As an aside, I've worked with plenty of academics and while I sometimes thought their research area was stupidly low stakes, the only researchers that I thought were truly wasting time were the ones that had to do research for a medical degree. Basically forced research.
Now I went to a premier university and I'm friends with some smart cookies, but I don't buy for a second the overall theme of this comment chain. There is a reason the West is incredibly wealthy and it isn't because our best and brightest are faking it.
That said, I have also witnessed plenty of low-level fraud: changing of dates to match documentation, discarding "outlier" samples without justification or even documentation, etc. Definitely enough to totally invalidate a result in some cases.
The reasons for that can be myriad. Actual or false scientific success of the last 30 years is not necessarily it.
Also, don't you feel the ship has kind of been slowly going down during the last 10 years, wealth-wise ?
Not for the rich, so the reasons are not that much to do with value-creation (it's value distribution that's rotten).
IMHO, there is also a tremendous amount of value dilution going on, and not just due to the action of the US FED or Treasury, or other central banks.
The problems are systemic and global, and conjoined with the problem of value distribution.
Yes but we’re talking about academics.
Your second comment was effectively "Well I don't know they are a fraud and I'm not going to be the one who upsets people by trying to put a stop to it".
I don't say this as a criticism of you. I say this a defense of the people you are criticizing. Stopping people like this takes a lot of work and often some personal risk. Most of us aren't willing to do it despite us pretending otherwise.
I don't recall where I first heard it, but the principle that it takes 10x the amount of energy to refute bullshit as it does to generate it certainly seems to apply in this case.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bullshit%20a...
Reality is almost irrelevant in the face of ideology, dogma, and all the other forces that keep counterintuitive or uncomfortable reality out.
That is an awfully authoritative statement to make based off what OP shared.
But either way, this has been proven time and time again whether we are talking about simple corruption like OP mentioned or more serious forms of injustice. People will judge themselves based off motivations and others based off actions. We can excuse ourselves because of the personal inconvenience that acting will cause us. But other people don't get that luxury. They get criticized purely based off that lack of action because if we were in their situation surely we would do the right thing. Being honest about this is important step to actually fixing the system because we need to identify the motivations which lead to the lack of action in order to remove them and encourage action. Simply vilifying people for not acting accomplishes nothing.
Which part do you disagree with? Maybe the 'much' on much less risk?
'given evidence' is true unless OP made op the story. (And even if OP made up the story then we're judging fictional people and the judgements are still valid.)
I think 'less risk' goes part and parcel with being administration rather than someone lower rank reporting a problem.
And it seems clear to me that it's their job.
So, criticism. Which is not a particularly harsh outcome. And doesn't necessarily mean they made the wrong decision, but them providing a justification would be a good start.
Inaction is often excusable when it's not your job. It's always important to look at motivations, but vilification can also be appropriate when there's dereliction. Sometimes there are no significant motivations leading to lack of action, there's just apathy and people that shouldn't have been hired to the position.
OP never mentioned evidence. People just "knew" this person was a fraud but there was no mention of the actual evidence of fraud. The closest thing to evidence is that "their work was terrible" but that isn't evidence of fraud.
>I think 'less risk' goes part and parcel with being administration rather than someone lower rank reporting a problem.
We have no idea the risks involved. It would be highly embarrassing for a prestigious school and/or instructor to admit that they admitted a fraud into their program. Maybe this isn't even the first time this has happened to these people. Would you want to be the person know for repeatedly being duped by frauds? Maybe that would that ruin your reputation more than looking the other way and letting this person fail somewhere else where you would not be directly tied to their downfall. It is also incredibly risky to punish this person without hard evidence as that can lead to a lawsuit.
These are not meant to be definitive statements. They are just hypothetical that show how we can't judge people's motivations without knowing a lot more about the situation.
While I agree that there are frauds out there in academia and elsewhere, I have no reason to believe that you’re not yourself some sort of fraud. You’ve essentially posted “I have direct knowledge of [unspecified academic fraud in which somebody claimed to have direct knowledge of [unspecified academic fraudulent conclusion] but can’t back it up] but won’t back it up”
Your overall point is… what? Fraud of perpetuated by cowardice? Self interest? An overall sense of apathy towards the truth? Your comment could be construed as any of those.
There are people that love to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt without having to rely on being truthful. People that are intentionally misleading with the sole intent of leveraging people’s biases and emotions to confirm folks notions and whip people up into an artificially-created frenzy make statements yours.
Serious questions: 1. Do you actually give a shit about this big fraud you’ve brought up but not revealed? And 2. Why did you post?
To expose it directly here would likely have little effect generally, but would have an outsized effect personally (damaging trust). If it did have an impact it would likely expose those involved (many careers). I am not in the command chain, I have seen the evidence and it's overwhelming. But I'm not in a position to enact the requisite change.
That said, I don't actually give a shit about this particular case. It's widespread, insanely wide spread. Most studies / work cannot be replicated.
> 2. Why did you post?
As an anecdote to highlight something that I've seen. I also linked to several other informational pieces with public accounts (so don't trust mine, fine -- trust theirs).
Sorry, I don’t mean to pick at you but… what?
If you were to anonymously post the name of an academic fraud, you personally would necessarily be found out, and it would ruin multiple careers?
The powers that be know who you are, know of the fraud and its nature and those involved? You’ve been privy to this big juicy secret that’s shared by many, but if its content were to be revealed, you would certainly be the one pointed out?
Are you the only person that could reasonably know about and publicly object to this fraud? If so, is it a necessary function of your social or professional life to cover up this fraud? If so, I’ll go back to “why did you post?” (“Sharing anecdotes” isn’t really an answer to “Why did you share this anecdote?”)
I think its more "how dare you hint scientists are corrupt!" that kind of drives the outrage.
Correct me if I am wrong, but this website, and the owners are in U.S. of A. If so, an appropriate court order would force the disclosure of logs, IP addresses, accounts, etc. There are plenty of examples where sites had to disclose sufficient details to track an 'anonymous' writer down. With multi-million (billion?) dollar endowments on the line, I would be worried to presume just a throw away account would work.
Feel free to dismiss the claim if you wish.
Sure, sometimes people lie on the internet but this is not an outlandish story.
“Best case” scenario everyone loses their funding, including the colleagues who did report this stuff. The institution, the lab, etc would lose their funding. Those wanted to get PhDs in those labs will lose theirs. It’ll have a serious negative impact on everyone, even those who did the correct thing.
This is why academia is as corrupt as it is. They all evaluate each other’s paper, give each other grants and anyone who exposes anything loses their entire careers.
That's an odd way of reading a post about "a professor" that contrasts them against the rest of their lab.
Academic misconduct.
> Against whom?
I don't know, which puts me exactly where I was ten minutes ago. They have no control over the situation, and if they hadn't posted I would know even less, so it's not suppression.
They have complete control over how complicit they are in preserving the coverup of acts they allege to know are definitely true.
> and if they hadn't posted I would know even less
The reality is that right now you know exactly as much as before they posted because what they posted was unsubstantiated. They may as well have said that their name is Princess Peach and that they're pregnant with the mustached child of a certain Italian plumber for all the good it does you.
One of three things must be true:
1) They have real firsthand knowledge that the claims are true and they're actively deciding to protect the identity(ies) of a conspiracy of rampant fraudsters whose actions are so egregious that they tarnish the very essence of the scientific academy itself.
2) They don't have any real knowledge that the claims are true, and the story is rumormongering.
3) I swear I had a third one, but now that I've written those two I can't think of what it was. I'll leave this placeholder here in case it comes to me.
As you are doing here. I don't see a name or any specifics anywhere in your comment. Of course not including any names or specifics also means you could be making it up for a good story. We have no way of knowing.