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Scientific fraud robs the community twice: the first time by wasting research funds on fraud, the second time because experiments with the appearance of success
by yafbum 3y ago
Scientific fraud robs the community twice: the first time by wasting research funds on fraud, the second time because experiments with the appearance of success funnel more dollars to them, taking away funding from other areas that might look less sexy but might have yielded a breakthrough of they'd been pursued. Grant issuers should insist on some form of end-to-end third-party data custodianship to prevent tampering with data during analysis. Seems better than the many billions of $ being wasted on fraud and subsequent missed opportunity.
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoAnd a third time when they ask for research funding in the future and the public says "No, last time you used the money fraudulently"
- azinman2 3y agoAnd a fourth time when the scientific community says “this is our hard earned conclusion” and the public says “I don’t trust this.”
- fooop 3y agonor should they, since the public is indeed being lied to.
- azinman2 3y agoAbout…? By whom..? Whatever it is, know that science as a whole is giant, diverse, and self correcting over the long term.
- verisimi 3y agoI don't agree. When you have lots of people whose livelihoods depend on the gravy train, who can't be sure that what they are working on is fraudulent because they are so specialised, who would take that risk? Its all about funding. And in the US basically all funding comes from the same source - government, military or corporations - what I think of as the governance system.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mwint 3y agoOver time, yes. But over, say, three weeks, science can do a lot of damage to an economy before it self-corrects.
- azinman2 3y agoIt’s very weird to me that science now equals vaccines and home-mandates, and it also equals advice given with little data. Science is way way bigger, and is an idea not a particular set of people or current beliefs. It also has brought untold value of taking us out of the dark ages but apparently that’s been normalized so much it’s no longer valued.
- Voultapher 3y agoSo many problems in science could be alleviated if we changed the culture and processes to multi replication. Your paper can only be accepted into a paper if an unrelated group can replicate the results with only the paper and associated submitted info.
- ffgjgf1 3y agoSomeone will need to pay that other group though. Sometimes quite a lot.
- Voultapher 3y agoI'd argue it's worth it. Some practical ideas, when allocating the money for research 30% or so has to be kept back for replication. Public science is mostly government funded. And the government could allocate X% percent of the budget for replication work. It sounds like a solvable problem to me.
- ffgjgf1 3y agoI agree in principle but forcing institutions or governments to allocate money for this and enforce is pretty much an unsolvable problem at this point IMO.
- Voultapher 3y agoYeah, as I said it's also a question of culture and that's very difficult to change.
- doctorpangloss 3y agoIt is a misconception that replication doesn’t occur. In vanguard basic science, every journey crosses replicating the most recent results.
- Voultapher 3y agoI'd like to learn more, could you please provide some sources. Based on the recent Ranga Dias fraud, I'd think replication culture still has a long way to go.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoNot to mention all of the students who end up dropping out or having to take Masters instead of PhDs because their theses built on the fraud fail. Just like we should place failed results (when due to wrong science, not bad skills) on an equal level with successful results, we should place failed thesis projects on equal level with successful thesis projects as having added to the general knowledge (again, when the failed projects demonstrate a falsified theory, not when they fail due to mistakes or inability on the part of the student).
- stanford_labrat 3y agoGreat comment. I would encourage all PhD students to bomb-proof their thesis topic and build it on as solid a foundation as possible. I chose perhaps a less flashy, relevant, and lucrative topic for this reason but I would rather finish than be staring down the barrel of a "my entire work has been based off a lie"...
- nerdyadventurer 3y agoHow do we know that a paper was based on false data?
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoI think the point is to pick a grad lab extending a well-trod path, or at least well replicated path, not something relatively new and flashy.
- bsimpson 3y agoAnd a third time: reputation Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino were two of the most well-known behavioral economists. Hell, Ariely even published a a board game about it (as well as a bunch of popular books). They've both been accused of data manipulation this year. My friends in the field are worried that the whole field will be tainted. It grew out of a controversial idea - that despite what past models demand, people don't consistently behave in a rational way. If the two biggest practitioners of a new discipline are outed as frauds, what does that do the the reputation of the discipline as a whole? Will people be skeptical of any behavioral hypothesis that bucks tradition because Ariely was accused of fraud?
- hilux 3y agoAriely and Gino have been very credibly accused. And they are far from the only ones: Diederik Stapel, Brian Wansink, the list goes on and on. (I'm not listing the many names, also at R1 universities, whose verdicts are still "in process.") What NPR liked to call "replication crisis" was a combination of junk science and blatant fraud. The whole field (slightly more broadly, of social psychology) is badly damaged for at least a generation. Pete Judo has some consumer-friendly youtube videos on the topic.