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Comment by __MatrixMan__ | Hacker News Reader

The problem is letting this be a step that directs our attention in the first place:

> platform X published this so it must be good

It's a root-of-trust scheme, and those create high value targets which fail to corruption. Better would be:

> human Y cited this, it's about Z, and you've configured Y to be trusted in domain Z

Webs of trust require maintenance, which isn't convenient, but if roots of trust continue to degrade in trustworthiness, then that maintenance will eventually be a price worth paying.

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The height of trust rot is Science publishing Woo Suk Hwang's 2005 stem cell research. This was one of the top scientific journals publishing research that appeared to be a nobel-prize track line of research that would have been a breakthrough in medical treatment. Instead it tainted a line of research.

The research results were fraudulent, claiming a much higher success rate at generating a stem cell line than what was achieved. They lied about the number of stem cell lines generated, the number of oocytes used to generate the stem cell lines, and the number of donors the oocytes came from.

As if bad data wasn't enough, they lied both to their donors, lied about their donors, and miscredited authors.

I wasn't aware of the this kind of thing in 2005. How do you think the trustworthiness of papers has been trending since then, generally speaking. It sounds like that was a bit of an outlier.

I don't think a single worse example has occurred since, even though there have been other high profile instances of falsifying data and other unethical conduct.

I think after the replication crisis the scientific community is more aware of the limitations and faults of the current system. This has impacted different fields in different ways, to varying degrees of improvements. Now, I think a lab like Hwang's would be meet with more skepticism from both readers and the top tier journals.

The biggest cause for skepticism now would be Hwang's claimed success rate with the techniques. If other labs couldn't reach similar levels of success then the most generous assumption would be that the techniques weren't described well enough in the articles. Compare this to CRISPR gene editing, which is a slightly more modern advancement in genetics that is valued because of how easily other labs can incorporate it.

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