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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   29189 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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I mean, there are two separate issues here and it's important not to conflate: 1) scientific fraud i.e. bad stuff happened because you provided Science and people trusted you but the Science was a lie; 2) mad science i.e. you did experiments that were -EV because the experimental procedure caused or risked harm.

With regard to #1 I would caution you that there is a really-obvious failure mode:

  1. Scientist does politically-incorrect research.
  2. Colleagues accuse scientist of fraud.
  3. "Experts" testify that scientist's results could only have been the result of fraud and that anyone who disagrees is Xist.
  4. Oh whoops, there goes the last shred of capability of our research mechanisms to find politically-incorrect truths.

Regarding #1, they already do this.

The PIC researchers don't generally get jailed for the bogus fraud, though.

In corrupt countries that's how the police works. You get expropriated and imprisoned but can't complain since the courts will side against you.

That's bad but it doesn't follow that we should abolish the police. We should abolish corruption and policing is a useful tool for that, in principle.

My point is not that it's impossible to fix academia from outside, just that there are hostile actors who are very good at rules abuse there and a treacherous epistemic environment, and naïve action that doesn't take those into account risks backfire.

Based on this and other high profile cases it seems we could have a high standard for proving fraud.

On the other hand in these cases of fraud maybe we wouldn’t have confessions if there were more serious consequences.

The thing I think certainly I have been catching up on the last eight years is how important culture is for plugging in the gaps of laws. It’s like this type of fraud should be a career-ending scandal, not necessarily illegal. The law is too blunt an instrument I think.

anyone who disagrees is Xist.

Surely anyone who disagrees isn't sufficiently Xist.

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