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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Prosecutors (and juries) already are expected to adjudicate fraud across cases that IMO are much more ambiguous than this.

I think it's fair to debate whether it's a good thing that, as I heard it put once, "everything is wire fraud" (i.e. lots of crimes require lying on documents that are sent electronically and thus become federal crimes), but I see zero reason to think that committing academic fraud (which, again, is done for personal gain and causes real, measurable harm to others) is any less of a crime than lots of other things that are prosecuted as wire fraud.

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Perhaps we need a new/updated law to cover this kind of thing. This sort of academic fraud should absolutely be criminalized, but I'm not sure I'm the biggest fan of the "everything is wire fraud" approach to achieving that.

If it gets so bad that a society/academic system needs to criminalize such fraud, they have already lost that race.

The only thing that really works is a culture where this rarely if ever happens, because of the peer respect and self-respect of academics.

[flagged]

>Do you know a trick to pay my bills in self-respect? Most of my creditors demand I pay in money.

Nobody said that shit. You can pay your builds with the monetary salary from doing your job honestly. That was my first point.

If many people discover that such a salary is not enough to get by, or if many people aren't content with "enough to get by" and decide to perform academic fraud for extras, then that's a society that already lost the plot. That was my second point.

> I wasn't expecting an account named after a racial slur to last so long.

That's a good point. We've banned the account.

Peer reputation and self policing works in a system where no money is at stake.

In the old days scientific research was only done by self-funded rich people with tons of money and free time.

Nowadays science is mostly done by people whose income and food depends on getting grants.

When your career and income are at stake, why would you take the risk of opposing Dan Ariely? Only someone who was already rich could do that.

>Peer reputation and self policing works in a system where no money is at stake.

It works in systems where money is at stake too. You need a high trust, conscientous society. Doesn't mean that having one solves the issue entirely. The ocassional bad apple will fraud there too, but it wont be rampant enough to be a systemic problem.

>When your career and income are at stake, why would you take the risk of opposing Dan Ariely? Only someone who was already rich could do that.

You don't need independently wealthy scientists to expose fraud.

You just need an environment where if regular salary dependent scientists expose fraud, they're not punished for it.

If you don't have that, sure, then you need independently wealthy scientists to dare.

Sure, if culture were different, or human nature we different, we wouldn't have the problems we currently do.

However, given the culture we have, and the human tendencies we have, I think laws can make things better. Like criminalizing various sorts of fraud.

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