there are many separate problems of scientific fraud. I think these issues sometimes get confused which is unhelpful.
1. apparently-legitimate papers in prestigious journals with fraudulent data. extremely bad.
2. legitimate papers in legitimate journals which, innocently or not, just used bad methods and have wrong conclusions. this is "the replication crisis".
3. totally fake papers in paper mills with no meaningful peer review. it's really easy to spot these, no one is individually getting taken in by the results, but...
3a. sometimes they wind up in a meta-analysis, which is really bad because people might trust the meta analysis.
Problem 1 is morally worst and much more common than one would hope. Outright fabricated data in a Nature or NEJM publication (as has happened) is a disaster.
Problem 2 is amenable to reform for the most part (fields are already doing this).
Problem 3 isn't a problem at all for scientific knowledge per se, although universities and funding bodies might not be pleased their scientists are buying fake papers. You can just ignore the paper mills.
But Problem 3a can actually alter policy, which is pretty serious.
> Problem 1 is morally worst and much more common than one would hope. Outright fabricated data in a Nature or NEJM publication (as has happened) is a disaster.
In my experience, fabricated data is rare. But cherry-picking data and misuse of statistics to prove the desired hypotheses is extremely common in top journals from e.g. the Nature Portfolio journal family. I'd say at least 1/5 of the articles in biology and medicine have serious methodological errors.
IMHO, the main reason are perverse incentives and power imbalance. If you are a student or a postdoc and you get pressure from your supervisor to obtain certain result and you refuse to engage in academic misconduct, you will get pushed out of most projects and this might be the end of your academic career.
In contrast, there are few, if any, consequences for the senior scientists and principal investigators who perpetuate this culture. There's no oversight, no integrity checks, nothing. Universities tend to ignore even clear cases of data fabrication and fraud, where e.g. images derived from experiments are fake. Ultimately, this creates selective pressure for misconduct, as those willing to bend the rules are rewarded.
That's all true but I think what you meant to say is that successfully detecting fabricated data is rare. I've been in the weeds on this and after a while it's tempting to believe you can always spot scientific fraud by reading papers, but of course it's not so. A paper is just a bag of words and pictures, it can say anything it wants. As long as a data fabricator doesn't make basic errors you won't detect fraud.
Unfortunately, when people do find ways to automatically detect inconsistent numbers in a paper, like SPRITE or GRIM, they find maybe 50% of all checkable papers fail the audit and the authors almost invariably refuse to share their raw data for further checks despite having previously agreed to do so. So it seems likely that fake data is actually not rare at all but very widespread.
Caveat: like I say in every comment on scientific fraud on HN, all this varies dramatically by field. Some fields are much more corrupt than others. That 50% number is from psychology. Computer science isn't that bad relative to others. But for example, in climatology it's taken as axiomatic that it's OK to fabricate data and then present it as "observations". Anyone who tries to call them out on this behavior gets attacked, censored or even sued, yet if you did the exact same thing in physics nobody would hesitate to call it fraud. There isn't even a consistent definition in academia of what data fabrication means.
So no, sadly we don't really know how prevalent data fabrication is. The only way to detect scientific fraud to the level of robustness we'd accept for any other kind of fraud is regular, randomized lab audits with jail time or ruinous damages for perpetrators, backed by rigorous field-independent written standards for what evidence must be provided, all checked by outside organizations. Think financial audits but for scientists.
Obviously not only is academia not doing this, it's culturally nowhere close to considering the possibility of even thinking about starting. Academia has spent so many years engaging in such deep ideological purges that everyone who remains is at minimum sympathetic to ideas like "defund the police". The concept of policing themselves to the level accountancy does will never come up, not even during discussions of reform.
* If there's no clear way to get the raw-data
* If it's unclear how the data was gathered
-> the results are most likely fabricated
One strange psychological effect I've seen is that especially in medicine some people themselves spend a lot of time rigging data to get to their PhD, but in the end they absolutely trust in anything published in the field. "The science nowadays is so good - medical scandals today are completely impossible"
There are many detailed discussions out there. Go to any skepticism website and search for terms like TOB adjustment, homogenization, "the blip", "the pause". I'd give you links but without fail HN commenters just engage in ad hominem attacks on any source given without bothering to read them. If you want more details and can't find any given this info, email me and I'll send you starter links.
tl;dr where does temperature data come from? Climatologists gather data from various sources and then aggregate them into time series which are then used for later research. Which would be fine, except that along the way they do things that aren't considered legitimate in other fields like:
• reporting "observations" in their "raw data" from weather stations that haven't existed for decades. They are actually software-generated guesses based on other stations that themselves may not exist or be in comparable similar surroundings. This isn't a rare thing, in some countries most of the data is attributed to weather stations that don't physically exist or have moved large distances, yet still show up in databases with readings at their old coordinates.
• adjust their "raw data" in various ways and for various reasons. That is, what gets presented as observational data in climatology - like graphs of temperature - are not actually readings from thermometers, although it's usually presented as if it is. Modern temperature time series have dozens of adjustments including many extremely questionable ones like homogenization (a form of spatial averaging).
• dropping confidence intervals or even reporting temperatures that are simply the max of the CI around the real reading. This is a problem because QA on weather stations is frequently non-existent. In the UK over 80% of weather stations are WMO grade 4 or 5, meaning they are junk tier with uncertainties of 2C and 5C respectively. As claimed warming is 0.1C/decade this sort of data is of no use for detecting it but is used anyway. It's a global problem not UK specific.
• they regularly rewrite temperature time series in ways that invalidate all prior published papers and claims based on that data, but they don't retract any of those papers.
Editing data points, making up readings from non-existent instruments, using garbage-tier instruments, ignoring confidence intervals, playing with the data until it comes good and retroactively deciding your data was wrong but not doing retractions of papers built on it, are all behaviors that would be decried in most other fields.
Until academia can settle on universal standards for what it calls science people's trust in it will continue to fall, because they won't be able to make any assumptions about what kind of methods the word science really means :(
> I'd give you links but without fail HN commenters just engage in ad hominem attacks on any source given without bothering to read them.
That's a red flag. Reads as evasive to me. Why are you bothered by internet randos disagreeing with you? If you have reputable sources link them instead of wasting time. If the responses are truly ad hominem that should only strengthen your argument in the eyes of any making an attempt to be objective.
I apologize if it seems uncharitable but my default assumption in this sort of scenario is that you've been the subject of well reasoned rebuttals and don't want to confront that reality.
> universal standards for what it calls science
> what kind of methods the word science really means
That's nonsensical. "Science" is a vague, very high level methodology. There's no single correct way to go about things other than to recursively apply evidence driven approaches.
Some fields have broad applicability of course. For example something like the foundations of statistical methods will presumably remain the same no matter what task you apply them to. But what the results of such methods "mean" is going to vary widely.
No, I've never seen a well reasoned rebuttal. The type of reply you get here on HN is always exactly like yours: an insistence on arguing the who instead of the what. Hence your requirement that any given sources are "reputable", without specifying what that means. Based on experience it's guaranteed to exclude 100% of all sources that discuss the issue honestly. That game has played out here 1000 times and is boring. If you disagree, check a fact or two. Go find sources that you think are reputable instead of expecting others to guess and read a few, poke holes in them if you can. That would be interesting.
> "Science" is a vague, very high level methodology. There's no single correct way to go about things
It's really not. But this is the kind of semantic dispute I am warning of. If your response to discovering that academics engage in data fabrication is to say that's ok because science can mean anything, then science doesn't mean anything. And eventually the general public will learn that, and vote to defund it.
> the foundations of statistical methods will presumably remain the same no matter what task you apply them to.
Overfitted models are not only common in many fields but academics often try to justify them as OK to use, so I wouldn't assume statistical methods remain the same no matter what task you apply them to. After all, science is really vague, right? Who is to say what the foundations of statistics are?
The widespread belief that it is rare, is an invitation to fraudsters. Who have therefore wound up in such positions as president of Stanford. It is hard to catch them because people's a priori belief that there isn't much fraud makes it hard to accept that any particular researcher could be a fraudster. Which greatly reduces the risk of being a fraudster.
Well meaning students have little alternative than to publish journal papers showing how their algorithm/method had a 0.001% improvement (measured by questionable metrics) because they are trying to get N publications to graduate.
While discourse about such methods can be beneficial, it also tends to create too much noise that drowns out more meaningful work.
Just to clarify, I think fabricated data in top biology and medicine journals is relatively rare because it's typically high-throughput data, and you must archive it. It's just too much trouble to fake that.
However, another equally damaging form of fraud, cherry-picking data and manipulating statistical inference is common. I think the reason is that it's much simpler to get the results you want this way, and you are much less likely to get caught.
Previously, fake data was common, e.g. in the form of fabricated Western blots, as it has been proven by large-scale image analyses conducted by sleuths. I imagine similar forms of fraud are still frequent in other disciplines or in domains that generate low-throughput data, such as some clinical trials.
The advisor gets all the credit for publishing and none of the blame for retracting. That’s why some labs have been hit by multiple retractions (clearly a indicator of fraud culture) but only the low level researchers are punished
The problem is that academic publishing isn't tied to any real fitness function.
Unlike a startup or company or some other thing where you vote with dollars on utility, many papers can't be quantitatively evaluated on how much they contribute to science.
Some papers are obvious and groundbreaking, but a lot of research is at such a frontier that literally no one else can evaluate it. You just nod your head and trust it.
That, coupled with the fact that negative results just aren't published, is incredibly inefficient and disheartening.
Maliciousness, incompetence, and accidents all look EXACTLY THE SAME from a replication perspective. We can't tell the researchers' intent.
Until the "industry" (defined vaguely as scientists, their institutions, universities, funding entities, etc, etc) cleans house and punishes those researchers, we're quickly approaching a time where we'll have to take EVERY study skeptically until it can be replicated.
* Punishment could range from "no, we won't publish your stuff without data+methodology" to ratcheting back funding to "we publicly document your lying/incompetence" (hardest and riskiest) to a variety of other things.
> we're quickly approaching a time where we'll have to take EVERY study skeptically until it can be replicated
I've always felt like this should be the norm. Why would you trust something before it can be replicated? Even if it's unintentional, people make mistakes.
> I've always felt like this should be the norm. Why would you trust something before it can be replicated? Even if it's unintentional, people make mistakes.
If you are close enough with a scientist, generally they will admit they don’t trust a single study
Some fields also have guardrails, such as the LIGO being two separate detectors a with two independent teams
Unfortunately, we have a media and political structure that uses the most recent study/model/whatever to advocate for, design, and enact policy before that review.
There isn’t really a way to “clean house” on a large scale, everyone has to somehow be more virtuous and not lie to themselves when p hacking or publishing data they know someone wouldn’t be able to reproduce.
I do think that you can tell apart these cases. Outright fabricated data is very different from p-hacking, which is very different from a meaningless garbage paper.
On the other hand, convenient laboratory errors might be hard to tell apart from fabrication (though not always, sometimes people get caught using photoshop), and statistical incompetence might be hard to tell apart from p-hacking. So I agree this is why it's hard to punish fraud.
no they don't. sometimes incompetence can stumble on the correct answer. like you could repeat the experiment, get very different results, be convinced of the charlatanism and incompetence of the original reporter, and then sigh a huge sigh of disgust because the data may have all been wrong but it points to the same overall/big-picture conclusion.
I just recently found an incredibly cool paper that solved a problem I was having. It was published in a tier A conference. They claimed they would make the data and code public at a later point.
Problem is, I could find nothing of it when I googled. O tried to get ahold of the authors and I even wrote to their department. The only Mail back I received concluded that neither would be available any time soon.
So there‘s that. A paper that could be completely made up, with no data to support it. It might as well be make believe. I would lie if I said this didn't make me lose faith in my own work, since it justifiably takes me ages to gather data and write code for my experiments. Great.
Problem 3 has another effect. There's a whole industry of conspiracy theorists who will point to that paper to give credence to their own BS, while they create Youtube videos and wild pop-sci articles to influence the general public on whatever their agenda is.
I have a friend who recently has 'taken an interest in science' and is now passing Youtube videos all of the time that are total crap, but make reference to 'scientific' papers. I 'learned' how earth is already doomed because Betelgeuse went supernova, and that there are deep shafts below the pyramid of Gizeh that only an alien race could have dug. Stuff like that.
Net outcome where it comes to science may be that this helps erode people's trust in science.
It really doesn't matter what the motive is when the effect is the same. Treating it as an individual moral failing isn't going to work when the incentives to fake papers (wilfully or not) are so strong. Any fix that works for 1 is going to work for 2 as well and vice versa.
You don't even have to change the laws. Just changing the social norms would be enough. At the moment our social norms are that the ends justify the means. If you make money, or produce something that looks like a breakthrough, that is all that matters. How you did it, or whether the thing you did has actual value, matters not at all. As long as you've provided yourself with plausible deniability, that's good enough.
I know this because I've been the beneficiary of this system on multiple occasions, and it makes me sick. This is not the kind of world I want to live in.
No you can't legislate morality. But operationally we want accountability commensurate to control. As others have pointed out, there must be consequences to bs. With that in place, we don't have to legislate other than point out consequences. Now to be a pedantic, consequences are a kind of legislation, but at least it's about behavior and outcomes not intent. It would elides certain issues out of scope.
Unfortunately the line between 2 and 3 is very blurry. Like paper mill output submitted to legimate medium-to-low impact journals. Some of it gets inevitably published, others just puts a strain on peer reviewers.
In a recent conversation with the editor-in-chief of a journal I am on the editorial board of, a substantial bulk of the submissions we get are LLM written papers that essentially randomly look for associations in accessible data, which are then sold to faculty (primarily in China).
probably not. the writing quality will improve but LLM-generated papers will still be ignored.
to the extent they aren't ignored, but seem so plausible that they are taken seriously, eventually people will want to talk to the researchers about their results, invite them to give talks, and so on. at which point it becomes problem 1.
No, probably Not. Nobody is reading these Journals anyway. It's only good one resumes. i think even 3a is Not a problem because fake papers will follow a specific pattern in Meta Analysis. Should be catched in one of the "filter" stages during Meta Analysis.
Or cheating in other ways, like collusion rings [1], reviewers using LLMs to review, or authors putting text in their papers so reviewers using LLMs to review will give them a favorable review [2]
Problem #3 is relatively easy to address: shift from journals to conferences. Organizing fake conferences is a lot harder than setting up paper mill journals.
I can tell you from personal experience that organizing a "fake" conference is beyond trivial. All you need is a topic that is narrow enough that all of the attendees know and like each other. I was an attendee at several such conferences back when I made my living publishing papers, and I was astonished at how easy it was to publish bullshit as long as it was the right venue, and how borderline impossible it was to publish anything that I considered to have actual value. (In my career I published dozens of conference papers, but only one journal paper and one book chapter.)
In actual practice what I found was that the principle driver of publishing success has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the work, it has to do with how much your reviewers think that you might some day be in a position to review a paper of theirs. This is the fundamental problem with peer review when: career success is measured by quantity of papers published, the resulting dynamic is governed by game theory, not scientific merit.
I get "invited" to fake or semi-fake conferences all the time. Also fake or semi-fake "awards". I just have a programming blog. I would not expect any other field to be any different.
Not really. I see many, many fake conferences adjacent to my field each year. I don’t really see why setting up one would be harder than creating a fake journal.
I think they mean predatory journals and conferences. Setting up a predatory journal costs nothing, whereas actually holding an in-person conference of any kind costs money.
A good time to repost about the famous VIDEA conference:
These conferences have fees, just like predatory journals. They tend to be held in dodgy places in otherwise touristy areas, and most of them are partly or fully online anyway. The cherry on the cake is that attendees can use them as holidays funded by their institution.
I don’t dispute that there are probably orders of magnitude more fake papers than fake conference presentations, just that shifting from journal articles to conference talks won’t help at all. If the incentives shift, current paper mills will just shift with the market.
You can't rely on journals because they have bad incentives. Their customers are the universities they're supposed to monitor for fraud, and their prestige comes from the same place news/magazine prestige does - publishing incredible claims.
Catching fraud further down the chain is easy. Other professions know how to do it. Just adopt the same framework as used in financial controls. External auditors, written standards, randomized spot checks, lots and lots of paperwork to provide audit trails back to real experiments with hard-to-forge evidence. And severe punishments for those found to have engaged in intentional fraud.
That sounds expensive and difficult. Science is not a single field with a single set of practices. Regulating it is more like trying to draft a single set of regulations for finance, agriculture, pharma, and software.
You can get a glimpse of that when applying for grants or publishing in more prestigious journals. There are often endless checklists and questions about regulatory and ethical compliance, data availability, reproducibility, and whatever else. And more often than not, many of the questions are category errors or otherwise make no sense in the context of your work. Even the people who are supposed to regulate science lack the ability to do so in a way applicable to the entire breadth of science.
I don't think the differences between fields in (academic) science are as big as the differences between agriculture and software. They all take grants to publish papers, in journals, and they are measured via similar metrics like citations, papers published, impact factors and so on. Academia is highly homogenous across institutions too.
Yes, for sure a lot of controls implemented via audit aren't perfect fits for what is being regulated, that's the nature of trying to fix bad incentives via regulation. It's better to just have aligned incentives to start with, but that can't be done in academia, it's regulation or nothing.
Also, my experience has been that sometimes academics like to claim their field is special and shouldn't be expected to play by the same rules as other fields. But that's often not true. They should in fact be held to the same standards as everyone else is and their justifications for why they're an exception don't hold water.
The academia is far from being homogeneous. Institutions in the same country are usually similar, but things vary a lot between countries.
Science is fundamentally an activity, not a field. You can do scientific research in most fields. Agriculture and software are nice examples, as academic scientists are doing both. And in many cases, the outputs are used by the general public.
Quantitative metrics such as citations, paper counts, and impact factors are mostly used by bureaucrats who don't know what they are doing. Actual evaluations in reputable institutions depend heavily on the subjective judgment of other people in the field.
The role of grants varies a lot between fields and insitutions. In some cases, a professor is expected to become a manager, win grants, and hire other people to do their research. In other cases, grants are nice but optional. Such professors can do research with limited external support, both personally and with students funded from other sources.
I remember "fondly" when a professor in China stole my paper from my PhD thesis; equations, pictures, and everything. I only found about it because a Chinese student in another lab came across both papers and was puzzled by the extreme similarities. I tried to contact his/her university to let them know about the fraud and never got a reply. Good times ...
comedy option: visit as a tourist and show up in their office.
I did this to someone who ripped off my master's thesis, word for word, as a side trek on holiday and it was like steam came out their ears when they realized if they call the campus authorities to escort me out they'd generate an incident report of why I was there.
Edit: This was not in China btw -- ironically despite the stereotypes all the folks I've collaborated with from there have been pretty ethical and hardworking, it's a shame some ruin things for everyone.
I had a similar experience. I was visiting the UK doing research and a Chinese post-doc was there. Apparently he was taking our methods and results and sending them to someone in China. They published in some journals we’d never heard of, at the same time we realized there was almost nothing we could do about it. Shaming had no impact on them. But their actual impact on us was negligible.
> First-author paper published at a top conference
I now find that requirement in most AI-related high-tech jobs. Starter salary for these jobs is often $150k+. When someone is willing to pay you $150k+ for having published a paper, fraud definitely makes (financial) sense. Basically, the problem is the demand, and the demand corrupts the metrics (h-index).
I think that having a paper published would become less and less significant in the future. With time, businesses will also move onto other signals of success.
It's not just a way for landing a job either. It's also a ticket for white collar immigration on "specialist" visas that have a much shorter waiting list, higher quota or better perks than regular work-based visas. I was blown away the first time I heard people talking openly about this in my field - it was considered totally normal for them to pay money to have an academic portfolio constructed on their behalf specifically for the purpose of having these "published papers" and "unique research" on their record so they could qualify for "specialist" visas. It adds a whole nother layer to the warped idea of good immigrants vs bad immigrants.
It is well-known that top-conferences had and still have many problems. Some examples:
There used to be the problem with authors adding new co-authors after acceptance, aka "selling seats".
There is a debate about how many papers one should be allowed to submit, as some people with money and influence are heavily franchising.
It is unclear to what extent there is implicit and explicit reviewer collusion. Even double-blind reviews don't really solve the problem.
If we don't admit that there are fundamental problems that affect all of us (academics) and instead pretend it is only the lesser people who f things up, we'll all be screwed sooner or later.
This really undermines the "trust the science" narrative. It has become much more about cushy white collar jobs, than the brightest minds being laser focused on understanding and bettering mankind.
> This really undermines the "trust the science" narrative.
Not really, but it does mean you shouldn’t trust individual papers blindly.
Anyone who follows research already knows this. Individual papers appear all the time with remarkable findings which seem revolutionary, but then nobody can replicate or commercialize it.
Some communities eat these isolated results up, like supplement and health podcasters (Rhonda Patrick, Huberman). They should know better than to take some random mouse study at face value, but it’s too good of a story to pass up.
In medicine and the industry, anyone experienced knows not to get excited about singular results unless it’s from a trusted source or until it’s replicated.
The more this kind of thing happens, the more it's going to blow back on you. The hacks, ideologues, and frauds have done a lot to destroy trust in science and the image of science. When the public backlash comes, muggles aren't going to be able to tell the difference between someone like you and the hucksters you've trained yourself to ignore. They are ruthless, and nothing of science will remain unless you are as ruthless, to the people who abuse your good name.
I'd argue that the vast majority of fraud - even high profile fraud - doesn't actually affect public perception of science. For example, the STAP cell paper and Jan Hendrik Schön's series of papers aren't really widely known outside of academia. And those papers were essentially attempts to lie all the way to a Nobel prize - as egregious as it gets.
In my opinion, the three research frauds of the past 30 years that have had the biggest impact outside of academia are:
1. Andrew Wakefield's autism paper
2. Elgazzar's paper on ivermectin as a treatment for COVID
3. Marc Tessier-Lavigne's Alzheimer's papers
The interesting thing about 1 and 2 is that yes, they reduced public confidence in science, but only because there are large blocks of people who remain convinced that the research wasn't actually fraudulent.
I think trying to keep a tally rather misses the larger point. You can’t properly determine the most impactful bad science of the last 30 years, because you’re not aware of all of it! These meta-studies are showing how often you find bad science when you dig deeper, but that’s just a rate of incidence, not an absolute number. There’s a whole iceberg of findings we haven’t begun to press on. Who knows what kind of stuff might turn out to be fraudulent? The real concern is about what kind of damage has been done to the foundations of knowledge, which compounds as we continue to do research on top of shoddy prior work.
Fraudulent research can be damaging along multiple axes, and I completely agree that there is probably a mountain of undiscovered fraud out there that continues to have negative downstream effects. I'm more skeptical of the idea that undiscovered fraud has a negative effect on the public perception of science. If even highly prominent known frauds have had little discussion outside of academia, why would undiscovered frauds affect the way nonscientists think about science?
It does undermine the narrative. Eventually nobody will trust any public sector funded science. Private companies will still invest in scientific R&D to enhance their products but, like today, they won't talk about it much and they won't publish papers, only patents. That's where we're heading.
First problem: the sort of people who popularized Follow The Science™ actually meant "follow the people who run public sector institutions". Not "follow single studies" or anything that deep. The catchphrase was deployed many times during COVID to browbeat people into obeying people like Anthony Fauci, a man notorious for claiming he literally was science. "Attacks on me are attacks on science", he said. It was pure authoritarianism dressed up as intellectualism, as was so often the case throughout history (see: Lysenko).
Second problem: the heuristic that you should only trust a claim if it appears in several papers will also lead to you trusting many bogus claims. Academics regularly cite work they haven't even read, let alone replicated. It's easy to find invalid citations in the literature. Most of them just take claims on trust or even cite claims clearly advertised as made up fiction (sorry, "modeling assumptions").
Third problem: many results that replicate shouldn't:
> Anyone who follows research already knows this. Individual papers appear all the time with remarkable findings which seem revolutionary, but then nobody can replicate or commercialize it.
But there are many scientists that love hearing themselves on TV etc. that pull out a paper to shove whatever agenda they have.
i think what people are talking about is that infomercial-level quackery and double-think and dishonesty has now breached the levy into mainstream science. now, instead of seeing papers claiming breakthroughs you will also see papers that are fraudulent but claim to prove or reinforce a hypothesis or model that everyone already agrees is true. obviously most fraudulent papers are like this because the point of fraudulent papers is to avoid detection and create an appearance of legitimacy. now we have a billions dollar drug for alzheimers that literally does nothing. thats what people are talking about. but you refuse to acknowledge it
"Trust the science" will work as long as science works, which even to this day is pretty nicely, this practice is given a bad name by the "Trust the science*" crowd, which activity is based on having a position then attempting to legitimize it by quoting the abstract of a paper they have never read, prioritizing pushing ideas above factual matters.
This in turn allows certain people in institutions to trade legitimacy for agenda pushing, creating the current crisis of institutional trust, which the legitimate "Trust the science" crowd suffers from.
Science itself is all about testable hypotheses and facts. If we can't rely on it, chances are we are doing something wrong and science itself is perfectly fine.
The incentive structure in academia exacerbates that by encouraging authors to hype up their findings and obfuscate any deficiency in their models. Withholding information and making results difficult to reproduce is a symptom of that, as are academic jargon disconnected from terminology used in the private sector, and obtuse presentation. Those practices make it easier for bad data, bad methodologies, and misrepresentations of findings to slip past reviewers and readers and harder for other researchers to dispute, and undermine the scientific process itself as we get flooded with junk.
Agree on all points. It's worth asking: who maintains the academic incentive structures? If the social structures are harming science (e.g., promoting fraud), why do the social structures persist? Who or what stymies reform? As I've asked these questions, I am led to blame (i) scientists who gain power broker status by playing the game and (ii) university administrators who benefit from larger production numbers (dollars, papers, enrollment, awards).
Maybe it's a naive outlook but maybe "science" can continue to work... with, without, or despite all the politics, waste, cruft, and scaffolding that academia erects all around it.
According to the article, bad papers are getting criticized and retracted. It appears "science" is robust enough to work as intended, even with some bad actors involved.
What practical solution would you offer to this problem? Without changing the entire publishing software ecosystem, it’s not like articles are living in github repositories where pull requests are a thing.
In many cases, citing articles still go to print media.
Obviously not all of them. And obviously there is corruption and mistakes with anything involving humans. What's so funny is that when people make criticisms like this, they always leave out the alternative. What's the alternative? Trusting mostly uneducated influencers and quacks who do even less research and don't even attempt peer review?
I'm sure if, god forbid, you were diagnosed with a curable cancer you wouldn't go "trust the science" and go get treatment. I'm really sure you would do that.
You can say that of all cases of fraud, but that’s a survivorship bias fallacy, since we can only talk about cases we know to be fradulent, i.e. where fraud has been identified.
It's complicated. There is a whole lot of corruption and fraud in science. But this kind of fraud doesn't end up leading to dominating narratives. The fraud remains part of the 99% of science that is invisible to the general population and that is precisely why the fraud isn't so easily uncovered in the first place.
Depending in the field and impact, reproduction becomes “free” because other scientists try to build on the results. Science is often about chasing the latest, hottest thing
If they can’t reproduce the original, they should get called out eventually
In over 80 volumes of ASTM publications, I would estimate they may amount to more kilos than that.
Almost all of the actual lab work requires statistical determination of repeatability & reproducibility to be calculated between different labs, and the summary is included with each document.
I would say there is way less than a kilo without this.
And the amount of supporting raw data on file amounts to kilos which dwarf the pages published. Formally accessible so everything can be thoroughly reviewed at any time in the future, allowing for complete reconsideration if called for.
Scietific instrumentation doesn't stand still.
So it definitely can be done. Even if it's to the extreme not suitable for everybody else.
The less-reproducible documents are there, they did the best they could, but have a smell not shared by the good stuff. You know "exactly" how good or bad the underlying science turned out to be in the real world.
Paradoxically, or intuitively, as the case may be, if you're going to utilize the less-reliable techniques (most likely because they're the best there is), you may need to know how bad they are most of all.
Maybe other publications should raise the bar on statistics as appropriate, I figure zero statistics is about as far as you can get from ASTM "standards".
Some places probably have a lot further to go than others and it would be nice to have a whole lot sweeter smell all around.
I thought it was understood that's what they do these days.
People can probably appreciate that lot of the kilos are more figurative than ever, but there's still enough hard copies made to fill big trucks though.
I'm not in academics professionally myself, how universal would you estimate it is among their journals these days to require a statistical study between an adequate number of different labs before final publication?
It depends a lot on the area. I'd not be so pessimistic. The problem is how many of the papers that reach newspapers are reproducible? I guess less than the average. And also strange results that are misinterpreted to get a amazing but wrong layman explanation.
I haven't seen the "trust the science" narrative since covid honestly.
Junk science has been around since, well, even before we coined the word science really. In some ways I think the situation has improved. People seem far more aware of misconduct, and willing to make retractions than they used to.
The lab where I did my postdoc had a joke that the first graduate student to make it big at some startup had to come back and endow a chair for their advisor.
I'd say they were when I was starting out in 2002. Obviously not perfect, but they had a lot to offer. That steadily changed until the pandemic. Then the job went to shit. I no longer recommend students look for academic jobs. I'll give my support if that's what a student's after, but I've talked to enough people that have moved away from academia, and academic jobs are dominated on pretty much every dimension in 2025.
you should not trust science. I mean look where the article is published. It's not Vox nor The New York Times, etc. It's in Science, one of the most reputable journals in the world. So the community of scientist is aware of the problem and in the end science is self-correcting. It's just a slow process. Science advances one funreal at a time.
Science isn't self correcting. These problems have existed for many decades. There were people complaining that social science doesn't replicate back in the 1960s.
The idea that science is self-correcting is a nice fiction spread by academics to absolve themselves of the need to reform. "Don't make us change, any problems will go away if you wait because science is naturally self correcting", they say. It's a silly word game. Academia, which is what they mean when they say science, is a human institution whose incentives lead naturally to rewarding bad behavior. Nothing in that system self corrects, corrections must be forced from the outside (or we give up on reform and dissolve the whole thing, a solution now actively being talked about in hardline right-wing forums).
There ideas in how to get better.
-People start talking about pre-register studies, where the study design is evaluated independent of the results.
-Some years ago Nature was thightening the acceptance criteria for articles about new laser principles.
- in the field of metasurfaces there are more and more articles in how to assess the performance of flat optics and calling Out Problems with the Status quo.
Honestly, i Don't See your point. Is the progress maybe slow... Yes. But changes are Happening. It's also in the best interest of Academia. You don't want to build Up your career (~5-30 years)on someone else fraudulent.
These ideas are all decent in the abstract but all rely on the assumption that there are auditors of some kind. There aren't.
Example: pre-registration does happen sometimes today, and it always happens for corporate clinical trials. It's a good idea that works. In the private case the FDA is the auditor and there's some circumstantial evidence that pre-registration may be the reason why pharma productivity flatlined around ~2000. But in a surprising number of cases in academia a study is pre-registered, the final paper doesn't match the pre-registration and nobody notices. Why? Well, who is responsible for systematically checking these things? It'd have to be auditors, but universities point the finger at journals and journals point the finger back at universities.
Papers calling out problems: it's been done for much longer than I've been alive. Doesn't work. People nod their head and say something should be done, then go right back to the bad old ways.
The only thing that can help is external force. Governments have to either defund academia and let science be done by the private sector, or they have to tie funding to passing rigorous external audits (by private sector actors paid to find fraud, not academics themselves). The latter has been tried a few times, the US ORI is an example of that, but it doesn't work. The ORI was set up on the assumption that academic malpractice is rare so its methods don't scale.
“Trust the science” is a terrible slogan. It almost turns science into a religion. Most people that use it seem to think that science is whatever a scientist says. We should be saying “Trust the scientific method”.
Agreed. I have never heard a scientist use this phrase, but I've heard plenty of left leaning folks use it. As left wing politics absorbs science as it's cause - and not a cause that everyone is for - I fear it actively turns right leaning folks against science solely because of it's mindless support by progressive folk.
I have been thinking through all of these comments that it's somewhat rich that a very SV heavy site is so critical of smart, driven people not applying themselves to important problems.
But I think the worst are the Science Fans who go around saying "Science, bitches!" just because something has a two-column layout and never actually read the shit. Then they go around saying "There is some evidence that" and they've never read the paper.
In fact, there is so much bullshit that you would never accept if you were the one making a decision. It's why so many outsiders frequently make the right decisions on things.
e.g. Bezos closed flights to/from China to/from his offices a month before the pandemic. Bezos isn't a scientist. Trump tried to do the same. Trump isn't a scientist. But what did the scientists say? That it would hinder a coronavirus response: https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/31/as-far-right-calls-for-c...
The "far right" non-experts said one thing while the scientists said another thing and now we know that the "far right" non-experts were right. It's not even because the "far right" has some exclusive access to truth. It's just that there is a certain kind of blind spot imposed upon science by the fact that scientists have certain political persuasions. This causes them to self-censor and blatantly lie so as to preserve those politics.
Even if some racist view were true, you would be hard pressed to find a liberal scientist who would espouse it. Even if some sexist view were true, or xenophobic view were true, or whatever. Which is a dirty stain on science as practiced today.
> This really undermines the "trust the science" narrative.
Even more like undermining trust in journals.
With Science.org doing it to its own self.
Which should be living up to a higher standard than most so they can set an example.
At Science.org I think they have the responsibility to reverse the forces that are trying to build hatred for scientific endeavors across-the-board.
Looks like the haters are most concerned with climate and vaccines, and are perfectly willing to let everything else go down the tubes if that's what it takes to purge every last trace there is concerning progress in those areas past, present, and future.
So when you get the direct opinion of the most hateful where they explain why they don't trust vaccine and climate research, they can often further explain why they don't really trust very many scientists at all, not even NASA, so this is where the most concentrated anti-scientist effort can be found.
The worst of the haters are the ones painting with the broadest brush.
But it has already "trickled" outward from there and naturally the hatred is so extreme (and undesirable) that is the part that fortunately gets watered down as it spreads, but that can leave the anti-science momentum seeming more credible than where it emanated from. When the source hatred & superstition are less prominent, the non-haters and non-superstitious laypersons are more likely to be persuaded.
This fraud needs to be exposed, but the way it looks to me it just gives haters another arrow in their quiver.
This article looks very well researched itself and seems like the authors are on the right track and will only gain more expertise on the subject if they try.
What bugs me is that they're painting with as broad a brush as you can get, themselves.
With the resources at their disposal, they should be breaking down in great detail which fields of science are the most effected and least effected by the growing fraud industry. The numbers of scientists in these fields and the locations their research was conducted in, as well as the estimated fraud in each of the fields. We want University and institution affiliations, correlations with educational histories, numbers, why not?
If they try, and stick with it for a number of years, progress in one direction or the other should become measurable for each field.
So the most egregious fraud can be targeted first & strongest.
If there was a time when there was no fraud "industry" at all, I would say that some of most questionable findings were still heavily concentrated on the social sciences, and least of all on the natural sciences.
It would be good to know if this trend still holds based on true statistical data, this could indicate if or when the fraud industries are disproportionally targeting natural science. It would be good to have a sign whether fraud in natural science is on the increase or not independently, whether initiated for the purpose of promoting the lesser scientists or their institutions, or perhaps a source of uncertainty & doubt that can be put on steroids without any intention to promote scientists or their work at all, just the opposite effect could be intended.
You know natural sciences like climate and vaccines are in their cross-hairs so you can expect those to take a big hit without any proven or rumored fraud, but if you're not careful everything else will be equally destroyed even though it was not the primary target of the hate.
One of the worst ways to discredit natural science is to lump it in with social science or anything else.
Its odd how I viewed academia as a beautiful place where people were judged by merit not by politics. Then I joined it and realized its even more cutthroat than corporate politics, I guess you cant escape human fallibility no matter the system since all systems are reflections of human nature.
Former solar researcher here, had the same experience.
I'll summarize it like this:
- join one of the most prestigious laboratories for my master's thesis in the world
- be assigned work based on a paper published in the same lab by a previous researcher
- can't replicate the results for s*t for months, put in insane overtime hours getting ridiculously good at all the processes, still nothing
- randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by the system in the publication is literally impossible, but by raising the voltage you can easily fake out the amount of electricity generated by the system. Nobody really caught it before because you need some very intimate experience with those systems, and it's just one random (albeit important) point.
- ask why this happens
- she explains that only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid
- she explains that only professors that run labs with a huge number of citations can find good funding
- only good funding can allow you to get the material, equipment and countless number of bodies (phds) to run as many experiments as possible and thus grow your position in the scientific world
Essentially there's way too many incentives to cheat and ignore the cheating for all the people involved.
And due to the fact that as soon as you enter a niche (and literally everything is a niche in science) everybody knows each other toxic things happen all around.
I wanted to be a researcher, but having wasted ultimately 7 months of my life trying to get numbers that were impossible to get, and having understood it was ALL about money (no funds -> no researchers/equipment -> papers -> citations -> funds) and politics I called it quits.
I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.
My mother worked in academia on the teaching and administrative side and said it was pretty much the same there too. In her experience even at public universities, it was all about the money. In order for the department or faculty to justify itself, it needs to bring in revenue, and the number one way to do that (along with those research grants) is international students. But the most reliable source of international students who can afford the fees are not necessarily the world's best and brightest, they're the kids of wealthy elites who see education as a business transaction - we pay, you pass our kids. So the syllabus is adjusted to suit, and the teaching methods are adjusted to suit, and in the end everybody suffers because the system becomes structured around keeping the money train coming in. The education still happens, just like the research still happens, but it's happening in a suboptimal fashion, or as a side-effect rather than as the primary focus.
Sometimes I think about tapping out of private industry and getting into academia because in my imagination at least the work would be more pure, but then I think back to the stories my mother told me and realize most likely it isn't.
I agree that the only answer seems to be serious change at the highest levels of government, i.e. revolution. Aside from advocating for that, it seems the best we can do is try exist within these systems and find niches where we can create value for society without feeling too much like our morals are being compromised in the process. It's not easy.
Great story and it shows what everybody knows but won't say - normal academics are the frauds. Not just mysterious strangers in foreign countries, paper mills, etc. but normal medium or high status academics in prestigious universities in western countries doing the fraud themselves.
You can say it's not their fault - they're forced into it because it's the only way to succeed. But it's still their fault. I remember a case of a politician in China being arrested for corruption and he said that the only way to reach his position was with corruption. Yea he was probably right but he was still corrupt.
For the curious, the laboratory I'm talking about is the Laboratory of Photonics Interfaces[1] at the EPFL in Switzerland ran by Michael Gratzel[2].
I want to stress out that the lab is great, the people in there are extremely hardworking, Gratzel is a great scientist, but at the end of the day research is what it is and stuff like this can slip under both your lab managers and reviewers. I have never ever seen the slightiest indication that lab staff ever encouraged nor tolerated such stuff, but it's easy for it to happen and there's not enough incentives (nor possibility) to review every single experiment.
But the reproducibility problem does exist and the number of scientists tweaking numbers by tiny percentages here and there to make sure they publish is relevant.
I can understand mistakes happening and going unnoticed. But from what that lady told you, it sounds like they have a culture of sweeping mistakes under the rug. Was the affected paper retracted or at least a correction published? If not, they're still benefiting from the fake success which makes it unethical even if it's not technically academic fraud.
There are so many other ways to make money that don't involve crime. And there are even many crimes that make more money that are far less harmful to society.
> I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.
This is just aggravating the problem. Science is mostly fraud because it's mostly done on behalf of a funder who doesn't want it. It's easier to write a paper describing the results you'd like to get than to actually get those results. And the funding agency is indifferent between those two things. So mostly you just get the papers.
The current system has essentially no requirement of reproducibility.
Having a paper that only allows reproducible experiments (where there's funding for random labs to reproduce results) may be difficult, or an utopia, or whatever, but not aggravating for sure.
It's aggravating the problem because you're proposing to put that indifferent funder in charge of ensuring quality. There are two problems here:
(1) This is not a recipe for actually getting any quality.
(2) By virtue of providing the funding, they already are in charge. They're not going to get better results by wishing harder. But they can easily waste more money than they already do.
Your mental model seems to be that the government received a mandate to cause research to happen, and they did that as faithfully as they could, with the only problem being that we forgot to specify that we didn't want fake research. So if we change the mandate to "cause non-fake research", the kind of research we get will change.
But that makes no sense. "Non-fake" was always a requirement. It was an unenforced requirement because it didn't matter to anyone, but you aren't proposing to change that.
Reproducibility can be a working requirement before publication when the progress is expected to be serious.
At ASTM the publishing company is non-profit and more non-academic industries pay for the (not cheap) publications every year. The employees are well-paid journalists and efficient bureaucrats specializing in continuous quality improvement themselves, highly skilled at organizing the scientists. The scientists are all volunteers.
>indifferent funder in charge of ensuring quality.
Nice not to have. Publication requires complete consensus of the volunteer scientists, and the institution is crafted to progress toward valid consensus.
It's all about quality from day zero.
In more ways than one, more than you can count actually.
So it didn't take 125 years to get that way, it had a better start than most, and has only gotten more strict over the recent decades as computer statistics became mainstream.
Edit: Forgot to mention, there's no eminence. Nobody's name appears at the top of the document, and almost nobody (still living) ever appears within the text.
Further edit: I guess you could say that ASTM is a product of the Industrial Revolution, and there hasn't been an equivalent Academic Revolution yet.
Seeking eminence costs more than making breakthroughs.
How else are you going to pay for lack of breakthroughs?
Some people aren't going to be capable of breakthroughs anyway, lots of them even know it from the beginning, so they naturally or intentionally seek different things using the same institutions and resources that could otherwise yield breakthroughs instead.
Edit: As a footnote suggested by my own question, you pay for lack of breakthroughs by building eminence out of thin air, if it wasn't obvious.
This is likely a generalized problem with basic science. In applied science you need to be very careful about fraud because ultimately the application of research findings will end up in customers hands who can and will pursue legal action if the original claims turn out to be false.
One thing that helps to counter this somewhat is that if your paper is proven to be wrong, the journal can force a retraction. A retraction isn't exactly career ending, but it is a huge deal and will have an impact on future jobs and funding.
my gut feeling is that the more famous a group/lab, the more likely there is some funny stuff going on. Smaller groups/labs are less cutthroat. But it also depends on the discipline...
> randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by the system in the publication is literally impossible
I'm interested in the apparent contradiction between the "tens of thousands of citations" credential for your evidently competent labmate who caught the fraud, and the "only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid" indictment of the evidently mediocre fraudster.
How much of the science that happens do you think is due to people like your labmate, who seems to have earned her citations organically with talent, and how much is due to the fraud? Are most citations still going to talented people?
My parents were both academics who built their careers in the 70s and 80s. I don't know that they had a perspective on fraud per se, but they did say that science used to be totally different—lots of money going into a smaller research community. But because each PI trains many PhDs, the research community has grown unsustainably and now funding is highly competitive. For the system to be sustainable, the vast majority of PhDs need to leave science, and there need to better exits for those people (or else there need to be many fewer PhD candidates and researchers need to stop relying on PhD candidates for labor). I wonder if the fraud is a consequence of this problem.
> I'm interested in the apparent contradiction between the "tens of thousands of citations" credential for your evidently competent labmate who caught the fraud, and the "only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid" indictment of the evidently mediocre fraudster.
Not every paper out there is fake and Yella Aswani [1], was an excellent PhD in Switzerland before becoming a full time professor in India.
That being said, some of her colleagues might have felt desperate to publish something meaningful before ending their PhD and cooked the numbers by that 8/10% that makes it impressive. Either that or they took an outlier result that overperformed for some reason (poor instrument calibration e.g.) and never investigated and just published.
Funny, as someone who works in private sector, I always had the opposite view of academia:
A zero-sum system based around a fixed pool of grants and positions that everyone competes for, and a terminal job ladder position where, once reached by successfully having competed for aforementioned grant $$, I become un-fireable.
I would have to sleep with a gun under my pillow in such a world.
There's already plenty of cheating in business, which is full of positive-sum win-win opportunities. I don't even want to imagine how badly I might behave in academia just in order to survive.
From 1945 to about 2000, academia in the western world was slowly growing. That made the pool of positions not-quite-zero-sum, and way too many people went into it expecting a much more genial environment.
If the pool grows at the same rate as the academics who need money from the pool, it's zero-sum. If the pool were ever to grow more slowly, then it's a negative-sum game. That's when all hell breaks loose -- by many accounts, this is unfolding now.
In other words, the academics do not grow the pool through their own actions, as in private business. They are forever reliant on the kindness of strangers.
That's not quite right. Academics do grow the pool through public outreach and demonstrating value to companies which lobby the government to fund them, but since there is usually one big pool (such as the NSF budget), it is impossible for people to grow their own pool directly. It's closer to working at a large company, where your impact on earnings is next to nonexistent and your career is determined by the beliefs of the people around you about your impacts on them.
Negative sum is the worst outcome. Only the cheaters win in that scenario and they slowly eat the legitimate players, then the weak cheats so only the biggest cheaters remain. The entire pool is then tainted.
We have acquired a couple such companies and the people that survived that environment are some of the most toxic players you ever meet. They are also really good at the game so they immediately rise to power and begin to devour their next victim.
You are un-fireable for the usual reasons for which people outside academia worry about being fired.
Layoffs aren't a thing in academia. Poor performance in the classroom isn't punishable. Failure to bring in grants isn't punishable. You can't be fired for disagreeing with your boss. You can (in most cases) publicly criticize the administration you work for, and advocate for many (yes, not all) controversial ideas.
That's an American thing. By default, you can fire anyone at any time for no reason. Universities then overcompensate and give extensive protections for tenured faculty.
In Europe, it's more common that a professor has roughly the same job security as a teenager in their first real job. There are some exceptions due to academic freedom, but they are mostly about the substance of the work rather than the performance in it. And other independent professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, and civil engineers, often have similar exceptions.
They are, but extremely infrequently and when they are it is minor numbers, at least at the largest universities. And when they are laid off it is for financial reasons not performance.
Look up "rubber rooms". They sequester teachers and professors accused of sexual harassment of children, and keep paying them, because they cannot be fired.
Look up teachers' and academics' unions (e.g. AAUP), and the contracts they have in place to keep them from being fired.
There's a more transparent and straightforward pathway to a lifetime appointment as a federal judge (which actually pays OK and has many social perks) than there is to a tenured professorship in most fields. Judges have Solomon-like-life-and-death power, and the lawyers who argue before them (often successful, high-status people in their own right) are professionally obligated to suck up.
By comparison almost all professorships are like becoming the most important hobo on a given street corner.
Yeah, it's mostly either students or academia who admire their hobo kings.
It's kind of like a sport like tennis. If you're in the system, you think that the world number 150 tennis player is amazing, but they barely make enough to afford travel to the matches.
In all fairness though, it's very difficult to become a judge. At least in my country, you have to have been both a defense lawyer and a prosecutor in order to become a judge. It takes many years of experience that is not easily gained.
At the state university in my smaller city, an actual professorship (not some adjunct) earns up towards $200k/year salary. Maybe pretty modest by FAANG standards, but for many people outside of tech that sounds like a lottery jackpot. So it's not just prestige, though that's on offer too.
Professors don't get the summer off. If you have a heavy teaching load, summers are your one window to get research work done. If you don't, like me, the difference between the summer and the rest of the year is its easier to find parking.
Fine, 3-4 months to think about interesting things all day long with basically zero expectation that you’ll be anywhere or show up to anything. Call it what you will.
I mean, its not completely untrue. You do not have set hours. You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs, depending on how despotic you want to be.
I do not have set hours, but I do have obligations. When a program officer wants to talk to you, and it's 6 AM because you're on the west coast, you say yes.
"You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs" is just untrue - there's always more work than there are people to do it, and I'm pretty sure a number of committees I'm on would be more than a little annoyed if I sent a postdoc.
Is it a job that has some nice properties to it? Yes. But the idea that we have summers "off", or that it's all time to contemplate blue sky research ideas, rather than go to curriculum meetings and work on monthly grant reports is a fantasy.
> When a program officer wants to talk to you, and it's 6 AM because you're on the west coast, you say yes.
Why? What happens if you as a tenured PI say no?
> "You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs" is just untrue - there's always more work than there are people to do it, and I'm pretty sure a number of committees I'm on would be more than a little annoyed if I sent a postdoc.
No this part is definitely true and I have firsthand experience of it. Your graduate students are paid less than minimum wage and are often immigrants from poorer countries. Often they are even paid zero by the PI. So they can be effectively serfs and beholden to you for literal survival.
Use your imagination. What's to stop you from recruiting a bunch of students and offloading all your grant writing to them, hunger games style?
Look, I know there are idealistic professors who put in the work. If that's you, thank you. But the system incentivizes what is effectively feudalism and the professors who take advantage of that climb faster than you and become program chairs. Acknowledgement of this perverse system is not an attack on you.
> Why? What happens if you as a tenured PI say no?
In the last lets say five years of my career, the range of possible consequences for this range from "Mildly annoying a colleague I like" to "Catastrophic outcomes for a 100+ million dollar research program".
Will I get fired? No. But we can't both argue that academia is incentivized toward grant-getting (which is true) and that pissing off the people who award and administer those grants is consequence free.
It also includes leaving a whole study section in the lurch (I was recruited for specific expertise, the meeting time was published in the Federal register, and then it had to move to an online format, which a 6 AM start for PST folks).
Or collaborators in various foreign countries who need to talk outside regular business hours.
A non-fixed schedule (and I only have one because I rarely teach - the times I do teach my schedule is much more rigid) is like unlimited paid leave. It's very nice, but it also has downsides - you can't reach for business hours. It works for me, but it also makes my GP go a little pale whenever I document my sleep schedule.
Ironically, the only colleague of mine I know who does do a good job with work boundaries does so by assertively working 9 to 5.
> Your graduate students are paid less than minimum wage and are often immigrants from poorer countries.
My unionized graduate students are paid considerably more than minimum wage.
> Use your imagination. What's to stop you from recruiting a bunch of students and offloading all your grant writing to them, hunger games style?
To be blunt? All our graduate students write a mock proposal as part of a professional development course. They are not good at writing proposals.
Beyond that, much of the actual work I do has nothing to do with what graduate students do. I'm not going to have a graduate student review and prepare my department's packets for this year for the Tenure and Promotion Committee. Or have yet another fight with IT. Or figure out how to best represent programs that exist in a multidisciplinary department so they both have a sense of identity but don't undermine a coherent whole (though I will ask their input on that, because it matters to them).
Academia has very real problems, including some of the ones discussed in this article. But Hacker News is very bad at understanding how academia actually works on a pragmatic level, including things like what being a professor is actually like, or how indirect costs work, etc. Even those who have been to graduate school struggle with it - partially because academia is bad at actually teaching to so-called "hidden curriculum" of how being a PI actually works.
> My unionized graduate students are paid considerably more than minimum wage.
This is not typical and you know it.
> To be blunt? All our graduate students write a mock proposal as part of a professional development course. They are not good at writing proposals.
That's the thing with hunger games, if they don't get good they don't survive. I've seen it. I know PIs who don't write a single one of their grants.
While maybe you don't abuse grad students and post-docs to do your job its simply not possible to say it doesn't happen unless you are willfully putting on blinders. Frankly, it sounds like you are in full denial of just how bad it can get.
But my entire field goes off NIH rates, which while not nearly high enough, are well above minimum wage. That's what I'm objecting to - the broad strokes exaggeration that covers up genuine problems.
> That's the thing with hunger games, if they don't get good they don't survive. I've seen it. I know PIs who don't write a single one of their grants.
Personally, I wouldn't put my name on any graduate student's first grant proposal attempt, because I don't like wasting my time, nor is that what I want them working on.
I am not saying abuse of graduate students and postdocs doesn't occur. I'm acutely aware that it does - and having helped colleagues through a number of crises, I'm very much not in denial about it. But it is also not the norm.
If you want to have an honest discussion about the problems facing graduate students and postdocs in academia, including abusive working conditions, that's one thing. But that's also a massive shift in goalposts from asserting that I get to spend 3-4 months thinking about interesting things all day because "You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs", which is just factually untrue.
Your setup sounds rather different than mine, though I am under the impression mine is typical. There are no “curriculum meetings” or any other sort of teaching or service work during the summer, for the simple reason that the university literally does not pay you in the summer. I meet with my group to talk about research, but that falls under “enjoyable” for me. Grant reports are due once a year, in the spring as it happens. I have never heard of monthly reporting grants, but I’m used to garden-variety NSF and R01 type stuff only.
If your job much of a grind as you are making it out to be, why not go make 3-10x in industry? Honest question.
The curriculum meetings are because we're starting a new program, and my entire department is on 12 month contracts, not 9 month ones. Honestly, those meetings are rather fun, because it's a chance to talk about what I think we should be teaching people in my discipline - it's just an example of something that can't be "pawned off on a grad student".
My NIH grants have annual reports, as do NSF. CDC and USAID (RIP...) have much more intensive reporting requirements.
Honestly, I love my job, and there are some very nice things about it. It's just not the case that all professors get the summers off, or that if they are working, it's all fun and games and sitting in my office thinking Big Ideas.
maybe those who fight for it have better information.
for example they realize that once they achieve tenure, the amount of work truly required to retain the for-life annuity is risibly low so they can go on to do just about whatever else they want or “consult” for extra dollars as needed.
My workload has only steadily increased once I got tenure. The nature of the work changed, but the "Kick back, relax and enjoy your zero effort forever job" is a fantasy of people who don't actually know what they're talking about.
i’ve personally known a number of tenured professors who’ve systematically shirked all responsibility after their tenure event. they’ve been willing to live as semi-pariahs within their peer group though.
even when required to teach they simply repeat classes they’ve taught many times before making no effort to optimize for reviews.
i don’t doubt your experience but i wonder how much it has to do with not wanting to endure your colleagues’ and departments’s disapproval vs actual threat to employment.
and fwiw, i’m not saying it has to be this way just that it can be this way due to the structure of the system. similarly there are many corporate situations in which one can scrape by for extended periods of time, but there is rarely a “for life” clause. even so, it hasn’t prevented the university system from helping to catalyze all the amazing discoveries we all benefit from in society every day.
fwiw, i agree with most of the points in @Fomite’s response below. the people i’ve known fall into a perverse version of his “ego” point.
they felt that when they got tenure they “won” and their “ego” was strong enough to allow them to ignore the disapproval of their peers for not doing the conventionally expected things. they felt that they knew better in their hearts what the discipline truly needed and that the rat-race of establishment approval wasn’t it. so they turned inward. which is not necessarily the healthiest path imo.
I mean, there are definitely people who coast, because there are people everywhere who coast.
But the vast majority of tenured professors I know don't do so, for one of the following reasons:
- I can't get fired, but I also don't need to get paid. My position has a non-trivial soft money component to it, and it's actually low for my field, which ranges from 50% to 100% soft money depending on the institution. A double-digit pay cut is motivation for most people.
- There are still promotions to be had, and those promotions are really the only way to get a raise beyond cost of living increases. At my institution there are two steps beyond Associate Professor with Tenure, and both of them are not obtained by phoning it in.
- Ego. It's hard to understate this one. Most academics are smart, determined people. There are other easier, more lucrative jobs. But there's a sense of purpose and ego that channeled them to the career they're in. Said ego is usually not fed by being in the doldrums. That's not how you get awards and invited to talks, and recruited elsewhere, etc.
Sure, the stick of "You could get fired" isn't there, but there are also ways to make a tenured professor whose coasting's life less pleasant. But even if not, I don't think it's nearly as common as the popular imagination (or this thread) think it is. Most people I know only really take their foot of the gas in the last few years of their careers, often well past retirement age.
I viewed academia as altruistic and relatively enlightened. And I've certainly met many who live up to that.
I've also occasionally heard of entire academic departments who should be in jail, for being pieces of crud.
Then there's what I'm guessing is the bulk of academia: care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be.
That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
> That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
I regularly see both worlds. What I find more troubling in academia is that it is difficult to openly talk about how flawed the system is, that people make mistakes, that papers have mistakes (the own ones as well as others'). We know all software has bugs; but the code that a PhD student hacks together over night is assumed to be flawless (the more senior people rarely even glance at it), otherwise the paper is all wrong, and papers are set in stone...
So I genuinely struggle with the lack of a proper failure culture in academia, as it is designed as a system that is fundamentally geared against openly discussing failure.
I suspect there's many reasons for the field/department cultures.
One of them, which was surprising to me (which I first heard from a friend in a hard STEM field), was what happens when student A's thesis result is found to be wrong due to flawed experiment... but only after student B is well into their own dissertation building upon A's result. Reportedly, everyone involved (A, B, their PI, the department, the university) has incentive to keep quiet about student A's bad result. B has an academic career to move forward, within funding and timeframes, and everyone else cares about reputation and money. And there is only downside for bystanders to complain, especially if it's other students especially vulnerable to retaliation/disfavor.
Another one I've seen, which is less surprising, is when there seems to be a culture of alliance or truce among faculty. So, if someone is misbehaving, or makes a mistake, it's understood that no one is going to call them out or interfere, and no one wants to even know about it more than they have to. In general, no selfish benefit can come from that, but a whole lot of negative feedback can. Mind your own business, glass houses, etc.
> care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be. That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
That's pretty much my experience from 20+ years ago.
One thing that I didn't appreciate when I left the ivory tower was the extent of the replication "crisis."
If other academics can't replicate your work in some esoteric corner of bio research, it's no big deal--some people get burned wasting time, but the research just atrophies in the end.
But in the biotech / pharma industry, we in-licensed a lot of un-replicatable garbage from academia.
And replication was important to us because we actually had to make a drug that was effective (which loosely translates to ... "clinicians must be able to replicate your drug's efficacy.").*
* I'm not sure how true this is anymore, given politicization of regulatory bodies, but it was an eye-opener to me years ago.
Yeah, I would say that my time in academia disillusioned me somewhat, but not to the level that some people here are expressing. I never got the sense that people were falsifying data, directly (but covertly) backstabbing one another, or anything really awful like that.
But there are plenty of disheartening things that don't rise to that level of actual malfeasance. People get so comfortable in their tenured positions that they can lose touch with reality (e.g., the reality of how difficult their grad students' lives are). Even if they don't engage in actual research misconduct, there's a tendency for people to put their thumb on the scale in various ways (often, I think, without being aware of it), many of them connected to a sort of confirmation bias, in terms of who they think is a "good fit" for a job, what kind of work they want to support, etc. In my experience they are at best dismissive and at worst offended by the idea that maybe the current financial/employment model of higher education isn't the best (e.g., that maybe you shouldn't have a two-tiered system of tenure-track and non-ladder faculty with wildly differing payscales, but rather should just have a larger number of people doing varying amounts of teaching and research for varying but roughly comparable levels of pay).
I felt like virtually everyone I met was in some sense committed to the truth, but often they were committed to their own view of the truth, which was usually a defensible and reasonable view but not the only view, and not as clearly distinct from other reasonable views as they felt it was. And they varied considerably in how much they felt it was acceptable or necessary to engage in minor shenanigans in order to keep moving forward (e.g., to what extent they'd compromise their actual beliefs in order to placate journal editors and get something published).
Also, there is often something endearing about how academics can be genuinely emotionally invested, sometimes to the point of rage or ecstasy, in matters so obscure that the average person wouldn't give them a second thought. It's sort of like finding someone who's a fan of some TV show that ran for 12 episodes in 1983 and is adorably gushy about it. Even the people I met who were quite cognizant of making strategic career moves and other such practical stuff still had a lot of this geeky obsession about them.
A lot of this may vary from one field to another. But on the whole there are many worse people in the world than academics.
As an US undergrad decades ago, at a major (non-elite) research school, I was already discovering these criticisms of the current academic system, in action, way back then. So I don't think we can blame much of any 'fraud' increase going on today on that system. Today, perception of fraud may be on the increase.
(I started to become alert to what that program was really about when I took one of the classes -critical- to my major. It involved a lot of heavy math, and was being taught by a TA with a -very poor- command of the English language. When I complained, my Princeton-grad advisor's reply was 'this course is to separate the men from the boys'. Yeah, thanks pal.
So far as I know, he published very few cited papers.)
Well, the amount of money being wasted is generally smaller, and often the results are not harming hundreds of millions of people around the world. (But it depends on the field.)
Tenured people carry it out, but in my experience, the goal tends to be for their students/subordinates/group colleagues/etc. to achieve tenure instead of others.
I've heard of an engineering faculty where there was basically a cold war between a few of the tenured profs. They would do everything they could to undercut or screw each other over. Pure spite-based politics. Toxic as hell and there was very little anyone could do about out.
i know of prestigious departments where after literally decades of political stalemate with colleagues (over things as petty as who gets what office) prestigious faculty finally managed to finagle a high-dollar offer from a lower tier institution and de-camped over the politics.
Well, I’m not sure I’ve seen that pattern quite so much, but if you’re seeing it, I would speculate survivor bias. The people who stay around are the ones who were good enough at the game to stay around.
the way i’ve generally understood the use of the word “vicious” in this context is in judging other academics’ work quality. which is also typically where i think most people from the outside perceive the stakes to be low: as in who cares whether one more journal article that no one will read gets published? but from the inside it can mean the difference between tenure and no tenure (for the young academic vying for it), respect and abject failure, money or no money.
Well sure but in this case the actual word was “viscous”, not “vicious”. Academic politics is thick, sticky, and insufficiently fluid and insufficiently solid at the same time. Okay it was probably a typo but it kind of works as an analogy.
sure, maybe it was intended as a novel coinage, but i assumed the “vicious” interpretation which is the more common one since the comment explicitly references Sayre's Law.
I was also wondering if it was a spelling mistake, a failure to know the difference between the two words, a legit description of academic politics as molasses-like, or a play on the user's own username. The layers of potential irony here are thick and viscous!
Especially when the position is filled by someone who couldn't earn half as much (in money, security, and prestige) if forced to compete on merit in the real world.
I think ideally academia needs to evolve to be open to everyone and worshiping of nobody. Pop in to publish your article, return to whatever else you had been doing after. Repeat. University professors are rarely that innovative or good in their teaching methods, so that part could be to be taken up by teaching faculty instead.
Pop in to publish your article, return to whatever else you had been doing after.
Nothing is stopping you. I've published papers and presented at academic conferences while working in industry. Both in collaboration with academics and without.
Well over half of college teaching is already done by "adjuncts" who are non tenure track teaching staff. The teachers are effectively unsupervised and do their best but have no incentive to improve other than self motivation.
Disclosure: I was an adjunct for a semester while I was between industry jobs.
The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability. One of the best lecturers I had at university was a postdoc who didn't get hired and ended up teaching at a 'third rate' university. One of the worst lecturers I had got head hunted by MIT.
>The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability.
Because they aren't intended to be educational. Universities (as they are run today) are primarily grant-revenue capture organizations, secondarily research organizations (at least to the degree necessary that grant money doesn't dry up because of fraudulent spending accusations), and finally after that, a begrudged effort is made at education for optics. If they could ditch the education angle entirely, they'd send the students home tomorrow.
That's not necessarily a problem. There are different options in the marketplace. If you attend an R1 research university then of course hiring decisions will heavily weight research productivity. But many other smaller schools absolutely do look at teaching ability.
No "system" can ever overcome such problems. Sure, some political orders are better than others in various respects, but nothing will overcome the basic origin of our problems, which is us! The "system" itself is made from the crooked timber of our humanity, and even if some perfect "system" could be made, its perfection could only be actualized by a perfect people.
Hence the need to focus less on systems and more on personal virtue. You want to find your greatest enemy? Look within.
To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”
Your post being down voted is unjust. There is a tendency to expect salvation from the system and the rule, but they only have power if they are kept by and defended by the commons.
This also applies to society as a whole. The role of the media as the fourth estate in the system is to inform the public when destruction is breaking the rules, to explain how it will bring down the house.
But when in a Res Publica the media susses the common man instead, when the outlets prostitute them to the destructive powers that finally will kill their enablers, all is too late. The common man will have exchanged his virtues for hate towards imaginary enemies. Then it turned out that the rules did not save the public.
>To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”
This gets invoked way too often by bad people defending bad things that they were warned not to do/support at the time but did/supported anyway because there was something in it for them.
Perhaps my wording was misleading. I am not claiming that reform is not possible. I am only claiming that the impulse, especially when it is messianic, that drives some reformers and revolutionaries is delusional, a dead end, and worse, usually involves tyrannical measures and produces more bad than it does good.
Of course, academia could absolutely benefit from certain changes and reforms - I have argued for this myself; education has been derailed by inferior goals - , but the primary place where the work has to happen isn't policy or institutional structure, but ourselves. Indeed, the counterpart to your criticism is that excessive talk of reform is a way of avoiding the difficult and unpleasant work of having to look in the mirror. This does not exclude the need for certain reforms, but unless you get your own house in order first, you will be in poor shape to know what to reform and how.
I think it's more beneficial to think in terms of incentive structures. How we structure societies and industries can incentivize virtue, but it can also disincentivize fradulance and incentivize good clean work more directly.
Sure, incentives are important. I don't disagree. The law is a teacher, and it involves the use of incentives and disincentives.
But there is a bootstrapping problem here. The first is that virtue is needed to know what and how to incentivize and disincentivize, and to be able to choose to do it. Corrupt men will tend to create incentives in their own image.
Another problem is that even when incentives are properly aligned, this alone does not guarantee good behavior. Murderers know what awaits them for their crimes. So while incentives are important, a purely game theoretic construction is not enough. It does not do enough to secure rational behavior. So the problem is not merely political, but moral. We each have a personal duty here to demand moral action from ourselves and to grow in virtue.
I was planning on going into academia in the early aughts and this was also around the time that there was a groundswell to take away tenure from professors. "They" wanted to set out a quota for how many times you needed to have your research published on a yearly basis to show you were still doing your job.
I opted out when all three of my advisors during my first year of graduate work told to get out and that the whole field of academia was not the romantic vision I had aspired to be. It was quickly becoming toxic. One of my advisors had stopped taking money from universities, and was leaving to go work for a large pharmaceutical company doing research out in Siberian Russia. Another was quietly working on a degree in statistics to go work for the government.
These were people who I admired and fashioned myself after. It's quite a shock when people you respect suddenly warn you academia is not where you want to be. I was lucky, the other two guys I was in grad school with went ahead anyways. Years later, I found out neither lasted more than a few years for exactly what you described and what I was warned of.
One thing that really needs to be unbundled is assessments for credentials, teaching, and research. As it is now you want to be assessed for credentials at a top institution, you have to pay to take classes and learn at that institution. Which often leaves you in a class being "taught" by a researcher who's uninterested in teaching and unresponsive, and who hands off the actual job of teaching to an inexperienced graduate student making minimum wage. And for this privilege, you're charged a massive amount of money.
Part of the problem is many academic institutions, even prestigious ones, simply don't prioritize teaching. They don't even really prioritize challenging education. They prioritize prestige and opportunity hoarding. The hardest part about many of these schools is getting in. Once you're in, then grade inflation and the desire for the institution to retain it's prestige brand means the classes aren't particularly hard --- graduating is particularly easy and most students actually barely put in effort. Getting in is the golden ticket more than graduating.
One solution, is for an institution to prioritize accessibility (easier to get in) but also prioritize difficulty (actually hard to graduate). This would reorient incentives around challenging education that pushes students to excel rather than coast after striving just to get in. Unfortunately, the priorities are the exact opposite today.
I had the same view until I went to do a small internship in a research lab. There, I realized that my research group's boss was spending most of his time submitting grant requests, that in my view distilled to 'Give use money and we will find X'. Which was absolutely antithetical to what I thought research was like(wait, aren't we supposed to not know what we will find ?). Then came the publishing part where you get reviews saying your paper isn't good enough because it didn't cite ${completely not relevant to the topic} paper (which sort of narrows down who the "anonymous reviewer" was). Then there's the quasi-feudal approach of putting the lab head in the authors. I mean, come on, I'm not sure the guy even knows the paper exists...
- Very few successful grants, in my experience, are "Give money and we'll find X". Rather, they tend to be "We're reasonably sure X is over here for $reasons, but we'd need money to actually confirm that."
I'm open to the idea that i somehow caught an outlier. then again, its a lab integrated to the general eu funding schemes, so it can't be that much of an outlier.
your summary of a grant request doesn't really sound all that different from mine tbh, just more charitable. Its just that i naively came in with the expectation that it would be something like "we need X$ to explore domain $Y" "sure. here you go", then 2 years later "we found x y and z, see $papers, now we'd like $x2 to explore $y2". and back to square 1/2.
a full broadcast over all available and unavailable channels of "please, master grant officer, just a few coins to explore $X a bit further, we'll very certainly find $Y", i was not ready for.
Im overdoing the tone a bit to highlight that it had to be tuned to the grant officer, way more than it had to be tuned to reality. to promise to find whatever was popular in the field at the time. regardless of the practical facts of the field. because the people evaluating the proposal didnt know shit about the field.
so when you were in the trench every day, it just sounded like absolute parody of what we were actually doing, explained to a kindergartener.
i realize this comes off as a knock on my boss way more than I'd like. i absolutely don't mean to. he did what had to be done, so that his team can keep working, within the system he had to work with to move our field forward. and the money we got was well spent, no doubt here.
but my view was : if I work my ass off for 10 years, I can be this guy. Do I want this? and the answer was a resounding, definitive "hell no".
all the paper publishing shenanigans were just extra irritants that sealed my decision.
I have a "We need X to explore domain Y" grant, and it's lovely. It's also pretty rare, but at the moment, most of my funding is from those types of mechanisms. That is, admittedly, somewhat unusual.
I will say that "the people evaluating the proposal didnt know shit about the field." isn't true in the U.S. For grants from the NIH, NSF, or CDC, they're almost all peer-reviewed. While some hot topics get a bit of needless shine to them, I've also seen grants ripped apart for "They just tacked LLMs onto this for no reason", etc.
I do definitely get not wanting that. There are people I know and respect immensely as scientists who went "I don't want to be a PI" and that's legit.
I will say, and this is not about your post, that Hacker News both often laments the paucity of staff scientist positions, and also likes to attack the PI who does nothing but write grants, but you can't actually have it both ways. Almost all of my grant writing is driven by keeping my people employed.
Academia these days is a lot like industry, but with worse pay, better schedule, and low consequences/verification if the data that is published is "wrong", intentionally or unintentionally.
The schedule is not better. My quality of life increased dramatically when I left academia and realized that I had time for things like hobbies.
Even in startups, there’s a tacit understanding that you’re exchanging your time for money and that this exchange has limits. This is simply not true in academics where the need to publish to keep funding (and often your job) is incredibly intense.
Sorry, you're correct. I specifically meant flexible, which I equate to better. Both academia and in some industries will likely be 50+ hrs weekly, especially in the early days of their careers. But academia offers substantially more flexibility. Especially once you bring kids into the mix where you're more likely to need to shift your day around for children/child care.
Posted this same comment elsewhere, but seemed equally appropriate as a response to you.
Sorry, you're correct. I specifically meant flexible, which I equate to better. Both academia and in some industries will likely be 50+ hrs weekly, especially in the early days of their careers. But academia offers substantially more flexibility. Especially once you bring kids into the mix where you're more likely to need to shift your day around for children/child care.
Not all humans are practitioners of the terminal gamesmanship that is infecting our economy and government. It's about electing, promoting, and buying from the right people, and having the courage to properly punish those who have betrayed the good faith that powers successful societies.
It seems to me that the "elephant in the room" no one has mentioned yet w.r.t. academia is the model of modern academic administration, where universities are run like cruise ships (look at the perks kids are paying for these days!) with hedge funds attached, and have no "skin in the game" with regard to the incredibly high financial risks that students take when they pay for tuition.
If: (a) students paid 1/10 of what they pay today[0], (b) all the on-campus expensive perks were ended (new buildings sold, etc.) and the administration headcount dropped to 1 per every 50 students, (c) tuition went directly to professors, research, and basic groundskeeping, (d) some kind of financial arrangement were put in place so universities had skin in the game with regard to the success of their graduates[0]
then I'm positive the academic system would become far more effective at educating students and preparing them for life, and there would be a positive trickle-down effect to scientific research and the politics there.
[0] State-funded secondary education in European countries costs far less than university education in the US. There's a reason for that - unlike students with easy access to debt, the government won't pay such exorbitant fees.
[1] A very rough stab at an idea for making universities have skin in the game: make tuition for degrees conferred refundable by some percentage (50%?) if more than a certain fraction (10%?) of graduates with B- or higher GPA in their majors are collectively unable to find a job in their field within 2 years of graduation. If a university needed to withhold that guarantee for some majors, that would be a very helpful signal for prospective students.
But the point isn't the specifics, it's that just the presence of such a lever (and its absence at some universities or majors) would be a powerful signal to prospective students, better align the university's incentives, and cause a lot of necessary changes.
Most universities do not have "hedge fund" class endowments.
It should also be noted that there are reasons tuition is the way it is. State allocations for higher ed were slashed in 2008, and didn't really get put back even when the economy was doing well. Similarly, federal research dollars (which fund the vast bulk of research, not tuition) has been pretty flat for decades (the amount of a non-modular NIH R01, for example, hasn't changed since the Clinton administration).
Tuition is the only lever left to most institutions.
> Tuition is the only lever left to most institutions.
No, cutting costs (especially slashing the administration and facility budget) is another lever that few institutions use. The other really important levers are professor hiring and pay, and admissions standards.
Build a reputation for hiring a great faculty, paying them well, keeping a minimal administration, and cultivating a student body that is hungry to learn, and the right people will come. Everything else is mostly fluff with regard to a quality education.
Have a look at the average admin headcount per student in 1995 vs 2025. It has grown to be the largest department by far of modern US universities (and a lot of places in Europe as well, unfortunately) - usually significantly larger and more well-paid than the faculty.
In one extreme example, I heard the ratio of student:admin is nearly 1:1. That is bonkers.
And no - administration employees don't need to justify their ongoing employment by constantly publishing new research in academic journals. For them, the gravy just keeps rolling in. Just keep increasing tuition, increasing the endowment fund (often through real estate deals and other hedge fund like activity), increasing donations, increasing their own budget, and threatening to cut research & academic department budgets.
Yes, academic and research departments have often had budget cuts. But expenditures per student are way up to pay academic administration salary.
(If I sound angry, it's because I am. MBA types have caused so much harm to these institutions.)
Another ex-researcher here. Similar experience. I went in with hopes of a lot of rationality and intense cooperation between people who would be there mostly for a shared curiosity. Fast forward years and... Good grief - so, so many people publicly being shouted down, shamed, bullied, insulted. So many serious abuses of power - up to sexual and bodily - essentially without consequences for the abusers (often with way more negative consequences for the victims if they complained). So many tears, so many ends to academic careers of people who were really smart and really cared - in quite a few cases accompanied by burn-outs and other long-term health consequences. So much tax money down the drain with questionable accounting up to outright lies. So, so many utterly absurd intrigues and wars between mini-kingdoms based on nothing but the feelings of the biggest, loudest and most vicious narcissists. So many publications of questionable methodology that are sliced as thinly as they possibly can be and are hyper-targeted towards all-important journals or conferences. And so much more soul-destroying nonsense.
I'm still mostly in academia but nowadays, I focus on teaching and infrastructure. Especially with teaching, I feel that I can make more of a long-term impact that I ever could as a researcher - not least because I have way more freedom for discussions and interesting projects with students (I still have to deal with way more hostile, petty and sometimes outright dangerous BS than I feel comfortable with - but it's better than in the even-higher-pressure parts of the system).
I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism. If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently. Because what you see in small, specially poor communities is that trust in each other is strong.
You could argue that the church tried it and we had the inquisition, but I think it's different. We have way more benefit of hindsight and the population is way more educated than it was in the middle ages.
Not advocating for a renaissance of the Christian kingdom, but for embedding care and charity as first class moral values in economics.
It's not what I see. I go out and I see people helping each other, people having fun and taking care of the environment, social justice being discussed at the government level. I'm Brazilian though so I might be biased, but I think I prefer to be an idealist than a defeatist.
If the world is like what you say it is, shouldn't you just drop dead? Thinking like this is like committing philosophical suicide anyways, if you can't imagine a better world that's worth fighting for, even if it's just in a thought experiment.
This learned helplessness is by design, not by nature, so you don't question the status quo and keep working to make the elites richer without realising it's killing the world.
I think one of the core failures of our current economic religion is that we can rely solely on anonymous transactions. But many transactions fail when everything is black boxes. We can't easily evaluate (1) if the thing we got is of good quality and (2) there wasn't any harmful side effects.
Transactions need more trivially verifiable metadata. That could solve one of many issues.
> I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism
This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don’t have capitalism, they’re all getting along, right? Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for mates?
Being competitive is human nature. People will always compete for things, even if you try to artificially remove or forbid financial incentives. There are always more incentives. There will always be social standing to pursue, a coveted position, or the recognition of having accomplished something.
> If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently.
Alternate economic systems that forbid capitalism rely on heavy government enforcement to prevent people from doing capitalistic things: Running unapproved businesses, being entrepreneurial, selling goods and services at market rate.
This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).
We should be able to tell which behaviors are not properly included in the concept of "humanity".
And when we find these behaviors within ourselves, recognize those as a vestige of inhuman nature.
We should be constantly striving not to confuse the unsuitable animalistic stuff as "human nature", otherwise that's the lamest excuse of all and has leveraged more stupidity than probably anything else in history.
I'm with you on competitiveness though, to a degree it's all not purely animalistic, especially not financially ;)
OTOH, the cutthroat stuff can be so inhuman there's not any question, or it wouldn't be called that.
animals do frequently get along and cooperate, ironically what youre doing is a reflection of capitalism, youre projecting the current economic system onto the animal planet. Think of that famously wrong study from the 70s about alpha wolves, its been disproven but people still of it as true because it molds to the economic system they understand.
But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly: will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses. Market economies, command economies, mercantile economies, and any other economic system must deal with these scarcities somehow. Even in the animal kingdom this must be contended with, albeit at a much lower level of abstraction. We deal with scarcity in a number of different ways, e.g. higher prices, waiting lines, by need, or some other metric or any combination thereof. Animals tend to deal with resource (food) scarcity through violence, abandonment, and a few other processes because not eating means death. That isn't to say cooperation doesn't happen, it absolutely does, but it is still constrained by resource scarcity.
> But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly
All economic systems are a set of trade-offs and capitalism in general tends to outperform all other economic systems we know of. That isn't to say it's a perfect system, it isn't, but I've noticed people who profess your opinion implicitly assume the alternative is a utopia that which simply does not exist. We may find a better system in the future but it will still be constrained by the law of supply and demand, resource scarcity, and human nature and hence will have trade-offs.
And humans do, too. So what’s your point? I’m drawing parallels between animals and humans and you are too! You seem to be supporting my point, not refuting it.
Humans get along and cooperate at scales far beyond anything the animal kingdom can do. Capitalism has driven the advancements that enable it.
> will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
The classic vacuous anti-capitalism rhetoric: Capitalism will destroy the world, but unspecified alternative which doesn’t exist and isn’t described is better. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the non-existent superior non-capitalistic that solves everyone is the bad person, right?
> Capitalism will destroy the world, but unspecified alternative which doesn’t exist and isn’t described is better. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the non-existent superior non-capitalistic that solves everyone is the bad person, right?
And this is the classic positivist rethoric that prevents self assertion and self criticism. Every doctrine that can't take criticism and take care of it's flaws while maintaining it's benefits is doomed to fail.
Nobody is saying that you are bad in essence, that is the whole idea. There is no essence. You create the meaning you see in the world.
You've nailed it: this is exactly why Soviet socialism failed in the past, and also paradoxically the reason why neoliberal capitalism is failing today.
Although I am a Marxist, I reject the idea that Communism is going to be the "final" form of human society. We may be able to get there someday, but only constant care and effort towards maintaining the system will be able to sustain it, and there is no "deterministic" answer to what the ultimate form of human society is.
>an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly: will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
Not my downvote, but . . .
More like so there will be massive corporations to work for instead of the appropriate number of small businesses and farms that could substitute. For instance if things wouldn't have pivoted long ago, including major milestones like the formation of the Federal Reserve system.
Nothing like how it could have been if things would have been allowed to continue as they were progressing, the working citizens would have continued to gain wealth at a faster rate than the government, even more so than many established Wall Street capitalists. Especially the ones who have no talent for creating wealth and instead resort to just moving money around, and they were as powerful as any.
All pressure has been put on to reverse independent prosperity, whatever it takes, whenever the threat to centralized control appears on the horizon.
Those who prefer to centralize their power over you are not the ones wanting you to have an opportunity to start a small business someday. They just haven't completely eliminated that possibility. Yet.
> This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don’t have capitalism, they’re all getting along, right? Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for mates?
Even if this was true, humans aren't subjective to their base instincts and can adapt and reinvent themselves.
> Being competitive is human nature.
I'm not and I'm human.
> People will always compete for things
Sometimes you want something, but you let others have it when they need it more than you. Otherwise if you always compete for things you are just a little kid.
> This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).
This is a misunderstanding of what I said. If you read back I never said competition should be tossed out of the window, it's just that caring for the other as it is right now it's not a core value of the economic system. It's just best effort, if we can say that to the eventually charitable billionaire.
This is a weird quirk of history. I feel like open source, and especially free software, was at least left-adjacent when I was coming up in the 90s. The bad guys were the megacorps. Open source was the counter-culture. I guess it changed around the dotcom boom.
Netscape feels like a big part of the story - a company staffed with hackers coming out of a public-funded research institute who rewrote a closed-source version of their browser that quickly killed off the predecessor and helped the company to a massive IPO. Then, only when threatened by a more established player, they finally open-sourced it. From the outside that came across more as a Hail Mary than an authentic expression of principles. Around then we also had the Red Hat IPO, the Slashdot/Andover/VA Linux thing etc. It was clear by then that open source had become another gimmick that capitalists could leverage to compound their wealth, rather than a fundamental belief that users of a piece of software should have the right to modify and reconstruct it as they see fit.
Nowadays capitalists love open source because their startups and big tech investments are the users - open source provides free labor whose products these companies can repackage and sell as a platform. Meanwhile a lot of that "free" labor is no longer done by hobbyists or researchers, but by workers at other for-profit companies looking to boost their personal brand or the company's profile, so the whole motivation to contribute has changed too.
In a free market system people can transact as they wish, including giving away something for free if they want.
There is nothing at odds at all. If you don’t see it, you might have a rather cartoonish, villainy view of a capitalism that gets promulgated by people who refuse to allow anything good or nice to be ascribed to capitalism.
If you can’t understand why capitalists can also like open source, have you considered that maybe it’s your understanding of the system that is flawed, not theirs?
I understand that capitalism is the doctrine that is based on economic growth and profit. This is invariably going to be at odds with the core tenets of open source, because given enough time ownership will have to give way to profit, hence the embrace, extend, extinguish and the various changes in licensing in major opensource projects.
However that's not even the case because op wasn't criticizing capitalism as whole, just how absurd the ethos in HN is where we seem to defend contradictory values.
one of the core tenets of capitalism is the profit motive, its a central piece of it: the idea that people innovate and create and labor for the expected reward of a pile of money, but so much of tech actually bucks this idea between open source projects and public funded initiatives (maybe not as relevant for app based coding, but the space race was pretty important for technology overall.)
>capitalism is the doctrine that is based on economic growth and profit.
These are not actually essential.
I'm not going to put down a better definition of capitalism, but if you're not handling Other Peoples' Money, and they're not handling yours, you are definitely not a capitalist.
No matter how financially successful you are as an entrepreneur with your own money, even when you out-compete capitalists in a pro-capitalist market.
Unsurprising. It's the natural byproduct of overproduction of scientists, brutally competitive job markets, and the shortsighted decisions to use publications as the primary metric for hiring and promotion decisions.
Anyone who is alarmed by this hasn't been paying attention to the perverse incentives scientists have been facing for decades.
The particular type of fraud described here (paper mills etc.) is less common in the U.S. (different types of fraud may exist but that's more subtle and complex). There tend to be specific geographic clusters associated with this behavior that have to do with how university expansions have been done in many countries.
Oddly enough, pre-LLMs, I would have said most of these crap paper mill papers didn't really affect the actual fields. Yes, they cited each other but outside the citation ring didn't really alter the field in a knowledge sense. But now.. if these get picked up in Deep Research it's a problem.
Look what happened to Nature, which used to be good. It was once the definitive
journal of the life sciences. They became "Nature Portfolio", and now publish all these titles:
Nature Energy is notorious for battery hype articles. Nature Materials is notorious for surface chemistry hype ("nanotechnology") articles. I suspect some of the others have similar problems.
This only makes sense if the corruption is in the same corp that's doing the reporting.
Corporations have an incentive to undercut one another and compete. They'll only band together when something affects them all at the same time, which is basically only economy-wide events.
Again, at what level of fraud do we consider defunding if not now? When 90% is irreproducible crap? 95%? 98%? Yes, you will lose out on 'healthy tissue'. That damage is necessary when the cancer is spreading.
Most of the opinions you hear online about the importance of funding science come from science fanatics who don't have any idea how the sausage is made, and are not themselves scientifically minded. It's part of their self constructed identity as a "smart person" who "believes in evidence".
Press your face against the glass, and it's much more complicated. The institutions that we have made for funding science don't reliably channel money towards the best ideas. All the experts in the field have figured out how to work the system well enough to build lives for themselves, and this leads to the tautology that "experts" support the status quo. We don't consider someone an expert if they aren't thriving in the current institutions.
Anytime someone mentions new institutions e.g. prediction markets that might better allocate funding, or even enrich the best scientists, there is a visceral backlash.
Every scientist I've talked to about my pie-in-the-sky funding mechanism - getting past a "top 50%" triage and then a lottery has met said idea with "Yeah, that would probably work. better."
I'd also suggest that lower scientific funding levels exacerbate the problems with the current system - risky research is less likely to be funded, as are new investigators, etc. Large, established labs are also better able to weather the storm.
This is interesting because it was the reversal of prosperity overall due to the spiraling inflation of the 1970's that caused the defunding responsible for the pivot toward financialization and away from academic excellence.
Like the vast majority, everyone had to focus more on financial survival than was ever imaginable before, and this permeated the universities also and was never recovered from. This is when the reliance on foreign students began to skyrocket too.
i don't think its a good faith argument to compare science with cancer. Do you have numbers? Are you sure 90% is irreproducible? How is cancer similar to whats going on in science?
Arguing for defunding science is about as asinine a mindset as one can possess. I doubt he has any figures to back that up. The article cited shows how the self-policing nature of science is improving.
Honestly, i'm tired of Hearing this. I am a Scientist and i work in science. On HN i feel a breeze of Anti-science sentiments which are only dwarfed by the Anti-Vax Community. I Don't Like my Profession being called a fraud, i also do not call a programmer, a Typewriter Monkies.
Hasn't scientific fraud always been an industry and we rely on signal to noise ratios to be good enough to get by?
Alternatively, in times of high wealth inequality are we putting a higher burden on our academics to survive, and forcing them to do more and more, thereby increasing the likelihood they will turn to cheating to survive?
The whole "publish or perish" paradigm has commodified scientific research. My theory is that the pre-WWI paradigm of academia being mainly for rich kids who could afford to devote their life to science did not scale, but it also had fewer issues with "making stuff up" since scientists were in it for the love of the game rather than making a living. I don't think we should go back to that model, but the MBA-inspired approach of treating "scientist" as a fungible role in a system and trying to apply metrics like citations to measure "impact" is doomed to fail in my opinion.
I directionally agree with you. But there are plenty of examples of scientists being extremely petty, political or egotistical further back in history. Newton and Leibniz. Gauss withholding publication of non-Euclidean geometry presumably due to fear of Kant.
I wonder if there is any empirical analysis of what has historically funded/supported scientific work (private funding vs. academic systems).
I also wonder whether a lone genius in it for the "love of the game" could make much progress in cutting edge science nowadays, given the cost of experiments and the specialization of fields.
You don't have to be a genius to make way more progress on the latest equipment compared to PhD's in their environment, with their constraints and encumberment, plus their survivor bias based on "dramatically" different things other than progress.
You could even do it as a complete gentleman without ruffling any feathers at lower cost than most well-paid corporate workers waste, and get more done if you set your mind to it. Sometimes even in your spare time.
So I definitely wouldn't sell the lone genius short.
A cool new indicator is "tortured phrases". These are turning out to be a gold mine for detecting fraudulent papers.
"In December 2023, a PubPeer user commented on 13 tortured phrases the Problematic Paper Screener had flagged in the article, such as the use of “Parkinson’s illness,” “Parkinson’s infection,” and “Parkinson’s sickness” rather than Parkinson’s disease.
"“These typically result from an attempt to avoid plagiarism detection using a paraphrasing software,” the commenter wrote about the phases. “How come these incorrect wordings survived proofreading by the coauthors, editors, referees, copy editors, and typesetters?”"
This is more concerning than the usual paper mills as the crap papers are published in otherwise legitimate journals. The pure paper mills are less destructive as people are much less likely to read and use those papers. But if you have ever growing numbers of crap papers mixed in regular journals that will be a problem.
If a journal is publishing "crap" then the term "otherwise legitimate" isn't helpful. The journal becomes illegitimate because you cannot trust what it has published any longer.
Unless there's some way to discriminate between the failed and successful review processes it has failed in its purpose.
Government subsidies enable fraud and largess. Individuals and organizations are inherently less careful and results-oriented with Other People's Money. That is starting to be rectified, for better or worse.
All money is someone else's money until it's your money. This is as true of private as public sector activities.
The problem is what's incentivized to be rewarded with someone else's money.
In my opinion, the ultimate problem in academics (aside from pyramid schemes) are administrations applying a profit model to science, where science is a means to a profit end (for the institution) rather than an end in itself. That is, the problem is in expecting a public service to operate as a private profit enterprise.
Sometimes you pay someone to do something, not to make a profit for you directly.
My name is lucky,and I am a receiving editor currently handling submissions for multiple SCOPUS-indexed journals. These journals are dedicated to fostering high-quality research and advancing scholarly discourse across various disciplines. At present, they are actively seeking innovative and impactful research contributions, and I would like to extend a sincere invitation for you to submit your valuable work for consideration.
We recognize the significance of your expertise and the effort that goes into producing meaningful research. If you have a manuscript ready or are in the process of developing a research project, I would be happy to provide further details on the submission process, journal options, and any other relevant information. Our editorial team is committed to ensuring a smooth and transparent review process, providing constructive feedback, and facilitating the timely dissemination of quality research.
If you are interested, please feel free to reach out with any questions or for guidance on submission requirements. I would be delighted to assist you in any way possible. I look forward to your response and the opportunity to collaborate with you in bringing valuable research to a wider audience.
It's about a group of journals optimised for sleazy publishing. The author claims he left research due to rampant fraud and went into cartoons and insulting the perpetrators instead.
In 2021 the Wikipedia page on paper mills was created.
We need to acknowledge that well-funded science driven by robust mission-focused systems (like pharma companies) is often a different animal than the field of science generally. In the below comments, I'm speaking about the latter.
In my experience good science is much rarer than bad.
Also, politics and hidden hands (eg: third party funding sources) have been shaping science likely since science's inception. It's an open secret that quite often science is not scientific. And that if you are seeing a published paper like this, then critiques have willfully ignored that fact.
I'm sure that this subtly varies from field to field, but I think that one tends to accept and become numb to the dross. Because it is overwhelming. The approach becomes to quietly try to filter for and celebrate better science, and otherwise say nothing. Beyond being overwhelmed, this approach may be necessary for political survival in some fields.
Well, maybe we should not trust authors that make vauge unsubstantiated claims?
The ingress: "Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities..."
The article: nothing
The ingress overreaches, oversimplifies and mixes hypotheses with results. Is this a test?
EDIT: Refers to the paper referenced by the article.
If you are interested in learning more about scientific fraud, I highly recommend you check out the YouTube channel Bobby Broccoli [0].
He makes engaging deep-dive documentaries on scientific fraud and scandals. It is absolutely /fascinating/. Videos are anywhere from 30m to 2h long, or broken up into several 1h episodes.
The series he has on cold fusion (not the Adobe programming language, the other cold fusion) is really good! [1].
The article hints that medical residents are a large source and it could be effects like competition and visas… does that account for the rate of growth?
Are these unscrupulous editors making “payola” or something?
Yeah, all I could gather from the article is that published-paper probably translates into padding out your resume. I don't doubt this could translate to one's likelihood of landing a prestigious job, a better salary, hiring bonus, etc.
There are countries where academic jobs have very firm "Publish X papers for promotion" thresholds, but where the venue for the paper doesn't really matter. This is one of the major markets for paper mills.
Look what happens in biotech constantly they prop up studies and results in papers and then they hedge with buying puts as they know it's all bs and they have raised enough exit liquidity to make huge profits on the drop.
Hindawi, Frontiers, MDPI are garbage for-profit publishers.
The problem is paid-for open-access. Society journal are not immune but much more closely monitored by dedicated teams.
Frontiers is really interesting to me, because some colleagues in other fields view their "version" of Frontiers In $Field as a meh journal of last resort, and I view Frontiers in Public Health as actively malign.
I know, but that's the reality. Sometimes the garbage I read from some journals is the reason I want to quit academia. How the hell those get published!! I have stopped taking journals at face value. Many things I read from Science or Nature journals (in my field) are just wrong
Fabricated data is rare. But cherry-picked data or model parameters which yield the desired result but are not robust or replicable, are not. That’s the biggest problem.
P-hacking and HARKing have become so normalized in many fields that researchers often don't even recognize when they're engaging in questionable research practices.
The process needs 'Darwinising' = plagiarised stuff carries an academic survival burden. Set up an LLM to do a cross-associative search. Latest models should be quite capable of this = A human sieves the sand for gold and find who does not live to procreate!!
Most people, even here, only read headlines anyway. Every time a really weird science claim is made in the news, finding the paper takes a while, if it's at all available. Then reading it correctly. Then usually, you can write a a blog post about how fake and bad the paper is (that 10 people in the world will read, vs the news reaching millions), and wonder how the one and a half peer reviewers approved it.
It's actually a fun exercise, IMO. I did it a couple of time for surface temperature claims, which were completely bogus. It took me a couple of days to actually "peer review" the paper though, so it's expensive in time.
Beside "science" is not a thing to trust, it's a process. It's never fully correct by definition.
This is genuinely unsettling, though sadly not surprising. The idea that scientific fraud has industrialized to this extent is a damning indictment of how broken parts of the academic publishing system have become.
Our economy is largely based on fraud. Forcing people to work hard to keep up with inflation and compete socially and buy things that actually do not improve their quality of life.
It's all about what we measure for, right? Publish or perish is like telling programmers they need to output 1,000 lines of code per week. What do you think will happen?
Not only an industry, it can make you isolated an even drop out of a PhD if you're not part of it. I found myself subject to demonstrably false claims in paper reviews because I stood up for academic integrity. Because I am kind, I have chosen not to out those reviewers, but I was pretty goddamn offended since my work involved vulnerable populations and censorship circumvention, so by silencing my research folks were not simply stymieing my ego, but harming vulnerable populations in the name of... of what?
Being a professor/researcher is not lucrative. I get the drive to "get funding" but... my impression was that narcissistic cheaters from undergrad couldn't get industry jobs and doubled down on their unethical behavior at the expense of those of us trying to actually do useful work for civil society.
I might not have had a 4.0 GPA or been the guy always getting into top tier venues, but at least my work was my own work, and it was solid.
With the dynamics of publish or perish being what they are, what’s the way out? As long as there is high demand for papers (not knowledge) then some market will pop up to feed that demand.
I hate to say it, but cutting off the money spigot of government funding for papers seems like a good start.
It feels like our society has been optimized to game a few metrics like this (government wants to raise GDP, CEOs want to increase shareholder value, university deans want to increase funding to write papers), and all of them have toxic second order effects that make society worse.
I'd assert it's not really a good start. The problem is largely rooted in scarcity - that there are very grants, and jobs, etc. that need to be competed for, and maybe it's worth it to you to overlook those couple outliers. You are after all pretty sure you're right, and they don't really mess anything up, and if you get this paper out, you'll have that good faculty job, and you'll do good work, etc...
Funding collapsing is just going to incentivize that. To be as competitive as possible for increasingly scarce resources. You won't be able to run that replication study, or document that code, or let a grad student spend six months chasing down that odd result, because the funding for all that just got cut.
Another problem: Publishing in good journals is for the rich. Open science is a paradox. They require such huge amount of money to publish.
My next manuscript is still going to Plos One ( :(given the reputation) bc it's free to publish. It's such a messed up system that prevents me from even trying to publish in good journals.
I have thought of that. But this study is a registered report so I need to submit to a journal before running the study and go through review. Plos has peer review but it's not as rigorous as others. Not many journals accept registered report in my field. So, first option is Plos Biology, else Plos one
Considering that the PHD process is as much about research as it is marketing/spin, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised the latter was formerly commercialized.
I became disillusioned when I realized people were publishing the most minute of contributions because they were desperate trying to show something to graduate.
Things stay the same when grants and funding are involved too.
Even in the respected publications, the reviewers are inexperienced students.
Imagine if a Senior Developer had 3 high school Interns as the only reviewers for all merge requests.
Not sure what the solution is, just too many disincentives for quality.
Nobody cares. State pays the salaries, BS conferences, BS journals, BS patents. Everybody is happy, no one can be fired. As long as stats look good (R&D per capita, publication, science indexes etc. ) gravy train will move on.
People care. The state isn’t the only source of funds, and researchers are in it to do research. PHDs make little money, and getting into academia is not generally considered a good career path.
The only people who can’t get fired are the few people with tenure. Most people struggle to get that.
Perhaps we just need institutions set up to do replication of papers?
ya know... i wonder if this is how a religion is formed. at the start, science was about identifying and explaining the things that were true, observable, and agreed upon by all. anyone who was present at the birth of an event that caused a religion would have had that same mentality. over time, generations pass and the concept that held the group together has shifted - it now attempts to explain new concepts, and the scientists/priests that make up the governing body decide tge truth based on opinion, rather than fact.
the point is, we're on a dangerous path. if left unchecked, the term scientist will eventually have the same meaning as the word priest.
Not at all. Research that appears useful is going to be picked up by others, and if it's really a fraud it will be exposed eventually.
That is the check you are looking for and indeed how we realized there's some fraud and reproducibility issues, btw. I'll be waiting for the day actual religions gets the same level of scrutiny.
> if left unchecked, the term scientist will eventually have the same meaning as the word priest.
Except if you base things like planes, computers, or medicine on science they provably work.
Obviously it's not perfect and probably never will be as science is a human endeavour and humans are not perfect. But dismissing all of it as "just a religion" fundamentally misunderstands both science and religion.
Religion - cargo cult et al. It is quite clear that religions arose from tribalism to aggregate tribes into pan religious groups. They are de-facto control mechanisms = toe the line = give us your $$ = fight/kill as ordered.
there are many separate problems of scientific fraud. I think these issues sometimes get confused which is unhelpful.
1. apparently-legitimate papers in prestigious journals with fraudulent data. extremely bad.
2. legitimate papers in legitimate journals which, innocently or not, just used bad methods and have wrong conclusions. this is "the replication crisis".
3. totally fake papers in paper mills with no meaningful peer review. it's really easy to spot these, no one is individually getting taken in by the results, but...
3a. sometimes they wind up in a meta-analysis, which is really bad because people might trust the meta analysis.
Problem 1 is morally worst and much more common than one would hope. Outright fabricated data in a Nature or NEJM publication (as has happened) is a disaster.
Problem 2 is amenable to reform for the most part (fields are already doing this).
Problem 3 isn't a problem at all for scientific knowledge per se, although universities and funding bodies might not be pleased their scientists are buying fake papers. You can just ignore the paper mills.
But Problem 3a can actually alter policy, which is pretty serious.
> Problem 1 is morally worst and much more common than one would hope. Outright fabricated data in a Nature or NEJM publication (as has happened) is a disaster.
In my experience, fabricated data is rare. But cherry-picking data and misuse of statistics to prove the desired hypotheses is extremely common in top journals from e.g. the Nature Portfolio journal family. I'd say at least 1/5 of the articles in biology and medicine have serious methodological errors.
IMHO, the main reason are perverse incentives and power imbalance. If you are a student or a postdoc and you get pressure from your supervisor to obtain certain result and you refuse to engage in academic misconduct, you will get pushed out of most projects and this might be the end of your academic career.
In contrast, there are few, if any, consequences for the senior scientists and principal investigators who perpetuate this culture. There's no oversight, no integrity checks, nothing. Universities tend to ignore even clear cases of data fabrication and fraud, where e.g. images derived from experiments are fake. Ultimately, this creates selective pressure for misconduct, as those willing to bend the rules are rewarded.
That's all true but I think what you meant to say is that successfully detecting fabricated data is rare. I've been in the weeds on this and after a while it's tempting to believe you can always spot scientific fraud by reading papers, but of course it's not so. A paper is just a bag of words and pictures, it can say anything it wants. As long as a data fabricator doesn't make basic errors you won't detect fraud.
Unfortunately, when people do find ways to automatically detect inconsistent numbers in a paper, like SPRITE or GRIM, they find maybe 50% of all checkable papers fail the audit and the authors almost invariably refuse to share their raw data for further checks despite having previously agreed to do so. So it seems likely that fake data is actually not rare at all but very widespread.
Caveat: like I say in every comment on scientific fraud on HN, all this varies dramatically by field. Some fields are much more corrupt than others. That 50% number is from psychology. Computer science isn't that bad relative to others. But for example, in climatology it's taken as axiomatic that it's OK to fabricate data and then present it as "observations". Anyone who tries to call them out on this behavior gets attacked, censored or even sued, yet if you did the exact same thing in physics nobody would hesitate to call it fraud. There isn't even a consistent definition in academia of what data fabrication means.
So no, sadly we don't really know how prevalent data fabrication is. The only way to detect scientific fraud to the level of robustness we'd accept for any other kind of fraud is regular, randomized lab audits with jail time or ruinous damages for perpetrators, backed by rigorous field-independent written standards for what evidence must be provided, all checked by outside organizations. Think financial audits but for scientists.
Obviously not only is academia not doing this, it's culturally nowhere close to considering the possibility of even thinking about starting. Academia has spent so many years engaging in such deep ideological purges that everyone who remains is at minimum sympathetic to ideas like "defund the police". The concept of policing themselves to the level accountancy does will never come up, not even during discussions of reform.
To me it's quite simple:
One strange psychological effect I've seen is that especially in medicine some people themselves spend a lot of time rigging data to get to their PhD, but in the end they absolutely trust in anything published in the field. "The science nowadays is so good - medical scandals today are completely impossible">In climatology it's taken as axiomatic that it's OK to fabricate data and then present it as "observations".
Do you have a source about this?
There are many detailed discussions out there. Go to any skepticism website and search for terms like TOB adjustment, homogenization, "the blip", "the pause". I'd give you links but without fail HN commenters just engage in ad hominem attacks on any source given without bothering to read them. If you want more details and can't find any given this info, email me and I'll send you starter links.
tl;dr where does temperature data come from? Climatologists gather data from various sources and then aggregate them into time series which are then used for later research. Which would be fine, except that along the way they do things that aren't considered legitimate in other fields like:
• reporting "observations" in their "raw data" from weather stations that haven't existed for decades. They are actually software-generated guesses based on other stations that themselves may not exist or be in comparable similar surroundings. This isn't a rare thing, in some countries most of the data is attributed to weather stations that don't physically exist or have moved large distances, yet still show up in databases with readings at their old coordinates.
• adjust their "raw data" in various ways and for various reasons. That is, what gets presented as observational data in climatology - like graphs of temperature - are not actually readings from thermometers, although it's usually presented as if it is. Modern temperature time series have dozens of adjustments including many extremely questionable ones like homogenization (a form of spatial averaging).
• dropping confidence intervals or even reporting temperatures that are simply the max of the CI around the real reading. This is a problem because QA on weather stations is frequently non-existent. In the UK over 80% of weather stations are WMO grade 4 or 5, meaning they are junk tier with uncertainties of 2C and 5C respectively. As claimed warming is 0.1C/decade this sort of data is of no use for detecting it but is used anyway. It's a global problem not UK specific.
• they regularly rewrite temperature time series in ways that invalidate all prior published papers and claims based on that data, but they don't retract any of those papers.
Editing data points, making up readings from non-existent instruments, using garbage-tier instruments, ignoring confidence intervals, playing with the data until it comes good and retroactively deciding your data was wrong but not doing retractions of papers built on it, are all behaviors that would be decried in most other fields.
Until academia can settle on universal standards for what it calls science people's trust in it will continue to fall, because they won't be able to make any assumptions about what kind of methods the word science really means :(
> I'd give you links but without fail HN commenters just engage in ad hominem attacks on any source given without bothering to read them.
That's a red flag. Reads as evasive to me. Why are you bothered by internet randos disagreeing with you? If you have reputable sources link them instead of wasting time. If the responses are truly ad hominem that should only strengthen your argument in the eyes of any making an attempt to be objective.
I apologize if it seems uncharitable but my default assumption in this sort of scenario is that you've been the subject of well reasoned rebuttals and don't want to confront that reality.
> universal standards for what it calls science
> what kind of methods the word science really means
That's nonsensical. "Science" is a vague, very high level methodology. There's no single correct way to go about things other than to recursively apply evidence driven approaches.
Some fields have broad applicability of course. For example something like the foundations of statistical methods will presumably remain the same no matter what task you apply them to. But what the results of such methods "mean" is going to vary widely.
No, I've never seen a well reasoned rebuttal. The type of reply you get here on HN is always exactly like yours: an insistence on arguing the who instead of the what. Hence your requirement that any given sources are "reputable", without specifying what that means. Based on experience it's guaranteed to exclude 100% of all sources that discuss the issue honestly. That game has played out here 1000 times and is boring. If you disagree, check a fact or two. Go find sources that you think are reputable instead of expecting others to guess and read a few, poke holes in them if you can. That would be interesting.
> "Science" is a vague, very high level methodology. There's no single correct way to go about things
It's really not. But this is the kind of semantic dispute I am warning of. If your response to discovering that academics engage in data fabrication is to say that's ok because science can mean anything, then science doesn't mean anything. And eventually the general public will learn that, and vote to defund it.
> the foundations of statistical methods will presumably remain the same no matter what task you apply them to.
Overfitted models are not only common in many fields but academics often try to justify them as OK to use, so I wouldn't assume statistical methods remain the same no matter what task you apply them to. After all, science is really vague, right? Who is to say what the foundations of statistics are?
The widespread belief that it is rare, is an invitation to fraudsters. Who have therefore wound up in such positions as president of Stanford. It is hard to catch them because people's a priori belief that there isn't much fraud makes it hard to accept that any particular researcher could be a fraudster. Which greatly reduces the risk of being a fraudster.
It’s also just not fraud.
Well meaning students have little alternative than to publish journal papers showing how their algorithm/method had a 0.001% improvement (measured by questionable metrics) because they are trying to get N publications to graduate.
While discourse about such methods can be beneficial, it also tends to create too much noise that drowns out more meaningful work.
Just to clarify, I think fabricated data in top biology and medicine journals is relatively rare because it's typically high-throughput data, and you must archive it. It's just too much trouble to fake that.
However, another equally damaging form of fraud, cherry-picking data and manipulating statistical inference is common. I think the reason is that it's much simpler to get the results you want this way, and you are much less likely to get caught.
Previously, fake data was common, e.g. in the form of fabricated Western blots, as it has been proven by large-scale image analyses conducted by sleuths. I imagine similar forms of fraud are still frequent in other disciplines or in domains that generate low-throughput data, such as some clinical trials.
The advisor gets all the credit for publishing and none of the blame for retracting. That’s why some labs have been hit by multiple retractions (clearly a indicator of fraud culture) but only the low level researchers are punished
The problem is that academic publishing isn't tied to any real fitness function.
Unlike a startup or company or some other thing where you vote with dollars on utility, many papers can't be quantitatively evaluated on how much they contribute to science.
Some papers are obvious and groundbreaking, but a lot of research is at such a frontier that literally no one else can evaluate it. You just nod your head and trust it.
That, coupled with the fact that negative results just aren't published, is incredibly inefficient and disheartening.
That dynamic is deeply broken
Maliciousness, incompetence, and accidents all look EXACTLY THE SAME from a replication perspective. We can't tell the researchers' intent.
Until the "industry" (defined vaguely as scientists, their institutions, universities, funding entities, etc, etc) cleans house and punishes those researchers, we're quickly approaching a time where we'll have to take EVERY study skeptically until it can be replicated.
* Punishment could range from "no, we won't publish your stuff without data+methodology" to ratcheting back funding to "we publicly document your lying/incompetence" (hardest and riskiest) to a variety of other things.
> we're quickly approaching a time where we'll have to take EVERY study skeptically until it can be replicated
I've always felt like this should be the norm. Why would you trust something before it can be replicated? Even if it's unintentional, people make mistakes.
> I've always felt like this should be the norm. Why would you trust something before it can be replicated? Even if it's unintentional, people make mistakes.
If you are close enough with a scientist, generally they will admit they don’t trust a single study
Some fields also have guardrails, such as the LIGO being two separate detectors a with two independent teams
Individually, yes I've been there a LONG time.
Unfortunately, we have a media and political structure that uses the most recent study/model/whatever to advocate for, design, and enact policy before that review.
> Maliciousness, incompetence, and accidents all look EXACTLY THE SAME from a replication perspective.
Why do you think that? If something fails to replicate it, you can investigate the original paper, and then there may be very clear evidence of fraud.
There isn’t really a way to “clean house” on a large scale, everyone has to somehow be more virtuous and not lie to themselves when p hacking or publishing data they know someone wouldn’t be able to reproduce.
I do think that you can tell apart these cases. Outright fabricated data is very different from p-hacking, which is very different from a meaningless garbage paper.
On the other hand, convenient laboratory errors might be hard to tell apart from fabrication (though not always, sometimes people get caught using photoshop), and statistical incompetence might be hard to tell apart from p-hacking. So I agree this is why it's hard to punish fraud.
no they don't. sometimes incompetence can stumble on the correct answer. like you could repeat the experiment, get very different results, be convinced of the charlatanism and incompetence of the original reporter, and then sigh a huge sigh of disgust because the data may have all been wrong but it points to the same overall/big-picture conclusion.
I just recently found an incredibly cool paper that solved a problem I was having. It was published in a tier A conference. They claimed they would make the data and code public at a later point.
Problem is, I could find nothing of it when I googled. O tried to get ahold of the authors and I even wrote to their department. The only Mail back I received concluded that neither would be available any time soon.
So there‘s that. A paper that could be completely made up, with no data to support it. It might as well be make believe. I would lie if I said this didn't make me lose faith in my own work, since it justifiably takes me ages to gather data and write code for my experiments. Great.
Would you consider the Reinhart-Rogoff paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...
Where a mistake in the Excel spreadsheet was used by many politicians to justify austerity measures to be a #2 or #3a problem (or both)?
Problem 3 has another effect. There's a whole industry of conspiracy theorists who will point to that paper to give credence to their own BS, while they create Youtube videos and wild pop-sci articles to influence the general public on whatever their agenda is.
I have a friend who recently has 'taken an interest in science' and is now passing Youtube videos all of the time that are total crap, but make reference to 'scientific' papers. I 'learned' how earth is already doomed because Betelgeuse went supernova, and that there are deep shafts below the pyramid of Gizeh that only an alien race could have dug. Stuff like that.
Net outcome where it comes to science may be that this helps erode people's trust in science.
It really doesn't matter what the motive is when the effect is the same. Treating it as an individual moral failing isn't going to work when the incentives to fake papers (wilfully or not) are so strong. Any fix that works for 1 is going to work for 2 as well and vice versa.
You can’t legislate morality.
Most if not all legislation originated in morality at some point. We've just collectively forgotten that's still an option today.
Why not? Set up the laws to incentivize morality.
You don't even have to change the laws. Just changing the social norms would be enough. At the moment our social norms are that the ends justify the means. If you make money, or produce something that looks like a breakthrough, that is all that matters. How you did it, or whether the thing you did has actual value, matters not at all. As long as you've provided yourself with plausible deniability, that's good enough.
I know this because I've been the beneficiary of this system on multiple occasions, and it makes me sick. This is not the kind of world I want to live in.
No you can't legislate morality. But operationally we want accountability commensurate to control. As others have pointed out, there must be consequences to bs. With that in place, we don't have to legislate other than point out consequences. Now to be a pedantic, consequences are a kind of legislation, but at least it's about behavior and outcomes not intent. It would elides certain issues out of scope.
Unfortunately the line between 2 and 3 is very blurry. Like paper mill output submitted to legimate medium-to-low impact journals. Some of it gets inevitably published, others just puts a strain on peer reviewers.
About 3a: Never touch MDPI, the amount of fake data I've seen is ridiculous
Is 3/3a about to be more serious with LLMs in the mix?
"about to" it is.
In a recent conversation with the editor-in-chief of a journal I am on the editorial board of, a substantial bulk of the submissions we get are LLM written papers that essentially randomly look for associations in accessible data, which are then sold to faculty (primarily in China).
Arguably "randomly look for associations in accessible data" is like 90% of academic publishing even before LLMs though ;)
probably not. the writing quality will improve but LLM-generated papers will still be ignored.
to the extent they aren't ignored, but seem so plausible that they are taken seriously, eventually people will want to talk to the researchers about their results, invite them to give talks, and so on. at which point it becomes problem 1.
No, probably Not. Nobody is reading these Journals anyway. It's only good one resumes. i think even 3a is Not a problem because fake papers will follow a specific pattern in Meta Analysis. Should be catched in one of the "filter" stages during Meta Analysis.
4. Plagiarism
Or cheating in other ways, like collusion rings [1], reviewers using LLMs to review, or authors putting text in their papers so reviewers using LLMs to review will give them a favorable review [2]
[1] https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/collusion-rings-threaten-the-in...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/14/scientist...
I did a meta-analysis for my masters thesis and I was convinced that 2 of the 39 papers in my dataset had fraudulent data.
> Problem 2 is amenable to reform for the most part (fields are already doing this)
how are they?
Problem #3 is relatively easy to address: shift from journals to conferences. Organizing fake conferences is a lot harder than setting up paper mill journals.
I can tell you from personal experience that organizing a "fake" conference is beyond trivial. All you need is a topic that is narrow enough that all of the attendees know and like each other. I was an attendee at several such conferences back when I made my living publishing papers, and I was astonished at how easy it was to publish bullshit as long as it was the right venue, and how borderline impossible it was to publish anything that I considered to have actual value. (In my career I published dozens of conference papers, but only one journal paper and one book chapter.)
In actual practice what I found was that the principle driver of publishing success has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the work, it has to do with how much your reviewers think that you might some day be in a position to review a paper of theirs. This is the fundamental problem with peer review when: career success is measured by quantity of papers published, the resulting dynamic is governed by game theory, not scientific merit.
Conferences aren’t double blind. They aren’t even single blind. Fundamentally they can’t be
Peer review should be but sometimes isn’t. It always can be though, unlike conferences
I get "invited" to fake or semi-fake conferences all the time. Also fake or semi-fake "awards". I just have a programming blog. I would not expect any other field to be any different.
Not really. I see many, many fake conferences adjacent to my field each year. I don’t really see why setting up one would be harder than creating a fake journal.
I think they mean predatory journals and conferences. Setting up a predatory journal costs nothing, whereas actually holding an in-person conference of any kind costs money.
A good time to repost about the famous VIDEA conference:
https://users.cg.tuwien.ac.at/wp/videa.html
https://users.cg.tuwien.ac.at/wp/videa-paper.html
These conferences have fees, just like predatory journals. They tend to be held in dodgy places in otherwise touristy areas, and most of them are partly or fully online anyway. The cherry on the cake is that attendees can use them as holidays funded by their institution.
I don’t dispute that there are probably orders of magnitude more fake papers than fake conference presentations, just that shifting from journal articles to conference talks won’t help at all. If the incentives shift, current paper mills will just shift with the market.
Thanks for the breakdown.
If we can't rely on journals like Nature or NEJM to catch blatant fraud, then what hope is there further down the chain?
You can't rely on journals because they have bad incentives. Their customers are the universities they're supposed to monitor for fraud, and their prestige comes from the same place news/magazine prestige does - publishing incredible claims.
Catching fraud further down the chain is easy. Other professions know how to do it. Just adopt the same framework as used in financial controls. External auditors, written standards, randomized spot checks, lots and lots of paperwork to provide audit trails back to real experiments with hard-to-forge evidence. And severe punishments for those found to have engaged in intentional fraud.
That sounds expensive and difficult. Science is not a single field with a single set of practices. Regulating it is more like trying to draft a single set of regulations for finance, agriculture, pharma, and software.
You can get a glimpse of that when applying for grants or publishing in more prestigious journals. There are often endless checklists and questions about regulatory and ethical compliance, data availability, reproducibility, and whatever else. And more often than not, many of the questions are category errors or otherwise make no sense in the context of your work. Even the people who are supposed to regulate science lack the ability to do so in a way applicable to the entire breadth of science.
I don't think the differences between fields in (academic) science are as big as the differences between agriculture and software. They all take grants to publish papers, in journals, and they are measured via similar metrics like citations, papers published, impact factors and so on. Academia is highly homogenous across institutions too.
Yes, for sure a lot of controls implemented via audit aren't perfect fits for what is being regulated, that's the nature of trying to fix bad incentives via regulation. It's better to just have aligned incentives to start with, but that can't be done in academia, it's regulation or nothing.
Also, my experience has been that sometimes academics like to claim their field is special and shouldn't be expected to play by the same rules as other fields. But that's often not true. They should in fact be held to the same standards as everyone else is and their justifications for why they're an exception don't hold water.
The academia is far from being homogeneous. Institutions in the same country are usually similar, but things vary a lot between countries.
Science is fundamentally an activity, not a field. You can do scientific research in most fields. Agriculture and software are nice examples, as academic scientists are doing both. And in many cases, the outputs are used by the general public.
Quantitative metrics such as citations, paper counts, and impact factors are mostly used by bureaucrats who don't know what they are doing. Actual evaluations in reputable institutions depend heavily on the subjective judgment of other people in the field.
The role of grants varies a lot between fields and insitutions. In some cases, a professor is expected to become a manager, win grants, and hire other people to do their research. In other cases, grants are nice but optional. Such professors can do research with limited external support, both personally and with students funded from other sources.
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I remember "fondly" when a professor in China stole my paper from my PhD thesis; equations, pictures, and everything. I only found about it because a Chinese student in another lab came across both papers and was puzzled by the extreme similarities. I tried to contact his/her university to let them know about the fraud and never got a reply. Good times ...
comedy option: visit as a tourist and show up in their office.
I did this to someone who ripped off my master's thesis, word for word, as a side trek on holiday and it was like steam came out their ears when they realized if they call the campus authorities to escort me out they'd generate an incident report of why I was there.
Edit: This was not in China btw -- ironically despite the stereotypes all the folks I've collaborated with from there have been pretty ethical and hardworking, it's a shame some ruin things for everyone.
So how'd it end?
They ran away.
I had a similar experience. I was visiting the UK doing research and a Chinese post-doc was there. Apparently he was taking our methods and results and sending them to someone in China. They published in some journals we’d never heard of, at the same time we realized there was almost nothing we could do about it. Shaming had no impact on them. But their actual impact on us was negligible.
The ideal scientific method in practice suffers in various cultural contexts.
> First-author paper published at a top conference
I now find that requirement in most AI-related high-tech jobs. Starter salary for these jobs is often $150k+. When someone is willing to pay you $150k+ for having published a paper, fraud definitely makes (financial) sense. Basically, the problem is the demand, and the demand corrupts the metrics (h-index).
I think that having a paper published would become less and less significant in the future. With time, businesses will also move onto other signals of success.
It's not just a way for landing a job either. It's also a ticket for white collar immigration on "specialist" visas that have a much shorter waiting list, higher quota or better perks than regular work-based visas. I was blown away the first time I heard people talking openly about this in my field - it was considered totally normal for them to pay money to have an academic portfolio constructed on their behalf specifically for the purpose of having these "published papers" and "unique research" on their record so they could qualify for "specialist" visas. It adds a whole nother layer to the warped idea of good immigrants vs bad immigrants.
The papers published at top conferences are not the papers that is coming from this "industry" as the paper calls it.
These fraudulent papers are identified like this:
> For instance, of the 79 papers that one editor had handled at PLOS ONE, 49 have been retracted.
That's not what's happen at top conferences.
It is well-known that top-conferences had and still have many problems. Some examples: There used to be the problem with authors adding new co-authors after acceptance, aka "selling seats". There is a debate about how many papers one should be allowed to submit, as some people with money and influence are heavily franchising. It is unclear to what extent there is implicit and explicit reviewer collusion. Even double-blind reviews don't really solve the problem.
If we don't admit that there are fundamental problems that affect all of us (academics) and instead pretend it is only the lesser people who f things up, we'll all be screwed sooner or later.
> There used to be the problem with authors adding new co-authors after acceptance, aka "selling seats".
Top AI conferences allow that? That's insane.
They do not allow this any more. So _that_ problem has actually been addressed.
People are waking up to this, I have seen companies asking for paper reproduction on the spot before handing out offers.
This really undermines the "trust the science" narrative. It has become much more about cushy white collar jobs, than the brightest minds being laser focused on understanding and bettering mankind.
> This really undermines the "trust the science" narrative.
Not really, but it does mean you shouldn’t trust individual papers blindly.
Anyone who follows research already knows this. Individual papers appear all the time with remarkable findings which seem revolutionary, but then nobody can replicate or commercialize it.
Some communities eat these isolated results up, like supplement and health podcasters (Rhonda Patrick, Huberman). They should know better than to take some random mouse study at face value, but it’s too good of a story to pass up.
In medicine and the industry, anyone experienced knows not to get excited about singular results unless it’s from a trusted source or until it’s replicated.
The more this kind of thing happens, the more it's going to blow back on you. The hacks, ideologues, and frauds have done a lot to destroy trust in science and the image of science. When the public backlash comes, muggles aren't going to be able to tell the difference between someone like you and the hucksters you've trained yourself to ignore. They are ruthless, and nothing of science will remain unless you are as ruthless, to the people who abuse your good name.
I'd argue that the vast majority of fraud - even high profile fraud - doesn't actually affect public perception of science. For example, the STAP cell paper and Jan Hendrik Schön's series of papers aren't really widely known outside of academia. And those papers were essentially attempts to lie all the way to a Nobel prize - as egregious as it gets.
In my opinion, the three research frauds of the past 30 years that have had the biggest impact outside of academia are:
1. Andrew Wakefield's autism paper
2. Elgazzar's paper on ivermectin as a treatment for COVID
3. Marc Tessier-Lavigne's Alzheimer's papers
The interesting thing about 1 and 2 is that yes, they reduced public confidence in science, but only because there are large blocks of people who remain convinced that the research wasn't actually fraudulent.
I think trying to keep a tally rather misses the larger point. You can’t properly determine the most impactful bad science of the last 30 years, because you’re not aware of all of it! These meta-studies are showing how often you find bad science when you dig deeper, but that’s just a rate of incidence, not an absolute number. There’s a whole iceberg of findings we haven’t begun to press on. Who knows what kind of stuff might turn out to be fraudulent? The real concern is about what kind of damage has been done to the foundations of knowledge, which compounds as we continue to do research on top of shoddy prior work.
Fraudulent research can be damaging along multiple axes, and I completely agree that there is probably a mountain of undiscovered fraud out there that continues to have negative downstream effects. I'm more skeptical of the idea that undiscovered fraud has a negative effect on the public perception of science. If even highly prominent known frauds have had little discussion outside of academia, why would undiscovered frauds affect the way nonscientists think about science?
> If even highly prominent known frauds have had little discussion outside of academia
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808891
It does undermine the narrative. Eventually nobody will trust any public sector funded science. Private companies will still invest in scientific R&D to enhance their products but, like today, they won't talk about it much and they won't publish papers, only patents. That's where we're heading.
First problem: the sort of people who popularized Follow The Science™ actually meant "follow the people who run public sector institutions". Not "follow single studies" or anything that deep. The catchphrase was deployed many times during COVID to browbeat people into obeying people like Anthony Fauci, a man notorious for claiming he literally was science. "Attacks on me are attacks on science", he said. It was pure authoritarianism dressed up as intellectualism, as was so often the case throughout history (see: Lysenko).
Second problem: the heuristic that you should only trust a claim if it appears in several papers will also lead to you trusting many bogus claims. Academics regularly cite work they haven't even read, let alone replicated. It's easy to find invalid citations in the literature. Most of them just take claims on trust or even cite claims clearly advertised as made up fiction (sorry, "modeling assumptions").
Third problem: many results that replicate shouldn't:
https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science...
> Anyone who follows research already knows this. Individual papers appear all the time with remarkable findings which seem revolutionary, but then nobody can replicate or commercialize it.
But there are many scientists that love hearing themselves on TV etc. that pull out a paper to shove whatever agenda they have.
i think what people are talking about is that infomercial-level quackery and double-think and dishonesty has now breached the levy into mainstream science. now, instead of seeing papers claiming breakthroughs you will also see papers that are fraudulent but claim to prove or reinforce a hypothesis or model that everyone already agrees is true. obviously most fraudulent papers are like this because the point of fraudulent papers is to avoid detection and create an appearance of legitimacy. now we have a billions dollar drug for alzheimers that literally does nothing. thats what people are talking about. but you refuse to acknowledge it
"Trust the science" will work as long as science works, which even to this day is pretty nicely, this practice is given a bad name by the "Trust the science*" crowd, which activity is based on having a position then attempting to legitimize it by quoting the abstract of a paper they have never read, prioritizing pushing ideas above factual matters.
This in turn allows certain people in institutions to trade legitimacy for agenda pushing, creating the current crisis of institutional trust, which the legitimate "Trust the science" crowd suffers from.
Science itself is all about testable hypotheses and facts. If we can't rely on it, chances are we are doing something wrong and science itself is perfectly fine.
The incentive structure in academia exacerbates that by encouraging authors to hype up their findings and obfuscate any deficiency in their models. Withholding information and making results difficult to reproduce is a symptom of that, as are academic jargon disconnected from terminology used in the private sector, and obtuse presentation. Those practices make it easier for bad data, bad methodologies, and misrepresentations of findings to slip past reviewers and readers and harder for other researchers to dispute, and undermine the scientific process itself as we get flooded with junk.
Agree on all points. It's worth asking: who maintains the academic incentive structures? If the social structures are harming science (e.g., promoting fraud), why do the social structures persist? Who or what stymies reform? As I've asked these questions, I am led to blame (i) scientists who gain power broker status by playing the game and (ii) university administrators who benefit from larger production numbers (dollars, papers, enrollment, awards).
Maybe it's a naive outlook but maybe "science" can continue to work... with, without, or despite all the politics, waste, cruft, and scaffolding that academia erects all around it.
According to the article, bad papers are getting criticized and retracted. It appears "science" is robust enough to work as intended, even with some bad actors involved.
There is evidence to suggest that corrections and retractions do not even effect citations.
What practical solution would you offer to this problem? Without changing the entire publishing software ecosystem, it’s not like articles are living in github repositories where pull requests are a thing.
In many cases, citing articles still go to print media.
All of them? That worked well for Alzheimer research, didn’t it
Obviously not all of them. And obviously there is corruption and mistakes with anything involving humans. What's so funny is that when people make criticisms like this, they always leave out the alternative. What's the alternative? Trusting mostly uneducated influencers and quacks who do even less research and don't even attempt peer review?
The alternative is not trusting the science or the quacks.
Most people cannot tell those apart...
And those who are not supposed to be quacks will commit fraud anyway. Which is why you shouldn’t trust anyone.
Good idea, trust no one, get nothing.
Why not move back into a cave and stab your own meat with a sharpened stick next.
At least we wouldn't have Alzheimer
I'm sure if, god forbid, you were diagnosed with a curable cancer you wouldn't go "trust the science" and go get treatment. I'm really sure you would do that.
Except it did? Fraud was identified. Science moved forward. Literally working as intended.
You can say that of all cases of fraud, but that’s a survivorship bias fallacy, since we can only talk about cases we know to be fradulent, i.e. where fraud has been identified.
It's complicated. There is a whole lot of corruption and fraud in science. But this kind of fraud doesn't end up leading to dominating narratives. The fraud remains part of the 99% of science that is invisible to the general population and that is precisely why the fraud isn't so easily uncovered in the first place.
What percentage of papers even reproduce these days? Is it more than 50%?
Everyone wants reproduction, nobody wants to fund reproduction studies.
Depending in the field and impact, reproduction becomes “free” because other scientists try to build on the results. Science is often about chasing the latest, hottest thing
If they can’t reproduce the original, they should get called out eventually
It often is, but that's much less formal and field dependent than a lot of people want.
Yes, large clinical studies rarely get reproduced
The bigger issue is what percentage of papers contain enough details to even attempt to reproduce.
In over 80 volumes of ASTM publications, I would estimate they may amount to more kilos than that.
Almost all of the actual lab work requires statistical determination of repeatability & reproducibility to be calculated between different labs, and the summary is included with each document.
I would say there is way less than a kilo without this.
And the amount of supporting raw data on file amounts to kilos which dwarf the pages published. Formally accessible so everything can be thoroughly reviewed at any time in the future, allowing for complete reconsideration if called for.
Scietific instrumentation doesn't stand still.
So it definitely can be done. Even if it's to the extreme not suitable for everybody else.
The less-reproducible documents are there, they did the best they could, but have a smell not shared by the good stuff. You know "exactly" how good or bad the underlying science turned out to be in the real world.
Paradoxically, or intuitively, as the case may be, if you're going to utilize the less-reliable techniques (most likely because they're the best there is), you may need to know how bad they are most of all.
Maybe other publications should raise the bar on statistics as appropriate, I figure zero statistics is about as far as you can get from ASTM "standards".
Some places probably have a lot further to go than others and it would be nice to have a whole lot sweeter smell all around.
Or you could, you know, email the authors for the original data, etc. when planning your reproduction study.
I thought it was understood that's what they do these days.
People can probably appreciate that lot of the kilos are more figurative than ever, but there's still enough hard copies made to fill big trucks though.
I'm not in academics professionally myself, how universal would you estimate it is among their journals these days to require a statistical study between an adequate number of different labs before final publication?
It depends a lot on the area. I'd not be so pessimistic. The problem is how many of the papers that reach newspapers are reproducible? I guess less than the average. And also strange results that are misinterpreted to get a amazing but wrong layman explanation.
You would be lucky to get 1/10
I haven't seen the "trust the science" narrative since covid honestly.
Junk science has been around since, well, even before we coined the word science really. In some ways I think the situation has improved. People seem far more aware of misconduct, and willing to make retractions than they used to.
Compared to my colleagues who went into industry, I wouldn't describe academic jobs as "cushy".
I made more than my PhD advisor and my postdoc PI in my very first job out of school. I left academia, because I wanted to work less and make more.
The lab where I did my postdoc had a joke that the first graduate student to make it big at some startup had to come back and endow a chair for their advisor.
I'd say they were when I was starting out in 2002. Obviously not perfect, but they had a lot to offer. That steadily changed until the pandemic. Then the job went to shit. I no longer recommend students look for academic jobs. I'll give my support if that's what a student's after, but I've talked to enough people that have moved away from academia, and academic jobs are dominated on pretty much every dimension in 2025.
you should not trust science. I mean look where the article is published. It's not Vox nor The New York Times, etc. It's in Science, one of the most reputable journals in the world. So the community of scientist is aware of the problem and in the end science is self-correcting. It's just a slow process. Science advances one funreal at a time.
Science isn't self correcting. These problems have existed for many decades. There were people complaining that social science doesn't replicate back in the 1960s.
The idea that science is self-correcting is a nice fiction spread by academics to absolve themselves of the need to reform. "Don't make us change, any problems will go away if you wait because science is naturally self correcting", they say. It's a silly word game. Academia, which is what they mean when they say science, is a human institution whose incentives lead naturally to rewarding bad behavior. Nothing in that system self corrects, corrections must be forced from the outside (or we give up on reform and dissolve the whole thing, a solution now actively being talked about in hardline right-wing forums).
There ideas in how to get better. -People start talking about pre-register studies, where the study design is evaluated independent of the results. -Some years ago Nature was thightening the acceptance criteria for articles about new laser principles. - in the field of metasurfaces there are more and more articles in how to assess the performance of flat optics and calling Out Problems with the Status quo. Honestly, i Don't See your point. Is the progress maybe slow... Yes. But changes are Happening. It's also in the best interest of Academia. You don't want to build Up your career (~5-30 years)on someone else fraudulent.
These ideas are all decent in the abstract but all rely on the assumption that there are auditors of some kind. There aren't.
Example: pre-registration does happen sometimes today, and it always happens for corporate clinical trials. It's a good idea that works. In the private case the FDA is the auditor and there's some circumstantial evidence that pre-registration may be the reason why pharma productivity flatlined around ~2000. But in a surprising number of cases in academia a study is pre-registered, the final paper doesn't match the pre-registration and nobody notices. Why? Well, who is responsible for systematically checking these things? It'd have to be auditors, but universities point the finger at journals and journals point the finger back at universities.
Papers calling out problems: it's been done for much longer than I've been alive. Doesn't work. People nod their head and say something should be done, then go right back to the bad old ways.
The only thing that can help is external force. Governments have to either defund academia and let science be done by the private sector, or they have to tie funding to passing rigorous external audits (by private sector actors paid to find fraud, not academics themselves). The latter has been tried a few times, the US ORI is an example of that, but it doesn't work. The ORI was set up on the assumption that academic malpractice is rare so its methods don't scale.
“Trust the science” is a terrible slogan. It almost turns science into a religion. Most people that use it seem to think that science is whatever a scientist says. We should be saying “Trust the scientific method”.
Nullius in verba.
Agreed. I have never heard a scientist use this phrase, but I've heard plenty of left leaning folks use it. As left wing politics absorbs science as it's cause - and not a cause that everyone is for - I fear it actively turns right leaning folks against science solely because of it's mindless support by progressive folk.
The brightest minds are often paid to optimize ad revenue and move money around.
I have been thinking through all of these comments that it's somewhat rich that a very SV heavy site is so critical of smart, driven people not applying themselves to important problems.
I am not critical of them, I am critical of the state of society, that we value ads and moving money around more than anything else.
OTOH who can blame them, it’s not their fault the incentive structure is so heavily skewed away from academia
If the findings are replicated, thats fine, you can begin to trust.
But the findings are often not replicated.
A 12-day old account is pushing some political bullshit propaganda on HN? Color me surprised.
It's been this way for a while. There is even outright fake science in biotech that I mentioned years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26125867
But I think the worst are the Science Fans who go around saying "Science, bitches!" just because something has a two-column layout and never actually read the shit. Then they go around saying "There is some evidence that" and they've never read the paper.
In fact, there is so much bullshit that you would never accept if you were the one making a decision. It's why so many outsiders frequently make the right decisions on things.
e.g. Bezos closed flights to/from China to/from his offices a month before the pandemic. Bezos isn't a scientist. Trump tried to do the same. Trump isn't a scientist. But what did the scientists say? That it would hinder a coronavirus response: https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/31/as-far-right-calls-for-c...
The "far right" non-experts said one thing while the scientists said another thing and now we know that the "far right" non-experts were right. It's not even because the "far right" has some exclusive access to truth. It's just that there is a certain kind of blind spot imposed upon science by the fact that scientists have certain political persuasions. This causes them to self-censor and blatantly lie so as to preserve those politics.
Even if some racist view were true, you would be hard pressed to find a liberal scientist who would espouse it. Even if some sexist view were true, or xenophobic view were true, or whatever. Which is a dirty stain on science as practiced today.
If a thing is true, it is true.
> This really undermines the "trust the science" narrative.
Even more like undermining trust in journals.
With Science.org doing it to its own self.
Which should be living up to a higher standard than most so they can set an example.
At Science.org I think they have the responsibility to reverse the forces that are trying to build hatred for scientific endeavors across-the-board.
Looks like the haters are most concerned with climate and vaccines, and are perfectly willing to let everything else go down the tubes if that's what it takes to purge every last trace there is concerning progress in those areas past, present, and future.
So when you get the direct opinion of the most hateful where they explain why they don't trust vaccine and climate research, they can often further explain why they don't really trust very many scientists at all, not even NASA, so this is where the most concentrated anti-scientist effort can be found.
But it has already "trickled" outward from there and naturally the hatred is so extreme (and undesirable) that is the part that fortunately gets watered down as it spreads, but that can leave the anti-science momentum seeming more credible than where it emanated from. When the source hatred & superstition are less prominent, the non-haters and non-superstitious laypersons are more likely to be persuaded.This fraud needs to be exposed, but the way it looks to me it just gives haters another arrow in their quiver.
This article looks very well researched itself and seems like the authors are on the right track and will only gain more expertise on the subject if they try.
What bugs me is that they're painting with as broad a brush as you can get, themselves.
With the resources at their disposal, they should be breaking down in great detail which fields of science are the most effected and least effected by the growing fraud industry. The numbers of scientists in these fields and the locations their research was conducted in, as well as the estimated fraud in each of the fields. We want University and institution affiliations, correlations with educational histories, numbers, why not?
If they try, and stick with it for a number of years, progress in one direction or the other should become measurable for each field.
So the most egregious fraud can be targeted first & strongest.
If there was a time when there was no fraud "industry" at all, I would say that some of most questionable findings were still heavily concentrated on the social sciences, and least of all on the natural sciences.
It would be good to know if this trend still holds based on true statistical data, this could indicate if or when the fraud industries are disproportionally targeting natural science. It would be good to have a sign whether fraud in natural science is on the increase or not independently, whether initiated for the purpose of promoting the lesser scientists or their institutions, or perhaps a source of uncertainty & doubt that can be put on steroids without any intention to promote scientists or their work at all, just the opposite effect could be intended.
You know natural sciences like climate and vaccines are in their cross-hairs so you can expect those to take a big hit without any proven or rumored fraud, but if you're not careful everything else will be equally destroyed even though it was not the primary target of the hate.
One of the worst ways to discredit natural science is to lump it in with social science or anything else.
Its odd how I viewed academia as a beautiful place where people were judged by merit not by politics. Then I joined it and realized its even more cutthroat than corporate politics, I guess you cant escape human fallibility no matter the system since all systems are reflections of human nature.
Former solar researcher here, had the same experience.
I'll summarize it like this:
- join one of the most prestigious laboratories for my master's thesis in the world
- be assigned work based on a paper published in the same lab by a previous researcher
- can't replicate the results for s*t for months, put in insane overtime hours getting ridiculously good at all the processes, still nothing
- randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by the system in the publication is literally impossible, but by raising the voltage you can easily fake out the amount of electricity generated by the system. Nobody really caught it before because you need some very intimate experience with those systems, and it's just one random (albeit important) point.
- ask why this happens
- she explains that only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid
- she explains that only professors that run labs with a huge number of citations can find good funding
- only good funding can allow you to get the material, equipment and countless number of bodies (phds) to run as many experiments as possible and thus grow your position in the scientific world
Essentially there's way too many incentives to cheat and ignore the cheating for all the people involved.
And due to the fact that as soon as you enter a niche (and literally everything is a niche in science) everybody knows each other toxic things happen all around.
I wanted to be a researcher, but having wasted ultimately 7 months of my life trying to get numbers that were impossible to get, and having understood it was ALL about money (no funds -> no researchers/equipment -> papers -> citations -> funds) and politics I called it quits.
I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.
My mother worked in academia on the teaching and administrative side and said it was pretty much the same there too. In her experience even at public universities, it was all about the money. In order for the department or faculty to justify itself, it needs to bring in revenue, and the number one way to do that (along with those research grants) is international students. But the most reliable source of international students who can afford the fees are not necessarily the world's best and brightest, they're the kids of wealthy elites who see education as a business transaction - we pay, you pass our kids. So the syllabus is adjusted to suit, and the teaching methods are adjusted to suit, and in the end everybody suffers because the system becomes structured around keeping the money train coming in. The education still happens, just like the research still happens, but it's happening in a suboptimal fashion, or as a side-effect rather than as the primary focus.
Sometimes I think about tapping out of private industry and getting into academia because in my imagination at least the work would be more pure, but then I think back to the stories my mother told me and realize most likely it isn't.
I agree that the only answer seems to be serious change at the highest levels of government, i.e. revolution. Aside from advocating for that, it seems the best we can do is try exist within these systems and find niches where we can create value for society without feeling too much like our morals are being compromised in the process. It's not easy.
Great story and it shows what everybody knows but won't say - normal academics are the frauds. Not just mysterious strangers in foreign countries, paper mills, etc. but normal medium or high status academics in prestigious universities in western countries doing the fraud themselves.
You can say it's not their fault - they're forced into it because it's the only way to succeed. But it's still their fault. I remember a case of a politician in China being arrested for corruption and he said that the only way to reach his position was with corruption. Yea he was probably right but he was still corrupt.
For the curious, the laboratory I'm talking about is the Laboratory of Photonics Interfaces[1] at the EPFL in Switzerland ran by Michael Gratzel[2].
I want to stress out that the lab is great, the people in there are extremely hardworking, Gratzel is a great scientist, but at the end of the day research is what it is and stuff like this can slip under both your lab managers and reviewers. I have never ever seen the slightiest indication that lab staff ever encouraged nor tolerated such stuff, but it's easy for it to happen and there's not enough incentives (nor possibility) to review every single experiment.
But the reproducibility problem does exist and the number of scientists tweaking numbers by tiny percentages here and there to make sure they publish is relevant.
[1] https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lpi/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Gr%C3%A4tzel
I can understand mistakes happening and going unnoticed. But from what that lady told you, it sounds like they have a culture of sweeping mistakes under the rug. Was the affected paper retracted or at least a correction published? If not, they're still benefiting from the fake success which makes it unethical even if it's not technically academic fraud.
And this encourages the people with integrity to quit.
I wouldn't say they all quit, but they ultimately have to settle in less prestigious and less funded labs/universities.
I've met countless great scientists in Italy which were ultimately wasted as professors and achieved little as scientists.
I'm not saying that teaching isn't important, but it's a skill completely unrelated to being a good scientist, there's no overlap at all.
There are so many other ways to make money that don't involve crime. And there are even many crimes that make more money that are far less harmful to society.
> I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.
This is just aggravating the problem. Science is mostly fraud because it's mostly done on behalf of a funder who doesn't want it. It's easier to write a paper describing the results you'd like to get than to actually get those results. And the funding agency is indifferent between those two things. So mostly you just get the papers.
How would that be aggravating the problem?
The current system has essentially no requirement of reproducibility.
Having a paper that only allows reproducible experiments (where there's funding for random labs to reproduce results) may be difficult, or an utopia, or whatever, but not aggravating for sure.
It's aggravating the problem because you're proposing to put that indifferent funder in charge of ensuring quality. There are two problems here:
(1) This is not a recipe for actually getting any quality.
(2) By virtue of providing the funding, they already are in charge. They're not going to get better results by wishing harder. But they can easily waste more money than they already do.
Your mental model seems to be that the government received a mandate to cause research to happen, and they did that as faithfully as they could, with the only problem being that we forgot to specify that we didn't want fake research. So if we change the mandate to "cause non-fake research", the kind of research we get will change.
But that makes no sense. "Non-fake" was always a requirement. It was an unenforced requirement because it didn't matter to anyone, but you aren't proposing to change that.
>requirement of reproducibility.
Check my other comments.
Reproducibility can be a working requirement before publication when the progress is expected to be serious.
At ASTM the publishing company is non-profit and more non-academic industries pay for the (not cheap) publications every year. The employees are well-paid journalists and efficient bureaucrats specializing in continuous quality improvement themselves, highly skilled at organizing the scientists. The scientists are all volunteers.
>indifferent funder in charge of ensuring quality.
Nice not to have. Publication requires complete consensus of the volunteer scientists, and the institution is crafted to progress toward valid consensus.
It's all about quality from day zero.
In more ways than one, more than you can count actually.
So it didn't take 125 years to get that way, it had a better start than most, and has only gotten more strict over the recent decades as computer statistics became mainstream.
Edit: Forgot to mention, there's no eminence. Nobody's name appears at the top of the document, and almost nobody (still living) ever appears within the text.
Further edit: I guess you could say that ASTM is a product of the Industrial Revolution, and there hasn't been an equivalent Academic Revolution yet.
Seeking eminence costs more than making breakthroughs.
How else are you going to pay for lack of breakthroughs?
Some people aren't going to be capable of breakthroughs anyway, lots of them even know it from the beginning, so they naturally or intentionally seek different things using the same institutions and resources that could otherwise yield breakthroughs instead.
Edit: As a footnote suggested by my own question, you pay for lack of breakthroughs by building eminence out of thin air, if it wasn't obvious.
This is likely a generalized problem with basic science. In applied science you need to be very careful about fraud because ultimately the application of research findings will end up in customers hands who can and will pursue legal action if the original claims turn out to be false.
One thing that helps to counter this somewhat is that if your paper is proven to be wrong, the journal can force a retraction. A retraction isn't exactly career ending, but it is a huge deal and will have an impact on future jobs and funding.
For the expendables yes for the lab not career ending at all
> one of the most prestigious laboratories
my gut feeling is that the more famous a group/lab, the more likely there is some funny stuff going on. Smaller groups/labs are less cutthroat. But it also depends on the discipline...
> randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by the system in the publication is literally impossible
I'm interested in the apparent contradiction between the "tens of thousands of citations" credential for your evidently competent labmate who caught the fraud, and the "only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid" indictment of the evidently mediocre fraudster.
How much of the science that happens do you think is due to people like your labmate, who seems to have earned her citations organically with talent, and how much is due to the fraud? Are most citations still going to talented people?
My parents were both academics who built their careers in the 70s and 80s. I don't know that they had a perspective on fraud per se, but they did say that science used to be totally different—lots of money going into a smaller research community. But because each PI trains many PhDs, the research community has grown unsustainably and now funding is highly competitive. For the system to be sustainable, the vast majority of PhDs need to leave science, and there need to better exits for those people (or else there need to be many fewer PhD candidates and researchers need to stop relying on PhD candidates for labor). I wonder if the fraud is a consequence of this problem.
> I'm interested in the apparent contradiction between the "tens of thousands of citations" credential for your evidently competent labmate who caught the fraud, and the "only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid" indictment of the evidently mediocre fraudster.
Not every paper out there is fake and Yella Aswani [1], was an excellent PhD in Switzerland before becoming a full time professor in India.
[1] https://scholar.google.pl/citations?user=PHS1UAcAAAAJ&hl=en&...
That being said, some of her colleagues might have felt desperate to publish something meaningful before ending their PhD and cooked the numbers by that 8/10% that makes it impressive. Either that or they took an outlier result that overperformed for some reason (poor instrument calibration e.g.) and never investigated and just published.
In any case, the numbers didn't match up.
Funny, as someone who works in private sector, I always had the opposite view of academia:
A zero-sum system based around a fixed pool of grants and positions that everyone competes for, and a terminal job ladder position where, once reached by successfully having competed for aforementioned grant $$, I become un-fireable.
I would have to sleep with a gun under my pillow in such a world.
There's already plenty of cheating in business, which is full of positive-sum win-win opportunities. I don't even want to imagine how badly I might behave in academia just in order to survive.
From 1945 to about 2000, academia in the western world was slowly growing. That made the pool of positions not-quite-zero-sum, and way too many people went into it expecting a much more genial environment.
If the pool grows at the same rate as the academics who need money from the pool, it's zero-sum. If the pool were ever to grow more slowly, then it's a negative-sum game. That's when all hell breaks loose -- by many accounts, this is unfolding now.
In other words, the academics do not grow the pool through their own actions, as in private business. They are forever reliant on the kindness of strangers.
That's not quite right. Academics do grow the pool through public outreach and demonstrating value to companies which lobby the government to fund them, but since there is usually one big pool (such as the NSF budget), it is impossible for people to grow their own pool directly. It's closer to working at a large company, where your impact on earnings is next to nonexistent and your career is determined by the beliefs of the people around you about your impacts on them.
Negative sum is the worst outcome. Only the cheaters win in that scenario and they slowly eat the legitimate players, then the weak cheats so only the biggest cheaters remain. The entire pool is then tainted.
We have acquired a couple such companies and the people that survived that environment are some of the most toxic players you ever meet. They are also really good at the game so they immediately rise to power and begin to devour their next victim.
[dead]
Those whose parents stressed nothing but academics hit a dead end if the parents can't keep paying the kid to get high grades.
> I become un-fireable
That's not been true in most countries for a long time
You are un-fireable for the usual reasons for which people outside academia worry about being fired.
Layoffs aren't a thing in academia. Poor performance in the classroom isn't punishable. Failure to bring in grants isn't punishable. You can't be fired for disagreeing with your boss. You can (in most cases) publicly criticize the administration you work for, and advocate for many (yes, not all) controversial ideas.
That's an American thing. By default, you can fire anyone at any time for no reason. Universities then overcompensate and give extensive protections for tenured faculty.
In Europe, it's more common that a professor has roughly the same job security as a teenager in their first real job. There are some exceptions due to academic freedom, but they are mostly about the substance of the work rather than the performance in it. And other independent professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, and civil engineers, often have similar exceptions.
This is totally not true in my country (UK). Staff are laid off. Tenure doesn't exist. Departments are not closed.
But thats UK, a small backwater island
A small backwater island with 4 universities in the top 10 of worldwide rankings and outperformance in the top 100 too?
yeah
They are, but extremely infrequently and when they are it is minor numbers, at least at the largest universities. And when they are laid off it is for financial reasons not performance.
Not sure if you're following the news, but almost every university is in financial trouble at the moment.
> Layoffs aren't a thing in academia
May not "layoffs", but schools lose funding, get shut down, and fail to track sufficient students to justify continuing employment.
Depends what you do. Yes you can get fired, but you have to do some really nasty things (embezzlement, sexual assault, etc) to get fired.
Or when your department gets disbanded.
Ah, the “financial exigency” escape hatch
Look up "rubber rooms". They sequester teachers and professors accused of sexual harassment of children, and keep paying them, because they cannot be fired.
Look up teachers' and academics' unions (e.g. AAUP), and the contracts they have in place to keep them from being fired.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
> in most countries
Not every country is the US, lots of Hackernews audience isn't in the US
Academia.
Nowhere else do people fight so much and so dirty for so little.
Why do people say "so little". How is an appointment to a high prestige job for life small stakes?
There's a more transparent and straightforward pathway to a lifetime appointment as a federal judge (which actually pays OK and has many social perks) than there is to a tenured professorship in most fields. Judges have Solomon-like-life-and-death power, and the lawyers who argue before them (often successful, high-status people in their own right) are professionally obligated to suck up.
By comparison almost all professorships are like becoming the most important hobo on a given street corner.
Yeah, it's mostly either students or academia who admire their hobo kings.
It's kind of like a sport like tennis. If you're in the system, you think that the world number 150 tennis player is amazing, but they barely make enough to afford travel to the matches.
This is a really sharp take IMO.
In all fairness though, it's very difficult to become a judge. At least in my country, you have to have been both a defense lawyer and a prosecutor in order to become a judge. It takes many years of experience that is not easily gained.
At the state university in my smaller city, an actual professorship (not some adjunct) earns up towards $200k/year salary. Maybe pretty modest by FAANG standards, but for many people outside of tech that sounds like a lottery jackpot. So it's not just prestige, though that's on offer too.
Especially once you factor in the lower cost of living (relative to FAANG jobs) in that smaller city.
Don't forget 3-4 months off in the summer too.
Professors don't get the summer off. If you have a heavy teaching load, summers are your one window to get research work done. If you don't, like me, the difference between the summer and the rest of the year is its easier to find parking.
Fine, 3-4 months to think about interesting things all day long with basically zero expectation that you’ll be anywhere or show up to anything. Call it what you will.
That you think this is true betrays a complete lack of understanding about what a modern academic job requires.
I am speaking from firsthand experience. The level of manufactured contempt the site has for higher ed is almost comical.
I mean, its not completely untrue. You do not have set hours. You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs, depending on how despotic you want to be.
I do not have set hours, but I do have obligations. When a program officer wants to talk to you, and it's 6 AM because you're on the west coast, you say yes.
"You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs" is just untrue - there's always more work than there are people to do it, and I'm pretty sure a number of committees I'm on would be more than a little annoyed if I sent a postdoc.
Is it a job that has some nice properties to it? Yes. But the idea that we have summers "off", or that it's all time to contemplate blue sky research ideas, rather than go to curriculum meetings and work on monthly grant reports is a fantasy.
> When a program officer wants to talk to you, and it's 6 AM because you're on the west coast, you say yes.
Why? What happens if you as a tenured PI say no?
> "You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs" is just untrue - there's always more work than there are people to do it, and I'm pretty sure a number of committees I'm on would be more than a little annoyed if I sent a postdoc.
No this part is definitely true and I have firsthand experience of it. Your graduate students are paid less than minimum wage and are often immigrants from poorer countries. Often they are even paid zero by the PI. So they can be effectively serfs and beholden to you for literal survival.
Use your imagination. What's to stop you from recruiting a bunch of students and offloading all your grant writing to them, hunger games style?
Look, I know there are idealistic professors who put in the work. If that's you, thank you. But the system incentivizes what is effectively feudalism and the professors who take advantage of that climb faster than you and become program chairs. Acknowledgement of this perverse system is not an attack on you.
> Why? What happens if you as a tenured PI say no?
In the last lets say five years of my career, the range of possible consequences for this range from "Mildly annoying a colleague I like" to "Catastrophic outcomes for a 100+ million dollar research program".
Will I get fired? No. But we can't both argue that academia is incentivized toward grant-getting (which is true) and that pissing off the people who award and administer those grants is consequence free.
It also includes leaving a whole study section in the lurch (I was recruited for specific expertise, the meeting time was published in the Federal register, and then it had to move to an online format, which a 6 AM start for PST folks).
Or collaborators in various foreign countries who need to talk outside regular business hours.
A non-fixed schedule (and I only have one because I rarely teach - the times I do teach my schedule is much more rigid) is like unlimited paid leave. It's very nice, but it also has downsides - you can't reach for business hours. It works for me, but it also makes my GP go a little pale whenever I document my sleep schedule.
Ironically, the only colleague of mine I know who does do a good job with work boundaries does so by assertively working 9 to 5.
> Your graduate students are paid less than minimum wage and are often immigrants from poorer countries.
My unionized graduate students are paid considerably more than minimum wage.
> Use your imagination. What's to stop you from recruiting a bunch of students and offloading all your grant writing to them, hunger games style?
To be blunt? All our graduate students write a mock proposal as part of a professional development course. They are not good at writing proposals.
Beyond that, much of the actual work I do has nothing to do with what graduate students do. I'm not going to have a graduate student review and prepare my department's packets for this year for the Tenure and Promotion Committee. Or have yet another fight with IT. Or figure out how to best represent programs that exist in a multidisciplinary department so they both have a sense of identity but don't undermine a coherent whole (though I will ask their input on that, because it matters to them).
Academia has very real problems, including some of the ones discussed in this article. But Hacker News is very bad at understanding how academia actually works on a pragmatic level, including things like what being a professor is actually like, or how indirect costs work, etc. Even those who have been to graduate school struggle with it - partially because academia is bad at actually teaching to so-called "hidden curriculum" of how being a PI actually works.
> My unionized graduate students are paid considerably more than minimum wage.
This is not typical and you know it.
> To be blunt? All our graduate students write a mock proposal as part of a professional development course. They are not good at writing proposals.
That's the thing with hunger games, if they don't get good they don't survive. I've seen it. I know PIs who don't write a single one of their grants.
While maybe you don't abuse grad students and post-docs to do your job its simply not possible to say it doesn't happen unless you are willfully putting on blinders. Frankly, it sounds like you are in full denial of just how bad it can get.
> This is not typical and you know it.
You said "your".
But my entire field goes off NIH rates, which while not nearly high enough, are well above minimum wage. That's what I'm objecting to - the broad strokes exaggeration that covers up genuine problems.
> That's the thing with hunger games, if they don't get good they don't survive. I've seen it. I know PIs who don't write a single one of their grants.
Personally, I wouldn't put my name on any graduate student's first grant proposal attempt, because I don't like wasting my time, nor is that what I want them working on.
I am not saying abuse of graduate students and postdocs doesn't occur. I'm acutely aware that it does - and having helped colleagues through a number of crises, I'm very much not in denial about it. But it is also not the norm.
If you want to have an honest discussion about the problems facing graduate students and postdocs in academia, including abusive working conditions, that's one thing. But that's also a massive shift in goalposts from asserting that I get to spend 3-4 months thinking about interesting things all day because "You can offload as much work as you want to grad students and postdocs", which is just factually untrue.
Your setup sounds rather different than mine, though I am under the impression mine is typical. There are no “curriculum meetings” or any other sort of teaching or service work during the summer, for the simple reason that the university literally does not pay you in the summer. I meet with my group to talk about research, but that falls under “enjoyable” for me. Grant reports are due once a year, in the spring as it happens. I have never heard of monthly reporting grants, but I’m used to garden-variety NSF and R01 type stuff only.
If your job much of a grind as you are making it out to be, why not go make 3-10x in industry? Honest question.
The curriculum meetings are because we're starting a new program, and my entire department is on 12 month contracts, not 9 month ones. Honestly, those meetings are rather fun, because it's a chance to talk about what I think we should be teaching people in my discipline - it's just an example of something that can't be "pawned off on a grad student".
My NIH grants have annual reports, as do NSF. CDC and USAID (RIP...) have much more intensive reporting requirements.
Honestly, I love my job, and there are some very nice things about it. It's just not the case that all professors get the summers off, or that if they are working, it's all fun and games and sitting in my office thinking Big Ideas.
It's a slam on how petty many of the internal grudge matches are. But of course they don't seem at all petty to those engaged in them.
The quote is referring to fights between people who already have tenure.
in many countries the salaries are unbelievably low by US standards, but they generally do come with healthcare, benefits and a pension.
maybe those who fight for it have better information.
for example they realize that once they achieve tenure, the amount of work truly required to retain the for-life annuity is risibly low so they can go on to do just about whatever else they want or “consult” for extra dollars as needed.
My workload has only steadily increased once I got tenure. The nature of the work changed, but the "Kick back, relax and enjoy your zero effort forever job" is a fantasy of people who don't actually know what they're talking about.
i’ve personally known a number of tenured professors who’ve systematically shirked all responsibility after their tenure event. they’ve been willing to live as semi-pariahs within their peer group though.
even when required to teach they simply repeat classes they’ve taught many times before making no effort to optimize for reviews.
i don’t doubt your experience but i wonder how much it has to do with not wanting to endure your colleagues’ and departments’s disapproval vs actual threat to employment.
and fwiw, i’m not saying it has to be this way just that it can be this way due to the structure of the system. similarly there are many corporate situations in which one can scrape by for extended periods of time, but there is rarely a “for life” clause. even so, it hasn’t prevented the university system from helping to catalyze all the amazing discoveries we all benefit from in society every day.
fwiw, i agree with most of the points in @Fomite’s response below. the people i’ve known fall into a perverse version of his “ego” point.
they felt that when they got tenure they “won” and their “ego” was strong enough to allow them to ignore the disapproval of their peers for not doing the conventionally expected things. they felt that they knew better in their hearts what the discipline truly needed and that the rat-race of establishment approval wasn’t it. so they turned inward. which is not necessarily the healthiest path imo.
There's definitely a few of those.
I mean, there are definitely people who coast, because there are people everywhere who coast.
But the vast majority of tenured professors I know don't do so, for one of the following reasons:
- I can't get fired, but I also don't need to get paid. My position has a non-trivial soft money component to it, and it's actually low for my field, which ranges from 50% to 100% soft money depending on the institution. A double-digit pay cut is motivation for most people.
- There are still promotions to be had, and those promotions are really the only way to get a raise beyond cost of living increases. At my institution there are two steps beyond Associate Professor with Tenure, and both of them are not obtained by phoning it in.
- Ego. It's hard to understate this one. Most academics are smart, determined people. There are other easier, more lucrative jobs. But there's a sense of purpose and ego that channeled them to the career they're in. Said ego is usually not fed by being in the doldrums. That's not how you get awards and invited to talks, and recruited elsewhere, etc.
Sure, the stick of "You could get fired" isn't there, but there are also ways to make a tenured professor whose coasting's life less pleasant. But even if not, I don't think it's nearly as common as the popular imagination (or this thread) think it is. Most people I know only really take their foot of the gas in the last few years of their careers, often well past retirement age.
Student politics, perhaps.
I viewed academia as altruistic and relatively enlightened. And I've certainly met many who live up to that.
I've also occasionally heard of entire academic departments who should be in jail, for being pieces of crud.
Then there's what I'm guessing is the bulk of academia: care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be.
That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
> That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
I regularly see both worlds. What I find more troubling in academia is that it is difficult to openly talk about how flawed the system is, that people make mistakes, that papers have mistakes (the own ones as well as others'). We know all software has bugs; but the code that a PhD student hacks together over night is assumed to be flawless (the more senior people rarely even glance at it), otherwise the paper is all wrong, and papers are set in stone... So I genuinely struggle with the lack of a proper failure culture in academia, as it is designed as a system that is fundamentally geared against openly discussing failure.
I suspect there's many reasons for the field/department cultures.
One of them, which was surprising to me (which I first heard from a friend in a hard STEM field), was what happens when student A's thesis result is found to be wrong due to flawed experiment... but only after student B is well into their own dissertation building upon A's result. Reportedly, everyone involved (A, B, their PI, the department, the university) has incentive to keep quiet about student A's bad result. B has an academic career to move forward, within funding and timeframes, and everyone else cares about reputation and money. And there is only downside for bystanders to complain, especially if it's other students especially vulnerable to retaliation/disfavor.
Another one I've seen, which is less surprising, is when there seems to be a culture of alliance or truce among faculty. So, if someone is misbehaving, or makes a mistake, it's understood that no one is going to call them out or interfere, and no one wants to even know about it more than they have to. In general, no selfish benefit can come from that, but a whole lot of negative feedback can. Mind your own business, glass houses, etc.
> care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be. That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
That's pretty much my experience from 20+ years ago.
One thing that I didn't appreciate when I left the ivory tower was the extent of the replication "crisis."
If other academics can't replicate your work in some esoteric corner of bio research, it's no big deal--some people get burned wasting time, but the research just atrophies in the end.
But in the biotech / pharma industry, we in-licensed a lot of un-replicatable garbage from academia.
And replication was important to us because we actually had to make a drug that was effective (which loosely translates to ... "clinicians must be able to replicate your drug's efficacy.").*
* I'm not sure how true this is anymore, given politicization of regulatory bodies, but it was an eye-opener to me years ago.
If you want to make a company based off a science discovery you have to start by replicating the initial discovery. Most biotech companies die there.
That's not really where most biotechs die.
You don't move a drug into clinical trials unless you can replicate the initial studies, which is almost always "drug x cures y in animal z."
They die when they try to determine if "drug x cures y in humans."
Series A companies die there. That’s why most not largest.
"drug x cures y in humans - without causing z where bad_y - bad_z < ε".
> where bad_y - bad_z < ε".
LOL. That is often the hard part. "We cured your toe fungus. Sorry about the heart attack."
Yeah, I would say that my time in academia disillusioned me somewhat, but not to the level that some people here are expressing. I never got the sense that people were falsifying data, directly (but covertly) backstabbing one another, or anything really awful like that.
But there are plenty of disheartening things that don't rise to that level of actual malfeasance. People get so comfortable in their tenured positions that they can lose touch with reality (e.g., the reality of how difficult their grad students' lives are). Even if they don't engage in actual research misconduct, there's a tendency for people to put their thumb on the scale in various ways (often, I think, without being aware of it), many of them connected to a sort of confirmation bias, in terms of who they think is a "good fit" for a job, what kind of work they want to support, etc. In my experience they are at best dismissive and at worst offended by the idea that maybe the current financial/employment model of higher education isn't the best (e.g., that maybe you shouldn't have a two-tiered system of tenure-track and non-ladder faculty with wildly differing payscales, but rather should just have a larger number of people doing varying amounts of teaching and research for varying but roughly comparable levels of pay).
I felt like virtually everyone I met was in some sense committed to the truth, but often they were committed to their own view of the truth, which was usually a defensible and reasonable view but not the only view, and not as clearly distinct from other reasonable views as they felt it was. And they varied considerably in how much they felt it was acceptable or necessary to engage in minor shenanigans in order to keep moving forward (e.g., to what extent they'd compromise their actual beliefs in order to placate journal editors and get something published).
Also, there is often something endearing about how academics can be genuinely emotionally invested, sometimes to the point of rage or ecstasy, in matters so obscure that the average person wouldn't give them a second thought. It's sort of like finding someone who's a fan of some TV show that ran for 12 episodes in 1983 and is adorably gushy about it. Even the people I met who were quite cognizant of making strategic career moves and other such practical stuff still had a lot of this geeky obsession about them.
A lot of this may vary from one field to another. But on the whole there are many worse people in the world than academics.
As an US undergrad decades ago, at a major (non-elite) research school, I was already discovering these criticisms of the current academic system, in action, way back then. So I don't think we can blame much of any 'fraud' increase going on today on that system. Today, perception of fraud may be on the increase.
(I started to become alert to what that program was really about when I took one of the classes -critical- to my major. It involved a lot of heavy math, and was being taught by a TA with a -very poor- command of the English language. When I complained, my Princeton-grad advisor's reply was 'this course is to separate the men from the boys'. Yeah, thanks pal.
So far as I know, he published very few cited papers.)
How is it better than the tech industry?
Well, the amount of money being wasted is generally smaller, and often the results are not harming hundreds of millions of people around the world. (But it depends on the field.)
Sayre's Law: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
as it turns out an annuity for life in the form of a tenured position is not really low stakes…
The viscous politics is often carried out by those who already have tenure, probably even more so because they have that protection.
Tenured people carry it out, but in my experience, the goal tends to be for their students/subordinates/group colleagues/etc. to achieve tenure instead of others.
I've heard of an engineering faculty where there was basically a cold war between a few of the tenured profs. They would do everything they could to undercut or screw each other over. Pure spite-based politics. Toxic as hell and there was very little anyone could do about out.
i know of prestigious departments where after literally decades of political stalemate with colleagues (over things as petty as who gets what office) prestigious faculty finally managed to finagle a high-dollar offer from a lower tier institution and de-camped over the politics.
Well, I’m not sure I’ve seen that pattern quite so much, but if you’re seeing it, I would speculate survivor bias. The people who stay around are the ones who were good enough at the game to stay around.
the way i’ve generally understood the use of the word “vicious” in this context is in judging other academics’ work quality. which is also typically where i think most people from the outside perceive the stakes to be low: as in who cares whether one more journal article that no one will read gets published? but from the inside it can mean the difference between tenure and no tenure (for the young academic vying for it), respect and abject failure, money or no money.
There are so many more ways than that to starve and sabotage a burgeoning researcher, ensuring they never take root.
Well sure but in this case the actual word was “viscous”, not “vicious”. Academic politics is thick, sticky, and insufficiently fluid and insufficiently solid at the same time. Okay it was probably a typo but it kind of works as an analogy.
sure, maybe it was intended as a novel coinage, but i assumed the “vicious” interpretation which is the more common one since the comment explicitly references Sayre's Law.
You probably mean "vicious" but "viscous" works too, funnily. Username checks out.
I was also wondering if it was a spelling mistake, a failure to know the difference between the two words, a legit description of academic politics as molasses-like, or a play on the user's own username. The layers of potential irony here are thick and viscous!
fair point - though it sometimes turns into a fight about how to remove others’ tenure; which is their most prized and valuable possession.
Especially when the position is filled by someone who couldn't earn half as much (in money, security, and prestige) if forced to compete on merit in the real world.
The "real world" is far from meritorious.
Yes, but it functionally allows a different kind of meritlessness.
Once you get that annuity you wind up embroiled in the fighting to decide who gets tenure next. Your proteges or other people's.
I think ideally academia needs to evolve to be open to everyone and worshiping of nobody. Pop in to publish your article, return to whatever else you had been doing after. Repeat. University professors are rarely that innovative or good in their teaching methods, so that part could be to be taken up by teaching faculty instead.
Pop in to publish your article, return to whatever else you had been doing after.
Nothing is stopping you. I've published papers and presented at academic conferences while working in industry. Both in collaboration with academics and without.
many academics also seem willing to invite industry people to guest lecture in their classes
Well over half of college teaching is already done by "adjuncts" who are non tenure track teaching staff. The teachers are effectively unsupervised and do their best but have no incentive to improve other than self motivation.
Disclosure: I was an adjunct for a semester while I was between industry jobs.
in my experience, teaching quality does benefit from repetition (it is also harmed by it!).
The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability. One of the best lecturers I had at university was a postdoc who didn't get hired and ended up teaching at a 'third rate' university. One of the worst lecturers I had got head hunted by MIT.
>The big problem is that universities basically never hire or promote based on a persons teaching ability.
Because they aren't intended to be educational. Universities (as they are run today) are primarily grant-revenue capture organizations, secondarily research organizations (at least to the degree necessary that grant money doesn't dry up because of fraudulent spending accusations), and finally after that, a begrudged effort is made at education for optics. If they could ditch the education angle entirely, they'd send the students home tomorrow.
No, even ignoring tuition and fees a huge chunk of the endowment comes from alumni donations. Mostly former undergrads.
There are pure grad institutions, such as UCSF and Baylor College of Medicine
That's not necessarily a problem. There are different options in the marketplace. If you attend an R1 research university then of course hiring decisions will heavily weight research productivity. But many other smaller schools absolutely do look at teaching ability.
Tenure should be more widespread.
It's really hard when there's no metrics beyond "perceived intelligence."
Citation numbers, weighted by impact factor, h-index, number of Ph.D. students... that are bad proxies for "perceived intelligence".
Academia is a petty place.
No "system" can ever overcome such problems. Sure, some political orders are better than others in various respects, but nothing will overcome the basic origin of our problems, which is us! The "system" itself is made from the crooked timber of our humanity, and even if some perfect "system" could be made, its perfection could only be actualized by a perfect people.
Hence the need to focus less on systems and more on personal virtue. You want to find your greatest enemy? Look within.
To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”
Your post being down voted is unjust. There is a tendency to expect salvation from the system and the rule, but they only have power if they are kept by and defended by the commons.
This also applies to society as a whole. The role of the media as the fourth estate in the system is to inform the public when destruction is breaking the rules, to explain how it will bring down the house.
But when in a Res Publica the media susses the common man instead, when the outlets prostitute them to the destructive powers that finally will kill their enablers, all is too late. The common man will have exchanged his virtues for hate towards imaginary enemies. Then it turned out that the rules did not save the public.
>To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”
This gets invoked way too often by bad people defending bad things that they were warned not to do/support at the time but did/supported anyway because there was something in it for them.
Perhaps my wording was misleading. I am not claiming that reform is not possible. I am only claiming that the impulse, especially when it is messianic, that drives some reformers and revolutionaries is delusional, a dead end, and worse, usually involves tyrannical measures and produces more bad than it does good.
Of course, academia could absolutely benefit from certain changes and reforms - I have argued for this myself; education has been derailed by inferior goals - , but the primary place where the work has to happen isn't policy or institutional structure, but ourselves. Indeed, the counterpart to your criticism is that excessive talk of reform is a way of avoiding the difficult and unpleasant work of having to look in the mirror. This does not exclude the need for certain reforms, but unless you get your own house in order first, you will be in poor shape to know what to reform and how.
I think it's more beneficial to think in terms of incentive structures. How we structure societies and industries can incentivize virtue, but it can also disincentivize fradulance and incentivize good clean work more directly.
Sure, incentives are important. I don't disagree. The law is a teacher, and it involves the use of incentives and disincentives.
But there is a bootstrapping problem here. The first is that virtue is needed to know what and how to incentivize and disincentivize, and to be able to choose to do it. Corrupt men will tend to create incentives in their own image.
Another problem is that even when incentives are properly aligned, this alone does not guarantee good behavior. Murderers know what awaits them for their crimes. So while incentives are important, a purely game theoretic construction is not enough. It does not do enough to secure rational behavior. So the problem is not merely political, but moral. We each have a personal duty here to demand moral action from ourselves and to grow in virtue.
I was planning on going into academia in the early aughts and this was also around the time that there was a groundswell to take away tenure from professors. "They" wanted to set out a quota for how many times you needed to have your research published on a yearly basis to show you were still doing your job.
I opted out when all three of my advisors during my first year of graduate work told to get out and that the whole field of academia was not the romantic vision I had aspired to be. It was quickly becoming toxic. One of my advisors had stopped taking money from universities, and was leaving to go work for a large pharmaceutical company doing research out in Siberian Russia. Another was quietly working on a degree in statistics to go work for the government.
These were people who I admired and fashioned myself after. It's quite a shock when people you respect suddenly warn you academia is not where you want to be. I was lucky, the other two guys I was in grad school with went ahead anyways. Years later, I found out neither lasted more than a few years for exactly what you described and what I was warned of.
One thing that really needs to be unbundled is assessments for credentials, teaching, and research. As it is now you want to be assessed for credentials at a top institution, you have to pay to take classes and learn at that institution. Which often leaves you in a class being "taught" by a researcher who's uninterested in teaching and unresponsive, and who hands off the actual job of teaching to an inexperienced graduate student making minimum wage. And for this privilege, you're charged a massive amount of money.
Part of the problem is many academic institutions, even prestigious ones, simply don't prioritize teaching. They don't even really prioritize challenging education. They prioritize prestige and opportunity hoarding. The hardest part about many of these schools is getting in. Once you're in, then grade inflation and the desire for the institution to retain it's prestige brand means the classes aren't particularly hard --- graduating is particularly easy and most students actually barely put in effort. Getting in is the golden ticket more than graduating.
One solution, is for an institution to prioritize accessibility (easier to get in) but also prioritize difficulty (actually hard to graduate). This would reorient incentives around challenging education that pushes students to excel rather than coast after striving just to get in. Unfortunately, the priorities are the exact opposite today.
I had the same view until I went to do a small internship in a research lab. There, I realized that my research group's boss was spending most of his time submitting grant requests, that in my view distilled to 'Give use money and we will find X'. Which was absolutely antithetical to what I thought research was like(wait, aren't we supposed to not know what we will find ?). Then came the publishing part where you get reviews saying your paper isn't good enough because it didn't cite ${completely not relevant to the topic} paper (which sort of narrows down who the "anonymous reviewer" was). Then there's the quasi-feudal approach of putting the lab head in the authors. I mean, come on, I'm not sure the guy even knows the paper exists...
It just wasn't my thing.
Two notes:
- Not all labs run this way. Mine doesn't.
- Very few successful grants, in my experience, are "Give money and we'll find X". Rather, they tend to be "We're reasonably sure X is over here for $reasons, but we'd need money to actually confirm that."
I'm open to the idea that i somehow caught an outlier. then again, its a lab integrated to the general eu funding schemes, so it can't be that much of an outlier.
your summary of a grant request doesn't really sound all that different from mine tbh, just more charitable. Its just that i naively came in with the expectation that it would be something like "we need X$ to explore domain $Y" "sure. here you go", then 2 years later "we found x y and z, see $papers, now we'd like $x2 to explore $y2". and back to square 1/2.
a full broadcast over all available and unavailable channels of "please, master grant officer, just a few coins to explore $X a bit further, we'll very certainly find $Y", i was not ready for.
Im overdoing the tone a bit to highlight that it had to be tuned to the grant officer, way more than it had to be tuned to reality. to promise to find whatever was popular in the field at the time. regardless of the practical facts of the field. because the people evaluating the proposal didnt know shit about the field.
so when you were in the trench every day, it just sounded like absolute parody of what we were actually doing, explained to a kindergartener.
i realize this comes off as a knock on my boss way more than I'd like. i absolutely don't mean to. he did what had to be done, so that his team can keep working, within the system he had to work with to move our field forward. and the money we got was well spent, no doubt here.
but my view was : if I work my ass off for 10 years, I can be this guy. Do I want this? and the answer was a resounding, definitive "hell no".
all the paper publishing shenanigans were just extra irritants that sealed my decision.
I have a "We need X to explore domain Y" grant, and it's lovely. It's also pretty rare, but at the moment, most of my funding is from those types of mechanisms. That is, admittedly, somewhat unusual.
I will say that "the people evaluating the proposal didnt know shit about the field." isn't true in the U.S. For grants from the NIH, NSF, or CDC, they're almost all peer-reviewed. While some hot topics get a bit of needless shine to them, I've also seen grants ripped apart for "They just tacked LLMs onto this for no reason", etc.
I do definitely get not wanting that. There are people I know and respect immensely as scientists who went "I don't want to be a PI" and that's legit.
I will say, and this is not about your post, that Hacker News both often laments the paucity of staff scientist positions, and also likes to attack the PI who does nothing but write grants, but you can't actually have it both ways. Almost all of my grant writing is driven by keeping my people employed.
> Then there's the quasi-feudal approach of putting the lab head in the authors
Changes from field to field but yes, very common.
And many times, like you wrote, they have no idea about what was even done.
Then you have the gigantic collaborations, where everyone gets a citation and it counts as much as a paper with one or two authors.
And of course, everyone will cite it because there's no real alternative.
Academia these days is a lot like industry, but with worse pay, better schedule, and low consequences/verification if the data that is published is "wrong", intentionally or unintentionally.
The schedule is not better. My quality of life increased dramatically when I left academia and realized that I had time for things like hobbies.
Even in startups, there’s a tacit understanding that you’re exchanging your time for money and that this exchange has limits. This is simply not true in academics where the need to publish to keep funding (and often your job) is incredibly intense.
Sorry, you're correct. I specifically meant flexible, which I equate to better. Both academia and in some industries will likely be 50+ hrs weekly, especially in the early days of their careers. But academia offers substantially more flexibility. Especially once you bring kids into the mix where you're more likely to need to shift your day around for children/child care.
Posted this same comment elsewhere, but seemed equally appropriate as a response to you.
My schedule, while more flexible, is not better than any one of my colleagues who went into industry.
Sorry, you're correct. I specifically meant flexible, which I equate to better. Both academia and in some industries will likely be 50+ hrs weekly, especially in the early days of their careers. But academia offers substantially more flexibility. Especially once you bring kids into the mix where you're more likely to need to shift your day around for children/child care.
The flexibility is undeniably nice, though it does sort of erode work-life separation in a way I have yet to figure out how to fix.
Same here. I think it's one of those fields that feel polar opposite to, what they advertise to be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculu...
Academia/Science has always been quarrelsome.
> Its odd how I viewed academia as a beautiful place where people were judged by merit not by politics.
If there's more than one human, you have politics.
Not all humans are practitioners of the terminal gamesmanship that is infecting our economy and government. It's about electing, promoting, and buying from the right people, and having the courage to properly punish those who have betrayed the good faith that powers successful societies.
in academia many times it matters whom you know rather than what you know,
It seems to me that the "elephant in the room" no one has mentioned yet w.r.t. academia is the model of modern academic administration, where universities are run like cruise ships (look at the perks kids are paying for these days!) with hedge funds attached, and have no "skin in the game" with regard to the incredibly high financial risks that students take when they pay for tuition.
If: (a) students paid 1/10 of what they pay today[0], (b) all the on-campus expensive perks were ended (new buildings sold, etc.) and the administration headcount dropped to 1 per every 50 students, (c) tuition went directly to professors, research, and basic groundskeeping, (d) some kind of financial arrangement were put in place so universities had skin in the game with regard to the success of their graduates[0]
then I'm positive the academic system would become far more effective at educating students and preparing them for life, and there would be a positive trickle-down effect to scientific research and the politics there.
[0] State-funded secondary education in European countries costs far less than university education in the US. There's a reason for that - unlike students with easy access to debt, the government won't pay such exorbitant fees.
[1] A very rough stab at an idea for making universities have skin in the game: make tuition for degrees conferred refundable by some percentage (50%?) if more than a certain fraction (10%?) of graduates with B- or higher GPA in their majors are collectively unable to find a job in their field within 2 years of graduation. If a university needed to withhold that guarantee for some majors, that would be a very helpful signal for prospective students.
But the point isn't the specifics, it's that just the presence of such a lever (and its absence at some universities or majors) would be a powerful signal to prospective students, better align the university's incentives, and cause a lot of necessary changes.
Most universities do not have "hedge fund" class endowments.
It should also be noted that there are reasons tuition is the way it is. State allocations for higher ed were slashed in 2008, and didn't really get put back even when the economy was doing well. Similarly, federal research dollars (which fund the vast bulk of research, not tuition) has been pretty flat for decades (the amount of a non-modular NIH R01, for example, hasn't changed since the Clinton administration).
Tuition is the only lever left to most institutions.
> Tuition is the only lever left to most institutions.
No, cutting costs (especially slashing the administration and facility budget) is another lever that few institutions use. The other really important levers are professor hiring and pay, and admissions standards.
Build a reputation for hiring a great faculty, paying them well, keeping a minimal administration, and cultivating a student body that is hungry to learn, and the right people will come. Everything else is mostly fluff with regard to a quality education.
The idea that universities have not been under continuous budget cuts is one out of step with my experience.
Have a look at the average admin headcount per student in 1995 vs 2025. It has grown to be the largest department by far of modern US universities (and a lot of places in Europe as well, unfortunately) - usually significantly larger and more well-paid than the faculty.
In one extreme example, I heard the ratio of student:admin is nearly 1:1. That is bonkers.
And no - administration employees don't need to justify their ongoing employment by constantly publishing new research in academic journals. For them, the gravy just keeps rolling in. Just keep increasing tuition, increasing the endowment fund (often through real estate deals and other hedge fund like activity), increasing donations, increasing their own budget, and threatening to cut research & academic department budgets.
Yes, academic and research departments have often had budget cuts. But expenditures per student are way up to pay academic administration salary.
(If I sound angry, it's because I am. MBA types have caused so much harm to these institutions.)
Another ex-researcher here. Similar experience. I went in with hopes of a lot of rationality and intense cooperation between people who would be there mostly for a shared curiosity. Fast forward years and... Good grief - so, so many people publicly being shouted down, shamed, bullied, insulted. So many serious abuses of power - up to sexual and bodily - essentially without consequences for the abusers (often with way more negative consequences for the victims if they complained). So many tears, so many ends to academic careers of people who were really smart and really cared - in quite a few cases accompanied by burn-outs and other long-term health consequences. So much tax money down the drain with questionable accounting up to outright lies. So, so many utterly absurd intrigues and wars between mini-kingdoms based on nothing but the feelings of the biggest, loudest and most vicious narcissists. So many publications of questionable methodology that are sliced as thinly as they possibly can be and are hyper-targeted towards all-important journals or conferences. And so much more soul-destroying nonsense.
I'm still mostly in academia but nowadays, I focus on teaching and infrastructure. Especially with teaching, I feel that I can make more of a long-term impact that I ever could as a researcher - not least because I have way more freedom for discussions and interesting projects with students (I still have to deal with way more hostile, petty and sometimes outright dangerous BS than I feel comfortable with - but it's better than in the even-higher-pressure parts of the system).
I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism. If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently. Because what you see in small, specially poor communities is that trust in each other is strong.
You could argue that the church tried it and we had the inquisition, but I think it's different. We have way more benefit of hindsight and the population is way more educated than it was in the middle ages.
Not advocating for a renaissance of the Christian kingdom, but for embedding care and charity as first class moral values in economics.
Not only is it human, it's far more general than human.
The world is not what you think it is. Social problems are almost never a result of improper social systems.
The game you are playing by virtue of existing is just shit and no amount of "rules" you build on top of it will ever change that fact.
It's not what I see. I go out and I see people helping each other, people having fun and taking care of the environment, social justice being discussed at the government level. I'm Brazilian though so I might be biased, but I think I prefer to be an idealist than a defeatist.
If the world is like what you say it is, shouldn't you just drop dead? Thinking like this is like committing philosophical suicide anyways, if you can't imagine a better world that's worth fighting for, even if it's just in a thought experiment.
This learned helplessness is by design, not by nature, so you don't question the status quo and keep working to make the elites richer without realising it's killing the world.
I think one of the core failures of our current economic religion is that we can rely solely on anonymous transactions. But many transactions fail when everything is black boxes. We can't easily evaluate (1) if the thing we got is of good quality and (2) there wasn't any harmful side effects.
Transactions need more trivially verifiable metadata. That could solve one of many issues.
> I don't think it's essentially human to be cutthroat and competitive, it's just capitalism
This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don’t have capitalism, they’re all getting along, right? Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for mates?
Being competitive is human nature. People will always compete for things, even if you try to artificially remove or forbid financial incentives. There are always more incentives. There will always be social standing to pursue, a coveted position, or the recognition of having accomplished something.
> If we could come up with an economic system centered first on the care we could see it differently.
Alternate economic systems that forbid capitalism rely on heavy government enforcement to prevent people from doing capitalistic things: Running unapproved businesses, being entrepreneurial, selling goods and services at market rate.
This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).
>when we look at animals in nature
We should be able to tell which behaviors are not properly included in the concept of "humanity".
And when we find these behaviors within ourselves, recognize those as a vestige of inhuman nature.
We should be constantly striving not to confuse the unsuitable animalistic stuff as "human nature", otherwise that's the lamest excuse of all and has leveraged more stupidity than probably anything else in history.
I'm with you on competitiveness though, to a degree it's all not purely animalistic, especially not financially ;)
OTOH, the cutthroat stuff can be so inhuman there's not any question, or it wouldn't be called that.
animals do frequently get along and cooperate, ironically what youre doing is a reflection of capitalism, youre projecting the current economic system onto the animal planet. Think of that famously wrong study from the 70s about alpha wolves, its been disproven but people still of it as true because it molds to the economic system they understand.
But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly: will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses. Market economies, command economies, mercantile economies, and any other economic system must deal with these scarcities somehow. Even in the animal kingdom this must be contended with, albeit at a much lower level of abstraction. We deal with scarcity in a number of different ways, e.g. higher prices, waiting lines, by need, or some other metric or any combination thereof. Animals tend to deal with resource (food) scarcity through violence, abandonment, and a few other processes because not eating means death. That isn't to say cooperation doesn't happen, it absolutely does, but it is still constrained by resource scarcity.
> But also, I dont even think it matters. We have to live under an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly
All economic systems are a set of trade-offs and capitalism in general tends to outperform all other economic systems we know of. That isn't to say it's a perfect system, it isn't, but I've noticed people who profess your opinion implicitly assume the alternative is a utopia that which simply does not exist. We may find a better system in the future but it will still be constrained by the law of supply and demand, resource scarcity, and human nature and hence will have trade-offs.
> animals do frequently get along and cooperate
And humans do, too. So what’s your point? I’m drawing parallels between animals and humans and you are too! You seem to be supporting my point, not refuting it.
Humans get along and cooperate at scales far beyond anything the animal kingdom can do. Capitalism has driven the advancements that enable it.
> will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
The classic vacuous anti-capitalism rhetoric: Capitalism will destroy the world, but unspecified alternative which doesn’t exist and isn’t described is better. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the non-existent superior non-capitalistic that solves everyone is the bad person, right?
> Capitalism will destroy the world, but unspecified alternative which doesn’t exist and isn’t described is better. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the non-existent superior non-capitalistic that solves everyone is the bad person, right?
And this is the classic positivist rethoric that prevents self assertion and self criticism. Every doctrine that can't take criticism and take care of it's flaws while maintaining it's benefits is doomed to fail.
Nobody is saying that you are bad in essence, that is the whole idea. There is no essence. You create the meaning you see in the world.
You've nailed it: this is exactly why Soviet socialism failed in the past, and also paradoxically the reason why neoliberal capitalism is failing today.
Although I am a Marxist, I reject the idea that Communism is going to be the "final" form of human society. We may be able to get there someday, but only constant care and effort towards maintaining the system will be able to sustain it, and there is no "deterministic" answer to what the ultimate form of human society is.
If capitalism destroys the world that seems like a good reason to try an alternative, comrade!
>an economic system that lets people sleep on the streets, and maybe more importantly: will commit full scale ecocide on the natural world because maybe you'll start a small business someday?
Not my downvote, but . . .
More like so there will be massive corporations to work for instead of the appropriate number of small businesses and farms that could substitute. For instance if things wouldn't have pivoted long ago, including major milestones like the formation of the Federal Reserve system.
Nothing like how it could have been if things would have been allowed to continue as they were progressing, the working citizens would have continued to gain wealth at a faster rate than the government, even more so than many established Wall Street capitalists. Especially the ones who have no talent for creating wealth and instead resort to just moving money around, and they were as powerful as any.
All pressure has been put on to reverse independent prosperity, whatever it takes, whenever the threat to centralized control appears on the horizon.
Those who prefer to centralize their power over you are not the ones wanting you to have an opportunity to start a small business someday. They just haven't completely eliminated that possibility. Yet.
> This is why when we look at animals in nature, which don’t have capitalism, they’re all getting along, right? Never competing for anything, fighting each other, or battling for mates?
Even if this was true, humans aren't subjective to their base instincts and can adapt and reinvent themselves.
> Being competitive is human nature.
I'm not and I'm human.
> People will always compete for things
Sometimes you want something, but you let others have it when they need it more than you. Otherwise if you always compete for things you are just a little kid.
> This belief that we just need to come up with an alternate economic system that makes everybody stop trying to do trade and then suddenly everyone’s behaviors will change is also a fantasy. Even within a system where everyone is hypothetically taken care of, you would still see competition over prestige, accomplishments, and coveted positions (even if they paid the same).
This is a misunderstanding of what I said. If you read back I never said competition should be tossed out of the window, it's just that caring for the other as it is right now it's not a core value of the economic system. It's just best effort, if we can say that to the eventually charitable billionaire.
its funny how the tech community is so pro capitalism but also pro open source, which seem completely at odds.
This is a weird quirk of history. I feel like open source, and especially free software, was at least left-adjacent when I was coming up in the 90s. The bad guys were the megacorps. Open source was the counter-culture. I guess it changed around the dotcom boom.
Netscape feels like a big part of the story - a company staffed with hackers coming out of a public-funded research institute who rewrote a closed-source version of their browser that quickly killed off the predecessor and helped the company to a massive IPO. Then, only when threatened by a more established player, they finally open-sourced it. From the outside that came across more as a Hail Mary than an authentic expression of principles. Around then we also had the Red Hat IPO, the Slashdot/Andover/VA Linux thing etc. It was clear by then that open source had become another gimmick that capitalists could leverage to compound their wealth, rather than a fundamental belief that users of a piece of software should have the right to modify and reconstruct it as they see fit.
Nowadays capitalists love open source because their startups and big tech investments are the users - open source provides free labor whose products these companies can repackage and sell as a platform. Meanwhile a lot of that "free" labor is no longer done by hobbyists or researchers, but by workers at other for-profit companies looking to boost their personal brand or the company's profile, so the whole motivation to contribute has changed too.
In a free market system people can transact as they wish, including giving away something for free if they want.
There is nothing at odds at all. If you don’t see it, you might have a rather cartoonish, villainy view of a capitalism that gets promulgated by people who refuse to allow anything good or nice to be ascribed to capitalism.
If you can’t understand why capitalists can also like open source, have you considered that maybe it’s your understanding of the system that is flawed, not theirs?
I understand that capitalism is the doctrine that is based on economic growth and profit. This is invariably going to be at odds with the core tenets of open source, because given enough time ownership will have to give way to profit, hence the embrace, extend, extinguish and the various changes in licensing in major opensource projects.
However that's not even the case because op wasn't criticizing capitalism as whole, just how absurd the ethos in HN is where we seem to defend contradictory values.
one of the core tenets of capitalism is the profit motive, its a central piece of it: the idea that people innovate and create and labor for the expected reward of a pile of money, but so much of tech actually bucks this idea between open source projects and public funded initiatives (maybe not as relevant for app based coding, but the space race was pretty important for technology overall.)
>capitalism is the doctrine that is based on economic growth and profit.
These are not actually essential.
I'm not going to put down a better definition of capitalism, but if you're not handling Other Peoples' Money, and they're not handling yours, you are definitely not a capitalist.
No matter how financially successful you are as an entrepreneur with your own money, even when you out-compete capitalists in a pro-capitalist market.
Capitalism =/= free markets.
Unsurprising. It's the natural byproduct of overproduction of scientists, brutally competitive job markets, and the shortsighted decisions to use publications as the primary metric for hiring and promotion decisions.
Anyone who is alarmed by this hasn't been paying attention to the perverse incentives scientists have been facing for decades.
The particular type of fraud described here (paper mills etc.) is less common in the U.S. (different types of fraud may exist but that's more subtle and complex). There tend to be specific geographic clusters associated with this behavior that have to do with how university expansions have been done in many countries.
Oddly enough, pre-LLMs, I would have said most of these crap paper mill papers didn't really affect the actual fields. Yes, they cited each other but outside the citation ring didn't really alter the field in a knowledge sense. But now.. if these get picked up in Deep Research it's a problem.
For U.S. it is common to write a paper about some small change to widely adopted structure and present it like a novelty.
Look what happened to Nature, which used to be good. It was once the definitive journal of the life sciences. They became "Nature Portfolio", and now publish all these titles:
Nature Energy is notorious for battery hype articles. Nature Materials is notorious for surface chemistry hype ("nanotechnology") articles. I suspect some of the others have similar problems.Don't forget the "nature partner journals", which people also call (and cite as) "Nature XY"...
Lots of industries these days seem to be rife with fraud and corruption.
In Canada the education system was abused as a immigration path, in part because the schools were greedy and corrupt.
It's just a lot harder to hide things nowadays.
It has probably been like this for centuries.
I dont know if this is just rose tinted glasses, but i feel like the west used to be a higher trust society
Go read about the rates of simony in early modern Europe.
Yeah, it's there in every industry, though it seems more prevalent in those that are heavily reliant on taxpayer money.
Taxpayers have the most money, and aren't as interested in protecting the money, unlike people that have ownership.
If your goal is to extract a percentage, find the biggest cashflow to maximize profits.
By that logic, the defense industry should have orders of magnitude more problems than the average research university.
Maybe it seems relevant because those are the ones getting caught?
Or maybe the corporate owned news doesn't like to publish corporate corruption?
This only makes sense if the corruption is in the same corp that's doing the reporting.
Corporations have an incentive to undercut one another and compete. They'll only band together when something affects them all at the same time, which is basically only economy-wide events.
Again, at what level of fraud do we consider defunding if not now? When 90% is irreproducible crap? 95%? 98%? Yes, you will lose out on 'healthy tissue'. That damage is necessary when the cancer is spreading.
Most of the opinions you hear online about the importance of funding science come from science fanatics who don't have any idea how the sausage is made, and are not themselves scientifically minded. It's part of their self constructed identity as a "smart person" who "believes in evidence".
Press your face against the glass, and it's much more complicated. The institutions that we have made for funding science don't reliably channel money towards the best ideas. All the experts in the field have figured out how to work the system well enough to build lives for themselves, and this leads to the tautology that "experts" support the status quo. We don't consider someone an expert if they aren't thriving in the current institutions.
Anytime someone mentions new institutions e.g. prediction markets that might better allocate funding, or even enrich the best scientists, there is a visceral backlash.
Every scientist I've talked to about my pie-in-the-sky funding mechanism - getting past a "top 50%" triage and then a lottery has met said idea with "Yeah, that would probably work. better."
I'd also suggest that lower scientific funding levels exacerbate the problems with the current system - risky research is less likely to be funded, as are new investigators, etc. Large, established labs are also better able to weather the storm.
This is interesting because it was the reversal of prosperity overall due to the spiraling inflation of the 1970's that caused the defunding responsible for the pivot toward financialization and away from academic excellence.
Like the vast majority, everyone had to focus more on financial survival than was ever imaginable before, and this permeated the universities also and was never recovered from. This is when the reliance on foreign students began to skyrocket too.
i don't think its a good faith argument to compare science with cancer. Do you have numbers? Are you sure 90% is irreproducible? How is cancer similar to whats going on in science?
Arguing for defunding science is about as asinine a mindset as one can possess. I doubt he has any figures to back that up. The article cited shows how the self-policing nature of science is improving.
Honestly, i'm tired of Hearing this. I am a Scientist and i work in science. On HN i feel a breeze of Anti-science sentiments which are only dwarfed by the Anti-Vax Community. I Don't Like my Profession being called a fraud, i also do not call a programmer, a Typewriter Monkies.
Hasn't scientific fraud always been an industry and we rely on signal to noise ratios to be good enough to get by?
Alternatively, in times of high wealth inequality are we putting a higher burden on our academics to survive, and forcing them to do more and more, thereby increasing the likelihood they will turn to cheating to survive?
The whole "publish or perish" paradigm has commodified scientific research. My theory is that the pre-WWI paradigm of academia being mainly for rich kids who could afford to devote their life to science did not scale, but it also had fewer issues with "making stuff up" since scientists were in it for the love of the game rather than making a living. I don't think we should go back to that model, but the MBA-inspired approach of treating "scientist" as a fungible role in a system and trying to apply metrics like citations to measure "impact" is doomed to fail in my opinion.
I directionally agree with you. But there are plenty of examples of scientists being extremely petty, political or egotistical further back in history. Newton and Leibniz. Gauss withholding publication of non-Euclidean geometry presumably due to fear of Kant.
I wonder if there is any empirical analysis of what has historically funded/supported scientific work (private funding vs. academic systems).
I also wonder whether a lone genius in it for the "love of the game" could make much progress in cutting edge science nowadays, given the cost of experiments and the specialization of fields.
Really interesting food for thought.
You don't have to be a genius to make way more progress on the latest equipment compared to PhD's in their environment, with their constraints and encumberment, plus their survivor bias based on "dramatically" different things other than progress.
You could even do it as a complete gentleman without ruffling any feathers at lower cost than most well-paid corporate workers waste, and get more done if you set your mind to it. Sometimes even in your spare time.
So I definitely wouldn't sell the lone genius short.
Could very well be an even better bet.
A cool new indicator is "tortured phrases". These are turning out to be a gold mine for detecting fraudulent papers.
"In December 2023, a PubPeer user commented on 13 tortured phrases the Problematic Paper Screener had flagged in the article, such as the use of “Parkinson’s illness,” “Parkinson’s infection,” and “Parkinson’s sickness” rather than Parkinson’s disease.
"“These typically result from an attempt to avoid plagiarism detection using a paraphrasing software,” the commenter wrote about the phases. “How come these incorrect wordings survived proofreading by the coauthors, editors, referees, copy editors, and typesetters?”"
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/11/11/all-the-red-flags-sci...
This is more concerning than the usual paper mills as the crap papers are published in otherwise legitimate journals. The pure paper mills are less destructive as people are much less likely to read and use those papers. But if you have ever growing numbers of crap papers mixed in regular journals that will be a problem.
If a journal is publishing "crap" then the term "otherwise legitimate" isn't helpful. The journal becomes illegitimate because you cannot trust what it has published any longer.
Unless there's some way to discriminate between the failed and successful review processes it has failed in its purpose.
Careerism and obsession with "status", especially when tied to superficial things like publication count.
The loftier aims that academia is supposed to enable are crushed by lesser appetites.
It's gonna get worse as LLMs enable "scientists" to publish with a higher frequency and less work.
This presentation from Defcon in 2018 on “Fake Science Factory” was fantastic and pretty funny as well:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ras_VYgA77Q
Finally, fraudsters are waking up to scientific methods and tools. Hoping soon unscientific frauds will be a thing of past.
I gotta say you made my day. Both the hero that we needed and wanted.
Government subsidies enable fraud and largess. Individuals and organizations are inherently less careful and results-oriented with Other People's Money. That is starting to be rectified, for better or worse.
All money is someone else's money until it's your money. This is as true of private as public sector activities.
The problem is what's incentivized to be rewarded with someone else's money.
In my opinion, the ultimate problem in academics (aside from pyramid schemes) are administrations applying a profit model to science, where science is a means to a profit end (for the institution) rather than an end in itself. That is, the problem is in expecting a public service to operate as a private profit enterprise.
Sometimes you pay someone to do something, not to make a profit for you directly.
This logic applies equally to non-government investment.
Is anyone else receiving crap like this? "Lucky"?
Dear Dr. [myname],
I hope this email finds you well.
My name is lucky,and I am a receiving editor currently handling submissions for multiple SCOPUS-indexed journals. These journals are dedicated to fostering high-quality research and advancing scholarly discourse across various disciplines. At present, they are actively seeking innovative and impactful research contributions, and I would like to extend a sincere invitation for you to submit your valuable work for consideration.
We recognize the significance of your expertise and the effort that goes into producing meaningful research. If you have a manuscript ready or are in the process of developing a research project, I would be happy to provide further details on the submission process, journal options, and any other relevant information. Our editorial team is committed to ensuring a smooth and transparent review process, providing constructive feedback, and facilitating the timely dissemination of quality research.
If you are interested, please feel free to reach out with any questions or for guidance on submission requirements. I would be delighted to assist you in any way possible. I look forward to your response and the opportunity to collaborate with you in bringing valuable research to a wider audience.
Best regards, Lucky Receiving Editor
Here's the oldest article I can find on Leonid Schneider's blog, from 2015.
https://forbetterscience.com/2015/10/28/is-frontiers-a-poten...
It's about a group of journals optimised for sleazy publishing. The author claims he left research due to rampant fraud and went into cartoons and insulting the perpetrators instead.
In 2021 the Wikipedia page on paper mills was created.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Research_paper_mi...
Macchiarini has been at it since, what, 2005?
Basically, one might as well go as far back as WWII and Ghislaine Maxwell's dad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnmFTvlrsOo
It’s absolutely insane to me that medical students need to publish research in order to not be disadvantaged at securing a residency.
We need to acknowledge that well-funded science driven by robust mission-focused systems (like pharma companies) is often a different animal than the field of science generally. In the below comments, I'm speaking about the latter.
In my experience good science is much rarer than bad.
Also, politics and hidden hands (eg: third party funding sources) have been shaping science likely since science's inception. It's an open secret that quite often science is not scientific. And that if you are seeing a published paper like this, then critiques have willfully ignored that fact.
I'm sure that this subtly varies from field to field, but I think that one tends to accept and become numb to the dross. Because it is overwhelming. The approach becomes to quietly try to filter for and celebrate better science, and otherwise say nothing. Beyond being overwhelmed, this approach may be necessary for political survival in some fields.
Well, maybe we should not trust authors that make vauge unsubstantiated claims?
The ingress: "Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities..."
The article: nothing
The ingress overreaches, oversimplifies and mixes hypotheses with results. Is this a test?
EDIT: Refers to the paper referenced by the article.
If you are interested in learning more about scientific fraud, I highly recommend you check out the YouTube channel Bobby Broccoli [0].
He makes engaging deep-dive documentaries on scientific fraud and scandals. It is absolutely /fascinating/. Videos are anywhere from 30m to 2h long, or broken up into several 1h episodes.
The series he has on cold fusion (not the Adobe programming language, the other cold fusion) is really good! [1].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/user/BobbyBroccoli
[1]: https://youtu.be/jn92eWhGG14?si=xvH8ChiSGHsFp2Bw
How are they generating a profit?
The article hints that medical residents are a large source and it could be effects like competition and visas… does that account for the rate of growth?
Are these unscrupulous editors making “payola” or something?
Yeah, all I could gather from the article is that published-paper probably translates into padding out your resume. I don't doubt this could translate to one's likelihood of landing a prestigious job, a better salary, hiring bonus, etc.
There are countries where academic jobs have very firm "Publish X papers for promotion" thresholds, but where the venue for the paper doesn't really matter. This is one of the major markets for paper mills.
Look what happens in biotech constantly they prop up studies and results in papers and then they hedge with buying puts as they know it's all bs and they have raised enough exit liquidity to make huge profits on the drop.
Hindawi, Frontiers, MDPI are garbage for-profit publishers. The problem is paid-for open-access. Society journal are not immune but much more closely monitored by dedicated teams.
Also PLOS ONE and a whole bunch of IEEE journals.
Frontiers is really interesting to me, because some colleagues in other fields view their "version" of Frontiers In $Field as a meh journal of last resort, and I view Frontiers in Public Health as actively malign.
Some Frontiers journals are good. You have to go look at individual paper on merit.
This completely undermines the purpose of peer-reviewing, though.
If it's necessary to do your own peer-reviewing for a publishing house, it could just as well be arxiv.
I know, but that's the reality. Sometimes the garbage I read from some journals is the reason I want to quit academia. How the hell those get published!! I have stopped taking journals at face value. Many things I read from Science or Nature journals (in my field) are just wrong
Fabricated data is rare. But cherry-picked data or model parameters which yield the desired result but are not robust or replicable, are not. That’s the biggest problem.
P-hacking and HARKing have become so normalized in many fields that researchers often don't even recognize when they're engaging in questionable research practices.
Really the reproducibility crisis might have had a financial motivation... Well I never... </sarcasm>
The process needs 'Darwinising' = plagiarised stuff carries an academic survival burden. Set up an LLM to do a cross-associative search. Latest models should be quite capable of this = A human sieves the sand for gold and find who does not live to procreate!!
Trust the Science, they said. :-)
Most people, even here, only read headlines anyway. Every time a really weird science claim is made in the news, finding the paper takes a while, if it's at all available. Then reading it correctly. Then usually, you can write a a blog post about how fake and bad the paper is (that 10 people in the world will read, vs the news reaching millions), and wonder how the one and a half peer reviewers approved it.
It's actually a fun exercise, IMO. I did it a couple of time for surface temperature claims, which were completely bogus. It took me a couple of days to actually "peer review" the paper though, so it's expensive in time.
Beside "science" is not a thing to trust, it's a process. It's never fully correct by definition.
Trust the process of science not bad science
Sorry, but they clearly didn't say that.
This is genuinely unsettling, though sadly not surprising. The idea that scientific fraud has industrialized to this extent is a damning indictment of how broken parts of the academic publishing system have become.
Our economy is largely based on fraud. Forcing people to work hard to keep up with inflation and compete socially and buy things that actually do not improve their quality of life.
It's all about what we measure for, right? Publish or perish is like telling programmers they need to output 1,000 lines of code per week. What do you think will happen?
Not only an industry, it can make you isolated an even drop out of a PhD if you're not part of it. I found myself subject to demonstrably false claims in paper reviews because I stood up for academic integrity. Because I am kind, I have chosen not to out those reviewers, but I was pretty goddamn offended since my work involved vulnerable populations and censorship circumvention, so by silencing my research folks were not simply stymieing my ego, but harming vulnerable populations in the name of... of what?
Being a professor/researcher is not lucrative. I get the drive to "get funding" but... my impression was that narcissistic cheaters from undergrad couldn't get industry jobs and doubled down on their unethical behavior at the expense of those of us trying to actually do useful work for civil society.
I might not have had a 4.0 GPA or been the guy always getting into top tier venues, but at least my work was my own work, and it was solid.
Anytime one has a system with lots of money sloshing around, and dependent on altruism with few checks and balances, this is the inevitable result.
Become?
While it's not my industry, my general understanding this has been more than just isolated covert pockets for some time.
I am so happy I learned about Philosophical Pragmatism. If its useful use it, if its not useful don't use it.
Replicated studies can likely be replicated under the same conditions.
N=1 means you might be able to believe it, but if the results contradict reality, toss it out.
I no longer feel like I need to 'trust science'. No need to trust. Use it if its useful, don't if its not.
This has eliminated those grandiose happy papers that propose a pretty popular fair world that contradict what we actually see.
If I am not mistaken, losing excess weight, emphaisis on excess, can extend life as well.
With the dynamics of publish or perish being what they are, what’s the way out? As long as there is high demand for papers (not knowledge) then some market will pop up to feed that demand.
I hate to say it, but cutting off the money spigot of government funding for papers seems like a good start.
It feels like our society has been optimized to game a few metrics like this (government wants to raise GDP, CEOs want to increase shareholder value, university deans want to increase funding to write papers), and all of them have toxic second order effects that make society worse.
I'd assert it's not really a good start. The problem is largely rooted in scarcity - that there are very grants, and jobs, etc. that need to be competed for, and maybe it's worth it to you to overlook those couple outliers. You are after all pretty sure you're right, and they don't really mess anything up, and if you get this paper out, you'll have that good faculty job, and you'll do good work, etc...
Funding collapsing is just going to incentivize that. To be as competitive as possible for increasingly scarce resources. You won't be able to run that replication study, or document that code, or let a grad student spend six months chasing down that odd result, because the funding for all that just got cut.
Another problem: Publishing in good journals is for the rich. Open science is a paradox. They require such huge amount of money to publish.
My next manuscript is still going to Plos One ( :(given the reputation) bc it's free to publish. It's such a messed up system that prevents me from even trying to publish in good journals.
Why would you want your stuff in PLOS? That's a huge red flag on a CV. Why not put it on (bio)arxiv and be done with it?
It's not peer reviewed in either case.
I have thought of that. But this study is a registered report so I need to submit to a journal before running the study and go through review. Plos has peer review but it's not as rigorous as others. Not many journals accept registered report in my field. So, first option is Plos Biology, else Plos one
I'm still waiting for the investigation into "Surgisphere".
We live in the age of grifting. Too much winner takes all incentives in the society, I suppose.
So academic politics is like Game of Thrones… but with footnotes?
Considering that the PHD process is as much about research as it is marketing/spin, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised the latter was formerly commercialized.
I became disillusioned when I realized people were publishing the most minute of contributions because they were desperate trying to show something to graduate.
Things stay the same when grants and funding are involved too.
Even in the respected publications, the reviewers are inexperienced students.
Imagine if a Senior Developer had 3 high school Interns as the only reviewers for all merge requests.
Not sure what the solution is, just too many disincentives for quality.
the biggest problem is the foreseeable timing.
there were scientists and engineers everywhere who warned the world.
who didn't listen?
Academia, at its core, is just not a capitalistic pursuit. Any attempts to turn it into one will inevitably pervert it.
Scientific, political, capitalist.
There's simply only one growth market left and that's our imagination.
make money, do science
Anything that you do as a career will lead to this.
- Split a paper into three
- Waste efforts by running the same research with a slight change
- Plagiarism
- Inter-peer favors (corruption, dishonesty)
Funding/grants, journals, publishers, paper count requirements, are the true source of these behaviors.
This is what markets are when left to develop. Academia made itself game-able. You can't have truth and profits sit in the same room.
Capitalism has made a very nice chair for careerism to sit in.
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Whoever is profiting from this shit needs to be sanctioned by the Treasury, make their money useless.
Nobody cares. State pays the salaries, BS conferences, BS journals, BS patents. Everybody is happy, no one can be fired. As long as stats look good (R&D per capita, publication, science indexes etc. ) gravy train will move on.
People care. The state isn’t the only source of funds, and researchers are in it to do research. PHDs make little money, and getting into academia is not generally considered a good career path.
The only people who can’t get fired are the few people with tenure. Most people struggle to get that.
Perhaps we just need institutions set up to do replication of papers?
And even minus the BS, researchers seem more comfortable with making minor incremental improvements in established science rather than taking risks.
ya know... i wonder if this is how a religion is formed. at the start, science was about identifying and explaining the things that were true, observable, and agreed upon by all. anyone who was present at the birth of an event that caused a religion would have had that same mentality. over time, generations pass and the concept that held the group together has shifted - it now attempts to explain new concepts, and the scientists/priests that make up the governing body decide tge truth based on opinion, rather than fact.
the point is, we're on a dangerous path. if left unchecked, the term scientist will eventually have the same meaning as the word priest.
Not at all. Research that appears useful is going to be picked up by others, and if it's really a fraud it will be exposed eventually.
That is the check you are looking for and indeed how we realized there's some fraud and reproducibility issues, btw. I'll be waiting for the day actual religions gets the same level of scrutiny.
> if left unchecked, the term scientist will eventually have the same meaning as the word priest.
Except if you base things like planes, computers, or medicine on science they provably work.
Obviously it's not perfect and probably never will be as science is a human endeavour and humans are not perfect. But dismissing all of it as "just a religion" fundamentally misunderstands both science and religion.
Religion - cargo cult et al. It is quite clear that religions arose from tribalism to aggregate tribes into pan religious groups. They are de-facto control mechanisms = toe the line = give us your $$ = fight/kill as ordered.
Wonder why's that... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10894160.2025.24...