‘A very disturbing picture’: another retraction for controversial physicist
nature.com
nature.com
I think this is the "money shot" here, but I admit I am biased :-). I got into a heated debate years ago over the "harshness" of treating students who cheated on an exam. The details are not particularly important but they were obscured by the fact that they involved 'foreign' students at an American university who were expelled (and lost their student Visas) after they were found to have cheated on an exam. The outrage was how these foreign students were "singled out" while "American students doing the same thing were just scolded".
There wasn't enough information available to address whether or not it was discriminatory but my assertion that all students who cheat should be expelled was rebuked as overly harsh and met with calls of "In that case Universities will have to expel their entire student bodies!"
My controversial (if you would believe the responses) take is that these sorts of "minor" infractions against cultural expectations are the basis for corruption. Whether it is telling lies to cover inconvenient (and perhaps inconsequential) truths or cheating to pass an evaluation for which one had not invested the time and effort to prepare. Habituating this behavior creates a stain on all future actions.
Since it's about exams, right? I'd say, at school tolerance is appropriate, but at university deliberate and definite cheating justifies at least being recorded like a triple-fail at that particular exam IMO. Which in Europe, AfAIK would mean being "expelled" from your main course if it's a mandatory exam.
Not sure if all the details are right but I am all for harsh penalties for certain kinds or cheating in high-stakes situations.
With "high stakes", I particularly mean things like university exams or scientifc publications, not every violation of the ethical and/or formal rule sets of society in general.
Another example would be a physician who was caught doing something that intentionally and significantly violates the rule set for physicians, endangering his patients: it's not negligience, it's malicious.
Disclosure. I never cheated in college and have a hunch that people trying to make excuses for cheaters are cheaters themselves.
I certainly expect more than losing my license if I run you over deliberately.
As for thieves aren’t they normally banned from that store or chain?
That may have happened because of past leniency, but at this point expelling students is shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted.
If 10% of students cheat, you can hold the line through punishment. If 80% of students cheat, you have a systemic problem, and beating students is only going to produce better cheaters. The whole structure is now set up to strongly disadvantage those who don't cheat, and once that happens, the decision to cheat ceases to be a moral one.
I went to school during the last century. I did not cheat. Cheating was already pretty common, I knew of plenty of people who did cheat, but the norm (as I understood it) was still to not cheat. If I were go to school today, I'm not sure what I would do. It would depend partly on the stakes.
It's like being an honest politician. You can feel good and pat yourself on the back, but you'll never get elected. (Ok, "honest" may not be the best word for it. Someone who measures the effects of various things and governs accordingly rather than by how popular and marketable positions are, and refuses to make deals that go against principles.)
However we may be operating under different assumptions; there was no assumption of grade curving (it happened a few times when an exam was a little over juiced, but it pulled people into a passing grade instead of pushing people into a failing one). On reflection it sounds like you are anticipating a curve designed to flunk a certain portion of students. I'm not sure if one or the other is the 'default' experience these days.
People were still being caught and harshly punished, but nobody would snitch if they saw you up to something. Snitching carried much more social stigma than cheating on an exam or whatever.
What didn’t help was these stupid false positive prone plagiarism detectors like turnitin which would assign an arbitrary “score” that would get you dinged for copying - even if it was original work.
This basically set a hard cap of a B/B- for any student that wasn’t either wildly talented or engaging with the course material and getting useful feedback from the assignments. It was possible to pass with a C by cheating on assignments (looking up the answer and rewriting it so it wasn’t terribly obvious) and memorizing the solutions to the preassigned problems, which was honestly fair based on the rules he set for the course.
Liars think everyone lies; cheaters think everyone cheats. I suspect these were university administrators, which is a job that I can definitely see attracting know-nothing losers who cheated their way through college. So of course they think everyone else did too. I was never aware of even a single instance of cheating among anyone I knew at college (although I was not exactly an inquisitor about it either). I suspect the rate of cheating is much lower than these admins think it is, and also support expelling everyone who is conclusively caught cheating. Conclusively is the big caveat, though: we'd have to be very, very sure. This means a lot more than running their essay through a "plagiarism checker", "AI checker", or some other lazy approach.
However, what is the societal problem here? It's the problem that in academia, there are such pressures to publish and be first nowadays that many people will do anything to get ahead. It doesn't help that social media and news sites have introduced a sort of gamification into it.
People have their natures, and the current state of academia encourages cheating, plain and simple. Just like the current state of finance encourages market manipulation.
If we want to fix it, simply outing these fakes will not be enough. While I don't have much sympathy for the cheaters, I also don't have much sympathy for the scientific community that has created this environment.
Edit: not to suggest that is anything inherent about people from those cultures.
If you can not do honest work in academia you should leave and go work somewhere else.
Fraud is not the correct reaction to the problems of academia, as it actively hurts it even more. Nobody is forced to do academic research for a living, especially if you have a degree in physics.
Not in the short term. And only for yourself personally if you are found out.
Of course there are perverse incentives which goes against the scientific spirit. It doesn’t even require malicious intent. Neglect and bias can be similarly powerful negative forces.
I did say that fraud is something that is essentially encouraged in academia. Nobody is forced to do it of course, but then again, any system will have its flaws that encourages bad behaviour, and it is also advantageous to restructure the system to minimize that.
Steroid users are few and far between, and we must weed them out of baseball.
Nearly everyone is using steroids, but it was their choice, so it's their own fault.
Classic cases are the Bell labs guy finding organic semiconductors and fermi lab guy finding new elements. They both were just making up stuff which they believed existed but just needed work to be found and published. They would make up experimental data to support existence of theoretical things. The assumption was just publish this first, get the accolades then use it to get money to get someone to eventually do this properly. But they just predicted stuff which weren’t true. Nobody knows the amount of bullshit that was made up that eventually turned out to be true.
All of this because scientists these days are not expected to work on things. They are expected to produce results. Nobody is giving passionate people time and space to explore things. It’s all about results now.
The irony is that the reward for running the rat race is freedom from rat race. Postdocs publish random crap to boost numbers for their tenure which they think will relieve them of this stupidity and let them focus on pure research. but once they catch the tigers tail they gotta keep running.
These jobs do exist[1], and we as a society need to figure out how to stop organizing research around a single manager (professor) with zero meaningful oversight.
It's true, and also entirely unhelpful.
That might have been right and proper. But years later, I read that of the top 30 finalists that year, every single one was taking performance-enhancing drugs. Presumably the same was true in previous years. Armstrong just happened to be the first-place finalist in a year where they finally had the ability to start testing.
In a case like that, it's not enough to say "if you can't bike fast without steroids, then biking isn't for you!" If cheating is pervasive, those who can't or don't cheat will fall behind and quit, and all that's left will be those willing to cheat. From the POV of Science writ large, if the culture is rotten then the incentives must be changed. You can't rely on the independent integrity of every individual not to cheat, or you'll just end up with only cheaters.
Telling people to be good is a waste of time unless they're your kid or loved one and they really don't want to disappoint you. Fixing your system so it doesn't reward people who commit fraud is the only thing that even has a possibility of working.
The publish-or-perish mentality combined with the grant system introduces a lot of bad incentives into the scientific ecosystem.
I would say yes. I think we need to place a lot more value in publishing research that isn't surprising. Research that simply replicates (or fails to replicate) other research should be just as valuable to one's career as finding something unexpected.
I scientist that has replicated a bunch of studies and identified several that they couldn't replicate is doing something very very valuable for the human race and we (universities, grants, etc.) need to recognize that.
Scientists didn't create this environment: you did. We, as a society, demanded that some sector produce new scientific research at a rate and level that is capable of supporting our economy, and then we allocated a very restricted set of resources for them to do it. And they've done miracles, too! We would literally not be alive today if the scientific community hadn't developed the improvements that allow us to feed, house, and provide energy to 8 billion people. And that's before we get to strictly optional stuff like the computers and networks that power this website.
It's a serious business and obviously that kind of pressure leads to bad results sometimes. But the correct response is to be grateful that we have an engine in our society that produces this basic research (since industry has dramatically lowered spending on basic R&D over the past decades) and try to improve it, not to be pointlessly angry at scientists for living in the system that society's incentives have built for us.
However as they teach the little kids, trust your gut instinct. This person didn't just plagiarize this work, but also his PhD thesis: https://www.science.org/content/article/plagiarism-allegatio...
> If we want to fix it, simply outing these fakes will not be enough.
Yes, but without outing these fakes and harshly and punishing them as the first step, we're immediately communicating that this is "ok". "Just fake the data and throw it over the wall, if you get caught, just blame it on pressure and the general academic culture".
Of course, the researcher in question has already raised venture funding (~$16.5M) and filed for patents.
Or to put it another way, I understand the impulse, buy why not self reflect a bit to figure out if that impulse has merit (it doesn't)?
Surely the fact that, overall, we do make meaningful and real scientific progress over time (we may now have room temperature superconductors!) shows there is more value in the academic process than there is problem, though obviously the problems are substantial and create significant limitations.
If your result is interesting, people will try to replicate it; it won't replicate, and you'll have to explain why.
If your result is not interesting, people won't try to replicate it, but then you don't gain much by publishing it.
For example, US census agency person for a county can just make up numbers based on his understanding of the place without actually doing a full survey. He believes that even if they check, it will be within reasonable tolerance and the final results will be similar. So he just sits at home keep making up numbers year after year. Until someday USPS opens a postoffice based on the numbers and get no customers causing a full investigation.
Once you have a critical mass, then cheating becomes normalized and you would be a fool not to cheat.
Reality is, the way bureaucracies work is the only way to survive in it is to become compromised so that all the other compromised people in it can trust you. From what I can tell from government, there's an informal initiation stage, where you are pressured to commit a fraud, where it shows you can "play ball," and then you are in the fold. An academic fraud jubilee would free a lot of people to do real work. It sounds crazy, but not nearly as crazy as what would have had to occur to create the replication crisis.
So first they put the bait inside a plastic box, to weed out all the dumb fishes.
Then they put the box inside another sealed wooden box, with a combination lockpad. Because only a really smart fish with skilled fin-paws should be able to figure out how to open also that box.
For better measure, they finally put the wooden crate out of the water, to select for olympic fishes able to keep its breath for a longer time.
And then put an electronic device in the bottom with an encrypted map to the treasure. When some fish will appear will be the most stupendous fish in the sea, with the most brilliant scales; And everybody will be happy to eat it
And then science waits...
and waits some more,...
a little more...
And after one year, science starts wondering where all the fishes go, and why all of the candidates that appeared are rats.
If you put too much requisites and ask for only ideal flawless careers, made in some unicornia university; in the short time the candidates interested in your job position will start lying. After a while all that remain at your door are cheaters
So, well... enjoy the fruits of your brilliant strategy.
scientific institutions != scientific method
Academia is the most prestigious scientific institution.
For some. For others its national labs, like Los Alamos or NASA centers. In those, the culture is very different.
That's an opinion. Industry does a lot more worthwhile science than academia, and does it without tax money, in my opinion.
Was the transistor invented by academia? You can argue that's engineering, rather than science. In my opinion the difference is semantics.
(Currently, it seems like, this is very often not the case. Hence, your trust in current-science-as-conducted should be correspondingly lower. Lots of variation by field, probably, too.)
(Though then again maybe you shouldn't even believe anything until you see it having actual real effects in your day to day life?)
Please.
Ed: to be clear, the one making the argument about publishing pressure in a sensible way is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36881029
Observing that fixing the latter might eliminate most of the behavior doesn't mean you think the behavior's good.
Police officer stops someone for driving over the limit. The driver:
- But I wasn't the fastest going on the road. What about the others?
- So when you go fishing, do you always catch the biggest fish?
Are you saying doing science is so hard the only way to succeed is to cheat?
This is a slap in the face to scientists doing honest work.
Sure in the short term dishonesty might work for a scientist but long term? Legacy after death? I'm not so sure on that.
Surely the conditions for being a professional academic are much more favorable than times in the past. (By virtue only that University is more accessible to more people today than any other time)
Just because we see flaws today doesn't mean that those flaws can not be 'fixed'. (Nor that we won't discover new flaws and new fixes: engineering is an interative process).
> Surely the conditions for being a professional academic are much more favorable than times in the past. (By virtue only that University is more accessible to more people today than any other time)
If anything this has made things worse in the current system, because it has grown so much more competitive. Competition is good only so far as success in the competition is based on contributing to the overall goal, and academia lacks a good alignment between that and rewards, so the competition has some fairly significant negative effects.
I agree there are likely ways to fix the current system, but it will require a concerted effort from many directions, as the current incentive structure rewards many in the current system for perpetuating it.
God's sake, you need to be able to think better about these kinds of things than this to understand business. It's all human systems—you ask for bad behavior, you get bad behavior, and sitting around tut-tutting over the people doing the bad behavior won't do jack-shit to fix things, no matter how good it feels. It's immature as hell.
Putting down groups of other commenters just makes the thread more dyspeptic, even if you're right.
... however, complaining about it doesn't help, sure, and I'm aware that posting (in basically any capacity...) doesn't improve it, so, shouldn't have posted. I'll leave it be, thanks for the deserved "bop".
I do wish there were a way for HN to get better at this specific thing, as it's always been about the same amount of bad, and avoiding non-tech topics doesn't seem to be something HN's interested in doing ("it's hard to define what that is" well, yes, but other tech-focused forums manage regardless—but they also get less engagement, and that does matter for this site's advertising purposes, I get it).
I think downplaying identity was a good idea to try and I like the ideals of it and appreciate what it's trying to achieve, but I'd say the evidence is firmly favoring the "failed" column for that experiment. We see the same people having the same extensive bad exchanges over and over, and identity helps avoid that with group-education about repeated behaviors by certain posters in certain contexts. Changing course might help with this and some of the other most-acute issues on the site. I expect nothing, just putting it out there. I know, unsolicited opinions are like assholes :-)
Failing that, user-managed blocklists would be a godsend—I know those come with their own problems, but it'd be well worth it on here. Bonus points if you could have separate lists for tech and non-tech posts (I know, tricky, that's why it's bonus points, haha). Some posters exclusively post uninformed flamebait nonsense (within the threshold of "HN Nice" so it keeps happening—not a dig at moderation, that's a Hard Problem in that space) in non-tech threads, but do contribute positively to tech threads. ("so correct them" -> folks do, that's how the threads keep happening, it's like sitting in on a 101 course mostly attended by non-majors who are nonetheless passionate about their uninformed position, and arguing with the professor and won't accept they may be wrong—it's not productive or enlightening) It'd be lovely to never see that again, but get to keep reading the site. Blocklists are the #1-100 features I'd add to the site, if I had a genie that could grant 100 only-HN-feature-related wishes.
His major discovery, assuming it's real, is room-temp superconductivity in nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride. Trouble is, anything which contains lutetium is going to be intrinsically more scarce and much more expensive than the lead-and-copper RT superconductor that was announced a few days ago. Doped lutetium crystals are also much more difficult to prepare -- and, even more troublesome, it seems they only work at 1 GPa pressure, which is absolutely non-trivial and makes them much more difficult to utilize than commonplace superconductors that can simply be cooled with LN2.
...Oh, and it might not even be real. [1]
To have a different research group discover your holy grail, as you're stuck defending yourself from misconduct allegations, must be an incredibly bad feeling.
though I think that to keep up with the scale, maybe I should call it "publishing institution" (alongside, government institutions, organized crime institutions (arguably blended with the government in some places), industrial institutions, and merchant institutions like banks)
so then, journalism was the first to be redrawn by the internet technology when tech companies became the biggest advertisers in the world. then music, even 'BIG entertainment' is on strike.
and now academia is having its moment, and so many things are unraveling as well
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/07/too-greedy-m...
also the scandals in standford and harvard.
also this https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=202307201... which is bad because the academia is intended to be above this "petty geopolitics". as far as I know academic collaboration didn't quite stop either during the cold war, but I was born after it was over so I don't really know this, might be wrong.
and more than all these, the whole sci-hub debacle is the biggest telltale.
this is not about good or bad science, but about the money incentives.
maybe I'm in a news-bubble, but I also see things about postdocs being a fraud, even PhD's are now a dubious gamble?
and then I add my personal experience doing a masters at a public 3rd world country university, and I just hope it burns to the ground, which is a bad idea to dwell on.
https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-04-20/one-of-th...
"One of the most internationally cited scientists, Ai Koyanagi, forced to renounce her controversial contract with a Saudi university"
"The psychiatrist, currently employed in Spain at the Sant Joan de Déu Research Institute, declared that her main place of work was King Abdulaziz University, with the aim of elevating the Arab institution in the international rankings"
And is not the only researcher in that gravy train:
"Seven highly cited Spanish researchers [employed by Spain], paid by universities in Saudi Arabia to increase their prestige [posing as fake full-time employees of that Universities]"
I see that the mathematics ultimately provide the basis for a lot of that research, which can be summed up as measuring various things, recording the measurements, and publishing the whole thing. But it's all built on the same essential math at the foundation.
and the mathematics is duplicated a lot to, but this is hard to see, you'd need a 'real' expert, of the kind that can be hand counted
The real peer review happens afterwards, when other researchers actually engage with your work.
A theoretical scientist will be caught much sooner and it will cause an irreparable damage to his/her reputation. Who will ever take them seriously after that?
Every physicist in this field would pick the paper apart (probably more so due to the history of the subject matter) and in the end it would not be reproducible.
And it would be a result that most labs looking into this would try to reproduce.
Imho he will surely lose his faculty appointment by the time this is over, and won’t have a prayer at getting another.
One of my favorite video essays is a long exploration of that case:
Do you have any more recommendations?
Or suggestions of channels to check out?
Of those, "Endnote 2: White Fascism" I consider the most important.
Unfortunately, this is further complicated by the simple fact that not everyone can even begin to evaluate whether a given information is bs. That is a problem.
130 years ago, and people certainly felt the need to record it.
https://ourworldindata.org/spanish-flu-largest-influenza-pan...