Think of Tour de France. Famously doping-riddled. There are a lot of clean cyclists, but they are much less likely to be able to compete in the tour.
You can fight cheating with policing: doping controls, etc. But as the competition gets more extreme, the more resources you need to spend on policing. There's a breaking point, where what you need to spend on policing exceeds what you get from competition.
This is why almost no municipalities have a free-for-all policy for taxis. There are too many people technically able to drive people for money. All that competition drives prices lower, sure, but asymptotically. You get less and less lower prices the more competition you pile on - but the incentives for taxi drivers to cheat (by evading taxes, doing money laundering as a side gig etc.) keep growing. London did an interesting thing - with their gruelling geography knowledge exam, they tried to use all that competitive energy to buy something other than marginally lower prices. Still incentive to cheat, of course, but catching cheaters on an exam is probably cheaper and easier than catching cheaters in the economy.
(Municipalities that auction taxi permits get to keep most of the bad incentives, without the advantage of competition on price.)
A success story would be this is exposed at large... we work out some kind of effective peer-reproduced tests... and the hundreds/thousands of cheating professors are fired.
FWIW, most top-ranked CS conferences have an artifact evaluation track, and it doesn't look good if you submit an experimental paper and don't go through the artifact evaluation process. Things are certainly changing in CS, at least on the experimental side.
It's also possible that theorems are incorrect, but subsequent work that figures this out will comment on it and fix it.
The scientific record is self-correcting, and fraud / bullshit does get caught out.
I might agree they're self-correcting in the (very) long-term, but we're seeing fictitious results fund entire careers. We don't know the damage that having 20+ years of incorrect results being built upon will have... And that's not to speak of those who were overlooked, and left academia, because their opportunities were taken by these cheaters (who knows what cost that has for society).
Study claims 1 in 4 cancer research papers contains faked data https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/06/study-claims-1-in-4-...
As an aside, the article cites that there have been a total of 2000 retracted papers in the NIH database. Considering that there are 9 Million papers in the database overall, that is a tiny percentage.
So you deflect from the entire content of the article with that distraction? And then an additional misdirection regarding retraction? Why?
> So you deflect from the entire content of the article with that distraction? And then an additional misdirection regarding retraction? Why?
What do you mean? I take issue with the headlines and reporting. And I believe if one claims lack of evidence, sloppy evidence or fraudulent evidence one should be pretty diligent about ones one evidence.
Regarding the claims in the article. If you look at the 1 in 4 article you find that the reality is actually much more nuanced, which is exactly my point. The reporting does not necessarily reflect the reality.
If you call that deflection...
One nuance is that his approach only focused on one easily identifiable form of fraud: Western blot images that can be shown to be fraudulent because they were copies of images use in different papers. Of all the potential opportunities for fraud, one must think that this must represent just a small portion.
If there are other nuances you care to mention, I'm all ears.
Instead, you refer to an entirely different article, as if the article I cited has no relevant content, which misleads casual readers of this comment stream. To paraphrase your comment in a less misleading way: "Inside this article you can find a link to an entirely different article whose content does not support the headline of the original article."
Instead, you're repeatedly citing this 25% number as if it was something the paper established. Even the author of the paper disagrees with you.
Yes, the ArsTechnica headline is poorly written, and not supported by the content of the article, because not all instances of duplication are fraud, but we can clarify that issue by quoting the article itself: "... the fact that it's closer to one in eight should still be troubling."
Another way to look at it: perhaps Tessier-Lavigne only got this scrutiny because he was president of the university. And the fact that they didn't guarantee anonymity when "not guaranteeing anonymity in an investigation of this importance is an 'extremely unusual move'" might be a sign that the scrutiny was politically diminished.
So it could be that most of the equally dubious researchers don't get caught because not enough attention is paid to patterns like this except when it's somebody especially prominent. Or it could be that this one was not as well covered up, perhaps because of the sheer number of issues. Or that the cross-institution issues made Stanford more willing to note the wrongdoing. Or that Stanford is less likely to sweep things under the rug because of its prominence. Or just that there was some ongoing tension between the trustees and the president and that this was an opportunity to win a political fight.
Grad students, Supreme Court clerks, 19-year-old soldiers.
Perhaps "nothing" is too harsh. Various people in the field raised concerns on several occasions. But the journals did nothing. The "field" still honoured him. And _Stanford_ did nothing (except enable him and pay him well) until public embarrassment revealed the ugliness.
E.g., in math / theory, if someone has a history of making big blunders that invalidate their results, you will be very hesitant to accept results from a new paper they put on arXiv until your community has vetted the result.
So yes, I do trumpet science as a model of a rational, self-correcting social enterprise, at least in CS.
Other sciences like biology and psychology have some way to go.
Forcing authors to share raw data and code in all papers would already be a start. I don't know why top impact factor papers don't do this already.
Forgive my ignorance but I thought that was SOP for all papers. Is it not?
But really we shouldn't be talking about math errors and falsification in the same category.
> A 2016 survey by Nature on 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility found that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiment results (including 87% of chemists, 77% of biologists, 69% of physicists and engineers, 67% of medical researchers, 64% of earth and environmental scientists, and 62% of all others), and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. But fewer than 20% had been contacted by another researcher unable to reproduce their work. The survey found that fewer than 31% of researchers believe that failure to reproduce results means that the original result is probably wrong, although 52% agree that a significant replication crisis exists. Most researchers said they still trust the published literature
Not sure if the results of that online study have (or can) themselves be reproduced, however. It's turtles all the way down.
I don't expect 1-5% fraud in airline pilots, bank tellers, grocery store clerks, judges, structural engineers, restaurant chefs, or even cops (they can be assholes but you don't have to bribe them in functional countries).
I think academics can do better than 1-5% fraudulent.
Store clerks, theft is about 1-2% of sales typically. It has been said for years that the majority of that theft is from employees. Airline pilots have been known to drink during their flights (or go away from there seat for other reasons that are not in the rules).
Cops, I mean don't get me started, just the protection of a cop who has done something wrong by the other cops would count as fraudulent, but I don't see many cops going after their own black sheep.
Judges, in Germany deals (i.e. the accused pleads guilty to lesser charges so the bigger ones get dropped) are only legal under very limited circumstances (almost never and need to be properly documented). Nevertheless, in studies >80% of lawyers reported that they had encountered these deals).
I think you seriously underestimate the amount of fraudulent behaviour.