I developed and maintain a large and very widely used open source agent-based modeling toolkit. It's designed to be very highly efficient: that's its calling card. But it's old: I released its first version around 2003 and have been updating it ever since.
Recently I was made aware by colleagues of a publication by authors of a new agent-based modeling toolkit in a different, hipper programming language. They compared their system to others, including mine, and made kind of a big checklist of who's better in what, and no surprise, theirs came out on top. But digging deeper, it quickly became clear that they didn't understand how to run my software correctly; and in many other places they bent over backwards to cherry-pick, and made a lot of bold and completely wrong claims. Correcting the record would place their software far below mine.
Mind you, I'm VERY happy to see newer toolkits which are better than mine -- I wrote this thing over 20 years ago after all, and have since moved on. But several colleagues demanded I do so. After a lot of back-and-forth however, it became clear that the journal's editor was too embarrassed and didn't want to require a retraction or revision. And the authors kept coming up with excuses for their errors. So the journal quietly dropped the complaint.
A while back I wrote a piece of (academic) software. A couple of years ago I was asked to review a paper prior to publication, and it was about a piece of software that did the same-ish thing as mine, where they had benchmarked against a set of older software, including mine, and of course they found that theirs was the best. However, their testing methodology was fundamentally flawed, not least because there is no "true" answer that the software's output can be compared to. So they had used a different process to produce a "truth", then trained their software (machine learning, of course) to produce results that match this (very flawed) "truth", and then of course their software was the best because it was the one that produced results closest to the "truth", whereas the other software might have been closer to the actual truth.
I recommended that the journal not publish the paper, and gave them a good list of improvements to give to the authors that should be made before re-submitting. The journal agreed with me, and rejected the paper.
A couple of months later, I saw it had been published unchanged in a different journal. It wasn't even a lower-quality journal, if I recall the impact factor was actually higher than the original one.
If it makes you feel any better, the problem you’re describing is as old as peer review. The authors of a paper only have to get accepted once, and they have a lot more incentive to do so than you do to reject their work as an editor or reviewer.
This is one of the reasons you should never accept a single publication at face value. But this isn’t a bug — it’s part of the algorithm. It’s just that most muggles don’t know how science actually works. Once you read enough papers in an area, you have a good sense of what’s in the norm of the distribution of knowledge, and if some flashy new result comes over the transom, you might be curious, but you’re not going to accept it without a lot more evidence.
This situation is different, because it’s a case where an extremely popular bit of accepted wisdom is both wrong, and the system itself appears to be unwilling to acknowledge the error.
It seems that the failure of the scientific process is 'profit'.
Schools should be using these kinds of examples in order to teach critical thinking. Unfortunately the other side of the lesson is how easy it is to push an agenda when you've got a little bit of private backing.
Many people do not know that Impact Factor is gameable. Unethical publications have gamed it. Therefore a higher IF may or may not indicate higher prominence. Use Scimago journal rankings for non-gameable scores.
Science and Nature are mol-bio journals that publish the occasional physics paper with a title you'd expect on the front page of The Weekly World News.
I was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland when you were a graduate student there in the mid nineties. A lot of what you had to say shaped the way I think about computer science. Thank you.
When I was a grad student I contacted a journal to tell them my PI had falsified their data. The journal never responded. I also contacted my university's legal department. They invited me in for an hour, said they would talk to me again soon, and never spoke to me or responded to my calls again after that. This was in a Top-10-in-the-USA CS program. I have close to zero trust in academia. This is why we have a "reproducibility crisis".
PSA for any grad student in this situation: get a lawyer, ASAP, to protect your own career.
Universities care about money and reputation. Individuals at universities care about their careers.
With exceptions of some saintly individual faculty members, a university is like a big for-profit corporation, only with less accountability.
Faculty bring in money, are strongly linked to reputation (scandal news articles may even say the university name in headlines rather than the person's name), and faculty are hard to get rid of.
Students are completely disposable, there will always be undamaged replacements standing by, and turnover means that soon hardly anyone at the university will even have heard of the student or internal scandal.
Unless you're really lucky, the university's position will be to suppress the messenger.
But if you go in with a lawyer, the lawyer may help your whistleblowing to be taken more seriously, and may also help you negotiate a deal to save your career. (For example of help, you need the university's/department's help in switching advisors gracefully, with funding, even as the uni/dept is trying to minimize the number of people who know about the scandal.)
This reminds me of my former college who asked me to check some code from a study, which I did not know it was published, and told him I hope he did not write it since it likely produced the wrong results. They claimed some process was too complicated to do because it was post O(2^n) in complexity, decided to do some major simplification of the problem, and took that as the truth in their answer. End result was the original algorithm was just quadratic, not worse, given the data set was easily doable in minutes at best (and not days as claimed) and the end result did not support their conclusions one tiny bit.
Our conclusion was to never trust psychology majors with computer code. And like with any other expertise field they should have shown their idea and/or code to some CS majors at the very least before publishing.
Unfortunately, academia is subject to the same sorts of social things that anything else is. I regularly see people still bring up a hoax article sent to a journal in 1996 as a reason to dismiss the entire field that one journal publishes in.
Personally, I would agree with you. That's how these things are supposed to work. In practice, people are still people.
I think the publish or perish academic culture makes it extremely susceptible to glossing over things like this - especially for statistical analysis. Sharing data, algorithms, code and methods for scientific publications will help. For papers above a certain citation count, which makes them seem "significant", I'm hoping google scholar can provide an annotation of whether the paper is reproducible and to what degree. While it won't avoid situations like what the author is talking about, it may force journal editors to take rebuttals and revisions more seriously.
From the perspective of the academic community, there will be lower incentive to publish incorrect results if data and code is shared.
I take the occasion to say that I helped making/rewriting a comparison between various agent-based modelling software at https://github.com/JuliaDynamics/ABMFrameworksComparison, not sure if this correctly represents all of them fairly enough, but if anyone wants to chime in to improve the code of any of the frameworks involved, I would be really happy to accept any improvement
Is this the kind of thing that retractions are typically issued for, or would it simply be your responsibility to submit a new paper correcting the record? I don't know how these things work. Thanks.
Nowadays high citation numbers don't mean anymore what they used to. I've seen too many highly cited papers with issues that keep getting referenced, probably because people don't really read the sources anymore and just copy-paste the citations.
On my side-project todo list, I have an idea for a scientific service that overlays a "trust" network over the citation graph. Papers that uncritically cite other work that contains well-known issues should get tagged as "potentially tainted". Authors and institutions that accumulate too many of such sketchy works should be labeled equally. Over time this would provide an additional useful signal vs. just raw citation numbers. You could also look for citation rings and tag them. I think that could be quite useful but requires a bit of work.
I explored this question a bit a few years ago when GPT-3 was brand new. It's tempting to look for technological solutions to social problems. It was COVID so public health papers were the focus.
The idea failed a simple sanity check: just going to Google Scholar, doing a generic search and reading randomly selected papers from within the past 15 years or so. It turned out most of them were bogus in some obvious way. A lot of ideas for science reform take as axiomatic that the bad stuff is rare and just needs to be filtered out. Once you engage with some field's literatures in a systematic way, it becomes clear that it's more like searching for diamonds in the rough than filtering out occasional corruption.
But at that point you wonder, why bother? There is no alchemical algorithm that can convert intellectual lead into gold. If a field is 90% bogus then it just shouldn't be engaged with at all.
There is in fact a method, and it got us quite far until we abandoned it for the peer review plus publish or perish death spiral in the mid 1900s. It's quite simple:
1) Anyone publishes anything they want, whenever they want, as much or as little as the want. Publishing does not say anything about your quality as a researcher, since anyone can do it.
2) Being published doesn't mean it's right, or even credible. No one is filtering the stream, so there's no cachet to being published.
We then let memetic evolution run its course. This is the system that got us Newton, Einstein, Darwin, Mendeleev, Euler, etc. It works, but it's slow, sometimes ugly to watch, and hard to game so some people would much rather use the "Approved by A Council of Peers" nonsense we're presently mired in.
Interesting idea. How do you distinguish between critical and uncritical citation? It’s also a little thorny—if your related work section is just describing published work (which is a common form of reviewer-proofing), is that a critical or uncritical citation? It seems a little harsh to ding a paper for that.
That's one of the issues that causes a bit of work.
Citations would need to be judged with context. Let's say paper X is nowadays known to be tainted. If a tainted work is cited just for completeness, it's not an issue, e.g. "the method has been used in [a,b,c,d,x]"
If the tainted work is cited critically, even better: e.g. "X claimed to show that..., but y and z could not replicate the results".
But if it is just taken for granted at face value, then the taint-label should propagate: e.g. ".. has been previously proved by x and thus our results are very important...".
Going to conferences seeing researchers who've built a career doing subpar (sometimes blatantly 'fake') work has made me grow increasingly wary of experts. Worst is lots of people just seem to go along with it.
Still I'm skeptical about any sort of system trying to figure out 'trust'. There's too much on the line for researchers/students/... to the point where anything will eventually be gamed. Just too many people trying to get into the system (and getting in is the most important part).
The worse system is already getting gamed. There's already too much on the line for researchers/students, so they don't admit any wrong doing or retract anything. What's the worse that could happen by adding a layer of trust in the h-index ?
I think it could end up helping a bit in the short term. But in the end an even more complicated system (even if in principle better) will reward those spending time gaming it even more.
The system ends up promoting an even more conservative culture. What might start great will end up with groups and institutions being even more protective of 'their truths' to avoid getting tainted.
Don't think there's any system which can avoid these sort of things, people were talking about this before WW1, globalisation just put it in overdrive.
Pretty much all fields have shit papers, but if you ever feel the need to develop a superiority complex, take a vacation from your STEM field and have a look at what your university offers under the "business"-anything label. If anyone in those fields manages to produce anything of quality, they're defying the odds and should be considered one of the greats along the line of Euclid, Galileo Galilei, or Isaac Newton - because they surely didn't have many shoulders to stand on either.
This is exactly how I felt when studying management as part of ostensibly an Engineering / Econ / Management degree.
When you added it up, most of the hard parts were Engineering, and a bit Econ. You would really struggle to work through tough questions in engineering, spend a lot of time on economic theory, and then read the management stuff like you were reading a newspaper.
Management you could spot a mile away as being soft. There's certainly some interesting ideas, but even as students we could smell it was lacking something. It's just a bit too much like a History Channel documentary. Entertaining, certainly, but it felt like false enlightenment.
I suppose it's to be expected, the business department is built around the art of generating profit from cheap inputs. It's business thinking in action!
> Stop citing single studies as definitive. They are not. Check if the ones you are reading or citing have been replicated.
And from the comments:
> From my experience in social science, including some experience in managment studies specifically, researchers regularly belief things – and will even give policy advice based on those beliefs – that have not even been seriously tested, or have straight up been refuted.
Sometimes people use fewer than one non replicatable studies. They invent studies and use that! An example is the "Harvard Goal Study" that is often trotted out at self-review time at companies. The supposed study suggests that people who write down their goals are more likely to achieve them than people who do not. However, Harvard itself cannot find such a study existing:
Definitely ignore single studies, no matter how prestigious the journal or numerous the citations.
Straight-up replications are rare, but if a finding is real, other PIs will partially replicate and build upon it, typically as a smaller step in a related study. (E.g., a new finding about memory comes out, my field is emotion, I might do a new study looking at how emotion and your memory finding interact.)
If the effect is replicable, it will end up used in other studies (subject to randomness and the file drawer effect, anyway). But if an effect is rarely mentioned in the literature afterwards...run far, FAR away, and don't base your research off it.
A good advisor will be able to warn you off lost causes like this.
The root of the problem is referred to implicitly: publish or perish. To get tenure, you need publications, preferably highly cited, and money, which comes from grants that your peers (mostly from other institutions) decide on. So the mutual back scratching begins, and the publication mill keeps churning out papers whose main value is the career of the author and --through citation-- influential peers, truth be damned.
The same dynamics from school carry over into adulthood: early on it’s about grades and whether you get into a “good” school; later it becomes the adult version of that treadmill : publish or perish.
There is a surprisingly large amount of bad science out there. And we know it.
One of my favourite writeup on the subject: John P. A. Ioannidis: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
This is a great paper but, in my experience, most people in tech love this paper because it allows them to say "To hell with pursuing reality. Here is MY reality".
John Ioannidis is a weird case. His work on the replication crisis across many domains was seminal and important. His contrarian, even conspiratorial take on COVID-19 not so much.
Ugh, wow, somehow I missed all this. I guess he joins the ranks of the scientists who made important contributions and then leveraged that recognition into a platform for unhinged diatribes.
Please don't lazily conclude that he's gone crazy because it doesn't align with your prior beliefs. His work on Covid was just as rigorous as anything else he's done, but it's been unfairly villainized by the political left in the USA. If you disagree with his conclusions on a topic, you'd do well to have better reasoning than "the experts said the opposite".
Ioannidis' work during Covid raised him in my esteem. It's rare to see someone in academics who is willing to set their own reputation on fire in search of truth.
“Most Published Research Findings Are False” —> “Most Published COVID-19 Research Findings Are False” -> “Uh oh, I did a wrongthink, let’s backtrack at bit”.
Yes, sort of. Ioannidis published a serosurvey during COVID that computed a lower fatality rate than the prior estimates. Serosurveys are a better way to compute this value because they capture a lot of cases which were so mild people didn't know they were infected, or thought it wasn't COVID. The public health establishment wanted to use an IFR as high as possible e.g. the ridiculous Verity et al estimates from Jan 2020 of a 1% IFR were still in use more than a year later despite there being almost no data in Jan 2020, because high IFR = COVID is more important = more power for public health.
If IFR is low then a lot of the assumptions that justified lockdowns are invalidated (the models and assumptions were wrong anyway for other reasons, but IFR is just another). So Ioannidis was a bit of a class traitor in that regard and got hammered a lot.
The claim he's a conspiracy theorist isn't supported, it's just the usual ad hominem nonsense (not that there's anything wrong with pointing out genuine conspiracies against the public! That's usually called journalism!). Wikipedia gives four citations for this claim and none of them show him proposing a conspiracy, just arguing that when used properly data showed COVID was less serious than others were claiming. One of the citations is actually of an article written by Ioannidis himself. So Wikipedia is corrupt as per usual. Grokipedia's article is significantly less biased and more accurate.
He published a serosurvey that claimed to have found a signal in a positivity rate that was within the 95% CI of the false-positive rate of the test (and thus indistinguishable from zero to within the usual p < 5%). He wasn't necessarily wrong in all his conclusions, but neither were the other researchers that he rightly criticized for their own statistical gymnastics earlier.
That said, I'd put both his serosurvey and the conduct he criticized in "Most Published Research Findings Are False" in a different category from the management science paper discussed here. Those seem mostly explainable by good-faith wishful thinking and motivated reasoning to me, while that paper seems hard to explain except as a knowing fraud.
Yeah I remember reading that article at the time. Agree they're in different categories. I think Gellman's summary wasn't really supportable. It's far too harsh - he's demanding an apology because the data set used for measuring test accuracy wasn't large enough to rule out the possibility that there were no COVID cases in the entire sample, and he doesn't personally think some explanations were clear enough. But this argument relies heavily on a worst case assumption about the FP rate of the test, one which is ruled out by prior evidence (we know there were indeed people infected with SARS-CoV-2 in that region in that time).
There's the other angle of selective outrage. The case for lockdowns was being promoted based on, amongst other things, the idea that PCR tests have a false positive rate of exactly zero, always, under all conditions. This belief is nonsense although I've encountered wet lab researchers who believe it - apparently this is how they are trained. In one case I argued with the researcher for a bit and discovered he didn't know what Ct threshold COVID labs were using; after I told him he went white and admitted that it was far too high, and that he hadn't known they were doing that.
Gellman's demands for an apology seem very different in this light. Ioannidis et al not only took test FP rates into account in their calculations but directly measured them to cross-check the manufacturer's claims. Nearly every other COVID paper I read simply assumed FPs don't exist at all, or used bizarre circular reasoning like "we know this test has an FP rate of zero because it detects every case perfectly when we define a case as a positive test result". I wrote about it at the time because this problem was so prevalent:
I think Gellman realized after the fact that he was being over the top in his assessment because the article has been amended since with numerous "P.S." paragraphs which walk back some of his own rhetoric. He's not a bad writer but in this case I think the overwhelming peer pressure inside academia to conform to the public health narratives got to even him. If the cost of pointing out problems in your field is that every paper you write has to be considered perfect by every possible critic from that point on, it's just another way to stop people flagging problems.
Ioannidis corrected for false positives with a point estimate rather than the confidence interval. That's better than not correcting, but not defensible when that's the biggest source of statistical uncertainty in the whole calculation. Obviously true zero can be excluded by other information (people had already tested positive by PCR), but if we want p < 5% in any meaningful sense then his serosurvey provided no new information. I think it was still an interesting and publishable result, but the correct interpretation is something like Figure 1 from Gelman's
I don't think Gelman walked anything back in his P.S. paragraphs. The only part I see that could be mistaken for that is his statement that "'not statistically significant' is not the same thing as 'no effect'", but that's trivially obvious to anyone with training in statistics. I read that as a clarification for people without that background.
We'd already discussed PCR specificity ad nauseam, at
These test accuracies mattered a lot while trying to forecast the pandemic, but in retrospect one can simply look at the excess mortality, no tests required. So it's odd to still be arguing about that after all the overrun hospitals, morgues, etc.
Does the IFR matter? The public thinks lives are infinitely valuable. Lives that the public pays attention to. 0.1% or 1%, it doesn’t really matter, right, it gets multiplied by infinity in an ROI calculation. Or whatever so called “objective” criteria people try to concoct for policymaking. I like Ioannidis’s work, and his results about serotypes (or whatever) were good, but it was being co-opted to make a mostly political policy (some Republicans: compulsory public interaction during a pandemic and uncharitably, compulsory transmission of a disease) look “objective.”
I don’t think the general idea of co-opting is hard to understand, it’s quite easy to understand. But there is a certain personality type, common among people who earn a living by telling Claude what to do, out there with a defect to have to “prove” people on the Internet “wrong,” and these people are constantly, blithely mobilized to further someone’s political cause who truly doesn’t give a fuck about them. Ioannidis is such a personality type, and as you can see, a victim.
He made a famous career, to being a professor and a director in Stanford University, about meta-research on the quality of other people's research, and critiquing the methodology of other people's studies. Then during Covid he tried to do a bit of original empirical research of his own, and his own methods and statistical data analysis were even worse than what he has critiqued in other people's work.
> I’ve been in the car with some drunk drivers, some dangerous drivers, who could easily have killed people: that’s a bad thing to do, but I wouldn’t say these were bad people.
If this isn't bad people, then who can ever be called bad people? The word "bad" loses its meaning if you explain away every bad deed by such people as something else. Putting other people's lives at risk by deciding to drive when you are drunk sounds like very bad people to me.
> They’re living in a world in which doing the bad thing–covering up error, refusing to admit they don’t have the evidence to back up their conclusions–is easy, whereas doing the good thing is hard.
I don't understand this line of reasoning. So if people do bad things because they know they can get away with it, they aren't bad people? How does this make sense?
> As researchers they’ve been trained to never back down, to dodge all criticism.
Exactly the opposite is taught. These people are deciding not to back down and admit wrong doing out of their own accord. Not because of some "training".
It's a broad and simple word but it's also a useful word because of its generality. It's nice to have such a word that can apply to so many kinds and degrees of actions, and saves so many pointless arguments about whether something is more narrowly evil, for example. Applied empirically to people, it has predictive power and can eliminate surprise because the actions of bad people are correlated with bad actions in many different ways. A bad person does something very stupid today, very irresponsible tomorrow, and will unsurprisingly continue to do bad things of all sorts of kinds even if they stay clear of some kinds.
When everyone else does it, it's extremely hard to be righteous. I did it long ago... everyone did it back then. We knew the danger and thought we were different, we thought we could drive safely no matter our state. Lots of tragedies happen because people disastrously misjudge their own abilities, and when alcohol is involved doubly so. They are not bad people, they're people who live in a flawed culture where alcohol is seen as acceptable and who cannot avoid falling for the many human fallacies... in this case caused by the Dunning Kruger effect. If you think people who fall for fallacies are bad, then being human is inherently bad in your opinion.
I don't think being human is inherently bad. But you have to draw the line to consider someone as "bad" somewhere, right? If you don't draw a line, then nobody in the world is a bad person. So my question is where exactly is that line?
You guys are saying that drink driving does not make someone a bad person. Ok. Let's say I grant you that. Where do you draw the line for someone being a bad person?
I mean with this line of reasoning you can "explain way" every bad deed and then nobody is a bad person. So do you guys consider someone to be actually a bad person and what did they have to do to cross that line where you can't explain away their bad deed anymore and you really consider them to be bad?
The webpage of the journal [1] only says 109 citations of the original article, this count only "indexed" journals, that are not guaranty to be ultra high quality but at least filter the worse "pay us to publish crap" journals.
ResearchGate says 3936 citations. I'm not sure what they are counting, probably all the pdf uploaded to ResearchGate
I'm not sure how they count 6000 citations, but I guess they are counting everything, including quotes by the vicepresident. Probably 6001 after my comment.
Quoted in the article:
>> 1. Journals should disclose comments, complaints, corrections, and retraction requests. Universities should report research integrity complaints and outcomes.
All comments, complaints, corrections, and retraction requests? Unmoderated? Einstein articles will be full of comments explaining why he is wrong, from racist to people that can spell Minkowski to save their lives. In /newest there is like one post per week from someone that discover a new physics theory with the help of ChatGPT. Sometimes it's the same guy, sometimes it's a new one.
> I'm not sure how they count 6000 citations, but I guess they are counting everything, including quotes by the vicepresident. Probably 6001 after my comment.
The number appears to be from Google Scholar, which currently reports 6269 citations for the paper
> All comments, complaints, corrections, and retraction requests? Unmoderated? Einstein articles will be full of comments explaining why he is wrong, from racist to people that can spell Minkowski to save their lives. In /newest there is like one post per week from someone that discover a new physics theory with the help of ChatGPT. Sometimes it's the same guy, sometimes it's a new one.
Judging from PubPeer, which allows people to post all of the above anonymously and with minimal moderation, this is not an issue in practice.
They mentioned a famous work, which will naturally attract cranks to comment on it. I’d also expect to get weird comments on works with high political relevance.
The problem is in parts, how confirmatory statistics work, and how journals work. Most journals wouldn’t publish „we really tried very hard to get significance that x causes y but found nothing. Probably, and contrary to our prior beliefs, y is completely independent of x.“
Even if nobody would cheat and massage data, we would still have studies that do not replicate on new data. 95 % confidence means that one in twenty surveys finds an effect that is only noise. The reporting of failed hypothesis testing would really help to find these cases.
So pre-registration helps, and it would also help to establish the standard that everything needed to replicate must be published, if not in the article itself, then in an accompanying repository.
But in the brutal fight for promotion and resources, of course labs won’t share all their tricks and process knowledge. Same problem if there is an interest in using the results commercially. E.g. in EE often the method is described in general but crucial parts of the code or circuit design are held back.
I don't understand why it has been acceptable to not upload a tarball of your data with the paper in the internet age. Maybe the Asset4 database is only available with license and they can't publish too much. However, the key concern with the method is a pairwise matching of companies which is an invention of the paper authors and should be totally clear to publish. The number of stories I've heard from people forensically investigating PDF plots to uncover key data from a paper is absurd.
Of course doing so is not free and it takes time. A paper represents at least months of work in data collection, analysis, writing, and editing though. A tarball seems like a relatively small amount of effort to provide an huge increase in confidence for the result.
This. I did my dissertation in the early '90s, so very early days of the internet. All of my data and code was online.
IMHO this should be expected for any, literally any publication. If you have secrets, or proprietary information, fine - but then, you don't get to publish.
Being practical, and understanding the gamification of citation counts and research metrics today, instead of going for a replication study and trying to prove a negative, I'd instead go for contrarian research which shows a different result (or possibly excludes the original result; or possibly doesn't even if it does not confirm it).
These probably have bigger chance of being published as you are providing a "novel" result, instead of fighting the get-along culture (which is, honestly, present in the workplace as well). But ultimately, they are (research-wise! but not politically) harder to do because they possibly mean you have figured out an actual thing.
Not saying this is the "right" approach, but it might be a cheaper, more practical way to get a paper turned around.
Whether we can work this out in research in a proper way is linked to whether we can work this out everywhere else? How many times have you seen people tap each other on the back despite lousy performance and no results? It's just easier to switch private positions vs research positions, so you'll have more of them not afraid to highlight bad job, and well, there's this profit that needs to pay your salary too.
Most of these studies get published based on elaborate constructions of essentially t-tests for differences in means between groups. Showing the opposite means showing no statistical difference, which is almost impossible to get published, for very human reasons.
My point was exactly not to do that (which is really an unsuccesfull replication), but instead to find the actual, live correlation between the same input rigourously documented and justified, and new "positive" conclusion.
As I said, harder from a research perspective, but if you can show, for instance, that sustainable companies are less profitable with a better study, you have basically contradicted the original one.
No, we shouldn't. Research fraud is committed by people, who must be held accountable. In this specific case, if the issues had truly been accidental, the author's would have responded and revised their paper. They did not, ergo their false claims were likely deliberate.
That the school and the journal show no interest - equally bad, and deserving of public shaming.
Of course, this is also a consequence of "publish or perish."
I appreciate the convenience of having the original text on hand, as opppsed to having to download it of Dropbox of all places.
But if you're going to quote the whole thing it seems easier to just say so rather than quoting it bit by bit interspersed with "King continues" and annotating each I with [King].
The discussion has mostly revolved around the scientific system (it definitely has plenty of problems), but how about ethics?
The paper in question shows - credibly or not - that companies focusing on sustainability perform better in a variety of metrics, including generating revenue. In other words: Not only can you have companies that do less harm, but these ethically superior companies also make more money. You can have your cake and eat it too. It likely has given many people a way to align their moral compass with their need to gain status and perform well within our system.
Even if the paper is a completely fabrication, I'm convinced it has made the world a better a place. I can't help but wonder if Gelman and King paused to consider the possible repercussions of their actions, and of what kinds of motivations they might have had. The linked post briefly dips into ethics, benevolently proclaiming that the original authors of the paper are not necessarily bad people.
Which feels ironic, as it seems to me that Gelman and King are doing the wrong here.
It's harder to do social/human science because it's just easier to make mistakes that leads to bias. It's harder to do in maths, physics, biology, medecine, astronomy, etc.
I often say that "hard sciences" have often progressed much more than social/human sciences.
you get a replication crisis on the bleeding edge between replication being possible and impossible. There’s never going to be a replication crisis in linear algebra, there’s never going to be a replication crisis in theology, there definitely was a replication crisis in psych and a replication crisis in nutrition science is distinctly plausible and would be extremely good news for the field as it moves through the edge.
Leslie Lamport came up with a structured method to find errors in proof. Testing it on a batch, he found most of them had errors. Peter Guttman's paper on formal verification likewise showed many "proven" or "verified" works had errors that were spottes quickly upon informal review or testing. We've also see important theories in math and physics change over time with new information.
With the above, I think we've empirically proven that we can't trust mathmeticians more than any other humans We should still rigorously verify their work with diverse, logical, and empirical methods. Also, build ground up on solid ideas that are highly vetted. (Which linear algebra actually does.)
The other approach people are taking are foundational, machine-checked, proof assistants. These use a vetted logic whose assistant produces a series of steps that can be checked by a tiny, highly-verified checker. They'll also oftne use a reliable formalism to check other formalisms. The people doing this have been making everything from proof checkers to compilers to assembly languages to code extraction in those tools so they are highly trustworthy.
But, we still need people to look at the specs of all that to see if there are spec errors. There's fewer people who can vet the specs than can check the original English and code combos. So, are they more trustworthy? (Who knows except when tested empirically on many programs or proofs, like CompCert was.)
I agree. Most of the time people think STEM is harder but it is not. Yes, it is harder to understand some concepts, but in social sciences we don't even know what the correct concepts are. There hasn't been so much progress in social sciences in the last centuries as there was for STEM.
I'm not sure if you're correct. In fact there has been a revolution in some areas of social science in the last two decades due to the availability of online behavioural data.
> Because published articles frequently omit key details
This is a frustrating aspect of studies. You have to contact the authors for full datasets. I can see why it would not be possible to publish them in the past due to limited space in printed publications. In today's world though every paper should be required to have their full datasets published to a website for others to have access to in order to verify and replicate.
Social fame is fundamentally unscalable, as it operates in limited room on the scene and even less in the few spot lights.
Benefits we can get from collective works, including scientific endeavors, are indefinitely large, as in far more important than what can be held in the head of any individual.
Incitives are just irrelevant as far as global social good is concerned.
Isn't at least part of the problem with replication that journals are businesses. They're selling in part based on limited human focus, and on desire to see something novel, to see progress in one's chosen field. Replications don't fit a commercial publications goals.
Institutions could do something, surely. Require one-in-n papers be a replication. Only give prizes to replicated studies. Award prize monies split between the first two or three independent groups demonstrating a result.
The 6k citations though ... I suspect most of those instances would just assert the result if a citation wasn't available.
Journals aren't really businesses in the conventional sense. They're extensions of the universities: their primary customers and often only customers are university libraries, their primary service is creating a reputation economy for academics to decide promotions.
If the flow of tax, student debt and philanthropic money were cut off, the journals would all be wiped out because there's no organic demand for what they're doing.
Not in academia myself, but I suspect the basic issue is simply that academics are judged by the number of papers they publish.
They are pushed to publish a lot, which means journals have to review a lot of stuff (and they cannot replicate findings on their own). Once a paper is published on a decent journal, other researchers may not "waste time" replicating all findings, because they also want to publish a lot. The result is papers getting popular even if no one has actually bothered to replicate the results, especially if those papers are quoted by a lot of people and/or are written by otherwise reputable people or universities.
This is simply a case of appeal to authority. No reviewer or editor would reject a paper from either HBS or LBS, let alone a joint paper between the two. Doing so would be akin to career suicide.
And therein lies the uncomfortable truth: Collaborative opportunities take priority over veracity in publications every time.
Not even surprised. My daughter tried to reproduce a well-cited paper a couple of years back as part of her research project. It was not possible. They pushed for a retraction but university don't want to do it because it would cause political issues as one of the peer-reviewers is tenured at another closely associated university. She almost immediately fucked off and went to work in the private sector.
That's not right; retractions should only be for research misconduct cases. It is a problem with the article's recommendations too. Even if a correction is published that the results may not hold, the article should stay where it is.
But I agree with the point about replications, which are much needed. That was also the best part in the article, i.e. "stop citing single studies as definitive".
I will add it's a little more complicated than I wanted to let on here as I don't identify it in the process. But it definitely was misconduct on this one.
I read the paper as well. My background is mathematics and statistics and the data was quite frankly synthesised.
Okay, but to return to replications, publishers could incentivize replications by linking replication studies directly on a paper's website location. In fact, you could even have a collection of DOIs for these purposes, including for datasets. With this point in mind, what I find depressing is that the journal declined a follow-up comment.
But the article is generally weird or even harmful too. Going to social media with these things and all; we have enough of that "pretty" stuff already.
However there are two problems with it. Firstly it's a step towards gamification and having tried that model in a fintech on reputation scoring, it was a bit of a disaster. Secondarily, very few studies are replicated in the first place unless there is a demand for linked research to replicate it before building on it.
There are also entire fields which are mostly populated by bullshit generators. And they actively avoid replication studies. Certain branches of psychology are rather interesting in that space.
> Certain branches of psychology are rather interesting in that space.
Maybe, I cannot say, but what I can say is that CS is in the midst of a huge replication crisis because LLM research cannot be replicated by definition. So I'd perhaps tone down the claims about other fields.
It’s much much more likely that she did something wrong trying to replicate it than the paper was wrong. Did she try to contact the authors, discuss with her advisor?
Pushing for retraction just like that and going off to private sector is…idk it’s a decision.
It went on for a few months. The source data for the paper was synthesised and it was like trying to get blood out of a stone trying to get hold of it, clearly because they knew they were in trouble. Lots of research money was wasted trying to reproduce it.
She was just done with it then and a pharma company said "hey you fed up with this shit and like money?" and she was and does.
edit: as per the other comment, my background is mathematics and statistics after engineering. I went into software but still have connections back to academia which I left many years ago because it was a political mess more than anything. Oh and I also like money.
This likely represents only a fragment of a larger pattern. Research contradicting prevailing political narratives faces significant professional obstacles, and as this article shows, so does critiques of research that don't.
>There’s a horrible sort of comfort in thinking that whatever you’ve published is already written and can’t be changed. Sometimes this is viewed as a forward-looking stance, but science that can’t be fixed isn’t past science; it’s dead science.
Not enough is understood about the replication crisis in the social sciences. Or indeed in the hard sciences. I do wonder whether this is something that AI will rectify.
The same way it would correct typos in a text. It's just a tool, you tell it to find inconsistencies, see what results that yields, and optimize it for verification of claims.
Once, back around 2011 or 2012, I was using Google Translate for a speech I was to deliver in church. It was shorter than one page printed out.
I only needed the Spanish translation. Now I am proficient in spoken and written Spanish, and I can perfectly understand what is said, and yet I still ran the English through Google Translate and printed it out without really checking through it.
I got to the podium and there was a line where I said "electricity is in the air" (a metaphor, obviously) and the Spanish translation said "electricidad no está en el aire" and I was able to correct that on-the-fly, but I was pissed at Translate, and I badmouthed it for months. And sure, it was my fault for not proofing and vetting the entire output, but come on!
Does it bug anyone else when your article has so many quotes it’s practically all italics? Change the formatting style so we don’t have to read pages of italic quotes
Family member tried to do work relying on previous results from a biotech lab. Couldn’t do it. Tried to reproduce. Doesn’t work. Checked work carefully. Faked. Switched labs and research subject. Risky career move, but. Now has a career. Old lab is in mental black box. Never to be touched again.
I haven't identified an outright fake one but in my experience (mainly in sensor development) most papers are at the very least optimistic or are glossing over some major limitations in the approach. They should be treated as a source of ideas to try instead of counted on.
I've also seen the resistance that results from trying to investigate or even correct an issue in a key result of a paper. Even before it's published the barrier can be quite high (and I must admit that since it's not my primary focus and my name was not on it, I did not push as hard as I could have on it)
For original research, a researcher is supposed to replicate studies that form the building blocks of their research. For example, if a drug is reported to increase expression of some mRNA in a cell, and your research derives from that, you will start by replicating that step, but it will just be a note in your introduction and not published as a finding on its own.
When a junior researcher, e.g. a grad student, fails to replicate a study, they assume it's technique. If they can't get it after many tries, they just move on, and try some other research approach. If they claim it's because the original study is flawed, people will just assume they don't have the skills to replicate it.
One of the problems is that science doesn't have great collaborative infrastructure. The only way to learn that nobody can reproduce a finding is to go to conferences and have informal chats with people about the paper. Or maybe if you're lucky there's an email list for people in your field where they routinely troubleshoot each other's technique. But most of the time there's just not enough time to waste chasing these things down.
I can't speak to whether people get blackballed. There's a lot of strong personalities in science, but mostly people are direct and efficient. You can ask pretty pointed questions in a session and get pretty direct answers. But accusing someone of fraud is a serious accusation and you probably don't want to get a reputation for being an accuser, FWIW.
I've read of a few cases like this on Hacker News. There's often that assumption, sometimes unstated: if a junior scientist discovers clear evidence of academic misconduct by a senior scientist, it would be career suicide for the junior scientist to make their discovery public.
The replication crisis is largely particular to psychology, but I wonder about the scope of the don't rock the boat issue.
It's not particular to psychology, the modern discussion of it just happened to start there. It affects all fields and is more like a validity crisis than a replication crisis.
He’s not saying it’s Psychology the field. He’s saying replication crisis may be because junior scientist (most often involved in replication) is afraid of retribution: it’s psychological reason for fraud persistence.
I think perhaps blackball is guaranteed. No one likes a snitch. “We’re all just here to do work and get paid. He’s just doing what they make us do”. Scientist is just job. Most people are just “I put thing in tube. Make money by telling government about tube thing. No need to be religious about Science”.
I see my phrasing was ambiguous, for what it's worth I'm afraid mike_hearn had it right, I was saying the replication crisis largely just affects research in psychology. I see this was too narrow, but I think it's fair to say psychology is likely the most affected field.
In terms of solutions, the practice of 'preregistration' seems like a move in the right direction.
Social “sciences” are completely bastardizing the word science. Then, they come complaining that “society doesn’t trust science anymore”. They, the social “scientists”, the ones responsible for removing all meaning from the word science,
Could you also provide your critical appraisal of the article so this can be more of a journal club for discussion vs just a paper link? I have no expertise in this field so would be good for some insights.
I will not go into the details of the topic but the "What to do" is the most obvious thing.
If a paper that is impactful cannot be backed by other works that should be a smell
And thus all citing, have fatally flawed there paper if its central to the thesis, thus, he who proofs the root is rotten, should gain there funding from this point forward.
I see this approach as a win win for science. Debunking bad science becomes a for profit enterprise, rigorous science becomes the only one sustainable, the paper churn gets reduced, as even producing a good one becomes a financial risk, when it becomes foundational and gets debunked later.
For all the outrage at Trump, RFK, and their Know-Nothing posture toward the world, we should recognize that the ground for their rise was fertilized by manure produced in academia.
Anyone know the VP who referenced the paper? Doesn't seem to be mentioned. My best guess is Gore.
Living VPs
Joe Biden — VP 2009–2017 (became President in 2021; after that he’s called a former VP and former president)
Not likely the one referenced after 2017 because he became president in 2021, so later citations would likely call him a former president instead of former VP.
> This doesn’t mean that the authors of that paper are bad people!
> We should distinguish the person from the deed. We all know good people who do bad things
> They were just in situations where it was easier to do the bad thing than the good thing
I can't believe I just read that. What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"
In this case, it seems not owning up to the issues is the bad part. That's a choice they made. Actually, multiple choices at different times, it seems. If you keep choosing the easy path instead of the path that is right for those that depend on you, it's easier for me to just label you a bad person.
Labeling people as villains (as opposed to condemning acts), in particular those you don’t know personally, is almost always an unhelpful oversimplification of reality. It obscures the root causes of why the bad things are happening, and stands in the way of effective remedy.
In this case they hadn’t labeled anyone as villains, though. They could have omitted that section entirely.
I happen to agree that labeling them as villains wouldn’t have been helpful to this story, but they didn’t do that.
> It obscures the root causes of why the bad things are happening, and stands in the way of effective remedy.
There’s a toxic idea built into this statement: It implies that the real root cause is external to the people and therefore the solution must be a systemic change.
This hits a nerve for me because I’ve seen this specific mindset used to avoid removing obviously problematic people, instead always searching for a “root cause” that required us all to ignore the obvious human choices at the center of the problem.
Like blameless postmortems taken to a comical extreme where one person is always doing some careless that causes problems and we all have to brainstorm a way to pretend that the system failed, not the person who continues to cause us problems.
> Like blameless postmortems taken to a comical extreme where one person is always doing some careless that causes problems and we all have to brainstorm a way to pretend that the system failed, not the person who continues to cause us problems.
Well, I'd argue the system failed in that the bad person is not removed. The root is then bad hiring decision and bad management of problematic people. You can do a blameless postmortem guiding a change in policy which ends in some people getting fired.
> You can do a blameless postmortem guiding a change in policy which ends in some people getting fired.
In theory maybe, but in my experience the blameless postmortem culture gets taken to such an extreme that even when one person is consistently, undeniably to blame for causing problems we have to spend years pretending it’s a system failure instead. I think engineers like the idea that you can engineer enough rules, policies, and guardrails that it’s impossible to do anything but the right thing.
This can create a feedback loop where the bad players realize they can get away with a lot because if they get caught they just blame the system for letting them do the bad thing. It can also foster an environment where it’s expected that anything that is allowed to happen is implicitly okay to do, because the blameless postmortem culture assigns blame on the faceless system rather than the individuals doing the actions.
agreed, the concept of a 'blameless' post mortem came from airplane crash investigation - but if one pilot crashes 6 commercial jets, we wouldnt say "must be a problem with the design of the controls"
So what do they say actually in aviation? There was a pilot suicide with the whole plane Germanwings Flight 9525, I find it more important the aviation industry did regulatory changes than the fact that (probably) "they blamed the pilot".
I think there are too many people that actually like "blaming someone else" and that causes issues besides software development.
Blameless postmortems are for processes where everyone is acting in good faith and a mistake was made and everyone wants to fix it.
If one party decides that they don’t want to address a material error, then they’re not acting in good faith. At that point we don’t use blameless procedures anymore, we use accountability procedures, and we usually exclude the recalcitrant people from the remediation process, because they’ve shown bad faith.
> Well, I'd argue the system failed in that the bad person is not removed.
This is just a proxy for "the person is bad" then. There's no need to invoke a system. Who can possibly trace back all the things that could or couldn't have been spotted at interview stage or in probation? Who cares, when the end result is "fire the person" or, probably, "promote the person".
> There’s a toxic idea built into this statement: It implies that the real root cause is external to the people and therefore the solution must be a systemic change.
It's both obviously. To address the human cause, you have to call out the issues and put at risk the person's career by damaging their reputation. That's what this article is doing. You can't fix a person, but you can address their bad behavior in this way by creating consequences for the bad things.
Part of the root cause definitely is the friction aspect. The system is designed to make the bad thing easier, and when designing a system you need the good outcomes to be lower friction.
> This hits a nerve for me because I’ve seen this specific mindset used to avoid removing obviously problematic people, instead always searching for a “root cause” that required us all to ignore the obvious human choices at the center of the problem.
The real conversations like that take place in places where there's no recordings, or anything left in writing. Don't assume they aren't taking place, or that they go how you think they go.
> There’s a toxic idea built into this statement: It implies that the real root cause is external to the people and therefore the solution must be a systemic change.
Not necessarily, although certainly people sometimes fall into that trap. When dealing with a system you need to fix the system. Ejecting a single problematic person doesn't fix the underlying problem - how did that person get in the door in the first place? If they weren't problematic when they arrived, does that mean there were corrosive elements in the environment that led to the change?
When a person who is a cog within a larger machine fails that is more or less by definition also an instance of the system failing.
Of course individual intent is also important. If Joe dropped the production database intentionally then in addition to asking "how the hell did someone like him end up in this role in the first place" you will also want to eject him from the organization (or at least from that role). But focusing on individual intent is going to cloud the process and the systemic fix is much more important than any individual one.
There's also a (meta) systemic angle to the above. Not everyone involved in carrying out the process will be equally mature, objective, and deliberate (by which I mean that unfortunately any organization is likely to contain at least a few fairly toxic people). If people jump to conclusions or go on a witch hunt that can constitute a serious systemic dysfunction in and of itself. Rigidly adhering to a blameless procedure is a way to guard against that while still working towards the necessary systemic changes.
Often institutions develop fundamental problems because individuals gradually adjust their behaviors away from the official norms. If it goes uncorrected, the new behavior becomes the unofficial norm.
One strategy for correcting the institution is to start holding individuals accountable. The military does this often. They'll "make an example" of someone violating the norms and step up enforcement to steer the institutional norms back.
Sure it can feel unfair, and "everyone else is doing it" is a common refrain, but holding individuals accountable is one way to fix the institution.
I agree with most of what you said but i'd like to raise 2 points
1) the immediate action _is more important immediately_ than the systemic change. We should focus on maximizing our "fixing" and letting a toxic element continue to poison you while you waste time wondering how you got there is counterproductive. It is important to focus on the systemic change, but once you have removed the person that will destroy the organization/kill us all.
I suppose that depends on context. I think it's important to be pragmatic regarding urgency. Of course the most urgent thing is to stop the bleeding; removing the bullet can probably wait until things have calmed down a bit.
If Joe dropped the production database and you're uncertain about his intentions then perhaps it would be a good idea to do the bare minimum by reducing his access privileges for the time being. No more than that though.
Whereas if you're reasonably certain that there was no intentional foul play involved then focusing on the individual from the outset isn't likely to improve the eventual outcome (rather it seems to me quite likely to be detrimental).
Exactly. The above comment is an example of the kind of toxic blameless culture I was talking about: Deflecting every problem with a person into a problem with the organization.
It’s a good thing to take a look at where the process went wrong, but that’s literally just a postmortem. Going fully into blameless postmortems adds the precondition that you can’t blame people, you are obligated to transform the obvious into a problem with some process or policy.
Anyone who has hired at scale will eventually encounter an employee who seems lovely in interviews but turns out to be toxic and problematic in the job. The most toxic person I ever worked with, who culminated in dozens of peers quitting the company before he was caught red handed sabotaging company work, was actually one of the nicest and most compassionate people during interviews and when you initially met him. He, of course, was a big proponent of blameless postmortems and his toxicity thrived under blameless culture for longer than it should have.
Of course. I actually think that "we did everything we reasonably could have" or "doing more would be financially disadvantageous for us" are acceptable conclusions for an RCA. But it's important that such a conclusion is arrived at only after rigorously following the process and making a genuine high effort attempt to identify ways in which the system could be improved. You wouldn't be performing an RCA if the incident didn't have fairly serious consequences, right?
It could also well be that Joe did the same thing at his last employer, someone in hiring happened to catch wind of it, a disorganized or understaffed process resulted in the ball somehow getting dropped, and here you are.
> Ejecting a single problematic person doesn't fix the underlying problem - how did that person get in the door in the first place? If they weren't problematic when they arrived, does that mean there were corrosive elements in the environment that led to the change?
This is exactly the toxicity I’ve experienced with blameless postmortem culture:
Hiring is never perfect. It’s impossible to identify every problematic person at the interview stage.
Some times, it really is the person’s own fault. Doing mental gymnastics to assume the system caused the person to become toxic is just a coping mechanism to avoid acknowledging that some people really are problematic and it’s nobody’s fault but their own.
On the contrary. It's all too easy to dismiss as being the fault of a fatally flawed individual. In fact that's likely to be the bias of those involved - our system is good, our management is competent. Behead the sacrificial lamb and be done with it. Phrases such as "hirinng is never perfect" can themselves at times be an extremely tempting coping mechanism to avoid acknowledging inconvenient truths.
I'm not saying you shouldn't eventually arrive at the conclusion you're suggesting. I'm saying that it's extremely important not to start there and not to use the possibility of arriving there as an excuse to shirk asking difficult questions about the inner workings and performance of the broader organization.
> Doing mental gymnastics to assume the system caused the person to become toxic
No, don't assume. Ask if it did. "No that does not appear to be the case" can sometimes be a perfectly reasonable conclusion to arrive at but it should never be an excuse to avoid confronting uncomfortable realities.
> Like blameless postmortems taken to a comical extreme where one person is always doing some careless that causes problem
Post-mortems are a terrible place for handling HR issues. I'd much rather they be kept focused on processes and technical details, and human problem be kept private.
Dogpiling in public is an absolutely awful thing to encourage, especially as it turns from removing a problematic individual to looking for whoever the scapegoat is this time.
The prior is stating an extreme case, eg "comical extreme".
One problem is that if you behave as if a person isn't the cause, you end up with all sorts of silly rules and processes, which are just in place to counter "problematic individual".
I agree, but in this hypothetical situation the HR part needs to happen, despite the fact that most people don't want to be the squeaky wheel that explicitly starts pointing fingers..
It's way too easy to pretend the system is the problem while sticking your head in the sand because you don't want to solve the actual human problem.
Sure, use the post mortem to brainstorm how to prevent/detect/excise the systematic problem ("How do we make sure no one else can make the same mistake again"), but eventually you just need to deal with the repeat offender.
People don’t really understand what this stuff means and create fucked up processes.
In a blame focused postmortem you say “Johnny fucked up” and close it.
When you are about accountability, the responsible parties are known or discovered if unknown and are responsible for prevention/response/repair/etc. The corrective action can incorporate and number of things, including getting rid of Johnny.
This hits the nail on the head. I liken it to a scale or ladder, each rung representing a new level of understanding:
1) Basic morality (good vs evil) with total agency ascribed to the individual
2) Basic systems (good vs bad), with total agency ascribed to the system and people treated as perfectly rational machines (where most of the comments here seem to sit)
3) Blended system and morality, or "Systemic Morality": agency can be system-based or individual-based, and morality can be good or bad. This is the single largest rung, because there's a lot to digest here, and it's where a lot of folks get stuck on one ("you can't blame people for making rational decisions in a bad system") or the other ("you can't fault systems designed by fallible humans"). It's why there's a lot of "that's just the way things are" useless attitudes at present, because folks don't want to climb higher than this rung lest they risk becoming accountable for their decisions to themselves and others.
4) "Comprehensive Morality": an action is net good or bad because of the system and the human. A good human in a bad system is more likely to make bad choices via adherence to systemic rules, just as a bad human in a good system is likely to find and exploit weaknesses in said system for personal gain. You cannot ascribe blame to one or the other, but rather acknowledge both separately and together. Think "Good Place" logic, with all of its caveats (good people in bad systems overwhelmingly make things worse by acting in good faith towards bad outcomes) and strengths (predictability of the masses at scale).
5) "Historical Morality": a system or person is net good or bad because of repeated patterns of behaviors within the limitations (incentives/disincentives) of the environment. A person who routinely exploits the good faith of others and the existing incentive structure of a system purely for personal enrichment is a bad person; a system that repeatedly and deliberately incentivizes the exploitation of its members to drive negative outcomes is a bad system. Individual acts or outcomes are less important than patterns of behavior and results. Humans struggle with this one because we live moment-to-moment, and we ultimately dread being held to account for past actions we can no longer change or undo. Yet it's because of that degree of accountability - that you can and will be held to account for past harms, even in problematic systems - that we have the rule of law, and civilization as a result.
Like a lot of the commenters here, I sat squarely in the third rung for years before realizing that I wasn't actually smart, but instead incredibly ignorant and entitled by refusing to truly evaluate root causes of systemic or personal issues and address them accordingly. It's not enough to merely identify a given cause and call it a day, you have to do something to change or address it to reduce the future likelihood of negative behaviors and outcomes; it's how I can rationalize not necessarily faulting a homeless person in a system that fails to address underlying causes of homelessness and people incentivized not to show empathy or compassion towards them, but also rationalize vilifying the wealthy classes who, despite having infinite access to wealth and knowledge, willfully and repeatedly choose to harm others instead of improving things.
Villainy and Heroism can be useful labels that don't necessarily simplify or ignorantly abstract the greater picture, and I'd like to think any critically-thinking human can understand when someone is using those terms from the first rung of the ladder versus the top rung.
I'm not sure the problems we have at the moment are a lack of accountability. I mean, I think let's go a little overboard on holding people to account first, then wind it back when that happens. The crisis at the moment is mangeralism across all of our institutions which serves to displace accountability .
I've read multiple times that a large percentage of the crime comes from a small group of people. Jail them, and the overall crime rate drops by that percentage.
It's also pretty clearly a deterrence against people admitting and fixing their own mistakes, both individually and as institutions. Which is exactly what we're seeing here...
Sure, but are you implying that is because of our stricter enforcement of the laws? Or other systemic / environmental causes (eg systemic poor mental health)?
I am unfamiliar with the reasons to which the varying murder rate is ascribed. If I had to guess, I would guess economics is #1.
reviewers are unpaid. its also quite common to farm out the actual review work to grad students, postdocs and the like. if you're suggesting adding liability, then you're just undermining the small amount of review that already takes place.
Just to add on, armchair quarterbacking is a thing, it’s easy in hindsight to label decisions as the result of bad intentions. This is completely different than whatever might have been at play in the moment and retrospective judgement is often unrealistic.
It is possible that the root cause is an individual person being bad. This hasn't been as common recently because people were told not to be villains and to dislike villains, so root causes of the remaining problems were often found buried in the machinery of complex social systems.
However if we stop teaching people that villains are bad and they shouldn't be villains, we'll end up with a whole lot more problems of the "yeah that guy is just bad" variety.
Bad acts are in the past, and may be situational or isolated.
Labelling a person as bad has predictive power - you should expect them to do bad acts again.
It might be preferable to instead label them as “a person with a consistent history of bad acts, draw your own conclusion, but we are all capable of both sin and redemption and who knows what the future holds”. I’d just call them a bad person.
That said, I do think we are often too quick to label people as bad based one bad act.
As with anything, it's just highly subjective. What some call an heinous act is another person's heroic act. Likewise, where I draw the line between an unlucky person and a villain is going to be different from someone else.
Personally, I do believe that there are benefits to labelling others as villains if a certain threshold is met. It cognitively reduces strain by allowing us to blanket-label all of their acts as evil [0] (although with the drawback of occasionally accidentally labelling acts of good as evil), allowing us to prioritise more important things in life than the actions of what we call villains.
It’s not really subjective if you don’t believe it’s your place to judge the human to begin with.
If you were in their exact life circumstance and environment you would do the same thing. You aren’t going to magically sidestep cause and effect.
The act itself is bad.
The human performing the act was misguided.
I view people as inherently perfect whose view of life, themselves, and their current situations as potentially misguided.
Eg, like a diamond covered in shit.
Just like it’s possible for a diamond to be uncovered and polished, the human is capable of acquiring a truer perspective and more aligned set of behaviors - redemption. Everyone is capable of redemption so nobody is inherently bad. Thinking otherwise may be convenient but is ultimately misguided too.
So the act and the person are separate.
Granted, we need to protect society from such misguidedness, so we have laws, punishments, etc.
But it’s about protecting us from bad behavior, not labeling the individual as bad.
I would argue that villainy and "bad people" is an overcomplication of ignorance.
If we equate being bad to being ignorant, then those people are ignorant/bad (with the implication that if people knew better, they wouldn't do bad things)
I'm sure I'm over simplifying something, looking forward to reading responses.
I'm guessing you believe that a person is always completely responsible for their actions. If you are doing root cause analysis you will get nowhere with that attitude.
In the case of software RCA, but if a crime is committed then many times there is a victim. There could be some root cause, but ignoring the crime creates a new problem for the victim (justice)
Both can be pursued without immediately jumping to defending a crime
On the flop side, maybe there wouldn't be as many garbage papers printed if there were any actual negative consequences. It's not so simple as you make it out to be.
A national "War on Data", a Data enforcement agency (DEA), and a Data Abuse Resistence Education (DARE) program and we should have this problem wrapped up in no time.
You presumably read the piece. There was no remedy. In fact the lavishly generous appreciation of all those complexities arguably is part of the reason there was no remedy. (Or vice versa, i.e. each person's foregone conclusion that there will be no remedy for whatever reason, might've later been justified/rationalized via an appeal to those complexities.)
The act itself, of saying something other than the truth, is always more complex than saying the truth. ← It took more words to describe the act in that very sentence. Because there are two ideas, the truth and not the truth. If the two things match, you have a single idea. Simple.
Speaking personally, if someone's very first contact with me is a lie, they are to be avoided and disregarded. I don't even care what "kind of person" they are. In my world, they're instantly declared worthless. It works pretty well. I could of course be wrong, but I don't think I'm missing out on any rich life experiences by avoiding obvious liars. And getting to the root cause of their stuff or rehabilitating them is not a priority for me; that's their own job. They might amaze me tomorrow, who knows. But it's called judgment for a reason. Such is life in the high-pressure world of impressing rdiddly.
It’s possible to take two opposing and flawed views here, of course.
On the one hand, it is possible to become judgmental, habitually jumping to unwarranted and even unfair conclusions about the moral character of another person. On the other, we can habitually externalize the “root causes” instead of recognizing the vice and bad choices of the other.
The latter (externalization) is obvious when people habitually blame “systems” to rationalize misbehavior. This is the same logic that underpins the fantastically silly and flawed belief that under the “right system”, misbehavior would simply evaporate and utopia would be achieved. Sure, pathological systems can create perverse incentives, even ones that put extraordinary pressure on people, but moral character is not just some deterministic mechanical response to incentive. Murder doesn’t become okay because you had a “hard life”, for example. And even under “perfect conditions”, people would misbehave. In fact, they may even misbehave more in certain ways (think of the pathologies characteristic of the materially prosperous first world).
So, yes, we ought to condemn acts, we ought to be charitable, but we should also recognize human vice and the need for justice. Justly determined responsibility should affect someone’s reputation. In some cases, it would even be harmful to society not to harm the reputations of certain people.
What specific pathologies characteristic of the materially prosperous first world? People almost universally behave better in a functional system with enough housing food education and so forth. Morality is and will always remain important but systems matter a LOT. For instance we've experienced less murder since we stopped mass lead poisoning our entire population.
It's a paradox. We know for an absolute fact that changing the underlying system matters massively but we must continue to acknowledge the individual choice because the system of consequences and as importantly the system of shame keeps those who wouldn't act morally in check. So we punish the person who was probably lead poisoned the same as any other despite knowing that we are partially at fault for the system that lead to their misbehavior.
What if the root cause is that because we stopped labeling villains, they no longer fear being labeled as such. The consequences for the average lying academic have never been lower (in fact they usually don’t get caught and benefit from their lie).
Actually the risks for academic misconduct have never been higher. For quite a while now there's been borderline activism to go out and search the literature for it - various custom software solutions have been written specifically to that end. We're also rapidly approaching a reality in which automated cross checking of the literature for contradictions will be possible.
Unfortunately academia as a pursuit has never had a larger headcount and the incentives to engage in misconduct have likely never been higher (and appear to be steadily increasing).
Surely the public discourse over the past decades has been steadily moving from substantive towards labeling each other villains, not the other way around.
Most people seem to think that holding the "wrong" political stance is a failure of moral character so I'm having difficulty making sense of your point.
They truly don't. That's just part of the alienation.
When the opposition is called evil it's not because logic dictates it must be evil, it's called evil for the same reason it's called ugly, unintelligent, weak, cowardly and every other sort of derogatory adjective under the sun.
These accusations have little to do with how often people consider others things such as "ugly" or "weak", it's just signaling.
I disagree. There's an awful lot of "my position is obviously based on the data, so if you disagree it must be because you want to be evil". (In my opinion, the left does this more than the right, for whatever that's worth.)
If we expand "based on the data" to also include "based on my obviously correct ethical framework dictated by my obviously correct religion" then I figure the score is probably pretty close to even. The weird thing to me is how the far left has adopted behaviors that appear to be fundamentally religious in nature (imo) while fervently denying any such parallel.
IMHO, you should deal with actual events, when not ideas, instead of people. No two people share the exact same values.
For example, you assume that guy trying to cut the line is a horrible person and a megalomaniac because you've seen this like a thousand times. He really may be that, or maybe he's having an extraordinarily stressful day, or maybe he's just not integrated with the values of your society ("cutting the line is bad, no matter what") or anything else BUT none of all that really helps you think clearly. You just get angry and maybe raise your voice when you're warning him, because "you know" he won't understand otherwise. So you left your values now too because you are busy fighting a stereotype.
IMHO, correct course of action is assuming good faith even with bad actions, and even with persistent bad actions, and thinking about the productive things you can do to change the outcome, or decide that you cannot do anything.
You can perhaps warn the guy, and then if he ignores you, you can even go to security or pick another hill to die on.
I'm not saying that I can do this myself. I fail a lot, especially when driving. It doesn't mean I'm not working on it.
I used to think like this, and it does seem morally sound at first glance, but it has the big underlying problem of creating an excellent context in which to be a selfish asshole.
Turns out that calling someone on their bullshit can be a perfectly productive thing to do, it not only deals with that specific incident, but also promotes a culture in which it's fine to keep each other accountable.
I think they're both good points. An unwillingness to call out bullshit itself leads to a systemic dysfunction but on the flip side a culture where everyone just rages at everything simply isn't productive. Pragmatically, it's important to optimize for the desired end result. I think that's generally going to be fixing the system first and foremost.
It's also important to recognize that there are a lot of situations where calling someone out isn't going to have any (useful) effect. In such cases any impulsive behavior that disrupts the environment becomes a net negative.
I honestly think this would qualify as "ruinous empathy"
It's fine and even good to assume good faith, extend your understanding, and listen to the reasons someone has done harm - in a context where the problem was already redressed and the wrongdoer is labelled.
This is not that. This is someone publishing a false paper, deceiving multiple rounds of reviewers, manipulating evidence, knowingly and for personal gain. And they still haven't faced any consequences for it.
I don't really know how to bridge the moral gap with this sort of viewpoint, honestly. It's like you're telling me to sympathise with the arsonist whilst he's still running around with gasoline
> I don't really know how to bridge the moral gap with this sort of viewpoint, honestly. It's like you're telling me to sympathise with the arsonist whilst he's still running around with gasoline
That wasn't how I read it. Neither sympathize nor sit around doing nothing. Figure out what you can do that's productive. Yelling at the arsonist while he continues to burn more things down isn't going to be useful.
Assuming good faith tends to be an important thing to start with if the goal is an objective assessment. Of course you should be open to an eventual determination of bad faith. But if you start from an assumption of bad faith your judgment will almost certainly be clouded and thus there is a very real possibility that you will miss useful courses of action.
The above is on an individual level. From an organizational perspective if participants know that a process could result in a bad faith determination against them they are much more likely to actively resist the process. So it can be useful to provide a guarantee that won't happen (at least to some extent) in order to ensure that you can reliably get to the bottom of things. This is what we see in the aviation world and it seems to work extremely well.
I thought assuming good faith does not mean you have to sympathize. English is not my native language and probably that's not the right concept.
I mean, do not put the others into any stereotype. Assume nothing? Maybe that sounds better. Just look at the hand you are dealt and objectively think what to do.
If there is an arsonist, you deal with that a-hole yourself, call the police, or first try to take your loved ones to safety first?
I think they're actually just saying bad actors are inevitable, inconsistent, and hard to identify ahead of time, so it's useless to be a scold when instead you can think of how to build systems that are more resilient to bad acts
You have to do both. Offense and defense are closely related. You can make it hard to engage in bad acts, but if there are no penalties for doing so or trying to do so, then that means there are no penalties for someone just trying over and over until they find a way around the systems.
Academics that refuse to reply to people trying to replicate their work need to be instantly and publicly fired, tenure or no. This isn't going to happen, so the right thing to do is for the vast majority of practitioners to just ignore academia whilst politically campaigning for the zeroing of government research grants. The system is unsaveable.
Perhaps start by defunding any projects by institutions that insist on protecting fraudsters especially in the soft sciences. There is a lot of valuable hard science that IS real and has better standards.
One thing that stands in the way of other people choosing the wrong path is the perception of consequences. Minimal consequences by milquetoast critics who just want to understand is a bug not a feature.
People are on average both bad and stupid and function without a framework of consequences and expectations where they expect to suffer and feel shame. They didn't make a mistake they stood in front of all their professional colleagues and published effectively what they knew were lies. The fact that they can publish lies and others are happy to build on lies ind indicates the whole community is a cancer. The fact that the community rejects calls for correction indicates its metastasized and at least as far as that particular community the patient is dead and there is nothing left to save.
They ought to be properly ridiculed and anyone who has published obvious trash should have any public funds yanked and become ineligible for life. People should watch their public ruin and consider their own future action.
If you consider the sheer amount of science that has turned out to be outright fraud in the last decade this is a crisis.
That comment sounds like the environment causes bad behavior. That's a liberal theory refuted consistently by all the people in bad environments who choose to not join in on the bad behavior, even at a personal loss.
God gave us free will to choose good or evil in various circumstances. We need to recognize that in our assessments. We must reward good choices and address bad ones (eg the study authors'). We should also change environments to promote good and oppose evil so the pressures are pushing in the right direction.
People are afraid to sound too critical. It's very noticeable how every article that points out a mistake anywhere in a subject that's even slightly politically charged, has to emphasize "of course I believe X, I absolutely agree that Y is a bad thing", before they make their point. Criticising an unreplicable paper is the same thing. Clearly these people are afraid that if they sound too harsh, they'll be ignored altogether as a crank.
> Clearly these people are afraid that if they sound too harsh, they'll be ignored altogether as a crank.
This is true though, and one of those awkward times where good ideals like science and critical feedback brush up against potentially ugly human things like pride and ego.
I read a quote recently, and I don't like it, but it's stuck with me because it feels like it's dancing around the same awkward truth:
"tact is the art of make a point without making an enemy"
I guess part of being human is accepting that we're all human and will occasionally fail to be a perfect human.
Sometimes we'll make mistakes in conducting research. Sometimes we'll make mistakes in handling mistakes we or others made. Sometimes these mistakes will chain together to create situations like the post describes.
Making mistakes is easy - it's such a part of being human we often don't even notice we do it. Learning you've made a mistake is the hard part, and correcting that mistake is often even harder. Providing critical feedback, as necessary as it might be, typically involves putting someone else through hardship. I think we should all be at least slightly afraid and apprehensive of doing that, even if it's for a greater good.
The fountain is charity. This is no mere matter of sentiment. Charity is willing the objective good of the other. This is what should inform our actions. But charity does not erase the need for justice.
American culture has this weird thing to avoid blame and direct feedback. It's never appropriate to say "yo, you did shit job, can you not fuck it up next time?". For example, I have a guy in my team who takes 10 minutes every standup - if everyone did this, standup would turn into an hour-long meeting - but telling him "bro what the fuck, get your shit together" is highly inappropriate so we all just sit and suffer. Soon I'll have my yearly review and I have no clue what to expect because my manager only gives me feedback when strictly and explicitly required so the entire cycle "I do something wrong" -> "I get reprimanded" -> "I get better" can take literal years. Unless I accidentally offend someone, then I get 1:1 within an hour. One time I was upset about the office not having enough monitors and posted this on slack and my manager told me not to do that because calling out someone's shit job makes them lose face and that's a very bad thing to do.
Whatever happens, avoid direct confrontation at all costs.
On one hand, I totally agree - soliciting and giving feedback is a weakness.
On the other hand, it sounds like this workplace has weak leadership - have you considered leaving for some place better? If the manager can’t do their job enough to give you decent feedback and stop a guy giving 10 min stand ups, LEAVE.
Reasons for not leaving? Ok, then don’t be a victim. Tell yourself you’re staying despite the management and focus on the positive.
I agree. If the company culture is not even helping or encouraging people to give pragmatic feedback, the war is already lost. Even the CEO and the board are in for a few years of stress.
The biggest reason for not leaving is that I understand that perfect things don't exist and everything is about tradeoffs. My current work is complete dogshit - borderline retarded coworkers, hilariously incompetent management. But on the other hand they pay me okay salary while having very little expectations, which means that if I spend entire day watching porn instead of working, nobody cares. That's a huge perk, because it makes the de facto salary per hour insanely huge. Moreover, I found a few people from other teams I enjoy talking to, which means it's a rare opportunity for me to build a social life. Once they start requiring me to actually put in the effort, I'll bounce.
I'll be direct with you, this sounds like an issue specific to your workplace. Get a better job with a manager who can find the middle ground between cursing in frustration and staying silent.
“For the sake of time, is it okay if we move on to the next update? We can go into further details offline.”
Also if that doesn’t work, “Hey Bro I notice you like to give a lot of detail in standup. That’s great, but we want to keep it a short meeting so we try to focus on just the highlights and surfacing any key blockers. I don’t want to interrupt you, so if you like I can help you distill what you’ve worked on before the meeting starts.”
While I agree there’s a childish softness in our culture in many respects, you don’t need to go to extremes and adopt thuggish or boorish behavior (which is also a problem, one that is actually concomitant with softness, because soft people are unable to bear discomfort or things not going their way). Proportionality and charity should inform your actions. Loutish behavior makes a person look like an ill-mannered toddler.
That's a legitimate fear though - it's exactly what happened in this case. "The reviewers did not address the substance of my comment; they objected to my tone".
In general Western society has effectively outlawed "shame" as an effective social tool for shaping behavior. We used to shame people for bad behavior, which was quite effective in incentivizing people to be good people (this is overly reductive but you get the point). Nowadays no one is ever at fault for doing anything because "don't hate the player hate the game".
A blameless organization can work, so long as people within it police themselves. As a society this does not happen, thus making people more steadfast in their anti-social behavior
It's interesting to talk about 'banality of evil' in the comment section about flawed papers. Her portrayal of Eichmann was very wrong, Arendt had an idea in her head of how he should be and didn't care too much about the facts and the process. Not that I totally disagree with the idea.
I guess he means that the authors can still be decent people in their private and even professional lives and not general scoundrels who wouldn't stop at actively harming other people to gain something.
At which point do you cross the line? Somebody who murders to take someone else's money is ultimately just too lazy to provide value in return for money, so they're not evil?
There are extremely competent coworkers I wouldn't like them as neighbours. Some of my great neighborhoods would make very sloppy and annoying coworkers.
These people are terrible at their job, perhaps a bit malicious too. They may be great people as friends and colleagues.
I think the writer might enjoy Vonnegut's Mother Night.
> Vonnegut is not, I believe, talking about mere inauthenticity. He is talking about engaging in activities which do not agree with what we ourselves feel are our own core morals while telling ourselves, “This is not who I really am. I am just going along with this on the outside to get by.” Vonnegut’s message is that the separation I just described between how we act externally and who we really are is imaginary.
Not sure if this in jest referring to the inherently sanctimonious nature of the framing, but this is actually exactly what I was gesturing towards. If it didn't feel good, then it would be either an unintentional action (random or coerced), or an irrational one (go against their perceived self-interest).
The whole "bad vs good person" framing is probably not a very robust framework, never thought about it much, so if that's your position you might well be right. But it's not a consideration that escaped me, I reasoned under the same lens the person above did on intention.
Connecting people's characters to their deed is a double edged sword. It's not that it's necessarily mistaken, but you have to choose your victories. Maybe today you get some satisfaction from condemning the culprits, but you also pay for it by making it even more difficult to get cooperation from the system in the future. We all have friends, family and colleagues that we believe to be good. They're all still capable of questionable actions. If we systematically tie bad deeds to bad people, then surely those people we love and know to be good are incapable of what they're being accused. That's part of how closing ranks works. I think King recognizes this too, which is why he recommends that Penalties should reflect the severity of the violation, not be all-or-nothing.
It is like in organisational error management (aka. error culture), there are three levels here:
1) errors happen, basically accidents.
2) errors are made, wrong or unexpected result for different intention.
3) errors are caused, the error case is the intended outcome. This is where "bad people" dwell.
Knowing and keeping silent about 1) and 2) makes any error 3). I think, we are on 2) in TFA. This needs to be addressed, most obviously through system change, esp. if actors seem to act rationally in the system (as the authors do) with broken outcomes.
I guess there isn't much utility in categorizing people as "good" and "bad," arguably. Better to think about the incentives/punishments in the system and adjust them until people behave well.
Never qualify the person, only the deed. Because we are all capable of the same actions, some of us have just not done them. But we all have the same capacity.
And yes, I am saying that I have the same capacity for wrong as the person you are thinking about, mon semblable, mon frère.
> Because we are all capable of the same actions, some of us have just not done them
> And yes, I am saying that I have the same capacity for wrong as the person you are thinking about...
No one is disputing any of this. The person who is capable, and who has chosen to do, the bad deed is morally blameworthy (subject to mitigating circumstances).
They are very related concepts. Lack of remorse? Malicious act? Particularly heinous act? Both morally blameworthy and bad person! Isolated incident? Not a pattern? Morally blameworthy but not bad person.
This is pretty standard virtue ethics we all learned in school. Your statements that morally blameworthiness and badness are "[n]ot the same thing...[a]t all" and that we should "[n]ever qualify the person, only the deed" make me think your moral framework is likely not linked to millennia of thought in this area from Socrates on down, so it's unlikely we will get anywhere and should "agree to disagree."
I think calling someone a "bad person" (which is itself a horribly vague term) for one situation where you don't have all the context is something most people should be loath to do. People are complicated and in general normal people do a lot of bad things for petty reasons.
Other than just the label being difficult to apply, these factors also make the argument over who is a "bad person" not really productive and I will put those sorts of caveats into my writings because I just don't want to waste my time arguing the point. Like what does "bad person" even mean and is it even consistent across people? I think it makes a lot more sense to label them clearer labels which we have a lot more evidence for, like "untrustworthy scientist" (which you might think is a bad person inherently or not).
> I can't believe I just read that. What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"
For starters, the bar should be way higher than accusations from a random person.
For me,there's a red flag in the story: posting reviews and criticism of other papers is very mundane in academia. Some Nobel laureates even authored papers rejecting established theories. The very nature of peer review involves challenging claims.
So where is the author's paper featuring commentaries and letters, subjecting the author's own criticism to peer review?
But he shoveled the neighbor sidewalks when it snowed.
I have a relative who lives in Memphis, Tennessee. A few years ago some guy got out of prison, went to a fellow's home to buy a car, shot the car owner dead, stole the car and drove it around until he got killed by the police.
One of the neighbors said, I kid you not, "he's a good kid"
Focusing on criticising people's actions and being lenient and not judging the person's character is literally centuries old, I don't think you can say it's because of woke.
The woke movement in many ways has taken core Christian principles, cut out the supernatural elements, and formed a new quasi religious movement. It has its dogmas and priests, it focuses on the poor & disadvantaged, etc. That's not a criticism of woke, I see it more as a response of the failures of Christianity in practice to live or embrace those values.
There's a reason Nietzsche labeled it slave morality. It undermines people's confidence to act and judge other appropriately, revalues weakness to be a virtue and strength as evil, and demands that people stop trying to change the world for the better and focus instead on their own supposed guilt. It's morality developed for people who are structurally unable to act (because they are commoner serfs with no power) to make them feel justified and satisfied with inaction.
But there is a concern which goes out of the "they" here. Actually, "they" could just as well not exist, and all narrative in the article be some LLM hallucination, we are still training ourself how we respond to this or that behavior we can observe and influence how we will act in the future.
If we go with the easy path labeling people as root cause, that's the habit we are forging for ourself. We are missing the opportunity to hone our sense of nuance and critical thought about the wider context which might be a better starting point to tackle the underlying issue.
Of course, name and shame is still there in the rhetorical toolbox, and everyone and their dog is able to use it even when rage and despair is all that stay in control of one mouth. Using it with relevant parcimony however is not going to happen from mere reactive habits.
It's 2026, and social media brigading and harassment is a well-known phenomenon. In light of that, trying to preemptively de-escalate seems like a Good Thing.
Google Scholar citation numbers are unreliable and and cannot be used in bibliometric evaluation. They are auto generated and are not limited to the journal literature. This critique is completely unserious. At the same time bad papers also tend to get more citations on average than middling papers, because they are cited in critiques. This effect should be even larger in a dataset that includes more than the citations from journal papers. This blog post will in time also add to the Google Scholar citation count.
Citation studies are problematic and can and their use should be criticized. But this here is just warm air build on a fundamental misunderstanding of how to measure and interpret citation data.
The paper publishing industry has a tragedy of the commons problem. Individual authors benefit from fake or misrepresented research. Over time more and more people roll their eyes when they hear “a study found…” Over a long period it depreciates science and elevates superstition.
For example, look at how people interact with LLMs. Lots of superstition (take a deep breath) not much reading about the underlying architecture.
The gatekeepers were able to convince the American public of such heinous things like circumcision at birth based on "science" and now they're having to deal with the corruption. People like RFK Jr. are able to be put into top positions because what they're spewing has no less scientific merit than what's accepted and recommended. The state of scientific literature is incredibly sad and mainly a factor of politics and money than of scientific evidence.
I studied a Masters from Cambridge Judge Business School, and my takeaway is that “Management Science” is to Science what “Software Engineering” is to Engineering.
I think what these papers prove is my newer theory that organized science isn't scientific at all. It's mostly unverified claims by people rewarded for throwing papers out that look scientific, have novelty, and achieve policy goals of specific groups. There's also little review with dissent banned in many places. We've been calling it scientism since it's like a self-reinforcing religion.
We need to throw all of this out by default. From public policy to courtrooms, we need to treat it like any other eyewitness claim. We shouldn't beleive anything unless it has strong arguments or data backing it. For science, we need the scientific method applied with skeptical review and/or replication. Our tools, like statistical methods and programs, must be vetted.
Like with logic, we shouldn't allow them to go beyond what's proven in this way. So, only the vetted claims are allowed as building blocks (premises) in newly-vetted work. The premises must be used how they were used before. If not, they are re-checked for the new circumstances. Then, the conclusions are stated with their preconditions and limitations to only he applied that way.
I imagine many non-scientists and taxpayers assumed what I described is how all these "scientific facts" and "consensus" vlaims were done. The opposite was true in most cases. So, we need to not onoy redo it but apply scientific method to the institutions themselves assessing their reliability. If they don't get reliable, they loose their funding and quickly.
(Note: There are groups in many fields doing real research and experimental science. We should highlight them as exemplars. Maybe let them take the lead in consulting for how to fix these problems.)
> We need to throw all of this out by default. From public policy to courtrooms, we need to treat it like any other eyewitness claim.
If you can't trust eyewitness claims, if you can't trust video or photographic or audio evidence, then how does one Find Truth? Nobody really seems to have a solid answer to this.
It's specific segments of people saying we can't trust eyewitness claims. They actually work well enough that we run on them from childhood to adulthood. Accepting that truth is the first step.
Next, we need to understand why that is, which should be trusted, and which can't be. Also, what methods to use in what contexts. We need to develop education for people about how humanity actually works. We can improve steadily over time.
On my end, I've been collecting resources that might be helpful. That includes Christ-centered theology with real-world application, philosophies of knowledge with guides on each one, differences between real vs organized science, biological impact on these, dealing with media bias (eg AllSides), worldview analyses, critical thinking (logic), statistical analyses (esp error spotting), writing correct code, and so on.
One day, I might try to put it together into a series that equips people to navigate all of this stuff. For right now, I'm using it as a refresher to improve my own abilities ahead of entering the Data Science field.
> It's specific segments of people saying we can't trust eyewitness claims.
Scientists that have studied this over long periods of times and diverse population groups?
I've done this firsthand - remembered an event a particular way only to see video (in the old days, before easy video editing) and find out it... didn't quite happen as I remembered.
That's because human beings aren't video recorders. We're encoding emotions into sensor data, and get blinded by things like Weapon Focus and Selective Attention.
The problem with academia is that it's often more about politics and reputation than seeking the truth. There are multiple examples of researchers making a career out flawed papers and never retracking or even admitting a mistake.
All the talks they were invited to give, all the followers they had, all the courses they sold and impact factor they have built. They are not going to came forward and say "I misinterpreted the data and made long reaching conclusions that are nonsense, sorry for misleading you and thousands of others".
The process protects them as well. Someone can publish another paper, make different conclusions. There is 0 effort get to the truth, to tell people what is and what isn't current consensus and what is reasonable to believe. Even if it's clear for anyone who digs a bit deeper it will not be communicated to the audience the academia is supposed to serve. The consensus will just quietly shift while the heavily quoted paper is still there. The talks are still out there, the false information is still propagated while the author enjoys all the benefits and suffers non of the negative consequences.
If it functions like that I don't think it's fair that tax payer funds it. It's there to serve the population not to exist in its own world and play its own politics and power games.
That's a very good point. Some of what's called "science" today, in popular media and coming from governments, is religion. "We know all, do not question us." It's the common problem of headlines along the lines of "scientists say" or "The Science says", which should always be a red flag - but the majority of people believe it.
That's a misunderstanding. There were plenty of ancient and medieval translations of the Bible, but the Bible itself wasn't as central as it is today.
Catholic and Orthodox Christianity do not focus as much on the Bible as Protestant Christianity. They are based on the tradition, of which the Bible is only a part, while the Protestant Reformation elevated the Bible above the tradition. (By a tortured analogy, you could say that Catholicism and Orthodoxy are common law Christianity, while Protestantism is civil law Christianity.)
From a Catholic or Orthodox perspective, there is a living tradition from the days of Jesus and the Apostles to present day. Some parts of it were written down and became the New Testament, but the parts that were left out were equally important. You cannot therefore understand the Bible without understanding the tradition, because it's only a partial account.
Scientists say that today too, it's a standard response if people outside of academia critique their work. "That person is not an expert" - totally normal response, it's taken to be a killer rebuttal by journalists and politicians.
Not exactly...in the past the Bible was literally not allowed to be translated from Latin into local languages. Ordinary people were 100% reliant on the elites to tell them what was in it.
They do and there is nothing wrong with that. The papers published in this journal are peer-reviewed and go through multiple rounds of review. Also, note that Andrew King could carry out the replication because the data is publicly available.
Yes, that's the problem, many do, and they swear by these oversimplified ideas and one-liners that litter the field of popular management books, fully believing it's all "scientific" and they'll laugh at you for questioning it. It's nuts.
There is a difference between popular management books and academic publications.
For example there is a long history of studies of the relationship between working hours and productivity which is one of the few things that challenges the idea that longer hours means more output.
Yes, but the books generally take their ideas from the academic publications. And the replication problems, and general incentives around academic publishing, show that all too often, the academic publications in the social sciences are unfortunately no more rigorous than the populist books.
The paper touches on a point (“sustainability “) that is a sacred cow for many people.
Even if you support sustainability, criticizing the paper will be treated as heresy by many.
Despite our idealistic vision of Science(tm), it is a human process done by humans with human motivations and human weaknesses.
From Galileo to today, we have repeatedly seen the enthusiastic willingness by majorities of scientists to crucify heretics (or sit by in silence) and to set aside scientific thinking and scientific process when it clashes against belief or orthodoxy or when it makes the difference whether you get tenure or publication.
Recently I was made aware by colleagues of a publication by authors of a new agent-based modeling toolkit in a different, hipper programming language. They compared their system to others, including mine, and made kind of a big checklist of who's better in what, and no surprise, theirs came out on top. But digging deeper, it quickly became clear that they didn't understand how to run my software correctly; and in many other places they bent over backwards to cherry-pick, and made a lot of bold and completely wrong claims. Correcting the record would place their software far below mine.
Mind you, I'm VERY happy to see newer toolkits which are better than mine -- I wrote this thing over 20 years ago after all, and have since moved on. But several colleagues demanded I do so. After a lot of back-and-forth however, it became clear that the journal's editor was too embarrassed and didn't want to require a retraction or revision. And the authors kept coming up with excuses for their errors. So the journal quietly dropped the complaint.
I'm afraid that this is very common.
reply