Comment by JadeNB
> The ideal amount of fraud and false claims in research is not zero, because the policing effort it would take to accomplish this goal would destroy all other forms of value.
Surely that just means that we shouldn't spend too much effort achieving small marginal progress towards that ideal, rather than that's not the ideal? I am a scientist (well, a mathematician), and I can maintain my idealism about my discipline in the face of the idea that we can't and shouldn't try to catch and stop all fraud, but I can't maintain it in the face of the idea that we should aim for a small but positive amount of fraud.
It's not actually "Ideal" is the point.
You CANNOT create a system that has zero fraud without rejecting a HUGE amount of legitimate work/requests.
This is as true for credit card processing as it is for scientific publishing.
There's no such thing as "Reject 100% of fraud, accept 100% of non-fraud". It wouldn't be "ideal" to make our spaceships with anti-gravity drives, it would be "science fiction".
The relationship between how hard you prevent fraud and how much legitimate traffic you let through is absurdly non-linear, and super dependent on context. Is there still low hanging fruit on the fraud prevention pipeline for scientific publishing?
That depends. Scientists claim that having to treat each other as hostile entities would basically destroy scientific progress. I wholeheartedly agree.
This should be obvious to anyone who has approved a PR from a coworker. Part of our job in code review is to prevent someone from writing code to do hostile things. I'm sure most of us put some effort towards preventing obvious problems, but if you've ever seen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Obfuscated_C_Cod... or some of the famous bits of code used to hack nation states then you should recognize that the amount of effort it would take to be VERY SURE that this PR doesn't introduce an attack is insane, and no company could afford it. Instead, we assume that job interviews, coworker vibes, and reputation are enough to dissuade that attack vector, and it works for almost everyone except the juiciest targets.
Science is a high trust industry. It also has "juicy targets" like "high temp superconductor" or "magic pill to cure cancer", but scientists approach everything with "extreme claims require extreme results" and that seems to do alright. They mostly treated LK-99 with "eh, let's not get hasty" even as most of the internet was convinced it was a new era of materials. I think scientists have a better handle on this than the rest of us.