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Comment by jakobnissen | Hacker News Reader

There is no way that's true in my research group. We would - and do - call each other out on our mistakes at ever group meeting. Straight up fraud would not be tolerated.

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.

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Upvoted for the optimism. And I presume it's just a typo, but "acamedia" is wonderfully evocative for cases where academic papers are to be written primarily to provide a foundation for future popularization and commercial use.

Hm, it looks like the Greek etymology is disputed (it was named after a place rather than with purpose).

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")

> There is no way that's true in my research

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

>Straight up fraud would not be tolerated.

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?

No, to the team. Science is collaborative. If you learn that the results you are working with and building on are fraudulent, what's even the point? Trying to replicate that team members results with it never workong, starting new projects designed based off of fake data, continuing to tolerate and endorse that fraud by keeping quiet means the entire group's work becomes meaningless. Fraud infects all the research that references it and builds on it. Would you want to spend 5 years of your life futilely trying to build on your collaborators work if you know at the start that their data is fake?

> There is no way that's true in my research group.

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.

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