Doubts about Johns Hopkins research have gone unanswered, scientist says
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The pressures that we put researchers under to deliver nothing but positive results is terrible. There is an overhead to research. There is an overhead to progress. Why do we try to eliminate it with such prejudice, when the consequences seem so obviously dire?
What has changed is the fact that research is getting more expensive, and that the financing model of state universities changed in the last decade - state funds have declined, and there is a greater pressure on professors to bring in external funding. The NIH budget, on the contrary, has not grown.
This is getting off-topic, but universities are in for an interesting time. A greater financial burden is placed on students, who then cannot find jobs thanks to the recession, the scramble for grant funding is increasing, there will be greater emphasis on teaching faculty, which at some point you cannot pay peanuts any longer. Altogether a perfect storm for deans.
While it may be shocking that a laboratory director is more concerned with the reputation of his institution than that it does good science in an ethical and responsible; I doubt anyone is terribly surprised.
We know this, but to face it requires us to acknowledge our own complicity in the lie that things are alright, that we live in a stable society that is not on the verge of collapse. Our institutions are visibly failing, and we don't know what we would replace them with.
When you look at the crimes of people in finance, government, academia, wherever, they're not particularly unique. If you're part of that system, you can easily see them as just doing their jobs. Of course GS screws its clients, what else are you supposed to do? That's the point of the organization. Of course you over hype your scientific results, how else will you get the next grant? Etc.
My suspicion is that this is setting up a period of reckoning which won't be too pretty for people who have planned out every step of their lives.
I read a compelling article recently (I can't for the life of me remember where) that makes precisely the opposite argument, which is that misconduct arises from a breakdown of stratification and the subjection of everything to competitive market pressures. In a world where what mattered is who your parents were and where you went to school and where you summered, there was substantially less incentive to fake outputs than one in which your outputs are carefully measured and compared against the outputs of your counter parts.
Not that I think a meritocratic world isn't better than the one we left behind. But I find that misconduct arising from the pressures of meritocracy better fits the available data than the theory you present.
[1] In 1965, a lawyer at a large firm might bill 1200-1600 hours per year, versus 1800-2200 today. This increase has been the result of the breakdown of long-term client relationships and the consequent increase in the competition for business and for rainmaker partners with business. What do you think that this increase does to the incentive structure vis-a-vis misconduct? Can you see how the same basic story has played out in many different fields, including academia?
This is made worse by how absolutely rampant it is—to the point the reporting it seemed futile. I actually had high ranking peers inform me that they didn't believe I had never cheated in high school. They actually could not understad the concept. The social risk for reporting any time of cheating is quickly amplified when you realize:
* It's more common in high school to cheat than not to cheat
* Administration has no time to pursue cheaters except in the most widespread and obvious circumstances
* It's very hard to prove cheating outside of an anecdotal "This is what I saw" story, and there is no court system for high school students
Honestly, it sucked.
P.S. Based on an American public high school experience. And, for what's it's worth, ~300 in the College Board Top 1000 Challenge Index schools.
That said, the incentive to cheat is certainly much higher these days, between the 15 hour days and rigorous course loads, than it was 50 years ago before SAT tutors and numbers-based admissions; back when just being able to pay the $$$ for a top preparatory school basically guaranteed admission into Harvard and Yale: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/books/review/06brooks.html... ("That year [1950] 278 students from elite prep schools applied to Harvard and 245 were accepted. The acceptance rate from Exeter and Andover was 94 percent.").
You must be joking. I would have a hard time believing anyone at the top got there honestly. I'm sure it happens but it must be vanishingly rare. Take Lance Armstrong: I doubt he set out to be a cheater, but when everyone else is doping the only way to compete is to dope yourself.
Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University has done research on stress in baboons, and notes that during times of turmoil it's the top-tier males which have the highest levels of stress (normally it's the lower-ranking males). Because when order is in question, the ones at the top have to fight it out.
The reality of why nobody addresses these concerns is:
1) It's bad publicity. Everyone is on board with making these things look good, from the universities that support this research to the federal government that spends billions funding this research. It doesn't serve anybody's interest to blow the lid on something like this.
2) It's boring. It's too esoteric to explain to the average person what actually constitutes scientific misconduct.
3) It's hard to pin down. Scientists aren't self-policing. Academics don't have a culture of ripping into each others' work, and indeed academia has a culture of letting everyone puff up their little egos. A given academic doesn't really rip into other academics so they don't rip into him.
From my experience reviewing papers, being privy to program committee discussions, listening to my colleagues talk, and attending conferences, I have to disagree.
I haven't experienced this. What field of academia were/are you most familiar with?
Close. The professor and the university both draw their salaries from the funding agency - the university through "indirect costs" - and understandably have little incentive to get to the bottom of the matter and risk having their grant terminated or worse.
Some faked scientific research--if it was indeed faked--is deplorable but does not mean that all our shit about to coming falling down around our ears.
The thing about earthquake weather is that everything is fine, until it isn't.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge
Other problems include lack of communication between local police forces, so a number of allegations from women in different areas don't pile up in one report.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21756150)
It's easy to say that these are because of deference to Savile, but let's not forget that many young women told police that they were being raped and forced to work as prostitutes and those women were also dismissed and ignored, and their attackers were not famous.
- classic! Yes, science stops when the scientist is dead, says the US government ...
If the treshold is set too low, we'll end up with false positives. I.e. we'll think the study shows something when in fact it doesn’t. And this is not something that can be fixed in follow-up papers.