If 9 out of 10 authors from Laos are known to be corrupt, is it unethical and racist to be biased against authors from Laos?
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?
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.
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.
:)