Comment by cgcrob
2 days ago
If it’s any consolation I split up with an ex partner after she wanted to put me as a co-author on a pseudoscience bullshit paper that she was working on to try and hit her quota. Her entire field, in the social sciences, is inventing a wild idea and using meta analysis to give it credibility. Then flying to conferences and submitting expenses.
I contributed nothing other than a statistical framework which was discarded when it broke their predefined conclusion.
When research is just means to an end...
I think as children if we are taught what earning a living means, people who only want to make ends meet would try to do it using other less damaging methods. For e.g., sales and marketing are not bad places for such people. When it comes to research people should know that perhaps money will not be great.
It is because we aren't aware of the full picture as children, we follow our passions (or we follow cool passions) and then realise that money is also important and then resort to unethical means to get that money. Let's be transparent about hard fields with children so that when they enter such fields they know what they are getting into.
I suspect there's a lot of people that end up pursuing research because they enjoy college and learning with the idea of seeking out a job sounding rather less enjoyable, and more education will just equal more $$$ in said job anyhow, right?
In the past this wasn't an issue because university was seen as optional, now in most places it's ostensibly required to obtain a sufficiently well paying job, and so much more of society ends up on a treadmill that they may not really want to hop off of.
Yeah that's about right.
I think in some fields you walk into them with some kind of noble ideology, possibly driven by marketing but then you find out it's all bullshit and you're n-years into your educational investment then. Your options are to shrug and join in or write everything off and walk away.
I don't blame people for taking advantage of it but in some areas, particularly health related, there are consequences to society past financial concerns.
> so that when they enter such fields they know what they are getting into
I don't think this would help. IMO, it's a money vs. effort thing. Yes, real research is hard, but if someone learns early on that the system can be easily gamed, then the required effort is relatively low.
Plus, there's the friction factor. Moving from undergrad to grad to post-grad to professor keeps you within an institution you know.
The game is this: get hired at a research university and pump out phony papers which look legit enough to not raise any suspicions until you get tenure. Wrap the phoniness of each paper in a shroud of plausible deniability. If anything comes out after you're tenured, then just deny and/or deflect any wrongdoing.
I treat all social science degrees as "likely bullshit" these days. Could as well be astrology.
A few computer science friends of mine worked at a social science department during university. Their tasks included maintaining the computers, but also support the researchers with experiment design (if computers were involved) and statistical analysis. They got into trouble because they didn't want to use unsound or incorrect methods.
The general train of thought was not "does the data confirm my hypothesis?" but "how can I make my data confirm my hypothesis?" instead. Often experiments were biased to achieve the desired results.
As a result, these scientific misconduct was business as usual and the guys eventually quit.
Sounds like economics.
Research fraud is common pretty much everywhere in academia, especially where there's money, i.e. adjacent to industry.
It does rather depend on the industry. Research in fields relevant to electrical engineering are much less likely to be fraudulent because the industry actually uses the results to make the products and the customers depend on those products working as specified.. If you discover a better and cheaper ceramic insulator you can be confident that transformer manufacturers will take it up but the big companies are well stocked with experts in the field so a fraudulent paper will quickly be spotted.
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Let me introduce you to theoretical condensed matter physics, where no one cares if the data confirms the hypothesis, because they are writing papers about topics that very likely can never be tested.
At least in the social sciences there is an expectation of having some data!
That's actually the part about people constantly negging on social sciences [1] that I often find confusing.
There's huge amounts of data available (geography, lots and lots of maps; history, huge amount of historical documentation; economics, vast amounts of public datasets produced every month by most governments; political science, censuses, voting records, driver registrations, political contest results all over the Earth - often for decades if not centuries).
Most is relatively well verified, and often tells you how it was verified [2]. Often it's obtainable in publicly available datasets that numerous other researchers can verify was obtained from a legitimate source. [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]
There's lots of data available. Much is also verifiable in a very personal way simply by walking somewhere and looking. In many ways, social sciences should be one of the most rigorous disciplines in most of academia.
[1] Using Wikipedia's grouping on "social sciences" (anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, culturology and political science): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science
[2] Census 2020, Data Quality: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/dec...
[3] Economic Indicators by Country: https://tradingeconomics.com/indicators
[4] Our World in Data (with Demographics, Health, Poverty, Education, Innovation, Community Wellbeing, Democracy): https://ourworldindata.org/
[5] Observatory of Economic Complexity: https://oec.world/en
[6] iNaturalist (at least from a biological history perspective): https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/43577-Pan-troglodytes
[7] Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis, Data Sources: https://www.archsynth.org/resources/data-sources/
[8] Language Goldmine (linguistics datasets): http://languagegoldmine.com/
[9] Pew Research (regular surveys on economics, political science, religion, communication, psychology - usually 10,000 respondents United States, 1000 respondents international): https://www.pewresearch.org/
[10] Marinetraffic (worldwide cargo shipping): https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-12.0/cent...
[11] Flightradar Aviation Data (people movement): https://www.flightradar24.com/data
[12] Windy Worldwide Web Cameras: https://www.windy.com/?42.892,-104.326,5,p:cams
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Glad to know they quit. That's exactly what I observed, except it was probably worse if I think back at it. I'm a mathematician "by trade" so was sort of pulled into this by proxy because they were out of their depth in a tangle of SPSS. Not that I wasn't but at least I have conceptual framework in which to do the analysis. I had no interest or knowledge of the field but when you're with someone in it you have to toe the line a little bit.
Observations: Firstly inventing a conclusion is a big problem. I'm not even talking about a hypothesis that needs to be tested but a conclusion. A vague ambiguous hypothesis which was likely true was invented to support the conclusion and the relationship inverted. Then data was selected and fitted until there was a level of confidence where it was worth publishing it. Secondly they were using very subjective data collection methods by extremely biased people then mangling and interpolating it to make it look like there was more observation data than there was. Thirdly when you do some honest research and not publish because it looks bad saying that the entire field is compromised for the conference coming up which everyone is really looking forward to and has booked flights and hotels already.
If you want to read some of the hellish bullshit, look up critique of the Q methodology.
I'm not a fan of flaming, but I have to get it out: where are the people screaming "THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED!" in any thread involving politically-relevant science? How can they read stuff like this constantly posted on HN then just trust sociology/psychology du jour to tell them what to think (or more likely, to help them justify what was already in their head)? Is Gell-Mann amnesia that potent?
Luckily this made-up social science trash won't be used as evidence when shaping our policies, so it's pretty harmless! /s
To be fair, lobbyists will use phony science from any field to influence policy, not just the social sciences. Think of the tobacco industry.
The science is settled, bro.