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Comment by gilmore606 | Hacker News Reader

That's not what he means, he's saying the pressure to constantly publish original research (the more original the better!) creates these incentives to become a rat, that is, to cheat.

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That's bullshit, though. Pressure is not an excuse to fabricate data, and no one will defend that claim out loud. But what else does a rambly comment about how hard it is for researchers mean under a story about data fabrication?

Ed: to be clear, the one making the argument about publishing pressure in a sensible way is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36881029

The original comment calls the people fabricating data "rats" and "cheaters", I'm not sure how you would construe that to be excusing them. The comment is describing that if a system is made to be so difficult you have to cheat to get past it, only cheaters will get past it.

The point is it's not an excuse, but it's not surprising that given that pressure those who fabricate data have an edge in the system compared to those who don't. (i.e. if you create an environment where the only way to succeed is to be fraudulent then of course it's going to be populated by frauds)

A behavior being bad, and a system being arranged such that it selects for that bad behavior, are separate things.

Observing that fixing the latter might eliminate most of the behavior doesn't mean you think the behavior's good.

Fraudsters are surprisingly less motivated to excuse themselves to you than most people. Surprisingly you can't depend on them for anything, so one should instead focus on the systems that reward people who commit fraud.

Right, and as another poster pointed out, that's academia, not science.

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