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Comment by raincom | Hacker News Reader

This is the other side of plagiarism. In third world countries, promotions depend on publications, so they just copy others papers. This is easy to catch with software with enough access to all journals.

In experimental fields, one just pulls data out of thin air or one just discards observations that are contrary to the hypothesis being tested. This attitude is so rampant in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and disciplines that use statistics.

I’m quite sympathetic to some guy in some random university in Pakistan, India or China. His plagiarization involves submitting his publication to some fourth rate publication.

The real abusers are in the first world, their primary tool is experiments and data.

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”In experimental fields, one just pulls data out of thin air or one just discards observations that are contrary to the hypothesis being tested. This attitude is so rampant in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and disciplines that use statistics.”

Please cite direct evidence that this is “rampant”.

Articles making claims of “replication crisis” without direct evidence of fraud do not count. There’s a huge gap between failure to replicate and fraud, and quite frankly, most of the replication crisis media tends to repeat the same stories, providing little additional proof to back up the claims of “crisis”.

Let's start with our beloved Brian Wansink:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/brian-wan...

The money quote is:

> "I don’t think I’ve ever done an interesting study where the data ‘came out’ the first time I looked at it,” he told her over email.

Wansink is a fraud. One case does not make for rampancy.

Yeah this is a case of someone on daytime television shows talking about dieting. There are plenty of fake doctors making claims in this realm. The scary part is the acceptance of fake science into the general public and especially it being perpetuated heavily by a large part of our political system.

It wasn't just Wansink.

Everyone around him knew and participated to some extent.

His postdocs (except the one who said no), his PhD students, and all his other co-authors.

They all knew and never said a word.

When Cornell was told, they made some pious noises and ignored it until it became too public.

Journals ignored all criticism until it became too public.

This is a system that does not police fraud.

When I look at the grad school system, I am really confused. I really, really wanted to go to grad school at a top 10 history program, where I also did an undergrad honors' thesis. I was prepared to accept $18,000 a year as a living wage, and I was excited to be an adjunct for $35,000 a year with crazy hours and no health benefits in a small college town.

Now I am paid usually $45,000 - $60,000 per year to talk on a phone to people who need help filling out a web form in order to buy something. It's a bit absurd. I don't mind this work and it is good money. It keeps me and my girlfriend fed and sheltered.

Why is the university system so negligent and abusive towards those who invent new ideas and teach new inventors?

>"Why is the university system so negligent and abusive towards those who invent new ideas and teach new inventors?"

Have you considered the possibility that academia is paying researchers/etc what they are worth on average? Its just that the majority of people being paid are generating near zero, or negative, value to society.

I've definitely considered it. However, interestingly, to attend university in the USA usually carries a pricetag of $20,000 to $30,000 per year minimum after all the smoke and mirrors of "grants and financial aid".

So, you have consumers (students and their parents) paying real money for a real education that they are hoping will result in gainful employment. Either millions of students are overpaying every year, or the system provides some value.

Now, the ones delivering that value (grad students) are receiving maybe $8,000 per semester while teaching 100 students lets say, while the students are paying collectively nearly $1,000,000 for 4 months of tuitoon.

Where does the other $992,000 go, besides administrator salaries and football stadiums?

Besides administrators and sports programs, glamorous campus amenities and affirmative action admittees.

“Besides administrators and sports programs, glamorous campus amenities and affirmative action admittees.” Is affirmative action really that expensive?

I believe in funding affirmative action but yes it is expensive, the university accepts the students into the school and covers much of the cost of their housing and tuition. The actual cost isn't $60,000 per year like the sticker price says, but it is certainly around $8,000-12,000 in operational costs.

When you talk to your boss about salaries, you'll quickly find out that your salary isn't determined by what value you bring to the firm, it's by whatever the market will bear.

If you got balls, you can try to extort your replacement value. If you come with unique skills it may be much higher than what your resumee looks like.

That requires rational thinking and accounting skills on part of management, both are often in short supply, just look at the current Elon Musk meltdown... mission-hostile management is a thing.

The value you bring to the firm is a factor in that it is a cap on what you'll get paid. Value is also relative, if a monkey can provide 90% of your value then you'll get paid a little more than peanuts.

If a monkey can provide 90% of your value, but there's a shortage of people who can provide the other 10%, you might still get paid well.

I mean, if the monkey doing the can generate 900k of value per year, but a human doing is can generate 1MM per year, then it would be better to hire the human for anything up to 96k/year (assuming peanuts cost less than 1k/quarter).

Of course your value is relevant to your salary. It sets the upper limit.

>"Either millions of students are overpaying every year, or the system provides some value."

Its the former, except the government is paying for it...

EDIT:

I say this as someone who got paid by the government via academia to torture rodents for no reason for years.

I can guarantee you that the $30,000 I wired from my bank account to my student loan company was not given to me by the government.

The government of course gave me the loan for inflated price of attending uni, but goddamnit I paid for it myself with my own blood and tears.

I had a scholarship.

Grad school, in academic research not engineering and MBAs, is mostly done on scholarships/grants. Your tuition is paid by your PI using a grant from the government (or sometimes a private foundation or company).

No worries, we are talking about two different things.

I'm saying that when a grad student or adjunct teaches a class, they get paid a few thousand dollars. The students in that class are paying 100x that amount in tuition.

I'm implying that grad students should be paid more for this service, instead of the money going to administrator salaries and football stadiums.

Oh I agree. It's just if you're doing grad school and you're paying with student loans, not the government, you're doing it wrong.

Yes 100%. Sometimes it works out profitable for "professional schools", but definitely not for history majors or even sometimes biology majors.

In capitalism it's better to create a small amount of value that you can capture, than a large amount of value that you can't. You will be more rewarded if you can say I made those people buy $500k more in widgets then they would have otherwise bought last year and back that up with stats, then if you write a paper that leads to better widgets years down the line or even worse, write a paper on the sociocultural effects of widgets.

People rob gas stations, that doesn't mean that there's a system that doesn't police robbery. And that's still one case.

That random guy in Pakistan, India, or China would absolutely submit his [1] publication to NEJM or Nature if he could get it accepted there.

[1] I say "his" because it seems like men are highly overrepresented in submitting falsified data. Obviously there are probably more men in science to start with, but consider that 30/30 of the most retracted scientists are men. https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard...

Additionally, in older English grammar books, "his" is the default gender neutral pronoun. "They/their" is a modern invention with disputed acceptance. I personally prefer "they/their" over even "his or her"

EDIT: Please don't downvote statements of fact. My karma score pays the price for your momentary burst of dopamine.

Shakespeare used they, those grammar books are stupid.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.h...

Then surely a generic CEO can be referred to as “him” since 29/30 of Fortune 500 CEOs are men.

Yes I agree men are statistically overrepresented as CEOs of fortune 500 companies. I don't think that's debatable.

30 is not even statistically significant... Plus, my belief at least, this is the tip of the iceberg for some fields. (So don't worry there will be more.)

30 vs. 0 is statistically significant for something that's theoretically a coin flip. It even beats a stringent five-sigma threshold.

Definitely!

If I were being pedantic [I guess I am :-) ], I'd probably say the best prior would be p =(n male scientists/number all scientists)

Overall I bet men are slightly more than 1/2, but even if it's an 80/20 split the p value for this would be many sigma.

It's extremely statistically significant, given any reasonable prior.

Don't take my word for it, here's a couple lines of R code.

  # vector of prior probabilities, natural choice is proportion of men
  prop.men <- seq(0, 1, length.out=100)

  # compute prob of observation (30/30) given prior probability
  pvals <- dbinom(x=30, size=30, prob=prop.men)

  plot(prop.men, 
       log10(pvals), 
       type="l", col="blue", lwd=2,
       ylab="log10 pval for 30/30 offenders being men", 
       xlab="Baseline male percentage in science"
       )
  abline(h=log10(0.05), col="red", lwd=2, lty=2) # "significance" line
  text(x=0.6, y=-30, lab="Below red line\nsignificant at α=0.05")

  # since prob vector is 100 long, indices of entries returned here
  # correspond to % men needed for this to have α > 0.05
  which(pvals>0.05)

The actual figure for completeness: https://imgur.com/a/E47AfSW

Of course this is a bit back-of-the-envelope done in 5 minutes, but you get the point.

Catching a fraudster is a delicate combination of not them working hard enough to fake the data, close scrutiny (why would a study be subjected to abnormally close scrutiny?), and many other factors. It is also worth mentioning that failed replications do not necessarily lead to retractions - in fact, in most cases (of an honest mistake or an unlucky sampling) retracting the original paper wouldn't make any sense. Finally, not all retractions involve fraud, for example mathematicians will issue retractions when mistakes are pointed out.

For these reasons, retractions are not a good measure of behavior.

True. However, if your comment about is about gender, that would only be true if you think that women are less likely than men to get caught falsifying data (there was differential detection by gender). I can't imagine why that would be the case.

Edit: this was in response to your comment before your edit

I agree retractions are an imperfect measure, but it's not like there is much more to go on.

Most importantly, the 30 people on this leaderboard who have dozens of retracted papers are not just people who got unlucky with sampling or made one mistake and had to retract a paper–they are those who repeatedly and knowingly faked data and then published it.

Retractions aren't issued just for falsifying data. Each field has its own culture of retracting papers, some only retracting deliberate fraud (each one with a different standard of evidence), and others retracting mistakes as well. It is also well-known that certain countries contribute more than others to scientific fraud - and it would be unlikely for them to all have exactly the same gender ratio. By the time all of these factors (along with whatever else can be thought of) are included there might be a lot less statistical significance left than we started with.

The retractions of people on this top 30 list are generally for falsifying data, severe plagiarism, or other misbehavior which would fall into the category of deliberate fraud.

I don't disagree that the rate of misbehavior and gender balance of scientists differ internationally and would ideally be factored into an analysis.

Do we always have to do the gender discussion? Don't get me wrong, I'd love a real scientific analysis. But social media speculations with people trying to push their favorite ideology with at best some anecdotes seems like a huge waste of time.

But to play the game... maybe woman are more likely to get caught falsifying data before publication, because the evil patriarchy thinks woman cannot to science and thus more rigorously verifies their results? We for sure could come up with lots of other crappy explanations and theories.

I am a man with no gender agenda whatsoever. I was just trying to justify my pronoun :). Interesting to observe the level of vitriol pointing this out led to.

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