Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Some people just get too big for their britches. If you're going to commit scientific fraud, you need to do it in the edges where nobody really cares, nobody's going to try to replicate it, nobody's going to try to build on it, and nobody's going to try to get you to explain more details because they want to build on it. You want to be working in the dead-end cul-de-sacs.

You do not want to be going "I've got a room temperature superconductor" or "I've detected a dark matter particle" or "I've got a simple procedure for flipping matter to anti-matter" or "I've cured all cancers". People are going to want follow-up details and to reproduce it and to begin building on it and turning it into engineering.

You gotta keep your aspirations realistic. You need to be working off in the darkness somewhere, not trying to conquer the territory where the brightest lights are shining. Don't try to fraud your way to Nobel-prize level work.

View on HN

It reminds me of Jan Hendrik Schön, who looked like physics' next emerging all-star wunderkind until his "discoveries" of crystalline semiconductors won him so many awards and so much attention that it was discovered his entire career had been built on falsified data. A huge embarassment for Bell Labs and a black mark on the final years of more than one great physicist's careers there, since so many people thought they were helping a great new mind succeed when they were in reality perpetuating his fraud.

There's a great 3-part documentary on youtube about it, which argues Schön was probably a contender for the Nobel Prize in Physics before everything collapsed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfDoml-Db64

I was instantly reminded of the same. I can recommend the documentary, it's the first time I saw an actual example of scientific fraud at this scale.

It's a stunningly well produced, informative and entertaining video with excellent visuals. It puts a lot of expensive tv, never-mind youtube to shame.

Medicine is a great area for scientific fraud. Unless you research a super common disease you need to have the relevant patients (which means only a handful of people can replicate your study), the sample groups tend to be small, and there is a million other factors to explain away why your results may differ from another study. To the point that there is a large grey area between outright fraud and unconvincing results (small impact that may very well be noise).

Medicine is an interesting area because all of the incentives lean towards incremental, long-term subscriptions for small-but-measurable gains. So if your fraud is an improvement by 2.5% instead of 2.45%, it's both unlikely to get a lot of attention and quite likely to get incorporated into the new drug development pipeline. All of the players except for the general public seem to have reached their goals here. Even if the fraud is detected during drug production it's probably small enough not to warrant a scandal, and who wants to shut down their next great drug production pipeline for what might or might not be a fraud and even if it was doesn't amount to very much?

Clearly we need adversarial science teams. Some people not connected and perhaps by law never connected directly or indirectly to each other that try to disprove the other team’s results. No husbands and wives and relatives and kids working for the other team.

You keep what you kill. If you proof something wrong you gain its funds for research.

I would guess that’s where Dias started. His thesis probably wasn’t his first piece of academic fraud. After getting away with fraud for so long, it’s possible the fraud got bigger in the classic “I’m too smart to get caught” way.

Do something bad enough times and you will think it’s normal and no big deal.

my assumption is that scientific fraud is rarely premeditated. perpetrators are not setting out to lie or cheat. they start honestly, pick their field like anyone else would, then more like with N-rays[1], they start to believe their own false - or even valid but difficult to reproduce - results. then I suspect that, in competitive fields like Alzheimer’s or superconductors, the pressure to get results is such that the temptation for some to cheat just a little to “get the paper over the line” is too high

it’s understandable really. if you’re working with extremely unreplicable results, as they are here, and you genuinely believe in your results, then it’s only a small step. it’s still inexcusable of course, but it’s easy to see the thought process

this is not the same as what you’re describing, which is setting out to cheat from the beginning, which is almost certainly much rarer and undoubtedly harder to get away with, even in obscure cul-de-sacs

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-ray

I think there is also a lot of pressure from funders to be the first to provide proof of a paradigm-breaking discovery, and tout it as a breakthrough before the claims can be verified.

By chance, about a decade ago I met the lead researcher of a NASA group that in 2010 made a shocking claim of arsenic being incorporated into bacteria's DNA in place of phosphorus at Mono Lake, CA. They later had to retract the statement after others were unable to replicate. But the research I did into the follow up indicated that NASA, who employed the scientist, did not have its astrobiologists follow basic standard microbiology protocols against sample contamination, and pushed the arsenic hypothesis as a game-changing breakthrough before it had been subjected to peer review.

Or "I can run dozens of tests on just one drop of blood"?

> If you're going to commit scientific fraud, you need to do it in the edges where nobody really cares, nobody's going to try to replicate it, nobody's going to try to build on it, and nobody's going to try to get you to explain more details because they want to build on it. You want to be working in the dead-end cul-de-sacs.

But then what would even be the point to do that?

Tenured professorship

Likewise, see the phrase "grist to the mill".

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/grist-t...

Nice advice for future pro cheaters :)

but what if you actually do have a room-temperature superconductor, but the entire community is dead set against considering even the possibility?

we already have plenty of evidence that even science people (flawed humans, like us all) cannot "do proper science" because they are swayed by irrational arguments such as distaste, shame, appeals to tradition, conformism etc. etc.

but what if you actually do have a room-temperature superconductor, but the entire community is dead set against considering even the possibility?

Well then you'll have no trouble demonstrating it and you will receive the accolades, the fame and the fortune that creating the first room-temperature superconductor will bring you.

Exactly. Even just in medicine: you’ll sell an MRI that is far cheaper than anyone else on the market, with no need for a quenching system, and with bigger margins. Etc.

> but what if you actually do have a room-temperature superconductor, but the entire community is dead set against considering even the possibility?

That's not the case, though. If you say "I've got a room temperature semiconductor" (or a reactionless drive, or an antigravity machine, or whatever) and tell people how you did it, people will _absolutely_ try to reproduce that. Not just academic institutions, either; the US Navy has a bit of a history of trying to reproduce obvious nonsense, in particular.

Who is this community that’s dead-set against this?

There’s lots and lots of academic research. And a fair bit of Department of Energy money flowing into those labs. There’s lots of interest. There’s lots of papers.

And the great thing about those who “do proper science” in materials research: you can do actual science by repeating and verifying the experiments.

This sounds like a reflexive take without any thought about what science actually is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com