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Comment by laborcontract | Hacker News Reader

How are the feds able to stick a wire fraud charge on almost anything except for academic fraud? It's one thing to make a mistake like Reinhart and Rogoff's embarrassing excel blunder. It's entirely something else to falsify data.

> Under Zlokovic’s leadership, the USC institute has expanded to more than 30 labs and grown its annual funding more than 10-fold, exceeding $39 million in 2022. NIH grants to Zlokovic have totaled about $93 million. A prodigious fundraiser, in the past decade alone he has added at least $28 million from private sources, according to USC.

So the NIH has given the man $93m. Surely that's a place to start?

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Wire fraud and prison sentences would be a good start. Besides the absolute dollar amount, the amount of damage done in the form of second order affects is enormous.

Could the NIH file some kind of civil suit here?

Potentially for something like fraud. There could also maybe be a False Claims Act suit here.

Where do you draw the line? I saw many funding proposals for extremely abstract category theory justified on the basis it helps number theorists solve problems related to cryptography and protect e-commerce. Between friends everyone knows this is not true. Am not against abstract research: given how cheap it is, I don't understand why we can just allow it to be funded without having to provide justification that makes everyone feel a bit of a criminal while writing the proposal. It should be seen sort of how we public commissions art.

Another type of mini-fraud: you could say almost 80% of applied machine learning papers contain serious methodical mistakes that are almost equivalent to falsifying data, and what's worse the authors are well aware of and even the reviewers. I am talking about the kaggle-type ones where you apply some kind of PCA or neural network on some relatively small dataset.

It's kind of sad that you need to jump through a lot of hoops for research funding but when talking about things like military funding everyone is ready to find it more than required and not ask too many questions

Because it actually is? I don’t understand how one can compare abstract research into category theory and investment into millions of people not getting killed and conquered and get sad that the latter comes up on top.

We're not talking about Saddam's military budget, we're talking about the one they used to kill and conquer him.

Saddam Hussein started the Iran-Iraq war, in which Iraq achieved no significant gain, at the cost of between one and two million lives. This war took place in the middle of his 40-year tenure as a president who killed hundreds of thousands of his own people with the same military equipment.

How is that an argument in favor of military spending?

It would almost sound like a noble motivation for all that shock-and-awe spending, except that wasn't the motivation.

Nobody cared when he was actually killing Iranians or domestics. Back then, kids of exiled Shah-regimers were protesting US gov't support for Iraq (widely reported overseas, widely ignored in the US) at colleges in CA, Michigan and Texas and getting beat up for their trouble.

Plus we were rolling in all that $15/b oil with the flooded oil market so domestic win-win. Except for all those oilmen in TX who went bust. Well, they voted for Ron, so I guess they got what they wanted.

Yes and who was supplying the weapons and other support during that time? Arguably defence spending in the US and western Europe directly contributed to the deaths.

There is a lot of defense spending that does nothing to support that mission, or does so in a terribly inefficient way. Given the scale of spending we're talking about, many billions of dollars get wasted every year, but folks who get worked up over a few million wasted on research are often unconcerned with 1000 times more wasteful projects as long as they have the military labeled slapped on them.

From where I’m standing, American defense spending is inadequately low for the current situation. US is struggling to increase artillery shell production from 15 to 30k per year, when only Ukraine conflict should consume hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Same with many other items — American and NATO stockpiles are low, and production capabilities almost non-existent compared to adversaries.

You mean getting killed and conquered?

If we had a social norm against pretending abstract research would "enable the creation of new materials, advance quantum computing, and enhance the security of your bank account" the agencies would learn to fund it anyway, because they would realize you run out of applied directions in the absence of basic research. Right now it's all laundered, so they think they can fund far more applied research than is available.

We used to have a social norm like that. It eroded, because populist politicians started ridiculing research proposals they found frivolous. Now most proposals are riddled with fake justifications, because people wanted more accountability in how tax money is spent.

Some of that blame should be pointed at those that proliferated frivolous and ridiculous research proposals.

> Some of that blame should be pointed at those that proliferated frivolous and ridiculous research proposals

There are fewer of these than you'd think. Modeling wobbling plates is easier mocked than done, for example.

There aren't. There are entire fields of this stuff.

Taxpayers shouldn't be funding studies into the weaving techniques used by pre-Columbian natives in the upper Mississippi basin.

No, the research was fine. For example, a friend of my family spent a large part of his career writing an extensive bilingual dictionary for an indigenous language in Southern Mexico. He won a "golden fleece" award from asshole Senator Proxmire of Wisconsin, who thought dictionaries for languages with only a few hundred thousand speakers was a waste of government research grant money.

Is this satire?

Creating a bilingual dictionary for an indigenous language spoken by a few thousand people who aren't even in the country funding that research is the definition of "a waste of government research grant money."

Is this satire? Leaving aside your sloppy reading, this is one of the the most exaggerated examples of a stereotypical "technical person utterly bereft of human perspective" takes I have ever seen on this website. Which is really saying something, because there are a lot of blinkered people here.

I feel profound sadness and pity for anyone with such an impoverished worldview. I hope someday you can experience some literature, art, nature, or human connection that can pierce though it and help you reconnect with your innate capacities for empathy and wonder.

What a ridiculous ad hominem response.

Not wanting to use taxpayer money to fund your friend’s whimsical intellectual odyssey is not the same as lacking empathy and wonder.

Keep your pity—you sound like you could use a fair dose of empathy yourself.

Please don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Who were these "populist politicians" exactly? I don't remember any of them ever talking about university research.

It'd actually be great to have some politicians who ridicule frivolous academic research. It's not like there's a shortage of it especially in the humanities and social sciences (where there's no such thing as basic research anyway). Alas, their attentions are all elsewhere.

>where there's no such thing as basic research anyway

Did you mean "applied research"?

>It's not like there's a shortage of it especially in the humanities and social sciences (where there's no such thing as basic research anyway).

Careful where you cast stones, my friend. There is a lot of bullshit in software engineering, too.

Gestures towards pile of discarded JS frameworks...

Was the development of those JS frameworks funded with federal tax dollars?

That's a separate point (and we'd be largely in agreement, I suspect).

In fact, I'm sure you've noticed the heaps of government-funded software trash.

No I meant basic research.

Academia justifies itself by claiming it's necessary to do "basic", "foundational", "fundamental" or "blue sky" research in a non-commercial setting, because supposedly corporations can't afford to do long term research that doesn't have immediate application. So in this model academic scientists develop a foundation of firm and rigorous theory about how nature works, publish a literature on it for the good of all mankind, and then shorter term applied research is done by companies to derive practical insights from that literature.

That model doesn't seem right, because there are lots of corporate research programmes into fundamental theory that were/are lavishly funded despite a decade+ of no ROI, most obviously at the moment AI. But let's put that aside and pretend it's true.

Problem is that humanities and social studies don't produce a body of theory on which anything can be built. Humanities produces only critical theory, which despite the name is more like a belief system than a scientific theory. The social studies produce a lot of that too, but even outside critical theory their output is just a giant pile of random thought bubbles and mini-studies to try and prove them. There's nothing much linking these studies, no frameworks that make reliable new predictions. Instead we get an endless stream of Just So claims that fall apart when people try to replicate them, but even failure to replicate doesn't have any impact because there's nothing underneath them to be invalidated. At most it's shown that this one specific paper isn't reliable.

Contrast to something like physics where the work of academic theorists is all about coming up with unified theories of everything, which could then be used to develop practical applications. Einstein is super famous because he invalidated large swathes of theory and opened up space for new theory to be developed. Social studies don't have any equivalent to Einstein and can't by design.

US Senator William Proxmire (D) and his Golden Fleece awards protesting odd-sounding projects

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece_Award

That does sound close but Proxmire doesn't seem like a populist politician, the Golden Fleece dates from the 1980s, and it wasn't specific to academia. A lot of the research was funded by other parts of the civil service than the NSF, like:

The Federal Aviation Administration was named for spending $57,800 on a study of the physical measurements of 432 airline stewardesses, including "distance from knee to knee while sitting", and "the politeal [sic] length of the buttocks."[19]

Office of Education for spending $219,592 in a "curriculum package" to teach college students how to watch television.

Amusingly it does seem to have hit the mark. A former NSF director even lied about the awards to try and discredit it!

Too bad this is all so long ago. I was asking more about the present day, as it seems like that was the implication of the comment being replied to. Where are all these populists with their modern version of the Golden Fleece awards?

At the risk of being controversial, the latter half of your statement tracks very well with my experience of organizational DEI initiatives, in particular. We have reached a point where tenure-track faculty are expected to provide justification, in writing, for the value of their research to various marginalized communities. That alone wouldn't be a huge deal if conference talks, research funding and, increasingly, tenure committees weren't being similarly pressed to provide these kinds of justification.

From where I'm standing (I hold a Ph.D in a scientific field, and my spouse is a tenure-track academic), an unsustainable portion of academic work consists in justifying one's research program, on grounds that have little to do with the subject of study.

It should hopefully be obvious that I'm not trying to stir a DEI flame war. Rather, I can't shake the feeling that DEI activism isn't accomplishing much beyond creating bureaucraty, and that this benefits neither research in general, nor marginalized groups trying to establish themselves in academia.

Anyway, this seems like a specific instance of a larger trend you're pointing to. Possibly not even the largest or most absurd one.

It's difficult to tell where the initiatives are coming from because the willingness to write and accept empty claims of relevance appears to exist at all levels and stages in the process. (For both DEI and "questionably applied number theory.") If they are getting that little buy-in from even the administrators I can't imagine how they get there in the first place.

It's like the same people put application and social consciousness first in their RFPs and then turn around to accept invisible fig leaves during evaluation... Who's getting fooled, the government? Politicians? The public?

>It's difficult to tell where the initiatives are coming from because the willingness to write and accept empty claims of relevance appears to exist at all levels and stages in the process.

Is it, though? In the case of DEI, it appears to me (on the surface, anyway) that these initiatives are being implemented at the request of very vocal special-interest groups, and at the orders of the politicians who represent them. It seems like a fairly straightforward case of lobbying by institutions whose existence depends on the existence of a social problem. It's a rough analog to Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex idea.

The same is true with what you call "questionably applied number theory". The only difference is that special-interest group isn't defined along ethno-racial lines, but instead comprises various bean-counters and ad-men who sell various forms of investment.

In my view, there used to be a consensus that such lobbyists were not welcome in universities, or at least not in droves, because of their tendency to subvert intellectual pursuits in favor of short-term profits.

Addendum: I suppose the point would be that special-interest lobbying is corrupting academia.

Thanks for the conversation. This has been interesting :)

> Where do you draw the line? I saw many funding proposals for extremely abstract category theory justified on the basis it helps number theorists solve problems related to cryptography and protect e-commerce.

That's not fraud. Not even the most gullible reviewer believes a word of it.

Leave it to anthropologists of science to describe the ritualistic aspects of writing abstracts.

If you (like me) weren't familiar with the Excel mistake:

https://www.businessinsider.com/reinhart-and-rogoff-admit-ex...

I thought it was going to be the Excel DNA to date conversion.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...

I love that the grad student who caught it came from a Marxist-oriented economics program. He legit figured it out by trying to replicate the results published by Reinhart and Rogoff.

Not-so-fun fact: Economists don't publish their actual Excel spreadsheets, which would have made their error trivial to prove, but just the results!

https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-excel-error-heard-round...

Feds don't prosecute the stuff their own tribe is involved in. Once retired, federal bureaucrats become honorary professors, chairs, fellows at 'X school of international studies/government', 'Y school of comparative law', 'Z school of efficient administration'. All such schools are hotbeds for govt spies, other folks. Where and how do these schools get money from? They use the same techniques that this neuroscientist uses. Once they open a front, charging academic fraud in the name of wire fraud charge, etc, if they succeed in doing that, expect the next round to be after these sinecure schools and their fundings, when power structures change.

“Director of Strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology”

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-board-set-ba...

This seems like needlessly conspiratorial thinking.

This is a deeply uninformed comment. I don’t even know where to start. Nearly every sentence is wrong.

You can absolutely get hauled in front of a judge for fraud and abuse in the use of NIH grants. You can be required to pay all of the money back, among other punishments. Google will reveal a variety of cases.

It is in fact rare for retired federal bureaucrats to become professors. It is much more common for people at the Secretary level to get teaching positions at schools of public policy. I am not aware of any former CIA directors holding those roles but I invite you to look.

These schools are not “hotbeds of spies” - truly that it is a completely uninformed statement.

By the way, very few law professors work via grants and even fewer via NIH grants.

>Feds don't prosecute the stuff their own tribe is involved in

I get it. The world is complex, and grouping helps make it more manageable. However, in no way are the "Feds," part of the same tribe, especially in 2023.

>All such schools are hotbeds for govt spies, other folks.

Maybe recruitment? I'm not familiar with the curriculum at USC. Seems like you'd get them when they finished their degrees, unless they offer "wetwork" as an elective.

>They use the same techniques that this neuroscientist uses.

Disagree. Whatever tribe or faction these people you describe belong to, they are definitely not publishing papers. They'd be administrators. They are not involved in prosecuting academic malfeasance, and certainly the prosecution, is not taking advice from retired government employees. He/she/they have their own careers to consider!

They usually don't use the wire fraud trick on academics ever since they killed Aaron Swartz.

Let us at least be truthful in our tactless descriptions of history: he killed himself to avoid spending 6 months in low security prison.

Now you're being dishonest. The 6-month sentence was a plea deal he declined. It was a 35-50 year sentence if he fought and lost all charges.

It remained to be seen if he were actually guilty.

> Carmen Ortiz, the federal prosecutor who hounded Aaron Swartz in the months before his Friday suicide, has released a statement arguing that "this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case." She says that she recognized that Swartz's crimes were not serious, and as a result she sought "an appropriate sentence that matched the alleged conduct – a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting."

> That's funny because the press release her office released in 2011 says that Swartz "faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million." And she apparently didn't think even that was enough, because last year her office piled on even more charges, for a theoretical maximum of more than 50 years in jail.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/01/17/aaron-swa...

> Some have blithely said Aaron should just have taken a deal. This is callous. There was great practical risk to Aaron from pleading to any felony. Felons have trouble getting jobs, aren't allowed to vote (though that right may be restored) and cannot own firearms (though Aaron wasn't the type for that, anyway). More particularly, the court is not constrained to sentence as the government suggests. Rather, the probation department drafts an advisory sentencing report recommending a sentence based on the guidelines. The judge tends to rely heavily on that "neutral" report in sentencing. If Aaron pleaded to a misdemeanor, his potential sentence would be capped at one year, regardless of his guidelines calculation. However, if he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced to as many as 5 years, despite the government's agreement not to argue for more. Each additional conviction would increase the cap by 5 years, though the guidelines calculation would remain the same. No wonder he didn't want to plead to 13 felonies. Also, Aaron would have had to swear under oath that he committed a crime, something he did not actually believe.

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2013/01/towards-learning-...

Thank you for detailing exactly what happened.

The intimidation of the stacked charges led to Swartz's suicide.

The gov. was 100% responsible for his death, which is why I say they killed him, indirectly, but they still caused the anguish that made him feel like suicide was the only way out.

Sadly this strategy is used all too often on citizens, plea deal offered to say "look they pleaded guilty, we were right", otherwise you get the stick, life in jail.

> The gov. was 100% responsible for his death

Not if you believe in personal accountability. He made a choice, he faced the consequences; he made a choice again, he faced those consequences. If I kill a man and am given a very long sentence, then kill myself to avoid the wait, it's not the government's fault I died.

Ahh, "personal accountability" for the victims. It's the victim's fault the government threatened them with decades of imprisonment over a minor "crime".

Where is the personal accountability for the prosecutor?

There is a notion of reckless disregard for human life in the law. If you are throwing bricks off an overpass just for fun, you are still guilty of murder if you kill someone - because you have reckless disregard for human life even though you weren't trying to kill anyone.

Likewise, a prosecutor who threatens someone with decades in prison for freely distributing academic material displays a reckless disregard for human life. Even if the prosecutor didn't intend to provoke a suicide the prosecutor was doing something bad with a reckless disregard for human life and it got someone killed. That's murder, in my view.

Perhaps you should ask for accountability from the prosecutor/murderer rather than from her victim.

Yes, she is accountable for her actions of making clear the gravity of the matter and letting him have an easy out of 6 months in low security prison should he make the choice of his own free will to admit his trespassing and copyright infringement were illegal.

And he is accountable for his actions of refusing to do that, and furthermore refusing to participate in the matter whatsoever.

> The 6-month sentence was a plea deal he declined.

Right, so he could have picked the option where he walked free in six months, but instead he picked the option where he's dead.

> Felons have trouble getting jobs

> aren't allowed to vote

> and cannot own firearms

He's not doing any of those now, so I do not see how his would-be restrictions are relevant. The following speculation is just that, and also irrelevant.

> Aaron would have had to swear under oath that he committed a crime, something he did not actually believe.

Ah yes, the "Sure I secretly entered the networking cabinet of an institution I have no formal relationship with, to install my personal equipment into it without their knowledge (much less consent) in order to exploit their access levels to fulfill personal objectives that would otherwise be impossible to me, then hopped around IP's as the institution I was stealing documents from blocked the IP I was stealing until the entire IP range of the institution whose access I was hijacking was blocked due to my hacking and hence all the researchers doing legitimate work at that institution could not access the resources they paid for, but how could I have known that was unlawful?? I fundamentally cannot accept any blame for my actions." defense. I don't buy it.

> Right, so he could have picked the option where he walked free in six months

You missed this part:

> However, if he plead guilty to a felony, he could have been sentenced to as many as 5 years, despite the government's agreement not to argue for more. Each additional conviction would increase the cap by 5 years, though the guidelines calculation would remain the same. No wonder he didn't want to plead to 13 felonies.

There was no guarantee it would only be a six-month sentence.

I'm actually in the "personal responsibility" camp myself, but the amount of overcharging they did to him was obscene. He wasn't facing the consequences of his actions-- he was about to get fucked by the Statutory Ape.

To put it in perspective...Ghislaine Maxwell got 20 years for being an accomplice to child sex trafficking. This is the same sentence given to lesser spies. Swartz committed trespassing, a bunch of copyright infringement, and caused a DoS? It's not cool, but it's not 2.5x worse than pimping children.

Again, that's all speculation. Sentences of this sort are almost always served concurrently, not back to back. Just because a sympathetic narrative on the matter wants to paint the picture of it being a hopeless situation does not make it so.

If he was willing to admit his trespassing, bunch of copyright infringement, and DoS was wrong he'd in all likelihood walk free within a year. But for whatever reason he was not able to do that, and here we are.

Personally, I'm glad we are in the world where trespassing into a property to hijack their network and cause outages of global services is not considered "minor". Obviously the situation as it played out here is an absolute tragedy, but the matter was indeed serious and was handled with an appropriate level of gravity. All the prosecution was looking for was a "my b, that was wrong" to prove their point - and he refused to give it.

As they say: if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

> Now you're being dishonest. The 6-month sentence was a plea deal he declined. It was a 35-50 year sentence if he fought and lost all charges

No, it was not a 35-50 year sentence. That's the theoretical sentence one could get for those same crimes if all the sentence enhancing factors that can apply do apply. Repeat offender, part of organized crime, massive monetary damage, drugs involved, things like that. Swartz didn't have any of those factors.

Here's an article on how DoJ press releases ridiculously exaggerate potential sentences [1].

If the prosecution has been able to prove everything they alleged and the judge decided to make an example of Swartz it might have been up to 7 years, but that is unlikely. Swartz's attorney said that if they had gone to trial and lost he thought it was unlikely that Swartz would get any jail time.

[1] https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...

Before you complain that a comment is a tactless description of history that distorts the truth, you should perhaps try learning some of the facts about said history. Such a habit will serve you well, I promise :)

Did he or did he not reject a plea deal that would have had him walking a free man in 6 months time?

Even the concept of a plea deal is morally atrocious in this and similar cases. The government threatens you with decades in prison in hopes of bullying you into pleading guilty where you are not.

6 months in prison is extremely inappropriate for what he was accused of. Threatening far worse to compel someone to accept a sentence they don't deserve is a crime orders of magnitude worse than anything Swartz was accused of.

Emetic.

"I was just telling this guy I was going to take away his life, lock him in a cage for decades, and force him to live with violent criminals in a place notorious for violence and rape as punishment for his victimless 'crime' - and then he killed himself."

6 months, low security. All he had to do was say "my b".

I'm not going to respond to you any more as I consider your position too reprehensible to continue engaging with. You are defending the murder of an innocent person and the abuse of government power. It's clearly a bad thing for agents of the government to use threats of extreme punishment to coerce people to accept lesser punishment. Rather than come up with some kind of argument to justify your moral degeneracy you simply keep repeating what happened.

A suicide is not a murder, no matter how little you believe in personal accountability and/or free will.

Crimes should be punished, no matter how little you believe in justice and/or the rule of law.

The life-preserving choice he had every chance to make was simple, no matter how little you believe in the righteousness of admission of clear guilt and/or simply saying what you must in order to move on with life.

These things are all true regardless of your beliefs – or my so-called reprehensibility and/or moral degeneracy.

Less truthful, really. There are good reasons we've moved on to "died by suicide" instead of "committed suicide" by now.

Who's "we"?

The LOE to figure out if someone manipulated data vs wirefraud is significantly different and probably much harder.

I would assume that once law enforcement has established facts were materially altered for the purpose of obtaining funding, the jump to wire fraud would be relatively trivial (given today's heavy reliance on email/internet to do just about anything).

> once law enforcement has established facts were materially altered for the purpose of obtaining funding

If you establish this, that's the case right there.

what exactly is wire fraud?

it seems like its basically "If you get money from lying electronically, go to jail"

That's the gist of it. It's basically a modernization of previously existing mail fraud statutes.

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

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