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Comment by notyofriend | Hacker News Reader

They want them to quietly go away less they reveal the rest of the fraud culture going on in other labs

Similar to the VC industry not seeking damages against fraudulent CEOs.

It would just make them look worse and make people question why they're giving that VC money.

Wouldn't companies with frauds for CEOs avoid VCs that are diligent? Wouldn't that mean those bulldog VCs would get more (honest) money? I guess investors want to support the good ol' pump and dump rather than real new value creation.

Why do you think soft bank is so popular with the frauds

> I guess investors want to support the good ol' pump and dump rather than real new value creation.

This is the primary critique from the left of the VC phenomenon.

I doubt this is the case. However they should deal with it before it ruins the reputation of the broader community - it would prevent comments like this one from gathering steam.

They can’t… it’s so endemic they can’t just fire half the labs and give up all that sweet grant money. The reputation hit would be ruinous. Universities would rather look away and pretend there is no problem because it’s too big to deal with.

This was downvoted for some reason but it is very clearly true that universities just can't go on firing sprees if they want to stay solvent.

Universities run a lot of even basic functions on grant money (university takes a cut in money and/or labor) and researchers and labs are the ones that apply for the grants.

Outright fraud, bad experiment design, and bad statistics. At this point a good rule of thumb is if it hasn't been replicated it's bullshit.

And replication studies are very difficult to get published, let alone funded.

That's why commercialization is a better metric than replication. If nobody is willing to pay for it, why should my taxes fill the gap?

There's no shortage of dodgy science in commerce.

Perhaps, but a sizable cohort of people that paid their hard earned cash for a product and go on the recommend others do the same is much more reliable a signal than an academic convincing their buddy in some government agency to allocate them more taxpayer dollars.

It took a few millenia from discovery to commercialize such things as number theory, electricity and the wheel.

And nobody's tax dollars paid for their development. What's your point?

Number theory and electricity development was/is very much paid from public funds, even dollars. For wheel there obviously was no money at all, let alone dollars.

For most science there is no obvious commercialization at least in any predictable timeframes. When there is, it's typically called R&D.

A distinction should be made between public funds from specific agencies with specific engineering goals in mind (department of energy, department of national security, NIST, etc. etc. etc.), vs "science is good we need science, health is good we need health, tell your local bureaucrat buddy how you will use science to fix health and collect your paycheck" funding (NSF, NIH).

Gen pop wants ultimate freedom from obligation and endless externalization of responsibility too

Turns out human meat suits are just driven by biology to survive and not egalitarian human philosophy and psychology

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