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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's true, and also entirely unhelpful.
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.