Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ace17 | Hacker News Reader

> I was curious to see how the self-correcting mechanisms of science would respond [...] > I was disappointed by the response from Southwest University. Their verdict has protected [a fraudulent researcher] and enabled him to continue publishing suspicious research at great pace.

The self-correcting mechanisms of science can only correct knowledge. Those mechanism work mainly by requiring the research works to be checkable by others. Self-correctness emerges by the accumulation of checks on the same topic, all leading to the same conclusion, and by the progressive retractation of bad research ... not by the elimination of "bad researchers".

Efficiently "correcting" people, whatever that means, is a different beast. Such a mechanism belongs to an administrative entity who can emit decisions - and, by construction, who can make errors.

View on HN

How does bad research get retracted and corrected then?

As the author points out, the "data" in these papers is large enough to contaminate meta-analyses for years to come. And if the Bad Scientist continues to produce more of them, then decades to come. The consensus of the entire discipline will be swayed. Self-correcting this will be very difficult, require lots of data, and be unrewarding. It probably won't happen. Politicians consulting The Science on this subject will get erroneous conclusions and make erroneous decisions.

The Scientific Method is self-correcting. Academia, not so much.

The usual way is someone writing a better paper and everyone going "yeah, that's a better reading of the data".

Not sure why you say correcting an established consensus would be unrewarding? Sure, for unimportant details getting a correction out isn't much fun, but correcting an important point is basically the career goal of every scientist precisely because it is important and rewarding.

From the author, who specifically stated that this task of correcting bad science is unrewarding.

She stated it is unrewarding because the university didn’t reprimand or remove the bad researcher, and because most papers didn’t retract the bad papers. She didn’t produce new studies disproving the results of the existing one, which might have been a more rewarding pursuit for someone who had that inclination. I’m sure the author has other ideas about what research she should do, and it’s not for us to say.

Yeah, I hear this a lot. That the goal of every scientist is to disprove the consensus and overturn bad science. Yet every time I read a blog article by someone who has actually tried to overturn bad science, they say it's an uphill battle against bad incentives, vested interests and academic politics.

If you know of a scientist who has written about succeeding in achieving this objective and had a great time (in the last 20 years), can you point me to their writing, please?

It's probably very different in different disciplines - in social studies like the ones in main article this is a big problem because, as you say, meta-studies will likely include these papers simply because they exist.

However, in more practical sciences if someone fakes data to show that their method A works better than baseline B, then other people building on that find out that method A doesn't really work well for them for a weird reason, shrug, and ignore the bad paper, so it doesn't get used and cited, while the correct assertions persist, get replicated, repeated and cited.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com