Comment by michaelt

2 days ago

Ah, perhaps I wasn't clear about what I'm trying to say. I don't think we should stop training researchers in common mistakes and fraudulent methods to watch out for.

I'm just saying: I don't believe anyone actually tells budding researchers that they should commit fraud. Instead I think the process is probably more like this:

Year 1: Statistics/research training. Here are a load of subtle mistakes to watch out for and avoid. Scientific fraud happens sometimes. Don't do it, it's very dishonest.

Year 2: Starting research. Gee a lot of these papers I'm reading are hard to reproduce, or unclear. Maybe fraud is widespread - or maybe they're just smarter or better equipped than me.

Year 3: "You really ought to have published some papers by now, the average student in your position has 3 papers. If you don't want to flunk out you really need to start showing some progress"

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michaelt

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proto-n  2 days ago

I still disagree. It's more like "omg I should have published at least a few papers by now, what am I doing" and then you start frantically looking for provable things in the dataset. You find one that you can also support with a nice story. Now either a) You were not tought about how or why this is wrong and you publish the paper b) You were, and know that you should collect a separate dataset to test the hypothesis. But also, there is a huge existential pressure to just close your eyes and roll with it.

It's not that you need to be tought how to cheat, it's that you need to be tought how to avoid unintentionally cheating.

  • genewitch  1 day ago

    Maybe I'm misreading but you both seem to say the same thing.

    New student is shown how to read a paper, how to spot egregious errors and all the things listed above.

    Student, i guess feels forced to publish. And maybe uses murkier tactics to get the paper published.

    As Dr Frank Etscorn said, "I can show anything correlates to anything else." We were discussing vitamin D papers anf I was testing that paper funding AI mentioned on HN a few times last year.