Comment by constantcrying

Comment by constantcrying 13 hours ago

But why is lying so common in science?

Incentives like these exist in basically all areas of work. Perform well and you get "job security, promotion and prestige". Yet somehow there is no decade long ongoing crisis in industry of corporations lying about their products. When these cases happens (obviously they do), corporations and individuals get punished.

How would you reform the system? More funding definitely is not the answer.

ChromaticPanic 10 hours ago

You mean like how tobacco company CEO's went to Congress telling them that there is no cancer risk? Oil companies pretending they didn't know about global warming? Shrinkflation? Corporations lie all the time and the people running them are never punished.

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constantcrying 4 hours ago

>Corporations lie all the time and the people running them are never punished.
Then why is the ex-VW CEO currently in court?
I did not deny that fraud exists in corporation, but it is not committed by the rank and file. Most employees actually perform their duties. Examples of fraud seem rare, the VW scandal maybe.
In science a good part of the rank and file is either incompetent and malicious.

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hansvm 11 hours ago

> why science in particular?

Because we can't usually measure our goals directly. We want outcomes like relativity and the two-slit experiment. Those results take a lot of time to uncover and have a meaningful chance of failure. If you look at an early-career scientist who hasn't produced (m)any papers, chances are they're fully qualified _and_ doing all the right things with respect to our society-level goals. However, that's hard to distinguish from outright fraud and freeloading from the outside, so we've imposed a crappy proxy measure, used for career advancement.

That's different from many jobs, where it's easy to measure incremental progress and where the results are more certain. You can directly weed out poor performers because you can watch them perform poorly.

> no decade long ongoing crisis of corporations lying about their products

Really? Flame retardants in our "food-grade" spatulas, lead leaching out from ceramic bowls into your soup and cereal, products "sold" as physical devices with a backdoor to start requiring a subscription years later, the pattern of building a brand on quality and then gutting the bill of materials to ramp up profits while deceiving customers into thinking it's the same thing, WalMart explicitly requiring manufacturers to not have any change in product numbers for the sub-par products sold there, .... Fraud is rampant, enough so that for most products I find it quite hard to actually make a sound purchasing decision, and those corporations seem to be wildly profitable.

> individuals get punished

That's true to an extent, but how many doc jockeys exist in some unimportant department in FAANG? You can have a very comfortable career skating by on minimal productive output when cause and effect for the business operate on sufficiently long timescales and with nonlocal, diffuse connections.

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constantcrying 4 hours ago

>You can directly weed out poor performers because you can watch them perform poorly.
Why don't we fire researchers who committed fraud or who are incompetent?
Some studies will fail replication, even though the researchers did everything right. But in many cases the methodology is flawed, statistics are misused or the data is massages. In industry this would be grounds of termination and this isn't even the outright fraud, which also happens. For most of these no serious punishment is expected.

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LorenPechtel 27 minutes ago

That flame retardant bit was bad research, they misplaced the decimal point and concluded that the contamination could reach the safety limit. And it wasn't like they put it there deliberately, that was the result of recycling stuff that can't be heated to the point of burning off impurities.

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