Comment by CGMthrowaway
1 day ago
Which is worse:
a) p-hacking and suppressing null results
b) hallucinations
c) falsifying data
Would be cool to see an analysis of this
1 day ago
Which is worse:
a) p-hacking and suppressing null results
b) hallucinations
c) falsifying data
Would be cool to see an analysis of this
I'm doing some research, and this is something I'm unsure of. I see that "suppressing null results" is a bad thing, and I sort of agree, but for me personally, a lot of the null results are just the result of my own incompetence and don't contain any novel insights.
All 3 of these should be categorized as fraud, and punished criminally.
criminally feels excessive?
You could make a good case for a white collar crime here, fraud for instance.
If I steal hundreds of thousands of dollars (salary, plus research grants and other funds) and produce fake output, what do you think is appropriate?
To me, it's no different than stealing a car or tricking an old lady into handing over her fidelity account. You are stealing, and society says stealing is a criminal act.
7 replies →
Only when we can arrest people who say dumb stuff on the internet too. Much like how trump and bubba (bill Clinton) should share a jail cell, those who pontificate about what they don’t know about (I.e non academics critiquing academia) can sit in the same jail cell as the supposed criminal academics.
You gotta horse trade if you want to win. Take one for the team or get out of the way.
Non-academics can definitely offer valid critiques of academia.
You don't need to be in academia to understand that scientific progress depends on trust. If you don't trust the results people are publishing, you can't then build upon them. Reproducibility has been a known issue for a long time[0], and is widely agreed upon to be a 'crisis' by academics[1].
The advent of an easier way to publish correct-looking papers, or to plagiarize and synthesize other works without actually validating anything is only going to further diminish trust.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a#citeas
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...