A Post Mortem on the Gino Case

The very last line of your story is why the “Market for Lemons” paper (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons) remains so powerful.

If fraudsters cannot be found or punished, it is logical to assume that everyone in the field is a fraud.

Take this comment as an extra upvote. The thing is: we need to figure out a way to make accountability to become more of a thing. Peer review isn't enough (clearly). I suspect that people should create a journal that has more strict requirements than simply peer review. I think for many forms of science, one should provide an R script with the data they used to get the results. Yes, there are still ways to fabricate stuff but it'll be more transparent. Another thing is: there needs to be an incentive for reproducible findings

Unfortunately, I don't know how to go about this

Maybe your friend could reach out to people like Elisabeth Bik, who blogs here:

https://scienceintegritydigest.com/

Alternatively, maybe the people behind the Data Colada blog can help:

https://datacolada.org/

I can't help but feel a similarity to the entertainment industry's dynamics that sparked the meToo movement.

The issues are different of course, but there are common patterns of prestigious abusers, victims risking ostracism, etc.

I wonder if we'll end up seeing a similar movement in academia were we spend a few months watching big names taken down from their pedestal every few days.

If she has nothing to lose now, why not release the story publicly?

> I can’t help but wonder if these mentors are also guilty of fabricating data and don’t want to cause issues that might lead to people looking at their own work more closely.

It's far more likely that they know whistleblowing creates far more pain than many people expect.

People who build their reputations on top of lies tend to lash out when threatened. They know they can't afford to have their lies revealed, so they launch an all-out offensive to discredit, bully, and push out their accusers.

I've seen it play out in the workplace a couple times now. Some people get downright vicious when they feel their reputation is at risk. I watched someone spend years trying to get another person fired simply because that person accidentally uncovered one of his lies. The person who discovered it wasn't even trying to do anything with the information, but the person who lied about it was so anxious about the fact that somebody knew that he started doing increasingly irrational and desperate things to push the other person out.

Interpersonal connections can matter more than results for one’s career. Spotting an influencer’s error risks closing important doors.

There is no way that's true in my research group. We would - and do - call each other out on our mistakes at ever group meeting. Straight up fraud would not be tolerated.

I think people are underestimatig the psychological impact of failing to act on fraud in your research. Once you've learned that you're a fraud and what you're doing is bullshit, it would be soul crushing to go to work every day.

I have a feeling that non-academics on the Internet have an overly bleak view of the ethics in acamedia. I don't know why, but several online influencers really like to peddle the idea that we're all corrupt.

I mean, have you ever seen things work out for a whistleblower?

At best, they get some 15 minutes of praise. At worst, straight to jail.

I don’t work anywhere near academia. I still wouldn’t blow the whistle or advise others to do so.

So it didn't end well. Your friend had no career in academia because he criticized his master's work

Sometimes, even a whole conference gets compromised, see e.g. ICIMTECH '21 [1]:

"NOTICE OF RETRACTION: While investigating potential publication-related misconduct in connection with the ICIMTech 2021 Conference Proceedings, serious concerns were raised that cast doubt on the integrity of the peer-review process and all papers published in the Proceedings of this Conference. The integrity of the entire Conference has been called into question. As a result, of its investigation, ACM has decided to retract the Entire Conference Proceedings and all related papers from the ACM Digital Library.

None of the papers from this Proceeding should be cited in the literature because of the questionable integrity of the peer review process for this Conference."

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3465631

I agree about CS reviewing for conferences (esp. in systems) - pretty reasonable for the most part. Also, if things just don't work, they don't work - which is a bit different than studies in social science.

Peter Higgs would agree:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...

>Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today's academic system because he would not be considered "productive" enough.

>The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

>He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today's academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: "It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964."

>Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

Yes. The bureaucratic systems put into place to increase "quality" and "output" are incoherent, so they create even more incentives for fraud. It's paper Stakhanovism.

* You could be self interested & greedy and like to see yourself as a famous researcher

* Some researchers make good money

* You could start honest, then realize cheating is the only good way forward given the incentives

Regarding 'cad-bloggers from Columbia:

Woit does do a bit of grey area coverage. Likewise, his academic pubs are more interesting to me, personally! His reputation, however, is mixed at best. A real hero!

Gelman: maybe he's trying to subdue the neuroticism*. I look forward to more compassionate, less overtly "curiosity"-driven grey-area coverage (not to mention stats papers) from him!

Here is recent one, sadly also about psychologists (would be more interesting to do it to card carrying statisticians)

http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/healing3...

*Not many people describe themselves as an exponent of radical self-honesty since radicality isn't a palatable, much less enjoyable, thing. It takes a real saint (or logician) not to reflexively flinch from the imagined tsunami of incoming pity.

Grey areas-- you can safely explore

Eh, very few fraudsters start with a plan to commit fraud. More often than not, it's legitimate intent, but then thoughts happen along the lines of "I could make my ten years of work much more effective by just being a tiny little bit dishonest!" And then it becomes, "but now I have to lie about this other slightly bigger thing too, else it will become suspicious!" And eventually, "now that I've already lied so much, I might just make stuff up."

Particularly in research, where you may be working on the same idea for decades, it can be damning when you realize that the idea might just be fruitless. If all you had to do was remove one or two zeroes, and finally your colleagues would praise instead of mock you, wouldn't that be great?

That's not really possible. If you're writing a dissertation and find that some of the important foundational work you're building upon is wrong you can't just ignore it. If it's wrong, you need to say it's wrong in order to justify why you've chosen not to consider it in your dissertation. If you can't claim it's wrong, then you have to use it in your dissertation otherwise you're going to leave yourself open to criticsm that your dissertation ignores important prior work in the field. So the only choice you have left is to write your dissertation built upon work that you know is trash, and then if you do later choose to publish criticism of that work you're essentially trashing your own dissertation. And of course, none of that matters, because you're still going to face professional consequences when you choose to write the separate paper disputing the famous paper.

> Why not a) finish the dissertation as soon as humanly possible, and b) now that you're bona fide, publish a separate paper disputing the famous paper which your dissertation didn't rely on?

The last thing you want to do before pointing out that the emperor has no clothes is get a job at the palace.

Not sure how it is in all fields but at least in the molecular bio world there's a lot more replication than meets the eye. Especially methods, it's just that there won't be a replication paper, it'll be in the methods/supplementary info of the new research paper ("we used xyz techniques as described in researcher et al").

Null publishing bias still exists and obviously it's not remotely a perfect system. However, it's not some sort of completely broken system where every paper is either fraud or replication, and interventions that start from that sort of an assumption (people are very aware of the need to trust but verify) are in my opinion unlikely to be useful.

If the world is at a 60/100, you need to focus on things that get you from 60 to 80, not from 0 to 20

Seems like wishful thinking, much like saying engineers at Amazon can do whatever they want despite what Bezos says. Yes, they can, but they'd get fired. And yes, incentives could be changed, but they won't, because the person running the organization doesn't want to.

Research funding and research institutions are existing things, that operate in specific ways. One can lobby to change this, but unless you want to go back to the "gentleman scientist" model of the 1700s and 1800s, and a scientific establishment about 1% the size of the one today, you can't just buck the system.