I can’t help but wonder if these mentors are also guilty of fabricating data and don’t want to cause issues that might lead to people looking at their own work more closely.
It's far more likely that they know whistleblowing creates far more pain than many people expect.
People who build their reputations on top of lies tend to lash out when threatened. They know they can't afford to have their lies revealed, so they launch an all-out offensive to discredit, bully, and push out their accusers.
I've seen it play out in the workplace a couple times now. Some people get downright vicious when they feel their reputation is at risk. I watched someone spend years trying to get another person fired simply because that person accidentally uncovered one of his lies. The person who discovered it wasn't even trying to do anything with the information, but the person who lied about it was so anxious about the fact that somebody knew that he started doing increasingly irrational and desperate things to push the other person out.
If you’re wrong and the result was legitimate, you’ve developed a reputation as a pain in the ass.
If you’re right, the researcher will say it was an honest mistake (maybe a clerical error) to absolve themselves modulo retraction, which happens all the time. Nothing of significance comes of it, but an “influencer” may well have other, above board, programs of research on which you could have collaborated and made a real name for yourselves.
There are crazy people in the world. But if someone comes to me and says "here is a thing that could end, or at least seriously screw up your career" I'm going to take them very, very seriously. Even if it is incredibly horrifying to contemplate.
I think people are underestimatig the psychological impact of failing to act on fraud in your research. Once you've learned that you're a fraud and what you're doing is bullshit, it would be soul crushing to go to work every day.
I have a feeling that non-academics on the Internet have an overly bleak view of the ethics in acamedia. I don't know why, but several online influencers really like to peddle the idea that we're all corrupt.
ake = silent
heka ... in borrowing normally means "one hundred", but in Greek it's actually "he" (one) + "katon" (hundred), so "heka" doesn't mean anything. (eka- in chemistry is Sanskrit and unrelated)
demos = district
medius = middle in Latin; the Greek is mesos, which seems to maintain more of the explicit "between/among" sense (for which Latin has "inter")
thats rare. i also worked in a lab that had a high degree of internal discourse freedom and low tolerance of fraud. it still took a lot of fortitude for one of the grad students to force a retraction of 4-5 papers of the lab (but it did happen). and many of my colleagues lost years of their lives by chasing other labs' misconduct. so either its a widespread problem or even the ppl in the good labs are too dimwitted to notice when things are sheisty
damn, you started off so hard-core and no-nonsense like seal team 6 had entered the research review arena, then your finishing blow to fraud was... it's soul-crushing to the fraudster?
Well, congratulations for you, but there's a real crisis of legitimacy in some fields. Especially once they've been filtered through the pop-sci press release filter, which only makes things less accurate and more extravagant claims.
Social science and psychology have big reproduction crises and seemingly no recent usable results at all. Nutritional science seems to be compromised by the food industry. Economics blatantly has different "schools" which give different answers depending on politics. "Business science" seems barely worthy of the name of science at all.
The risk is that mistrust from those spills over into scientifically settled but politically controversial areas.
At best, they get some 15 minutes of praise. At worst, straight to jail.
I don’t work anywhere near academia. I still wouldn’t blow the whistle or advise others to do so.
>Bik’s venture into scientific sleuthing began as a hobby when she detected duplicated western blot images in a PhD thesis.
Now full time.
The "at worst" is worse: Two recent Boeing whistleblowers died in rather suspicious circumstances.
You deserve the Nobel prize, but you critisized the work of someone? You get nothing! Swedish chemist Arrhenius blocked the Nobel price for Mendeleev because the later make some valid scientific critics the former didn't like.
Were they completely innocent? Nobody is completely innocent, Cardinal Richelieu knew that. But they were definitely whistleblowers who went to jail.