Which is not to say the "publish or perish" problem isn't endemic, and that we can safely assume Taiwan is about as bad as any other "normal", non-cargo cult science country.
> that we can safely assume Taiwan is about as bad as any other "normal", non-cargo cult science country.
I wouldn't say that. For example, there's a strikingly consistent observation that close to 100% of acupuncture experiments succeed when they are done in East Asia (which is pretty much impossible for any effect size) despite rates halving when you move out of the region; is the placebo effect that much stronger in East Asia, or does this reflect investigator bias / incentives to get positive results by any means etc?
Do we know that China and Taiwan are worse? There are scandals in the U.S. too, such as papers funded by business interests without disclosure.
Many publications have looked into the problem:
[1] http://www.economist.com/news/china/21586845-flawed-system-j...
In 2010, however, Nature had also noted rising concerns about fraud
in Chinese research, reporting that in one Chinese government
survey, a third of more than 6,000 scientific researchers at six
leading institutions admitted to plagiarism, falsification or
fabrication.
Last month a collection of scientific journals published by
Zhejiang University in Hangzhou reignited the firestorm by
publicizing results from a 20-month experiment with software that
detects plagiarism. The software, called CrossCheck, rejected nearly
a third of all submissions on suspicion that the content was pirated
from previously published research. In some cases, more than 80
percent of a paper’s content was deemed unoriginal.
"Many agencies have toll-free hotlines and customer service
representatives working ten hours a day. Some even list the titles
of papers for sale, or the names of journals with which they
supposedly collaborate, on their websites. It's a sort of
Wild West of academic publishing. You have a whole laundry list
of services on offer that many scientists would probably never
imagine to be possible."What's interesting is that the sheer amount of fraud suggests that this thought process is considered at least somewhat normal by an entire society. Which societal factors could've led to this situation?
That said, it's probably an more inculturated process of what the fraud being discussed in the article.
In the way that Dr. Dre is in higher regard by the majority compared to Miles Davis and Miley Cyrus compared to Grace Hopper?
In the way that villagers aspire to be people who wear fancy suits and order people about for a living.
If "hapiness" was a criterium, drug dealers and pimps would be up their in the "achievement" scale.
I'm not saying the west doesn't have it's share, just that:
A) they are different shames and B) there's no magical rule which makes all cultures equally util. Some places/people are inevitably worse than others.
I remember someone lying about pretty much everything he bought, sometime making it nearly 10 times more expensive than it is (I've checked afterwards), probably to make himself seem wealthy.
Same in the office, it doesn't matter if you sit there all day doing nothing productive. As long as you leave late, it will make people think that you're working hard, and that's all that matters.
That's not to say that everyone in China is practicing the worst excesses, but even the most conciencious and moral people in China are put in a position where they have to manipulate the system just to get anywhere or pretty much do anything, even for basic licenses and permits. Everybody is on the same slippery slope whether they like it or not. It's just a question of how far you're willing to slide.
It's hard. I don't even have words to describe how hard that is. But it does at least stand a chance of working.
(This seems to be ground deeply into the human psyche. In general, a group of any kind is best off in the long term if the group polices itself for misconduct more aggressively than any outsider could. But the human instinct is to band together, assist each other to various degrees in covering over problems (often not even deliberately per se, but as a side effect of the system's structure), and band together to attack anyone external who notices anything amiss. This, alas, works in the short term quite well, but is death in the longterm.)
That's like saying "blacks are lazy" and when someone complains you tell them that it's normal for people to make such correlations and that to fix this he has to work on "making it not true".
You got it backwards. The burden of proof is on you.
You have to prove what you state with regards to corruption is true. Not just speak like it's a given, and demand of them to fix it.
>This seems to be ground deeply into the human psyche. (...) the human instinct is to band together, assist each other to various degrees in covering over problems (often not even deliberately per se, but as a side effect of the system's structure), and band together to attack anyone external who notices anything amiss.
This is a generalization that can be said for all groups. Not a proof (or even an indication) that any charge of "something amiss" from somebody external is right.
I have friends that studied in the UK (including Cambridge) and the US. My anecdotal evidence is that tons of papers in Comp-Sci in those countries are also BS, to keep the churn rate up). And academics return favors to other academics all the time, with regards to favorable reviews, etc.
(Btw, I'm not Chinese, so the pop psychology 101 above doesn't apply).
All I'm asking for is fairness. Too many of my colleagues have to disguise where they are from to even get by double blind review (there is a bias against China-based papers, and so we take careful care to extra-anonymyze our papers). This is ridiculous and immoral.
What you just 'notice' is anecdotal and biased by, um, your biases. It's not a correlation until you actually demonstrate it in a validly constructed analysis.
Of course, the trick is that legitimate attempts at validly constructed analyses are also effected by biases of the analyzers. When your conclusion is something that 'everyone knows' (but not neccesarily based on legit analyzed evidence), I think it's especially at risk of confirmation bias (when you try to muster the legit analyzed evidence).
It would be very interesting to find historical examples in the US of something that, for a while, scientists simply believed in, and believed that valid objective scientific experiments have shown to be so -- but then later the scientific community came to the opposite consensus. (ESP in the early 20th century might be one example, believe it or not. Look it up!) Science isn't quite as foolproof as one might like or assume.
At the moment, consensus science is that there isn't even such a valid object of inquiry as 'race', so you can't even make claims about it. (Although this is changing in interesting ways too, post-genomics)
Did you just do what you've been accusing others of? (Suggest a discriminated course of action based on a generalization of a certain nationality)
Unless you're talking about Aussie immigrants.
:)
Edit: isn't that obvious?
When it has merit, it is accepted as ethical.
It is ethical to deny a loan to people with a terrible credit score, because there is very good reason to suspect people with a terrible credit score will default. It's still discrimination, but it is ethical because it is based in fact.
Discrimination can have useful purpose. You can't expect people to expose themselves to a 9 out of 10 risk of being exploited by corrupt authors "in the name of equality".
But what's your alternative? Is racism such a Great Evil we are willing to risk corruption of the entire global scientific knowledge by not applying extra scrutiny to "high-risk" papers? We should allow fraudulent or corrupt papers to freely pollute the community, just to make sure everyone feels like they are being treated equally?
Frankly I care a lot more about good science than being politically correct. Besides, if your science is sound, why would you be upset if your paper undergoes extra scrutiny? Isn't that why you publish it, to be reviewed?
Please note that I'm not suggesting "all PRC scientists should be excommunicated from the scientific community" or anything like that. But trust has to be earned.
If you told me that "one out of three black American males will go to prison in their lifetime" and so, accordingly, you decided to be more suspicious of all of them, then you would receive a plethora of downvotes and would be (rightfully so) tagged as a racist. But since the generalization you made is about Chinese, so it is somehow more socially acceptable to say that you will treat their papers differently when you review them? Perhaps, but that is not objective and has more to do with the culture of the hackernews community.
> Frankly I care a lot more about good science than being politically correct. Besides, if your science is sound, why would you be upset if your paper undergoes extra scrutiny? Isn't that why you publish it, to be reviewed?
Paper reviewing is already very subjective, to add racism on top of that is just too much. Reviewers usually make up their minds about a paper in around 5 minutes, and then that bias clouds how they read the rest of the paper. My papers are usually immune to this because my name sounds "white," but my colleagues (who I often co-author with) receive no such benefit.
How exactly do you 'know' that (hypothetically) 9 out of 10 authors from Laos are corrupt?
How have you demonstrated/discovered this? (hypothetically, I realize this is just a hypothetical example). How sure are you that your findings weren't accidentally effected by biases, effecting your research design or approach to accidentally confirm your biases?
When I plotted percentage of debunked papers by country of origin, it was clear Elbonian papers are debunked 3x as often as anywhere else
With that kind of a wide net, I would think the main sampling errors would be things like "Only studied physics papers" or "forgot to gather data from Journal Y". The findings could be impacted, certainly, but hopefully still trustworthy enough to be actionable?