Comment by zero_k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zero_k | Hacker News Reader

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It's a fine line. Fraud? No, they are just sloppy, and so one questions whether they ought to be amended, retracted, or a note by the editor attached. The solution you propose, about a follow-up paper is that who will accept a paper that simply demonstrates that the original work was so full of bugs/issues/misconceptions, that many/most of the claims of the paper don't hold? Would you accept that paper into a top-rated conference? And if it's in a 2nd or 3rd rate conference, wouldn't most people question it authenticity (remember, 2nd and 3rd rate conferences have less rigor in reviews) or simply not hear about it? I think these are legitimate concerns.

A slightly sad side-effect of the follow-up-paper idea, is that it sometimes means that the authors get one more citation, and furthermore, since some of the authors may themselves write part of it, it would mean even more papers by the authors, potentially further cited. So we may be unfortunately incentivizing sloppy research -- the authors can now make two papers: one sloppy, and one fixed. Not sure that's great.

I am not saying what you are proposing is wrong. But it has side-effects that are not great.

What’s the difference between sloppiness and fraud when you stand behind the paper all the same? I would argue that sloppiness in academia is a form of fraud. It’s one thing to be bad at writing, and another to have poor methodology

An honest researcher who has made a mistake on a matter of substance will seek to correct the scientific record, even at a cost to their reputation. Not doing so breaches professional ethics and is arguably worse than plagiarism, because of the potential to mislead.

Obviously. Nice people by definition act nicely. It's all the rest that need the right incentives. And the nice ones also need good incentives else their niceness ejects them from the competition if the competition is set up in perverse ways.

It's like as if someone talked about tax fraud or "tax optimization" and you retorted that an upstanding business owner doesn't cheat on their taxes and even donates some extra funding towards public causes and if he makes a mistake in the taxes he quickly publicly admits it and pays the fine. But if honesty bankrupts a business, all businesses that stay alive in such an environment will be ones that do some form of tax fraud. No matter how much someone stands there wagging their finger and declaring from the cathedra what upstanding business owners do, in the abstract.

Perhaps I can educate you a little further about the academic world.

There are indeed constraints other than one's own personal or professional virtue. The principal one is that if your work does not convince your professional peers, it will not get funded or published.

You can't just invent a bogus research program out of thin air, hold a press conference, and expect to get hailed as the new Einstein.

For example: claims of cold fusion, room temperature superconductors, and similar marvels appear fairly frequently and are quickly knocked down because experts in the field can tell they are false. (NB these are not necessarily frauds, just bad science.)

There are also institutional constraints provided by the universities and professional societies to which academics belong.

Scandals about plagiarism and fraud only hit the news when these institutions take action against senior academics. This typically only happens in the worst cases where there is a clear pattern of behavior and the guardrails have obviously failed.

IMO long running and successful frauds like Cyril Burt tend to already have the benefit of a well-earned professional reputation, but have gone about boosting their credibility in an unethical way.

Small bore fraud is hard to catch. It's like padding your resume. If you say you won the Nobel prize, people will smell a rat. But a lot of it probably gets under the radar.

I've known it from the inside for quite some time. I'm not saying you'll be hailed as the next Einstein just randomly. What I wrote is much more subtle than that.

Your insights went right over my head. Perhaps you could dumb it down a bit?

You simply declared in your comment what the ideal researcher would do and how other courses of action are bad and other normative and moralizing "ought" stuff. I'm more interested in observing what people actually do in the wild, like David Attenborough. Is-ought, prescriptivism-descriptivism.

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