ReceptioGate and the (Absolute) State of Academia | Hacker News Reader

ReceptioGate and the (Absolute) State of Academia

thecritic.co.uk

77 pointsnkurz23 comments

The conclusions are something that is well clear to anybody that is familiar with the environment of scientific research. The kind of metrics used to judge research are greatly damaging.

I mostly disagree with the distinction made between scientific research and research in the humanities - "Unlike scientists, humanities scholars generally need time, rather than large amounts of money, to do their work." - while some scientific projects also require expensive equipment, the problem of publication pressure and therefore lack of time to do proper work is identical in the sciences.

The converse is also true. Humanities would love to do large, expensive projects, but the funding for that simply doesn't exist and so the proposals are never written. People aren't running entire research programs on the rounding errors in science budgets by choice.

All the concerns are valid, of course, but there's one important caveat to cheating in academia:

Your career is a path dependency, and by cheating now, you may be brought down at any point in the future. In other words, cheaters need to make sure that their misconduct is detection-proof for a long time. That's not trivial. And once your career is tarnished, it's not easy to remain in academia, so your whole life concept is sabotaged.

Of course, some big players managed to weather scandals, but they arguably still took a serious hit to their credibility. For example, TED-famous psychologist Dan Ariely, who was the co-author of a paper with spectacularly forged data [1], and had to do an embarrassing public apology.

[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/08/19/a-scandal-...

As someone with an academic background, I would say it is very easy to forge results without anyone knowing it, at least in the biomedical field. The cases being caught are usually lazy like literally copying and pasting bands, if even a medíocre attempt to cheat was made it would have been undetectable. In many cases the professors involved in outright fraud don't even lose their career.

Of course it's a dire problem which is not nearly taken serious enough. Interestingly enough, some fields seem to have some intrinsic motivation to replicate, e.g. biology [1]. I hope we can create similar incentives for all sorts of science.

(caveat emptor: I don't know anything about biology)

[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/03/04/biology-as...

I grinned when I saw "biomedical". For some reason my mind always connects to grand old Gregor Mendel, and the Mendel Fisher controversy. I thought you might be subtly trolling, in a really clever way. I believe your comment was made in earnest.

Trusting results it tough, and only tougher with scale. Regardless, brilliant comment even if the link was unintentional.

Honestly I wasn't thinking about Mendel here. That's a big exception of course. I feel that at least some people who cheat imagine themselves to be doing something similar, cleaning up data to show a deeper truth. In reality, they cost science and individual researchers a lot of time and money.

Crazy that we only have Elizabeth Bik as the one person who tackles this kind of fraud. You’d think NIH would care more about where their billions of dollars go every year

Also, forging results is just one variety of unethical practice that is incentivized in academics today, out of many possibilities. There are many other things to do that involve greater degrees of plausible deniability.

If you have backing at your institution you can get away with no consequences like Kevin Kruse at Princeton.

https://philmagness.com/2022/10/kevin-kruses-plagiarism-scan...

Funny story from my gradschool days:

My cohort had to take a class on research methodology. The instructor assigned us to review a paper he wrote but was rejected for publication. The fate of the paper after publication was that it was published as a "Technical Report" through the university, which is where rejected papers go to save face.

One of the students decided to simple google the paper's abstract in completing the assignment to see what else was out there, and wouldn't you know, the full paper had been published in an obscure regional journal half way across the world. Everything was the same except the plagiarists made two changes to the paper:

- They removed authorship of the true authors and added themselves

- They added references to other papers they had written.

That's it. That's all they changed. Everything was exactly the same, down to the figures. Down to the references of the true author's prior work.

End result was the instructor was struck by how blatant it was. He contacted the publication and they issued a retraction. I don't know what happened to the plagiarists but I hope they learned a lesson!

> If you’ve ever wondered why academics seem mostly to talk to other academics, here’s one reason: many of us are (implicitly) penalised for spending time talking to the public, even as “public outreach” continues to be a buzzword in university management circles.

So some of the administrative bloat people complain about is because professors don't have time to do other jobs.

It's news to me that entire research institutes get fabricated.

> many of us are (implicitly) penalised for spending time talking to the public.

The infamous Sagan effect: https://astronomicca.com/2017/11/03/the-sagan-effect/

Which is how we end up with people like Neil Tyson - a planetarium administrator who switched out of research science very shortly after his PhD.

requiring professors handle it is waste. but now we require professor fight against administration team.

Requiring anything is a job, but some people volunteer because they enjoy doing it as a break from their job.

Interestingly enough the disputed institute is still online and posts things like this:

https://www.receptio.eu/kidd

I guess this case would need proper investigation form proper authorities to arrive at a final judgment what's going on there. What we have here are just two parties claiming stuff.

Even I lean to the side of believing in this "ReceptioGate" I would not judge only on the ground of reading through two random web pages and some tweets.

Some of the tweets about this were intricate teardowns and rebuttals of Rossi's factual claims, by people with significant expertise in the field.

For example, this series of tweets from medieval manuscripts cataloguer Stewart Brookes, about Rossi's claim to have colorized a black-and-white image of a miniature, rather than rip it off Kidd's blog as she actually did: https://twitter.com/Stewart_Brookes/status/16081371690460528...

I like the "blast my critics with bots" approach, even when you've been caught red-handed. Into every generation, a Bernie Shifman must fall.

What many don’t realise in academia is that your reputation is more important than your results.

The two are of course related but those who are dishonest mistakenly think their results are more important.

previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34123302

Wrong link.

I think this is the right link. It's the initial story from the point of view of the person whose work was plagiarized. The evidence of plagiarism provided there eventually led to the story that I submitted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com