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Comment by ooterness | Hacker News Reader

So in this analogy, the "startup" is Theranos and the professor is Elizabeth Holmes? That is not very reassuring.

Whoever's at the top has culpability for this type of fraud. Either they knew or they should have known.

Nobody wants to assume fraud in science, unless you have unassailable evidence that someone has committed fraud you really cannot risk your own reputation by dishing out allegations. The solution to this is trust but verify, but verifying data would require twice the amount of work, which not every lab has the funding to do, even if it was breakthrough research.

The sad truth about a lot of science is that science is built on trust. The psychology replication crisis is proof of that, there are so many ways to manipulate data to make it look like you have a result and also so much pressure to get a result that people resort to the former to get the latter.

There are plenty of historical scandals about how scientific fraud has taken way too long to investigate, people like Victor Ninov and Hwang Woo-Suk are two examples of just how far fraud can go before it's found.

The article here is comparatively tame compared to how far Huang and Ninov got.

Academia is funded to the tune of billions of dollars a year. If they don't have the funds to check their own work then it is a damning indictment of the funding process, one that suggests governments are utterly unqualified to be funding research at all.

But in this case funding doesn't seem to be the problem. The author says why she didn't check: she wanted to be famous.

Don't you think its funny that we pay academics a fraction of how much we pay tech workers and yet we expect so much more from them?

No because "we" don't pay academics, universities do. It's their decision to hire more professors instead of paying the existing ones more, it's their decision to create siloed departments etc. The system has plenty of money, but universities and grant agencies allocate it very badly despite being mostly staffed by academics and ex academics.

not really. in your analogy Elizabeth Holmes already the culprit.

Professor would be responsible of fraud if they learn about it and ignore it.

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