I'm all for people making honest mistakes, without career-ending repercussions. But this wasn't an honest mistake, this was outright deception. They knew that there was a good chance of their experimental-results being faulty (due to dust), and they also knew that a different team had the ability to confirm/deny this uncertainty. But instead of owning up to this, they decided to wilfully mislead the world about the quality of their findings. Stuff like this is exactly why people lose trust in science - why climate-change-deniers and anti-vaxxers gain more credibility than they deserve.
The sad part of this whole story is that the next time such an opportunity presents itself, people have no reason to do what's best for society/integrity. Heads I win, tails you lose.
Lots of people are playing this game and new people are encouraged to play it when they look at how other incompetent and ethically loose people quickly climbed the ladder. It’s truely a cancer in science.
The arms race between bullshit artists, finding shortcuts to extract resources "for free" using the right spin, and the rest of the society, is as old as world.
This is even more pronounced in business: selling dreams has always been the surest way to profit. Who wouldn't want to believe the solution has been found and is easy and cheap?
Note that there's no "fixing" this optimization arms race. Not even in principle—it's a core feature of Nature.
Shortening the path between resource generation and resource consumption helps, the gradients are simpler and quicker to adapt. Keeping the rights and responsibilities closely tied, essentially. Science is certainly out of whack, with its reliance on a super complicated system of wealth redistribution and taxation (people who pay have no say).
Of course they do. (Even worse?)
Actors want to be mega-famous. Nobody bats an eye... Musicians and basketball players want fame and loads of money. Is perfectly ok. They deserve it for playing a bass or being able to hit a ball. Yes, eeeeverybody wants to get rich quick. The difference with scientists is that scientists get blamed for this all the time.
Science reporting should more than spell checking university press releases.
> Science reporting should more than spell checking university press releases.
This implies a false dichotomy. Many journalists know a lot about the matters they cover, but of course they can be misled, just like the rest of us, by people who are nominally the experts in one corner of the field.
The fact that most reporting on BICEP2 didn't even mention the politics behind it and the competition with the Planck experiment tells you a lot about the quality of coverage.
I think it is quite clear that the original reporting of BICEP2 was over the top, and that talking with some of the group's competitors would have pointed to problems in the experiment and analysis.
The original reporting sounded to me more like PR than journalism.
Even pointing out the old joke that 5 sigma discoveries tend to be wrong half the time would have been helpful.
> but of course they can be misled, just like the rest of us, by people who are nominally the experts in one corner of the field.
And they should learn their lesson, and do better the next time. Unfortunately, this does not seem to happen (with a few notable exceptions).
Other times, what's at stake is an overly decisive attempt to interpret exciting data that might not be so exciting after all. The cold-fusion "discoveries" of 1989 fall into that camp, along with this gravitational-wave claim.
It's hard for journalists to referee everything in the first few hours. But by talking to other experts in the field, and by being willing to comb through the methodology underlying the claims, it's possible to get a sense within a few days (weeks?) of what's holding together very, very well, and what's starting to seem a little shaky. There's nothing wrong -- and a lot right -- with writing post-announcement articles that acknowledge such uncertainties.
They had a very shaky estimate of an important background (the foreground) and instead of being cautious they put out a video like this as part of the announcement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA
> If anyone changes their behavior, I'd rather it be the journalists
> it is good for society if researchers can make mistakes and keep their careers
According to the article, it was fraud, not "some mistakes". How is it good for society that frauds remain unpunished? Why would we want the behavior of frauds to continue unchanged?
Even if it isn't fraud, should there be no consequences for our actions? If my software fails miserably, would it be best that I suffer "no adverse effects", or perhaps should the market and investors allocate resources to people who can do a better job?
"As far as I can tell, the BICEP2 scientists haven’t suffered much professionally from the fiasco. When David Spergel talked here at Columbia about the subject, he noted that this hadn’t stopped the PI, John Kovac, from getting tenure at Harvard. In the book, Keating mentions some “embarrassment and guilt”, but no negative professional consequences"
In the long run, it is good for society if researchers can make mistakes and keep their careers.
In the long run, it is good for society if journalists are sometimes embarrassed by reporting on a story when they don't have access to the data behind the story.
So in the long run, it is probably for the best that these researchers suffered no adverse effects. If anyone changes their behavior, I'd rather it be the journalists. They should not give too much publicity to teams making big announcements while hiding their data.