Comment by mk_stjames | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mk_stjames | Hacker News Reader

This is obviously a quickly produced paper to get the finding out but.... I find there to be so much missing and so many things poorly worded or posed about their process that would have taken zero time to expound upon, it's infuriating.

"All the reactions are carried out under 10^-2 Pa"

OK, I know they mean 10^-2 of vacuum. But why not say that? "10^-2 Pa" isn't enough. Was this a full vacuum oven? Done in sealed quartz vials? Was there a purge, like argon, or just air?

If you look at the oven temperature profiles, you can see the ramp up time (0-2hr, 0-2hr, and 0-4hrs respectively), and the hold time, but the ramp down time isn't specified! There is no cooling rate, it just shows... a line drop off, with no end time. No label. This can be very critical. Were these just pulled straight out and air quenched? And were they kept under vacuum until at room temp or not?

Like, adding extra experimental setup details would take no time whatsoever to include in a paper and yet these researchers just don't do it. It's either pure fucking laziness or some sorta holier-than-thou gatekeeping that comes from theoreticians, or a combination, and it is the reason that replication is so hard in science right now. I would hope that no journal would accept this shit.

I agree, it could use more of the easy details, however, I don't have much issue with 10^-2 Pa, since standard atmospheric pressure is 101,325 Pa, so 0.1 Pa (10^-2 Pa, or 1.45x10^-6 psi) is definitely understood as a vacuum, but you're correct, why not just add "vacuum" for thoroughness.

I know mercury gauges use to have a 0 to 30 scale sometimes (not 0 to -30), and that was confusing!

10^-2 is 0.01

Classical off by one when you wrap through zero (not sure if this one has a specific name).

off by 1 (order of magnitude)

Off by one floating point

off by one em

Wouldn’t it be 1ch

It’s actually also an example of cache invalidation being difficult if you think about it…

Yep, had that on my calc, and then skipped the zero when typing the post. Good catch. Even closer to a pure vacuum!

Why isn't 10^-2 Pa enough? Clearly they mean absolute pressure. What would 10^-2 of vacuum mean?

What personal benefit does this gain someone to publish it so quickly? Is it just social media attention?

There are no prizes for being second in science.

Except, most likely, in exactly this story with the second paper from the original Korean authors (if things can be proven to be true).

There's a long standing joke (but also true) that many things are named after the last person to find them.

See, for instance, Stigler's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy (for the concept an example itself)

The list is interesting too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_Stigler%27...

>> What personal benefit does this gain someone to publish it so quickly? Is it just social media attention?

> There are no prizes for being second in science.

The reply (second quote above) fits in context, but there is more to it.

1. Publishing early at the expense of quality has a way of catching up to one's reputation. (Hopefully.)

2. History has many examples of scientists who were "too early" or not "in the right place at the right time" to get recognition.

3. A result may get little attention in one field but a lot in another. One example that comes to mind are string-matching algorithms. Sometimes they seem a dime-a-dozen in CS. But the "right" ones have transformed DNA sequencing.

There is intense pressure to publish as many papers as possible at Chinese universities. This has led to a big problem of faked or just bad research papers coming out of China, so people are generally skeptical of them

This is a quite biased view.

As a non-Chinese scientist, I can attest that there is intense pressure to publish as many papers as possible pretty much everywhere, and this leads to a problem of bad research across the world.

China may be among the worst offenders in this respect, but the particular thing the OP is asking about doesn't strike me as a Chinese-specific thing at all. I see non-Chinese scientists rushing half-baked results to arXiv all the time.

It's not biased, it's a fact. I see it all the time as PC/AC/reviwer/etc.

There is deluge of terrible papers from China that are just a mess, below any imaginable standard. Ones that labs in the EU/US/Russia/Japan/etc. don't put out. Yes, everyone has to publish, and there are bad papers out there, but the volume and low quality from China is unmatched.

Unmatched doesn’t make it qualitatively unique. It’s a problem everywhere.

If the problem is much bigger from certain countries then I would say that qualifies as qualitatively unique.

If those certain countries have a very big population I'd say is more of a quantitative issue. If china had 10 scientists they couldn't pump as many papers, fake or good or not as if they're 1million scientists

Isn't the population of China much bigger as well? Laws of percentages and what not can go along way. Has anyone displayed a percentage of rushed/inaccurate studies between countries to see if the lines normalize?

i saw such a chart a few days ago, specifically for withdrawn papers -- forgive me if i can't dig it up again but china made up something like 50% of the total number

e: recollection was slightly off but it is actually much worse! https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/s11948-017-9939-6

china is truly in a league of its own with this stuff, by literal orders of magnitude

Population of researchers != Population it's more than 4x as large in terms of population but only has ~25% more researchers while having around 50x the retractions.

> Isn't the population of China much bigger as well?

Yes, but official government stats have also been overstating the population a bit. I think it mostly affects the younger generation at present though.

lol I don’t know where you got this impression but during the one-child policy phase it’s widely known that people would underreport their kids to avoid fines. Why would the population be overstated?

> lol I don’t know where you got this impression but during the one-child policy phase it’s widely known that people would underreport their kids to avoid fines.

The news mostly. But also this guy[1], who I guess is using the leaked data. But even the official data shows a huge drop in the 0-4 bucket.

> Why would the population be overstated?

As I understand it[2], the local governments are reliant on two sources for income: land sales and money from the central government. Both are influenced by demographic change, so there's incentives to adjust the numbers upwards to keep revenue coming in.

[1]: https://zeihan.com/new-chinese-demographic-data-population-c... [2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-13/china-s-p...

> It's not biased, it's a fact. I see it all the time as PC/AC/reviwer/etc.

Let's agree this is anecdotal at best, and move on. Facts need data to back them up. There's no data or links to research in this post.

I'm confident that poster's experiences are based on the data they saw

if you're doubting the veracity of the poster's claims, just say so directly

Data linked from another comment.

https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/s11948-017-9939-6

face culture and science dont mesh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)

Seems like a wild generalization.

It is not wild, if you can't disagree with the majority I'm skeptical of your ability to discover truths.

I anecdotally feel religious or leftist western circles very much fall under the definition of face culture though.

That is crazy talk. I don't believe it. Korea and Japan both have crazy levels of "face" in their culture (and Taiwan to somewhat less extent), and they all produce huge amounts of high quality scientific papers.

China publishes more science research with fabricated peer-review than everyone else put together

https://qz.com/978037/china-publishes-more-science-research-...

I respectfully submit that you may be providing an anecdotal experience.

It’s so bad that China’s courts have called for the death penalty for scientific fraud.

https://www.statnews.com/2017/06/23/china-death-penalty-rese...

Goodness me.

“More than everyone else together” is meaningless without considering the relevant population sizes (in this case, the relevant population is “number of researchers producing papers”).

If China has half the worlds academics-writing-papers, one would _expect_ them to be responsible for half the fabricated ones.

Chinese researchers [1] publish fewer total articles in Nature than American ones [2]. It's just one journal, with an admittedly western-leaning audience, but that's what the QZ article focuses on. It does include the caveat that it's possible that translation problems played a bigger role in the Chinese retractions than they did for other countries' retractions, although it would be surprising if that were the only cause of such a widespread problem.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/country-outputs/China [2]: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/country-outputs/United%2...

Nice to see a government that takes science seriously. In the US if you fake data you can become president of Stanford (for a while).

It’s not taking science seriously when you have to threaten scientists with death. A healthy system wouldn’t need such threats.

> In the US if you fake data you can become president of Stanford (for a while).

One wonders: is the unearned time as an elite university president worth being humiliated by an 18 year old on the student newspaper and being forced to resign in disgrace?

For me that's an easy no, but others may have different preferences.

> It’s so bad that China’s courts have called for the death penalty for scientific fraud.

To add some context, the death penalty is used much more widely in China than a Westerner might realize, so to them this idea is not quite as radical as it might seem. The PRC government is a bit tight lipped about exact policies, but it's known the death penalty gets employed for things like corruption and even major economic crimes like fraud or money counterfeiting. And of course drug offenses and the violent crimes.

And for speaking out against the power structure. The death penalty for bad action is only if you are on the wrong side politically. Xi’s family is among the wealthiest in the world due to corruption.

This is quite a off-topic comment. Also, does the Biden family get showered with money left and right exactly because they’re hardworking?

The “death penalty” under discussion is for faking drug results and causing deaths of patients, which sounds reasonable.

Please refrain from whataboutism. We're not discussing Biden or the US. We're discussing the corrupt Chinese elites and the authoritarian regime of the PRC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Replication is just a nice term for it. It can just as well be a crisis of fraud with the failure of replicating fraudulent results as the consequence.

Scientific fraud and garbage results is a huge problem Everywhere. It's actually big enough to nearly invalidate the entire field of psychology.

> The move, as Nature explained, groups clinical trial data fraud with counterfeiting so that “if the approved drug causes health problems, it can result in a 10-year prison term or the death penalty, in the case of severe or fatal consequences.”

To be fair, according to TFA the death penalty is only for clinical trials where the drug or procedure, due to faked or doctored data, causes severe or fatal consequences.

It actually seems pretty reasonable to me. You develop a drug that actually kills people but fake your data to show it saves lives. Then you make money while people start dying, essentially killing people because your career was more important than reality. I’d call that murder.

Citations. The early papers will be cited more often. And citations are kind of a currency in science.

Some background on the drama (and the rush to publish): https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/15egs7i/avg_ru...

and

https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685294623449874432

The papers were totally rushed.

8teAPi admitted they were essentially writing fiction generated from some of the known facts

It's just a preprint. I appreciate the fast update of progress on a new development. Just don't give it the same weight as a peer reviewed piece.

From what I understand it was discovered in 1999, hence LK99. Doesn't seem very quick to me in that case.

Your point is fair. It feels it also underlies the importance of "continuous teaching and learning", global (or assigned) peer reviewing. At moments in time where discoveries like this one happen, one could hope that beyond "open publishing" like Arxiv, comes a true "science in the open", with room for cooperation. Looking forward evolving further our current system.

Or they are holding the details of their process close to their chest, in anticipation of a lucrative spin-off.

A breakthrough of this kind should be illegal to patent

Why do you think so?

Why do you not think so..... what if the internet was patented? What if copper was patented?

Not comparable to copper at all.

The formula and atomic structure should not be patentable (like gene sequence), but a novel and non-obvious industrial process to fabricate such material could be patented. There may be many different such patents.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com