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Comment by VSerge | Hacker News Reader

A scientist that causes, through willful fraud, the death of people seems to be guilty of something like manslaughter. Using fake data is a pretty clear-cut example of willful fraud, and a reasearcher fudging data over such a life and death question should 100% be held accountable.

Scientists making errors in good faith should on the other hand be insulated from any kind of liability.

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You cannot insulate scientists making errors in good faith from any kind of liability, if you make the wilful frauds liable. Because there is no 100% way of distinguishing the two.

There are cases where people have doctored images in their research data, or completely fabricated data to meet a significance threshhold.

There may be ambigious cases but there are non-ambiguous cases too.

or scientist who just don't understand statistics.

a biologist can understand how zillions of proteins interact with each other without understanding how to work with raw data.

We had to pass statistic courses in biology also.

Not that I'm in favor of the proposed measure, but saying because we can't identify wilful frauds 100% of the time then we can't protect the non-fraudsters, is just a bit silly, no? You have this kind of problem detecting any kind of fraud.

One test is, is there written communication between people about committing the fraud? If so, there you go.

Of course, such communication cannot ever be faked by interested third parties.

That isn't a new problem though. Should we not enforce laws against fraud because people might be framed? You determine that through investigation.

I'd argue scientists have better things to do than spending their time shielding themselves from liability lawsuits.

Again, not a new problem.

That is wrong, it would be a new problem, because currently it does not exist.

I don't believe you're engaging in good faith here, so I'm not going to reply any more, but if you're interested in having a productive conversation, try to think about what I might be meaning a little more and then reply instead of taking the least sensical interpretation and responding to that. Or, if you like, you might reply to multiple interpretations of what I said if you're not sure which one I mean, and that way we can advance the dialogue.

Have a good one.

Let me sum up the discussion for you. I am arguing that scientists should not be held liable for the consequences of published research that turns out to be wrong (for whatever reasons). That is the status quo.

Now you are saying, introducing liability is fine, as we can deal with that in this or that way. I am pointing out that all of these ways are inherently flawed, to which you respond that yes, this is true, but in other walks of life we are dealing with these things too. To which I am replying, that's fine, but if we don't introduce liability, we will have none of these problems in the first place.

So you see, it is not me who is not engaging properly with the other's argument. So I am happy to finish this discussion as well.

You don't need to be 100%. We assume innocent until proven guilty in other contexts. At least some criminals are known to go free because we cannot prove beyond a shadow of a doubt they really did it. However we get a lot of them. It isn't perfect, but it is a standard.

Despite innocent until proven guilty, there are innocent people in prison or on death row. I doubt that is a standard that any scientist would agree to.

Like I said, not perfect. It is overall the best I have heard of. I'm open to something better if possible.

No liability.

Wait, you're saying, based on your prior comment[0], that scientists who commit willful fraud shouldn't be held liable?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41329891

Scientists who publish research in a journal, and then it turns out that this research is wrong, for whatever reason, should not be held liable for the consequences of this.

That is what I am saying.

In science, 3 independent scientific organisations must reproduce the effect. Otherwise, it's not a science at all. It's just authority.

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