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Comment by drones | Hacker News Reader

What "Bad Incentives" are unique to China, distinct from those in the West?

There's a specific issue with doctors in China that doesn't exist elsewhere, namely that even for practicing doctors they are required to publish research to get promoted. But that's hard, because they're busy healing people. Cue lots of bought papers that describe medical cases or research that never happened.

I wrote about this in 2021:

https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-i-7e9764571422

One Chinese doctor who was rumbled pleaded with the (anonymous) guy who spotted the bad papers:

“Hello teacher, yesterday you disclosed that there were some doctors having fraudulent pictures in their papers. This has raised attention. As one of these doctors, I kindly ask you to please leave us alone as soon as possible.

Being as low as grains of dust of the world, countless junior doctors, including those younger me, look down upon the act of faking papers. But the system in China is just like that, you can’t really fight against it. Without papers, you don’t get promotion; without a promotion, you can hardly feed your family. I also want to have some time to do scientific research, but it’s impossible. During the day, I have outpatient surgeries; after work, I have to take care of my kids. I have only a little bit time to myself after 10 pm, but this is far from being enough because scientific research demands big trunks of time. The current environment in China is like that.

You expose us but there are thousands of other people doing the same. As long as the system remains the same and the rules of the game remain the same, similar acts of faking data are for sure to go on. This time you exposed us, probably costing us our job. For the sake of Chinese doctors as a whole, especially for us young doctors, please be considerate. We really have no choice, please!”

Interesting, what is the logic for requiring practicing doctors to all publish like that?

Too many people competing for everything.

Too many people competing for everything AND no system to check whether what they publish makes sense. Peer review only works if these doctors are not part of the same system, if they are then all of them are equally interested in covering up for themselves and for others.

If the system existed, it would actually make the expectations more realistic and make doctor's lives easier rather than increase the amount of research. But I assume the government isn't interested in the truth, i.e. realistically to fix this situation you would also need to admit that plenty of work done was basically bullshit and your numbers go down as a consequence.

CCP wanted to catch up with the west in terms of scientific output. They set targets for quantity, which were duly met: China now produces more research papers than the USA.

China has a history of things like this, e.g. the way that villagers melted down their pots and pans to increase "steel production" during the Great Leap Forward and ended up with unusably low grade steel combined with no cooking implements.

There's similar incentives in some parts of medicine in the West. Some physicians get into academic medicine not because they want to be researchers, but because they like teaching residents and/or the high complexity that academic medical centers attract. The result usually isn't fraud, but fluff papers that don't meaningfully contribute to the field.

huge difference in degree, intent and real-life effects on the author.. raw numbers and basic economic conditions as a backdrop. It is notable IMHO but not closely comparable

I know everywhere it holds a lot of weight, but I think that in Europe/US an additional huge factor for academic career is the ability to raise funding.

Maybe in China there's less need to find private funding for research thus scientific impact based on papers may hold more weight.

But I'm 100% that fake research and cheating is rampant in all of natural science everywhere in the world, and I myself had spent 6 months of my life in a lab trying to reproduce fake results from a previous researcher in my lab.

We only caught up it was fake data way later, when we spotted one single outlier number, an impossibly high voltage generated by his system (a 5/10% open current voltage that compounded all the other results).

> we spotted one single outlier number, an impossibly high voltage generated by his system

Surely the outlier could have been an innocent digital capture error.

You're supposed to publish results that can be reproduced as you describe.

And it wasn't an outlier.

The simplest comparison I can make to illustrate the point without boring you is measuring the power of a car engine.

Imagine that you get a very high torque number, but horsepower doesn't match. Issue is: torque and horsepower are linearly dependent

torque = HP * RMP / 5252

Measurements that linerarly correlated with the voltage published were all consistent with a number 10/15% lower.

> You're supposed to publish results that can be reproduced as you describe.

You are supposed to try. Whether you succeed is necessarily subject to any measurement issues.

> And it wasn't an outlier.

You said it was.

> But I'm 100% that fake research and cheating is rampant in all of natural science everywhere in the world, and I myself had spent 6 months of my life in a lab trying to reproduce fake results from a previous researcher in my lab.

A single anecdote doesn't support having 100% certainty for such a broad claim.

The reproducibility problem in natural science is a well known phenomenon of which I have provided confirmations.

I can't speak to incentives in China, but India had national publication requirements for post grads. These requirements drove an industry of predatory pay-for-publish journals, 'cause you aren't getting your degree without it.

In the US marginal students can take a degree and leave academia without churning out fake garbage.

There are plenty of conferences and journals publishing low quality articles in the US too lol. I'd say majority of phd and thesis based master's programs have publication requirements in the US.

Yes... but there's no national requirement. And in most master's programs there's no expectation of publication.

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