The more this kind of thing happens, the more it's going to blow back on you. The hacks, ideologues, and frauds have done a lot to destroy trust in science and the image of science. When the public backlash comes, muggles aren't going to be able to tell the difference between someone like you and the hucksters you've trained yourself to ignore. They are ruthless, and nothing of science will remain unless you are as ruthless, to the people who abuse your good name.

I'd argue that the vast majority of fraud - even high profile fraud - doesn't actually affect public perception of science. For example, the STAP cell paper and Jan Hendrik Schön's series of papers aren't really widely known outside of academia. And those papers were essentially attempts to lie all the way to a Nobel prize - as egregious as it gets.

In my opinion, the three research frauds of the past 30 years that have had the biggest impact outside of academia are:

1. Andrew Wakefield's autism paper

2. Elgazzar's paper on ivermectin as a treatment for COVID

3. Marc Tessier-Lavigne's Alzheimer's papers

The interesting thing about 1 and 2 is that yes, they reduced public confidence in science, but only because there are large blocks of people who remain convinced that the research wasn't actually fraudulent.

I think trying to keep a tally rather misses the larger point. You can’t properly determine the most impactful bad science of the last 30 years, because you’re not aware of all of it! These meta-studies are showing how often you find bad science when you dig deeper, but that’s just a rate of incidence, not an absolute number. There’s a whole iceberg of findings we haven’t begun to press on. Who knows what kind of stuff might turn out to be fraudulent? The real concern is about what kind of damage has been done to the foundations of knowledge, which compounds as we continue to do research on top of shoddy prior work.

Fraudulent research can be damaging along multiple axes, and I completely agree that there is probably a mountain of undiscovered fraud out there that continues to have negative downstream effects. I'm more skeptical of the idea that undiscovered fraud has a negative effect on the public perception of science. If even highly prominent known frauds have had little discussion outside of academia, why would undiscovered frauds affect the way nonscientists think about science?

> If even highly prominent known frauds have had little discussion outside of academia

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808891

i think what people are talking about is that infomercial-level quackery and double-think and dishonesty has now breached the levy into mainstream science. now, instead of seeing papers claiming breakthroughs you will also see papers that are fraudulent but claim to prove or reinforce a hypothesis or model that everyone already agrees is true. obviously most fraudulent papers are like this because the point of fraudulent papers is to avoid detection and create an appearance of legitimacy. now we have a billions dollar drug for alzheimers that literally does nothing. thats what people are talking about. but you refuse to acknowledge it

> Anyone who follows research already knows this. Individual papers appear all the time with remarkable findings which seem revolutionary, but then nobody can replicate or commercialize it.

But there are many scientists that love hearing themselves on TV etc. that pull out a paper to shove whatever agenda they have.

It does undermine the narrative. Eventually nobody will trust any public sector funded science. Private companies will still invest in scientific R&D to enhance their products but, like today, they won't talk about it much and they won't publish papers, only patents. That's where we're heading.

First problem: the sort of people who popularized Follow The Science™ actually meant "follow the people who run public sector institutions". Not "follow single studies" or anything that deep. The catchphrase was deployed many times during COVID to browbeat people into obeying people like Anthony Fauci, a man notorious for claiming he literally was science. "Attacks on me are attacks on science", he said. It was pure authoritarianism dressed up as intellectualism, as was so often the case throughout history (see: Lysenko).

Second problem: the heuristic that you should only trust a claim if it appears in several papers will also lead to you trusting many bogus claims. Academics regularly cite work they haven't even read, let alone replicated. It's easy to find invalid citations in the literature. Most of them just take claims on trust or even cite claims clearly advertised as made up fiction (sorry, "modeling assumptions").

Third problem: many results that replicate shouldn't:

https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science...