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Comment by ken47 | Hacker News Reader

How pervasive is corruption higher academia? The big names (Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Ariely, etc.) will make headlines, but how many more are there that we never hear about? I happen to know a prolific cheater who became a professor at a well-known university. I'd be surprised if their cheating stopped when they got to university and beyond...

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In my naïve early years as a phd student (doing experimental organic chemistry), I tried to replicate some promising results.

I'm a poor experimentalist (so poor I later switched to computational chemistry), but these procedures were absolutely impossible to follow once you got down to the details.

My advisor told me "yeah. we don't try to replicate anything that comes out of that lab." and left it at that.

Sobered me up real quick to the realities of how widespread these bullshit cheating practices are.

You are right. I remember I read an article about a PhD student struggling to reproduce experiment results despite he performed them hundreds of times. And when he talked about his worries to his friends, they told him they were in the same situation. So everyone had to write in his/her paper the results the mentors wanted. I wish I could find that article. He was into biology.

Off-topic, but related: "Reproducibility trial: 246 biologists get different results from same data sets" (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03177-1)

While I don't think we'll have a Terminator 2 style Judgment Day in the future because of AI, I do think there's a great deal of misconduct in many areas that's going to be exposed due to massive abilities to cross-correlate data at nuanced levels.

People who have been up to shifty things should be very nervous, and those entertaining doing shifty things should consider that it's very likely it will be exposed in the next decade.

I imagine as pervasive as it is generally. People lie abundantly on resumes, skip payment on their taxes, about 1 in 10 admit to shoplifting when polled, etc. Cheating is pretty openly present at universities nowadays.

Warren Buffett is pretty open that some kind of fraud is probably occurring at every one of his companies.

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