Comment by stanford_labrat
3 days ago
the greatest travesty of modern science is that fraud is not illegal.
in every other industry that i can imagine, purposely committing fraud has been made illegal. this is not the case in modern science, and in my opinion the primary driver of things like the replication crisis and the root of all the other problems plaguing academia at the moment.
It's not legal, but intentional misconduct can be tough to prove.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/professor-charged-op...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Poehlman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Reuben
> in every other industry that i can imagine
Our own industry (tech) is rife with unpunished fraud.
Note both those guys were found guilty for taking government money under false pretenses (to do with fake science, not for doing fake science, which is more supporting evidence that fake science is legal.
The government funds an enormous proportion of research, and they've got a lot more power to do something about it when you make them mad.
> intentional misconduct can be tough to prove
It's hard to prove when it isn't investigated. How many of the debunked psychology professors took federal funding? How many have been criminally investigated?
> How many of the debunked psychology professors took federal funding?
But being wrong isn't a crime. Intentional fraud is.
> It's hard to prove when it isn't investigated.
And it's hard to investigate without some reasonably solid evidence of a crime.
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