for academics and the way to get to the top etc were ?
the last RAE was 2008, with REF starting in 2014 now bring every 5-6 years I think.
who knows how much was begun by that vs how much that was reactive of other behind the scenes lobbying or culture changes and so on . But in the reward gif job/ rules of game gif career etc tgat stuff matters/mattered.
rvallee
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
It's really absurd thinking that this is something that could have been done so long ago, and yet hasn't, probably it's considered rude, inappropriate.
Some sort of red team discipline, dedicated only to rooting out not just fraud, but low quality research, with the goal of improving it over time. With hostile intent that takes no prisoners. Just like bug reports aren't some friendly "oh I don't want to be a bother but I don't think you have it quite right old chap". If someone made a mistake they are expected to fix it. If something doesn't they are expected to fix it.
It's so simple, and yet the very idea is a non-starter. Instead we see hostile reaction, or sometimes genuine puzzlement of the "what do you want me to do with this?" type from editors when you point out errors in their publications. The academic system is actually hostile to self-correction, while the general principle of science being self-correcting is so basic that no one would dare question it, and yet it simply cannot be applied in real life.
Although actually if academia were serious about this, they'd follow software development principles that actually work. We've already solved most of those issues, especially in open source. Most companies will give out bounties for people who find bugs. Don't even need to fix them, they want to know. In academia, as long as no one cares, errors are encouraged to remain. Instead we see garbage like what Cochrane is doing with the exercise review.
Also I read the article and did not find anything about this cure mentioned in the title. Did I miss something?
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rvallee
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I don't know how the timelines match, but this is the basic idea behind Google, the PageRank algorithm. Except they know and expect that people will try to cheat it, and adjust accordingly and pretty much in real time. Academia does no such adjustment. In fact old citations of debunked papers keep contributing to the impact of those citations. Even if they later are cited negatively, there is no such assessment. It's a popularity contest, and works about as poorly as if Google had taken no corrective measures to account for content farms, and allowed self-citation networks to game the algorithm.
Google didn't do that because it would have ruined the quality of their product, and basically killed the company. Academia is a chaotic system with no authority in charge, so no one can actually take those corrective measures, and in fact the equivalent of self-citation content farms has come to dominate in the form of predatory commercial journals. And that doesn't even take into account evidence-based medicine, which is largely made of self-citation networks spamming low-quality derivative garbage work.
Science and academia would improve so much if they followed the basic principles learned from software engineering. We solved so much stuff and problems dealing with information. But noooo, that would anger a lot of people.