Hacker News Reader

Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully people are keeping lists of the PIs on these redacted papers and keeping that in mind for future grants, hiring, etc. I know almost nobody is, but one can hope.

Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others.

This chip is an extreme example, but potentially millions of dollars of productivity, hundreds or even thousands of people spending months or years on something based in a fabrication.

The person or people directly responsible for this should never work again.

View on HN

Totally agree! As with any behavior which is difficult to detect and often goes by unnoticed; the punishment should be large enough for the expected value of fraud being clearly net negative for those that might feel tempted at "tweaking some numbers".

In case anybody else also isn't familiar with "PI" as an abbreviation in this context:

> In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator

>Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others.

That might actually be a perverse incentive. If you've already nuked your career with some fraud, you can't make it worse by extra fraud... why ever stop? People inclined to do this sort of thing, when faced with that deterrent just double down and commit even more fraud, they figure the best that can be hoped for is to do it so much and so perfectly that they're never discovered.

The trouble is that the system for science worked well when there exists only some tiny number of scientists, but now we're a planet of 8 billion and where people tell their children they have to go to college and get a STEM degree. Hell, you can only become a scientist by producing new research, even if there's not much left to research in your field. And the only way to maintain that position as a scientist is "to publish or perish". We have finite avenues of research with an ever-growing population of scientists, bullshit is inevitable.

You stop because you can’t get a job?

Even if "bullshit is inevitable" is true -- I don't think it is -- that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who make up data, who steal others' work, who steal grant money by using their fake data to justify future grants.

"Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification. You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate. That happens in part because you choose not to punish people who violate that trust in the first place.

>that doesn't mean we shouldn't punish people who make up data,

I am not wishy-washy on punishment. A part of me that I do not deny nor suppress wants punishment for those who do wrong.

But sometimes punishments are counter-productive. The easiest example is the death penalty for heinous, non-murder crimes. This incentivizes the rapist or child molester (or whatever) to kill the victim. You can't execute them twice, after all, so if they're already on the hook for a death penalty crime, murdering their victim also gets rid of a prime witness who could get them the death penalty by testifying, but without increasing the odds of the death penalty.

"Career death penalty" here is like that.

>"Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification.

It wasn't meant to be a justification. It was an explanation of the problem, and (in part, at least) and attempt to show that things need to change if we want the fraud to go away.

>You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate

We've been a low trust society for a long time now. People need to start thinking about how to accomplish the long, slow process of changing a low trust society to a high trust one.

>We've been a low trust society for a long time now.

Although trust has been decreasing, the US remains a high-trust society compared to the global average.

> We've been a low trust society for a long time now. People need to start thinking about how to accomplish the long, slow process of changing a low trust society to a high trust one.

The core problem is that most people define their self-worth by their employment, and no matter what, this is all going to crash hard due to automation. The generation currently in power is doing everything they can to deny and downplay what is about to happen, instead of helping our societies prepare.

We're all being thrown into the rat race, it is being told to us verbally and in personal experience that there is no alternative than to become the top dog at all costs because that will be the only chance to survive once automation truly hits home. The result is that those who have the feeling they have failed the rat race and have no hope of catching up withdraw from the "societal contract" and just do whatever they want, at the expense of others if need be.

In the case of academia, I’m fine with harsh punishment for people who fabricate data, even if it does incentivize them to be more brazen with their fabrications in the short term. Makes it easier to catch them!

The fact is, we don’t want these people in academia at all. You want researchers who are naturally inclined not to fabricate data, not people who only play by the rules because they think they’re otherwise going to get caught.

My hunch is that these double down types won't be dissuaded by much of anything. I think fundamentally this kind of person has a risk taking personality and often feels they will get away with it.

Or get rehabilitated, like Leo Kouwenhoven, see https://delta.tudelft.nl/article/gerehabiliteerde-kouwenhove...

I missed the redemption.

> Academic fraud ranging from plagiarism to outright faking data should, more often than not, make it basically impossible for you to get any academic job whatsoever, in your field or others.

Sadly, the system is often rewarding fake or, especially, exaggerated/misrepresented data and conclusions. I think that a significant proportion of articles exaggerate findings and deliberately cherry-pick data.

It's a market of lemons. Proving misrepresentation is really hard, and the rewards for doing so are immense. Publishing an article in Nature, Science, or Cell is a career-defining moment.

Yeah I agree it's not an easy problem to solve by any stretch. I'm not a professor or scientist so I won't pretend to understand the intricacies of journal publication and that sort of thing.

But I do wonder when someone's PhD thesis gets published and it turns out they plagiarized large parts of it, why isn't their degree revoked? When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year?

Serious universities do often revoke doctoral degrees if plagiarism is proven. I've seen Oxford University going as far as demanding someone to issue a correction of a journal article to cite prior work because they were making some claims of novelty that were not true.

> When someone is a professor at a prestigious institution and they fabricate data, why are they still teaching the following year?

Internal politics. Committees judging potential misconduct are not independent. If you are sufficiently high up in the ladder, you can get away with many things. Sweden recently created a Swedish National Board for Assessment of Research Misconduct (Npof) to address this problem. I think this is a step in the right direction.

But, ultimately, I think academic fraud should be judged in court. However, e.g. Leonid Schneider (forbetterscience.com) has been taken to court several times for reporting fraud, including fraud that led to patient death, and some judges didn't seem to care much about data fabrication / misrepresentation.

This would be half of the nsf grants according to the replication crisis work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com