<story><title>Fraud, so much fraud</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/fraud-so-much-fraud</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>testfoobar</author><text>Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud.&lt;p&gt;As I&amp;#x27;ve gotten older, I understand that Charlie Munger&amp;#x27;s observation &amp;quot;“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” is applicable everywhere - including science.&lt;p&gt;Academic scientists&amp;#x27; careers are driven by publishing, citations and impact.  Arguably some have figured how to game the system to advance their careers.  Science be damned.</text></item><item><author>dekhn</author><text>These sorts of articles raise so many thoughts and emotions in me.  I was trained as a computational biologist with a little lab work and ran gels from time to time.  Personally, I hated gels- they&amp;#x27;re finicky, messy, ugly, and don&amp;#x27;t really tell you very much.  But molecular biology as a field runs on gels- it&amp;#x27;s the priimary source of results for almost everything in molbio.  I have seen more talks and papers that rested entirely a single image of a gel which is really just some dark bands.&lt;p&gt;At the same time, I was a failed scientist: my gels weren&amp;#x27;t as interesting, or convincing compared to the ones done by the folks who went on to be more successful.  At the time (20+ years ago) it didn&amp;#x27;t occur to me that anybody would &lt;i&gt;intentionally&lt;/i&gt; modify images of gels to promote the results they claimed, although I did assume that folks didn&amp;#x27;t do a good job of organizing their data, and occasionally published papers that were wrong simply because they confused two images.&lt;p&gt;Would I have been more successful if fewer people (and I now believe this is a common occurrence) published fraudulent images of gels?  Maybe, maybe not.  But the more important thing is that everybody just went along with this.  I participated in many journal clubs where folks would just flip to Figure 3, assume the gel was what the authors claimed, and proceed to agree with (or disagree with) the results and conclusions uncritically.  Whereas I would spend a lot of time trying to understand what experiment was actually run, and what th e data showed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>klenwell</author><text>I think my favorite Simpsons gag is the episode where Lisa enlists a scientist (voiced by Stephen Jay Gould) to run tests to debunk some angel bones that were found at a construction site.&lt;p&gt;In the middle of the episode, the scientist bicycles up to report, dramatically, that the tests &amp;quot;were inconclusive&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;In the end, it&amp;#x27;s revealed that the bones were a fraud concocted by some mall developers to promote their new mall.&lt;p&gt;After this is revealed, Lisa asks the scientist about the tests. He shrugs:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m not going to lie to you, Lisa. I never ran the tests.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s funny on a few levels but what I find most amusing is that his incentive is left a mystery.</text></comment>
<story><title>Fraud, so much fraud</title><url>https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/fraud-so-much-fraud</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>testfoobar</author><text>Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud.&lt;p&gt;As I&amp;#x27;ve gotten older, I understand that Charlie Munger&amp;#x27;s observation &amp;quot;“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” is applicable everywhere - including science.&lt;p&gt;Academic scientists&amp;#x27; careers are driven by publishing, citations and impact.  Arguably some have figured how to game the system to advance their careers.  Science be damned.</text></item><item><author>dekhn</author><text>These sorts of articles raise so many thoughts and emotions in me.  I was trained as a computational biologist with a little lab work and ran gels from time to time.  Personally, I hated gels- they&amp;#x27;re finicky, messy, ugly, and don&amp;#x27;t really tell you very much.  But molecular biology as a field runs on gels- it&amp;#x27;s the priimary source of results for almost everything in molbio.  I have seen more talks and papers that rested entirely a single image of a gel which is really just some dark bands.&lt;p&gt;At the same time, I was a failed scientist: my gels weren&amp;#x27;t as interesting, or convincing compared to the ones done by the folks who went on to be more successful.  At the time (20+ years ago) it didn&amp;#x27;t occur to me that anybody would &lt;i&gt;intentionally&lt;/i&gt; modify images of gels to promote the results they claimed, although I did assume that folks didn&amp;#x27;t do a good job of organizing their data, and occasionally published papers that were wrong simply because they confused two images.&lt;p&gt;Would I have been more successful if fewer people (and I now believe this is a common occurrence) published fraudulent images of gels?  Maybe, maybe not.  But the more important thing is that everybody just went along with this.  I participated in many journal clubs where folks would just flip to Figure 3, assume the gel was what the authors claimed, and proceed to agree with (or disagree with) the results and conclusions uncritically.  Whereas I would spend a lot of time trying to understand what experiment was actually run, and what th e data showed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sitkack</author><text>If humanity is to mature, we should be an open book when it comes to incentives and build a world purposefully with all incentives aligned to the outcomes we collectively agree upon.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fs.blog&amp;#x2F;great-talks&amp;#x2F;psychology-human-misjudgment&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fs.blog&amp;#x2F;great-talks&amp;#x2F;psychology-human-misjudgment&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Charlie Munger&amp;#x27;s Misjudgment #1: Incentive-caused Bias 
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=h-2yIO8cnvw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.youtube.com&amp;#x2F;watch?v=h-2yIO8cnvw&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fs.blog&amp;#x2F;bias-incentives-reinforcement&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fs.blog&amp;#x2F;bias-incentives-reinforcement&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>