What may be even worse is when the president of the university won't let you publish a good paper because it refutes what the donor is trying to prove and the president doesn't want the university to lose the research grant.
I worked in the physics dept when an undergraduate, so I knew many of the grad students and professors. It was common knowledge that one prolific professor who was a phys rev referee would reject a submitted paper and then assume the research himself, another egregious type of fraud.
@@SurfinScientistfire him? That would require the universities to be respectable. They are nothing but brainwashing hubs, manipulating students to be future sheep.
We were never supposed to have put that much faith in them in the first place. A correction to normal skepticism is a good thing. Caveat emptor is rendered in Latin for a reason. It's not newly relevant advice.
We did lose this much faith back during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and some countries came out just fine. Of course, those that didn't started WWII and caused genocides and all sorts of suffering...
My main problem with scientific publishing is that there is very little focus on replication. I'm taking bets on how many studies we could throw away if we were to make a serious effort towards replication, I put myself down for about half.
That’s why one should never adapt an opinion unreflected. You can ditch alot of studies just by checking their authors, funding and possible agenda and evaluating their results vs. your own educated experience and knowledge (if you happen to have such).
they should adopt the blockchain model: A transaction (paper) is not valid until at least 5 blocks (similar papers) have confirmed it. Not that this will ever happen, with how utterly sting funding for science already is
I think this is a great example of Goodhart's law. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." If number of papers is the measure, then science isn't even the goal anymore.
@@undercoveragent9889 certainly we can see this across RUclips with clickbait - though there's still SOME incentive to provide good content to get subs.
This was one of the reasons I dropped out of academia. I hadn't published "enough" as a grad student. I just published work describing what I had done. Sincere researchers have to game the system by effectively publishing the same research multiple times with only small increments. It's not as bad as fraud but it produces a lot of hard-to-parse noise that does _not_ help with real progress.
I am PhD Chemist. what you are waking up to is the reason why I am unemployed and proud of it. There is no good reason to be a scientist in this corrupt scientific society.
What corrupt scientific society? If making up conspiracy theories is your MO, isn’t it more likely that you were bad at your work and you now have a chip on your shoulder, hence the complete lack of evidence for anything you claimed. Any fool can invent conspiracy theories. Valid and verified evidence is required to show they are true and you have demonstrably provided none.
no rational person takes you seriously if you say you're a scientist anymore. i ran into the replication crisis myself with papers on atmospheric rendering of all things. and that's not even a politically or economically charged topic with lots of money and power insisting on a specific result. if you really have a phd in chemistry, you should find a way of doing something useful with it. we need less corruption in science, research, and development, not the exodus of the non-corrupt.
Thanks for this Sabine. I decided against pursuing a career in academia when I interned with an academic at the University of Oxford last summer who admitted to flagrantly falsifying validation stats for his papers as he "couldn't be bothered" to derive them honestly but was "pretty sure" his models were going to be 90+% accurate anyhow. I was visibly aghast at this - he clearly sensed this and spent the remainder of my placement chastising me for being "arrogant" and "acting like I know better than everyone" and then didn't respond to my reference request. Seems bullies are rewarded in academic power structures even more so than in corporate ones. I'm now very cynical about novel findings in papers and wait for them to be widely replicated before I believe them.
Shameful. I have had dissolusioning experiences with some people. Bureaucrats at the University of Sydney (I believe in naming and shaming) backed one VIP (Very Important Psychopath) against me with devastating personal and career results, including prosecution on false criminal charges. I beat the rap, the Judge declaring that I was an unusual person. I said to the gentleman from the NSW Ombudsman's office that I had thought universities were places where honesty and integrity mattered. He laughed out loud. I said go ahead. I feel I have just admitted to finding out there is no Easter Bunny. Sorry you let a rotten apple put you off a career. They are in all walks of life and professions. I hope things are working out for you.
All of his criticisms of you are transparently projections, and are the classic signature of people with either narcissistic or sociopathic personality disorders. These are widespread in our society, and not simply in traditional suspected locations like politics and law but also science Industry etcetera.
I used to review papers for a few publications. Once I noted how a particular reference didn't actually say what the referring author said it did. That particular topic was never even mentioned in the reference. After that, that journal stopped asking me to review papers. And, yes, the paper with the suspicious reference got published anyway. 🤔
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
I was not aware of this saying. Thank you. Just went to a school referendum meeting and it was evident that the focus was on support of the public school institution and not the education of students. Very evident especially when school vouchers get discussed.
@@niblick616 unfortunately there is so much evidence that presenting all of it is a daunting task in itself. The sheer number of anecdotal tales confirmed by witnesses alone is only one of the many reasons mistrust and distrust in gooberment and bureaucracy is running rampant. The small fraction of tin foil hat wearing outliers are the ones used to dismiss all claims by the offending officials. But deniers who dismiss the claims don’t see the truckers protests and farmers protests as relevant. Deniers being mostly gooberment officials and bureaucrats and the people who aspire to such positions. 😤
We shouldn't talk about science as though it's a community, an industry, or a collective of any kind. It's a method. What you're referring to is academia, which is not always scientific, even in their "sciences" departments.
The problem and i think her point is, the information is being presented as a result of the scientific method. Alot of the time not being thoroughly being peer reviewed or at best let slide.
The WEF is a group of the most financially Wealthy people in in the world. They fly around on their private jets but insist that others need to reduce their carbon footprint. They have multiple CEO's of international investment firms (like Blackrock) in their ranks. Global investment firms have ownerships in most big corporations and they are also tied to credit lenders. Where do you think most research money and donations come from? It doesn't even need to be bribery - it's can be selective funding based on "preconceived outcomes".
The fact that there is a monetary incentive to publish as many papers as possible is a problem in and of itself. Ideally there should be incentives for quality over quantity as well as attempting to reproduce the results of existing studies.
I have to read scientific journals regularly for my work in military RnD. I notice that newer papers are full of regurgitations and fluff, no new knowledge at all. They can pass their thesis defenses, but when read for real industrial usage, the lies become obvious.
I've had to replicate many papers myself. The methods are simple, and I know what I'm doing. However, so many cannot be replicated and sometimes the thermodynamics don't even make sense. For example, I know that you can't make magnetite under these conditions, and sure enough the material I make is different. It slows progress and weakens the foundation of science.
So how is it to work for a system that supports and endorses these people while they expect YOU to provide critical infrastructure support so that they can forward their plan to create more such a people? It seems to me, like a positive feedback loop!
True dat! But you should add: "[...] And when the lies become obvious, they cease to matter at all. They only delay the ultimate knowledge and truth by a short time, and make the discoveries a little more expensive."
@@Alondro77 I regret to inform you that if you believe that this is oxymoron, they have already won. This is actually the greatest accumulation of experts that you can find in any field, with areas of research (among other, much more related to their original purpose) such as social engineering, state space cultural control of population, decision influencing and non-linear social systems. There is where the current research of social studies and computing emanates.
Speaking of Wikipedia, I know of 2 instances where owners of companies and authors of biographies tried to correct errors in Wikipedia and they were not allowed to edit misinformation in their fields of expertise. I left Academia after 10 years because I hated lying in grant proposals and using statistics to justify conclusions that were at best iffy or at worst wrong.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you tell you that one of the purposes of universities was supposed to insulate science from politics. But when the people running these centers are postmodern lefties, everything is political. 😕
Why did you choose to pervert your own scientific results? Did someone force you to do what you claim you did? Please provide their names, positions and all your valid evidence. Were you awarded any money as a result of your lying? From which body and for which project did you steal it?
@@briancrawford8751 1/ If the OP wants to be taken seriously, yes I do. 2/ That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed in the same way. 3/ Any fool can make up allegations. 4/ Providing at least some valid and verified evidence is what helps separates the conspiracy theorists from the honest. 5/ I note that you wouldn't provide any evidence for any similar claims either. Thanks for making my point.
i'm not saying you're wrong, but...we're in a public forum. you're asking him to admit to details of committing a crime he was coerced into committing by the government and/or corporations. maybe you haven't been watching the news lately? do you know what happens to people who blow the whistle on government and corporate corruption? they go to prison forever. the guy who testified against hunter biden just got indicted...not with any evidence, but simply on a claim by the FBI that he made it up. the fbi colluded with amazon to put a guy in prison for refusing to lie under oath admitting a crime he didn't commit, among other things, and that legal battle is still ongoing. julian assange has been in prison for over a decade without being charged for a crime because he embarrassed the US armed forces, the CIA and hillary clinton as well as leaking that the 2016 democratic primary was rigged. we're living in a dangerous time and you're asking him to lay his neck in a guillotine. the wikipedia thing is well known. they regularly change articles based on current events to support a narrative. it's not just wikipedia. all the popular dictionaries regularly change definitions for the same reason. if you don't believe me, look up the definition of marriage before 2000 and compare it to now in all major dictionaries. @@niblick616
"...we own the science...", "... I am the science...", "....solid science...", "...scientific consensus...", "...trust the science..."... are all common platitudes pushed time-and-again.
@@templarroystonofvasey "scientific consensus" is a very real thing and should not be dismissed without serious counter evidence. The others are red flags.
But the part of the iceberg which you don't see - the underwater part - becomes visible when it begins to matter. That's the good news. The truth will out, when we need it.
Popular science writers, videomakers must teach ignorants about the scientific method and "what is science according to Isaac Asimov ", knowing there are not many asimovs ....
Most people who deny science aren't doing it because they have issues with modern publishing practices. They deny things like evolution, climate science, medical science, and so forth. Their denial is motivated by some religious or anti-science bias, or some conspiracy theory, or willful ignorance; not reasonable skepticism. No one who has issue with modern publishing practices can be called a science denialist. But those who use that problem to make blanket reductionist statements about science in general are science denialists. And they indeed should not be listened to.
After recently retiring, I was curious how things were going in my former field. Twenty years ago, I could easily keep up with all relevant publications. Ten years ago, not so much. Now, not a snowball's chance in heck. It used to be all serious researchers. Based on my recent revisiting of my old field , there's stuff that's now published that's really more appropriate for a homework problem, and it takes way too long to sift through the nonsense to find the good stuff.
Maybe we shouldn't have forced everybody into getting a degree and then told them "go STEM and go home" just to be able to make a living wage to sustain a one bedroom flat in the inner city. Too many idle degrees = too many people looking into their own ways to make good, ethics be damned.
My field is medical statistics. Forty years ago someone doing methodology might be one of the authors of a paper every year. Now it is several papers per year. What they now do is develop methodology for data they haven’t seen.
@@slizzysluzzer I don't think it matters, you and everyone affected by these policies and developments are a drop in a bucket. Most papers are Chinese and Indian by a huge huge margin. It's a side effect of them increasing their standard of living and not wanting to be left behind again. Though these papers are usually... well i pretty much don't have words to describe a typical Indian paper today, still, do you want to be the one lagging behind India in 20-30 years? Of course all of this is going to generate inefficiencies. But progress is also the foundation of prosperity. So what's the solution?
As a peer reviewer for the major journal in my field, I don't run into too many of these faked papers, but I do run into a lot of researchers who can't get the basics of a technical paper right. What is a hypothesis, what is a null hypothesis, how to construct a method to test the both of them, and how to interpret the results.
In my hodunk college they couldn't even check papers properly for plagiarism. It appeared to be an automated check, so if it wasn't in their article database, they didn't care. Some chick in one of the groups I was in just copied paragraphs straight off a website, no problem.
In reviewing papers, I came across more than one example of people who couldn't convert units correctly. This used to be high-school chemistry stuff. A couple of decades later, a friend who was the dean of our vet school complained that his students couldn't do unit conversions. Add another decade or two and...
I agree. I am doing a PhD and my masters was more rigorous than my PhD courses. The students don’t know the basics. I was asked to TA a course and was asked to pass through students who didn’t know the basics. I kind of feel like not finishing the program because it feels like a joke, but I also don’t like the idea of my colleagues being the ones becoming professors teaching the next generation.
As a physicist, I long ago made the decision to decline to review for certain publishers like MDPI, Hindawi, Frontiers, and others. Also, I do not submit my papers there…especially MDPI.
Anytime financial incentives are involved in a system, there will always be some motivation for cheating. Seems like publishers should be financially penalized for not properly vetting papers before publishing them.
Absolutely! And it should be legislated to include the mainstream media as well so that they are incentivized to actually vet the stories they promote too.
i guess you aren't too familiar with how academic publishing works. Publishers (at least privately owned ones) are interested in selling subscriptions (mostly sold to consortia of universities). The vetting process is done "for free" by academics themselves! The editor at the journal after a brief initial assessment of the suitability of a submitted manuscript in their journal, (if not they reject immediately), sends the paper to anonymous (to the manuscript authors) reviewers, who are typically themselves academics in the field from which the paper originates. They spend some hours looking at the paper, its data, and the background literature and send their assessment of the manuscript back to the editor. The editor then decides if the paper should be published in the journal. If so, The authors get a copy of these reviews and are requested to respond to them and send a revision to the editor. If editor and reviewers are satisfied it gets published. The whole chain relies on the good will of those involved. If the publisher, editor, and authors are only interested in publishing and don't care about the quality, you get garbage published, and everyone profits. One way to disincentivize this practice is for university consortia to separate journals with good practices from those that are just publication mills. However, this is more easily said than done, and some publishers (notably the one mentioned by Sabine) are quite litigious, and so you need a legally speaking strong case to do this. It is a big problem and the academic community is grappling with how to deal with it. Science has always relied on publication to disseminate new knowledge and to build on existing knowledge with further work.
@@tokenghost7777 Fox News took a big hit from Dominion Voting Machines, but they’ve profited so much from their MO, they just paid the fine and continue to put their spin on things. Executives don’t fear financial penalties because it rarely impacts them directly. If criminal charges were in the mix, and sometimes they are, that’s a different ball game. Unfortunately, however, the first amendment is very important, so it should be a difficult task to impugn someone for making false claims unless you can show that malice was involved and not simply error. The Fairness Doctrine was overturned in the eighties. This required all media outlets to give equal airtime to both sides of an issue to prevent an excessively biased narrative. I don’t think this applies to the news itself, but opinion segments where talking heads discussed a political or social topic. The new should be delivered with sobriety and as little hype or sensationalism as possible, but that doesn’t get the ratings. This is nothing new, however. Yellow journalism got us into the Spanish American War and Americas foray into imperialism. The market place of ideas is supposed to guard against bias as well, but it really doesn’t work very well. People tend to go to sources that support their ideology and are dismissive of others.
@@tokenghost7777Not only mainstream media... ANY news source, whether they own a skyscraper or live in my mom's basement (don't get me started) should have to vet their stories, and be punished for repeatdly lying. We'd therefore need fact checkers, and since people can't seem to agree about what's real, people from each cartel would try to bribe the fact checkers. Therefore, I volunteer to be a fact checker.
I've seen a lot of what amounts to corruption in environmental science, specifically in relation to producing work making predictions of the consequences and costs of sea level rise in regions. Making a set of predictions is forecasting not research, the forecasts depend on a lot of assumptions with lots of leeway to swing the results, forecasts are often subject to little or no effective peer review, and unsurprisingly their forecasts often support the views of those providing funding to them. Add to that the tendency to produce books of papers by invited authors and you have published "science" which is sometimes functionally indistinguishable from propaganda. Unfortunately one sees non-profits engage heavily in this as their core business model.
I'm trying to recall the major US newspaper that publishes a page 1 story to support its agenda then retracts/corrects it quietly on page 12 a week later. I think it's in New York.
There's some uncertainty about the location. Every time you make a measurement you get a different city. Not US but I think it's been observed in several cities in the UK.
I live in a tiny rural redneck town in Colorado. Same crap here. Doesn't matter WHERE, it's a common practice of editors. A great click bait story is just one more lie. Sadly, it takes more than a week, sometimes it's months later.
I think that newspaper is all of them everywhere. 50 years ago, Florida Today had a front page story with click bait headline, and the next week buried a correction where no one would notice. It concerned a hot button issue coming up for election and the retraction made it irrelevant to that issue. They at least printed my letter to the editor calling them out for it.
@@HaakonOdinsson I will say that I believe what will happen is that people will become less and less interested in the news as they realize that it can’t even be trusted anymore. And this will simply lead to a world where people live in real life way more than they ever lived online, while still using online for their entertainment and stuff. I’m willing to bet the future of this country (The US) will be very outdoors and very physical and concrete. It would make sense too, as it would be a cultural pendulum sort of thing.
@@HaakonOdinsson My other reply TO YOU got deleted as well! Jesus Christ It’s POSSIBLE that Sabine has it set up herself to delete comments with certain keywords in it, as I am very certain I have read comments saying something similar to yours on other videos which have not gotten removed. I suppose it is possible an AI is determining which comments to remove using some esoteric principle other than just keywords, but I have no reason to believe that’s happening _just_ yet. I’ve seen straight up hate speech that doesn’t use slurs not get deleted before.
Meanwhile…. Trust the science bro. Long ago I came to realize the wisdom in Charlie mungers quote “you show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome”. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.
@@ColonelFredPuntridge In the world I would want to live in, yes that would happen. However this problem will not go away with a simplistic solution. Some of the lies are so deeply ingrained people would actually defend the deception instead of accept the truth. For example: Secondhand smoking. If you ask any doctor "How many cases of lung problems or anything can you link back to sencondhand smoke?" I guarantee you you will NEVER find one. I know that is a silly one and obviously it is a good idea to limit exposure to people who don't want to be around it and not have it around those who shouldn't be exposed at all, but honestly I don't think there is enough evidence or data other than it sounds like a good idea to not accidentally inhale smoke you aren't smoking lol
Isn't climate change the biggest example. When you have a Dept. of Climate Change at a university, how many of their articles are going to claim it's no big deal?
Very sad, but, in my opinion, part of a much larger problem. I suppose I'm so dated and old fashioned, that my opinion has little relevance, but it seems that greed, self-promotion, and shamelessness have become virtues over the past 40 years, while basic morality has disappeared. This is evident throughout society - not only in science. I did not stay in academic science, after finishing a PhD, as a result of observing really awful behaviors and lack of ethics as a grad student, but it's no better in corporate environments, law firms, and government.
You're not dated and old fashioned, the people that think that of people like you are the problem themselves. This moral relativism coming out of this thinking that the new is always better, that progress only moves forward, etc.. is what took us to this mess. I am those who think morality and ethics are absolutes and are not to change with times. And this is a scientific forum, so you will not agree with me on this, but atheism and Godlessness is the problem with the new generations. Feel free to disagree on that one.
rwb I agree with you and had the same experience. But there is a place for us. Resilient small communities where we can rebuild civilization. We need to find like minded others and do this. I went to a small island in Japan and welcome others of like mind.
@@kuba2ve The problem with moral relativism is also self-solving... when enough people realize they can 'morally' justify purging the 'immoral'. It's happened before... that's how Rome became the Catholic Church in a nut-shell, after all. Constantine was like, "Sayyyyy... if I embrace this popular new religion, make a few tweaks here and there... I can get rid of all the trouble makers and the populace will back me up on it! Now to make sure I get a military 'miracle' for propaganda.." Alondro knows... ALONDRO WAS THERE... whispering into Constantine's ear. >:}
@@Alondro77 You need to read Church History from the start, but from valid sources, not the secular sources that are always intent on blackwashing it for obvious purposes. Again, this is not the place to evangelize people, or talk about Religion (I know your kind). Have a good day, and God Bless you.
@@Alondro77Yeah; It was all to take back control of the populace. Too many people knew the true, original teachings of Jesus. It was done purely to edit the bible. That's why no one but clergymen were allowed to read Latin centuries later. And they remained pagan in private.
The change to short term contracts over the last few decades is the culprit. The pressure to publish is so great now that more researchers are willing to take risks and present papers of low standard or even fraudulent. In Australia we've had some mindboggling cases where good scientists have commited scientific misconduct. Some have even completely fabricated experiments in attempts to win grant funding. Lifetime tenure may have had its problems but now there is a serious problem with quality.
Many of the problems start at the post graduate level, where students know that to get a postdoctoral degree they need a certain number of publications that have been accepted. What seems to happen is that there is a design problem with their experiments, usually the number of observations is too small. So then they try different analysis methods to get them p
You get what you pay for. Low paying, fickle, short-term contracts, dished out by well-paid careerist administrators are below the paygrade of aspiring researchers who know they're getting paid less than someone working at McDonnald's lol
1) Forcing researchers to become sleazy salemen chasing grants. Tying Researchers salary directly to the funding they bring in. 2)Phd.oversupply resulting in a absurd scientific career,half life of 6 years and no prospects for 95% of them. 3)Publish or perish culture with absurd h index requirements. These issue want to make barf. How can the scientific community, which is supposed to be the most honest and most intelligent group of people fall this low. I wanted to become a researcher all my life. Now, I am just depressed at the state of science. I'm not jumping into this cesspit willingly.
About 8 years ago, as a lecturer, I detected fraud on a thesis, I brought it before the ethics committee where the fraud was confirmed, yet after a visit to st-petersburg of the academic director (the student was russian) the student passed and was given the best student price, and a few months later most people part of the ethics commission got sacked. This was a privately funded, yet regulated university.
I believe you are right on the money. Politicisation is the main issue and it penetrates the entire body of society and therefore also science. Thruth is relative.
The legacy status. Let's not forget universities are country clubs for some kids. The Wharton School of Business has produced some amazing people, who lose 350 million dollars because they such great businessman.
Sadly, lying is becoming the new default skill required by EVERY company/discipline/relationship. Honesty is just to hard, especially when you are the only one?
Hi Sabine, A related problem is when journals are controlled by scientists with a particular viewpoint who then suppressed dissenting viewpoints. This is problem is especially evident in climate science. Read Andrew Montford's books for examples. For example, Michael Mann's famous hockey stick paper, upon auditing, proved to be riddled with errors and worse.
This issue runs way deeper than just "quantity over quality". There is plenty of politics involved here, the least of all people seeking promotions. Corporations trying to insulate their products from contrary research; political parties trying to falsely legitimize questionable public policy; biased scientists steeped in dogma trying to push their own precious ideologies. Science is not as 'objective' as people like to think it is.
Never has been. I am not sure where this deified moral scientist trope comes from. Perhaps the massive propaganda we are pumped all the time. We have so many examples to reference, they are people as well. But let's pretend not; there's money to be made.
I'm sure all of those exist somewhere, but I don't think they're the driving factor compared to simple career incentives ("publish publish publish"). Your perspective on this does seem a bit politically driven to me though...
Scientists and academics are human. They have all the same pettiness, ego and self-interest issues that the general population has. They have to make a living like everyone else, but the way research is funded, both in universities and the private sector, creates incentives for scientists to do whatever is necessary to keep their job and/or reputation, even if it means steering conclusions in a particular direction or just pushing as many papers out the door as possible, regardless of quality. While the effort they put in to developing a deeper knowledge of their field should be respected, and most of them do act ethically, they shouldn't be put on a pedestal. That said, if you want to argue about science being dogma, ideological, or an illegitimate basis for public policy then you are probably being a hypocrite, because ideology is almost certainly what you are bringing to the argument. Individuals and groups of scientists can be dogmatic, but that doesn't mean science is dogma. Unless you have more expertise than the scientists you are condemning, you're just trying to inject the opinions of a layperson into a contest of evidence you don't have the ability to definitively interpret.
We just need to take science for what it is. Science is a consensus of view of many scientists and people that otherwise identify as scientists , who also happen to be horribly conflicted due to outside influences which pay them to claim studies which confirm propaganda as science while blackballing those that refuse to lose their integrity.
That's what the covidians and libshits have turned 'science' into. In the same way they turned men into woman and failed brown cultures into future "engineers".
I think it was ever so. In my career I sometimes reproduced experiments in published papers and they didn't do what the paper claimed. I always put it down to either the author's incompetence or mine, but could have been falsified results. Even years ago there was so much pressure on academics to publish or lose funding that a lot of dross got published and survived peer review. The only real test is independently reproducing the results.
in programming we are required to write automated testing for our assertions that code is correct. I feel like there could be something like this, but in some fields it's not quite as simple. It would also highlight several quite serious measurement issues we have going on currently in which I fully believe any prediction made upon complex systems gets lossier and lossier the further you look into the future. I admit this is my bias and my research bleeding in here, but I think we'll come to find more often than not any prediction 10~ years out is basically a guaranteed falsehood.
@@niblick616 Don't let your bias get in the way. Step back and ask yourself if someone will profit from research being skewed in a certain way. Organizations buy research, and it's very expensive. For a few dollars more, they can get the results they were hoping for. Don't be lazy, it's all over the Internet, from very honest people like Dr John Campbell, Dr John
Dr. P. Boghossian’s ridicules (and hilarious) gag papers that got published in a liberalized journal, was a real eye-opener on the kind of crap that can be published by a biased publication.
Raw data files and measurement parameters should be provided with manuscripts for publication. This would solve the problem in many instances and allow for better scrutiny of the results.
The trend is heading that way, we have been told to expect to have to upload everything within the next 2 years when we publish. Not sure it will help, AAAS and Nature have both required more uploaded data than most other papers. I have tried to download data only to find it is not really there, or the samples have working ID's with no map to the final ID making it useless.
Is it getting worse are we just getting more suspicious and looking deeper? My field is nutrition 'science' and while fraud is one issue, the appalling quality of published papers, deeply influenced by industry funding, going back seventy years years is an indictment to both scientists, 'peer reviewers' AND publishers. Worryingly, this has has influenced community advice/guidance with catastrophic results.
I am sad to have watched all the promise of the Information Age sour into the cynicism demanded by the Manipulation Age. The golden dawn of an era with unsurpassed potential for collaboration and free exchange of knowledge has prematurely dimmed to the grim dusk of an era characterized by the constant con. I am trying to stay sad rather than becoming bitter. I remember my excitement as a student, sending an email from my university to another to ask the author of a paper questions about their research. By the end of the day, and a couple of email exchanges later, I’d received generously thoughtful replies and a table of data that their group had not included in their publications. I can still remember sitting in the computer lab feeling a kind of reverence and thinking, “this is like being alive to see the first printing presses turning out copies of a book; the internet is one of human kind’s greatest advances.” The possibilities were writ large. Today m however, who can trust the information that is shared?
great topic. As you state, the problem stems from reward systems which emphasize quantity or stature of the journal instead of the content of the research. Part of the cause of this development is the sheer mass of publications and inability of editors, reviewers, and faculty search committees to digest it all, or even assess the value of work represented by a set of publications. When 100 applicants submit their CVs for a faculty position for example, the committee first tries to sift the grain from the chaff by eliminating those with fewer than a certain number of publications, or only including those who publish some minimum number of papers in a prestigious journal. This practice, and similar phenomena in grant review encourage researchers to focus on quantity or journal prestige instead of the quality of research. Then you have institutions who encourage this by financial incentives and ofcourse someone wants to make a buck on that.
Bribery in scientific journals is horrible. But, what percentage of reputable scientists would accept a bribe to promote a commercial product in a science video?
Bribery is science is only likely because we have given away all of an individuals rights. The rights that really matter like our ability to sue for meaningful sums or in actual courts with actual juries(you give up this right any time you sign a terms and conditions form.. online or off. That's because of right wing psychopaths systematically bamboozling y'all. )The rights limited that cause bribery though? Are that they gave rights to corporations and they abuse it. Scientific achievements never result in any single individual or even multiple hands on scientists having any legally binding right to sell their creations. They always belong to the corporations and even if you decide to leave a corporation with policies you don't agree with? You aren't legally allowed to discuss things you invented or even seek work in a remotely related field. They destroy their ability to create income yet not one single conservative seems to give a shit despite jobs & keeping Americans employed bbeing something they pretend to care about most.
This is very very serious indeed. It may endanger the scientific and publishing community, worse it may sow seeds to destroy the publics confidence in science and other academic discipline. Hope something can be done to address this problem. Thanks dr. Sabina pointing out the issue. Your great work is greatly appreciated and keep up the good work.
We all think you are idiots. No thinking person has trusted acedemia for over a century. The brightest minds in the world have the most contemptible and corrupt system in place, so very contrary to its empirical roots, and finding are whatever you want them to be. Institutionalized hypocrisy at the highest levels. "May induce distrust" is a long gone conclusion we troglodites settled on eons ago.
@@Sonny_McMacsson Not even a little bit. It's one of the reasons I dropped out of academia, along with the stunningly bad career prospects for even capable researchers. The current system is just broken.
Too be honest, I see fraud everywhere. It doesn't matter if it's a single person or a large corporation. It happens until they are caught and held accountable.
We built are whole society around wealth and money. Then act surprised when money corrupts everything. I don’t know why. I’m never surprised to find corruption in any Institute.
I received my Ph. D. in a Science many decades ago and decided to go into the private sector. You have to understand that to get to the level were you are paid a reasonable salary and have some security you have to spend typically a decade, maybe two decades living like a student. When I was in graduate school, I knew a few post-docs in their late 30s. The competition to get one of those few Academic jobs, after so much sacrifice, is incredible. I'm not shocked that there is so much fraud in Science and I'm shocked that su*cide is not sky high.
Would you accept hosting me in your house for six months (food and lodging)? No charge of course. Let's put that pesky "wealth and money" thing behind us. Never thought of traveling this way before, but your reply sparked this insanity. What is it in spanish? Mi casa, su casa?
you may not have understood that most money for "science" comes from out of control governments around the world, and yes that includes the USA, who always want more power. there's a reason why almost every politically relevant paper basically says we have catastrophic problems and we need the governments to solve them. if they didn't say that they'd lose their funding.
Money and wealth are not the problem. The selfishness already there in the hearts of people is the problem. When was the last time anyone had to teach a child to lie, to steal, or to be rude when doing so suits their selfish ends?
@@dmitripogosian5084 And if you work in R&D for a large company, you have to beg for money as well--at the organization, department, group, and project levels.
The idea that it might "become worse" seems to focus in an unfortunate way on perception, rather than reality. It is the exposure of existing corruption that will become worse, the corruption, bribery, censorship, in other anti-scientific behavior has been increasingly the norm for decades. If anything it's wonderful that it's becoming exposed now.
For a field on which people rely to understand the world but also drug interactions and risks, it becoming worse is not something to be looked forward to because credibility is being questioned industry wide. People will avoid vaccines in future because of what happened over the last few years. Even if there is solid evidence, people may have to wait decades for reproducibility in clinical studies. This has huge repercussions.
It’s not like exposing financial corruption which hurts the people who have lost money now but helps everyone relatively soon after. This will have long running repercussions, people avoiding treatments because of lack of faith (see the last 4 years), clinical studies having to be reproduced and taking longer to get cleared, for example.
@@TheBaumcm GOOD! People should avoid treatments that were not scientifically sound in their studies, because the whole point of the ACTUAL scientific method is that most things the "experts" decide are wrong, if they are not subjected to rigorous testing. The last four years, people who foolishly accepted the lies and incompetence of the "experts", and their treatments, have died far faster than those who did not trust them. The latter have been proven correct at every turn. And it's even better if all those studies that were untrustworthy must be done over. There is NO progress in studies with bad methodology. Their very existence is LOST ground.
@@TheBaumcm Credibility MUST be questioned. The foundation of credibility must be EARNING credibility, it must never be given by default, and credence especially must never be given to scientists or authorities unless they constantly, at every turn, prove they deserve it. The last few years have been proof that the authorities must NEVER be trusted by default. They were wrong, and killed huge numbers of people with their bad responses and treatments. Without reproducibility there IS no solid evidence. Your kind of anti-science attitude is deadly.
With or without AI, cheating and dishonesty is common in academia. The public only gets to see the high profile cases. But there are numerous cases that involve "nobody" scientists with such low impact that it's not worth the time and effort to bring them to justice. Several years ago, I was on a rank and tenure committee and discovered that 2 associate profs, going up for promotion to prof, plagiarized two chapters of a neurobiology textbook. The chapters were originally published in the preceding edition of the textbook by another author. The associate profs replaced the name of the original author with their own and modified less than 1% of the original text and figures. The updated chapters did not include an acknowledgment to the original author. I reported the plagiarism to the committee and Dean. We did not recommend promotion for the associate profs, but they appealed and got promoted anyway
As a biologist who worked in academia, I also want there to be coverage over abuses in science, especially of phds and post docs who often can’t leave without compromising their careers. I’ve seen people destroyed by the abuse and one friend of a friend even self-exited
Publishing bribes are usually called "advertising". The whole Lot of Media, which uses adverts for income generation, is bribed, essentially. And YES, i mean ALL media. not just scientific.
Those funding the research get the result they want to support whatever endeavor they are embarking upon. That's how it works. If they don't get the result they want then they just trash the "study" and find another institute willing to give them what they want. This is how paid research at universities works as well, and I learned that from a research scientist at a prestigious university in Canada. It's how we have so many pharma drugs on the market that are dangerous or do little or nothing beyond placebo. Sadly, many scientists are somewhat religious in their conviction that "science" is pure and not wrought with corruption, they that is changing, slowly and surely.
I've been fighting against "publish for promotion" my entire career. Fortunately, I'm a U.S. civil servant, so it hasn't been "publish or perish" for me. Still, I've seen some people get ahead by publishing lots of garbage, and it is admittedly disheartening. There is some comfort for me that most of those frauds are now in management, which to me is a punishment despite the higher pay. However, other frauds are still in research, and have better support for their dubious work since they can be relied upon to pad the lab's publication numbers, making the frauds in management look good for the higher ups who only know how to count. On the bright side, most of my peers are honest, ethical, and talented. The frauds distress them also. There is hope for science, at least at my lab.
One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.) - Carl Sagan The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996), 31.
No, this is a stupid and unproductive attitude to have. You are pretending like every paper out there is faked nowadays which it absolutely isn't. Trust, but verify. That's the only sensible way to operate.
This may have started 50 odd years ago when the 'publish or parish' rule was embraced by academia. It becomes really difficult to produce original papers/information when so much has already been produced.
The core motivation for fabricating papers is to *game* *the* *system* *of* *metrics* *used* *to* *assess* *researchers'* *track* *records* . I was always struck by how, in the sciences of all places, people would accept a measurement system that was so obviously flawed. Yet due to time constraints (and obviously those on funding and job security), it has become unavoidable for basically anyone without a Nobel prize (or a successful YT channel?) under their belt. To be clear, there are many ways in which this system can be gamed, the easiest is to simply pad author lists. Since metrics do not account for the *weight* of contribution, your best strategy is to do *just* enough to get your name on a bunch of papers, rather than do tons of work on a single paper. Any researcher in a medium/large group can multiply their research outputs (and thus their "performance") many times over this way without really risking their academic reputation at all.
Yes, it's hard to be a really good scientist. Pitfalls and monsters of error lie in wait for you, lurking under the weeds, everywhere. The life of the mind is not an easy one. This has always been true in every directed hierarchy. The British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars way horribly corrupt, nepotistic, cruel, and arbitrary. The question is: was it good enough to win the war in the end? (Spoiler: the answer is yes it was, _even though_ it was corrupt, nepotistic, cruel, and arbitrary.)
Re ivermectin, it would interesting to hear you talk with either Pierre Kory about his clinical experience with ivermectin or Alexander Marinos on his analysis of the shenanigans in the TOGETHER trial (such as arbitrarily limiting the dosage to patients over 90kg such that it slips below 400 mcg/kg for those with higher BMIs and therefore most at risk).
Reading the comments after listening to the video, it's clear that science can't do without something that science can't generate, the moral obligation to tell the truth and to follow through with its supposed methodology of actual and honest review and replication. If they don't do both then science will become increasingly discredited.
As a senior scientist, Dr. Sabin, what do you suggest? What can be done to prevent this? The reason why this is so prominent in the East, because, science institutions are still on shakey ground there, and its far easire to climb up the "metric" ladder. We all know how the publication and impact factor "metric" has polluted science in general. But since the institution behind science is what can bring the things on the right path, is there any way to measure scientific progress via them?
I just watched a video about an excellent paper that was retracted. Full of inconvenient truth about the harms of a procedure we all had our arms twisted to take in recent years. Harm covered up, profits ongoing.
Studies show that the results of a study are dependent upon the outcome that the financiers of the research want the results to be… now more than ever.
Precisely , the results will show exactly what who paid for them desire, regardless of how that data has to be manipulated or omitted in order to achieve that end.
One note: Ivermectin itself is not controversial; I have a prescription of Ivermectin for rosacea. What is controversial are non-approved issues such a covid-19 and use of veterinary Ivermectin for humans.
Right, when it is actually used to treat *parasites* (such as skin mites in your case) it is totally fine. That's what it was intended for. The problem and controversy is when people trying torture the data to make it seem like it magically works for things that aren't related to parasites at all.
The new particle smasher will get built, otherwise they will make a lose on the specialist equipment made to build such tunnels. Its operating on sunken costs
How was this not obvious? Seriously, they make bold claims & never Show Their Methodology. We know they’re openly biased. What makes you think their ‘studies’ can stand scrutiny.
Complicated times indeed. When I was working on my course conclusion work, which here in Brazil is not optional and needs to follow the scientific guidelines, my biggest difficulty was exactly to find papers, scientific articles. Like, I'd find a citation and then tried to find it, without much luck. That's where I spent the most of my time, instead of writing the work, writing the source code, working on the testing and so on... My college didn't have any subscriptions to those services, at least that I knew of. So... It was hard. And I don't have a solution either, because you need a huge infrastructure for that. Anyway, thanks, Sabine! 😊 Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
OK. Como o Português é a língua filha mais próxima do Latim e do Grego Antigo, aqueles de nós que usam e pensam em Português têm uma vantagem inicial na epistemologia e na ciência. Mas no Brasil se faz mais pensamento baseado no crânio sem ajuda porque tem menos máquinas para nos ajudar a pensar. Se todo brasileiro tivesse IA e a nação tivesse mais poder computacional que o resto do mundo, e o problema da corrupção fosse minimizado a um nível aceitável, qual seria a sua experiência?
A quote by Donnella Meadows comes to mind. It wen something like "Ultimately a complex system will always follow it's main system goal." Thinking about it that can be a true Dilemma! It means that as soon as one factor, one system goal, begins to dominate, the entire system behavior will sooner or later orient in that direction. Is a hospital's main purpose to provide the best possible healthcare? Or to maximized profit? Same with science: is it mainly a grand project to understand the world ormainly just another economic factor? Or the economy itself: the meaning of the word suggests it is about householding with scarce resources to provide a good livelihood for all. The very term "Capitalist Economy" has long become an oxymoron. It strikes me that either an economy can be economic, householding, homeostasis oriented (growth becomes meaningless beyond a certain saturation point). Or we talk about Capitalism, the main system goal not the lifelihood of people or householding with scarce resources but single mindedly increasing capital. What for? And research scientists accepting bribes just fits into the latter picture. Science is supposed to be an open and transparent endeavor. Otherwise it is a dying corpse.
They should model their actions on those that are used to sanction drug cheats in sports. 1st Offence 18 month suspension from having their group on any scientific publication, 2nd Offence 5 year ban, 3rd Offence lifetime ban.
A lot of errors and untruths published science are the fault of the principal investigators' underlings, who don't want to admit to errors and cause the principal investigator to have to waste time cleaning them up and correcting them. This sounds like a dodge, but it's inevitable, because the reason principal investigators _hire_ underlings is to save their (the PIs') time. In other words, you need to make very sure that you punish the truly guilty, not the culprits' bosses at the time when the error or untruth gets published.
I see the scientist often the PIs themselves as the biggest problem in modern scientific research. Faced with difficult situations, many scientists will either just fail to acknowledge their previous errors (since, it negates or partially negates much of their scientific careers) or even fabricate data (or covertly have underlings do it... they'll know its incorrect, but don't have a direct hand in this) . Underlings who don't provide evidence that supports their superior, will often not be retained and will return to their country of origin in many cases, whereas one's who somehow manage to support their PI 's hypotheses, will be retained and rise to the top. If you do an experiment and the results don't match your hypothesis (or that of your group/PI), and this hypothesis has been dealt a possibly fatal blow. This means you must at least revise, or abandon this initial hypothesis. This is the very basis of the true scientific method. The search for the truth. However, this is where the problems arise. A worker in such a position may be sent back to the laboratory bench with instructions to find appropriate results that fit the PI's hypothesis, or a career orientated rival will certainly do so. If this 'data' is not achieved the worker, in the very worst they may not continue to work for much longer in the lab/country, where they worked so hard to get to. Personally, I loved unexpected results, to me this meant the 'Universe was speaking to me' and I was about to discover something. However, from 3-4 decades of working at the laboratory bench (never rising above this position), I have come to the sad conclusion, that the cheats (largely concerned with their personal careers) rapidly rise to the very top, and almost always get away with it. I have known people who got 'great', but not controversial scientific findings, got a publication in a prestigious journal based on this data. This then catapulted their scientific careers on to tenure track positions at prestigious schools... However, their earlier work could not be reproduced, and negative data is much harder to publish, plus the original researcher will argue (if ever challenged) that their exact cell line or clone is no longer available etc., so their earlier work can't be tested. By the time it's finally known it was all BS (honest mistake at best/artifact/fluke/or fabrication at worst).... they are in an unassailable position as a World authority with 100s of publications to their name via large research teams. From my time at the laboratory bench I would say as much as 2/3rds of scientific manuscripts contain significant scientific errors.@@ColonelFredPuntridge
I think we should let go of the reins when it comes to people using A.I. to produce papers, editorials, movie scripts, TV shows etc... just pass them and add them to the pile that the A.I.'s learn from. So that it's stock from which it derives it's material will become increasingly dumb, as will the resulting products.
What may be even worse is when the president of the university won't let you publish a good paper because it refutes what the donor is trying to prove and the president doesn't want the university to lose the research grant.
As of four years ago the US Dept. of Energy was giving out over $2 Billion in annual science grants. You can guess what for.
@@infinitytoinfinitysquaredb7836Papers on energy ?
@@infinitytoinfinitysquaredb7836global warming?
Or let’s guess, to cure something developed in a China lab
There is no way any of the studies published about global warming contain fraud, just ask Sabine.
I worked in the physics dept when an undergraduate, so I knew many of the grad students and professors.
It was common knowledge that one prolific professor who was a phys rev referee would reject a submitted paper and then
assume the research himself, another egregious type of fraud.
Plagiarism.
That's theft
That is totally against research ethics. Why didn't they fire this guy?
That’s not fraud, that’s theft.
@@SurfinScientistfire him? That would require the universities to be respectable. They are nothing but brainwashing hubs, manipulating students to be future sheep.
I don't think people have ever lost this much faith in our institutions.. It is absolutely frightening.
Because the institutions are on the take ($) by foreign governments.
We were never supposed to have put that much faith in them in the first place. A correction to normal skepticism is a good thing. Caveat emptor is rendered in Latin for a reason. It's not newly relevant advice.
It's becoming time to fix things.
We did lose this much faith back during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and some countries came out just fine. Of course, those that didn't started WWII and caused genocides and all sorts of suffering...
Is it frightening that we're losing faith or is it frightening that they are demonstrating that they are not worthy of our faith?
My main problem with scientific publishing is that there is very little focus on replication. I'm taking bets on how many studies we could throw away if we were to make a serious effort towards replication, I put myself down for about half.
Yes, too little incentives to do that
That’s why one should never adapt an opinion unreflected. You can ditch alot of studies just by checking their authors, funding and possible agenda and evaluating their results vs. your own educated experience and knowledge (if you happen to have such).
There is no money there, which I would love to see changed.
they should adopt the blockchain model: A transaction (paper) is not valid until at least 5 blocks (similar papers) have confirmed it.
Not that this will ever happen, with how utterly sting funding for science already is
Harvard did a study that concluded about half of published papers contained results that could not be replicated.
I think this is a great example of Goodhart's law. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." If number of papers is the measure, then science isn't even the goal anymore.
Same with the Nobel prize.
True and if views and likes are the measure then science education is not the goal anymore either, right?
@@undercoveragent9889 certainly we can see this across RUclips with clickbait - though there's still SOME incentive to provide good content to get subs.
rewarding A while hoping for B
This was one of the reasons I dropped out of academia. I hadn't published "enough" as a grad student. I just published work describing what I had done.
Sincere researchers have to game the system by effectively publishing the same research multiple times with only small increments. It's not as bad as fraud but it produces a lot of hard-to-parse noise that does _not_ help with real progress.
I am PhD Chemist. what you are waking up to is the reason why I am unemployed and proud of it. There is no good reason to be a scientist in this corrupt scientific society.
What corrupt scientific society? If making up conspiracy theories is your MO, isn’t it more likely that you were bad at your work and you now have a chip on your shoulder, hence the complete lack of evidence for anything you claimed.
Any fool can invent conspiracy theories. Valid and verified evidence is required to show they are true and you have demonstrably provided none.
no rational person takes you seriously if you say you're a scientist anymore. i ran into the replication crisis myself with papers on atmospheric rendering of all things. and that's not even a politically or economically charged topic with lots of money and power insisting on a specific result. if you really have a phd in chemistry, you should find a way of doing something useful with it. we need less corruption in science, research, and development, not the exodus of the non-corrupt.
@@royhammel5205 you love to corner and manipulate people with nothing. Sad.
Many former pharmaceutical employees have said they've signed NDA's hiding the cure for cancer. All about $$$
Many former pharmaceutical employees say they've ALL signed NDA's hiding cures for cancer
Thanks for this Sabine. I decided against pursuing a career in academia when I interned with an academic at the University of Oxford last summer who admitted to flagrantly falsifying validation stats for his papers as he "couldn't be bothered" to derive them honestly but was "pretty sure" his models were going to be 90+% accurate anyhow. I was visibly aghast at this - he clearly sensed this and spent the remainder of my placement chastising me for being "arrogant" and "acting like I know better than everyone" and then didn't respond to my reference request. Seems bullies are rewarded in academic power structures even more so than in corporate ones. I'm now very cynical about novel findings in papers and wait for them to be widely replicated before I believe them.
Shameful. I have had dissolusioning experiences with some people. Bureaucrats at the University of Sydney (I believe in naming and shaming) backed one VIP (Very Important Psychopath) against me with devastating personal and career results, including prosecution on false criminal charges. I beat the rap, the Judge declaring that I was an unusual person.
I said to the gentleman from the NSW Ombudsman's office that I had thought universities were places where honesty and integrity mattered. He laughed out loud. I said go ahead. I feel I have just admitted to finding out there is no Easter Bunny.
Sorry you let a rotten apple put you off a career. They are in all walks of life and professions. I hope things are working out for you.
All of his criticisms of you are transparently projections, and are the classic signature of people with either narcissistic or sociopathic personality disorders. These are widespread in our society, and not simply in traditional suspected locations like politics and law but also science Industry etcetera.
This is so hope depleating😢
Agreed. This has also been my experience
I am so sorry it happened but I hope you keep being you because you were in the right. We need more people like you.
I used to review papers for a few publications. Once I noted how a particular reference didn't actually say what the referring author said it did. That particular topic was never even mentioned in the reference. After that, that journal stopped asking me to review papers. And, yes, the paper with the suspicious reference got published anyway. 🤔
That makes my blood boil
Nasty but I'm not surprised TBH.
Why not name the publication?
Maybe because he doesn't want to get sued.@@ninakore
So the publisher didn't select random anonymous peers in the first place, and knew it was you who pointed out the misquote?
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
a restatement of regulatory capture.
Sounds like the ethics of Communism . The leaders get the best of everything.
@@thomasmartin406
Regulatory capture is a special case of the more general principle.
I was not aware of this saying. Thank you. Just went to a school referendum meeting and it was evident that the focus was on support of the public school institution and not the education of students. Very evident especially when school vouchers get discussed.
@@deanh1449 Yea - the preachers of choice suddenly change their tune when the choice of some one else appears.
Seems there is no area of human endeavour where crime doesn't play a significant part.
Really? Do you mean crime plays a significant part in every religious organisation? What is your evidence for that claim?
Indeed. Those who deny it are either ignorant of the evidence, or stalling until they get their share of the profits.
@@uprightfossil6673 That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed in the same way.
@@niblick616 unfortunately there is so much evidence that presenting all of it is a daunting task in itself. The sheer number of anecdotal tales confirmed by witnesses alone is only one of the many reasons mistrust and distrust in gooberment and bureaucracy is running rampant. The small fraction of tin foil hat wearing outliers are the ones used to dismiss all claims by the offending officials.
But deniers who dismiss the claims don’t see the truckers protests and farmers protests as relevant. Deniers being mostly gooberment officials and bureaucrats and the people who aspire to such positions. 😤
@@niblick616 OP was hyperbolic but I'm sure you could think of a few instances of wrongdoing in... religions out there, let's keep it at that.
We shouldn't talk about science as though it's a community, an industry, or a collective of any kind. It's a method. What you're referring to is academia, which is not always scientific, even in their "sciences" departments.
The problem and i think her point is, the information is being presented as a result of the scientific method. Alot of the time not being thoroughly being peer reviewed or at best let slide.
@michaelabney3486 You're missing my point.
Quite appropriate.
@@FourthRootnah they did get your point and you both offer valuable contributions to the discourse
@@nofme No, the data is not necessarily even collected scientifically.
The WEF is a group of the most financially Wealthy people in in the world. They fly around on their private jets but insist that others need to reduce their carbon footprint. They have multiple CEO's of international investment firms (like Blackrock) in their ranks. Global investment firms have ownerships in most big corporations and they are also tied to credit lenders. Where do you think most research money and donations come from? It doesn't even need to be bribery - it's can be selective funding based on "preconceived outcomes".
30 years ago this was already a problem. I am happy to see it finally getting some publicity. Thanks Sabine!
👍
look up what she thinks is the cause of the replication crisis.
Yeah. I doubt it's much different from before. It's probably just that people are more honest about it.
A lot of truths of a false narrative has come out into the open in the last eight years.
In school in the 50s & it was a problem.
The fact that there is a monetary incentive to publish as many papers as possible is a problem in and of itself. Ideally there should be incentives for quality over quantity as well as attempting to reproduce the results of existing studies.
Not in our modern cheap-is-trump culture
Not even just monetary. In my field you will lose your licence unless you are publishing an insane number of papers. It's unbelievable actually
It's been bad for decades. Now it's so obvious it can no longer be hidden.
It's like true scientists are feeling what Galileo must have felt.
I have to read scientific journals regularly for my work in military RnD. I notice that newer papers are full of regurgitations and fluff, no new knowledge at all.
They can pass their thesis defenses, but when read for real industrial usage, the lies become obvious.
I've had to replicate many papers myself. The methods are simple, and I know what I'm doing. However, so many cannot be replicated and sometimes the thermodynamics don't even make sense. For example, I know that you can't make magnetite under these conditions, and sure enough the material I make is different. It slows progress and weakens the foundation of science.
So how is it to work for a system that supports and endorses these people while they expect YOU to provide critical infrastructure support so that they can forward their plan to create more such a people? It seems to me, like a positive feedback loop!
Military intelligence... the greatest example of an oxymoron.
True dat! But you should add: "[...] And when the lies become obvious, they cease to matter at all. They only delay the ultimate knowledge and truth by a short time, and make the discoveries a little more expensive."
@@Alondro77 I regret to inform you that if you believe that this is oxymoron, they have already won. This is actually the greatest accumulation of experts that you can find in any field, with areas of research (among other, much more related to their original purpose) such as social engineering, state space cultural control of population, decision influencing and non-linear social systems. There is where the current research of social studies and computing emanates.
Luckily this doesn't apply to fields related to public policy with massive budgets and far-reaching global consequences.
Very funny. Gave me a chuckle
😂😂😂. Thanks!
You forgot the /S label at the end of your post for the dripping sarcasm.
@@michaelrains64295 now I know
@@michaelrains64295 it has enough sarcasm to not need it
Speaking of Wikipedia,
I know of 2 instances where owners of companies and authors of biographies tried to correct errors in Wikipedia and they were not allowed to edit misinformation in their fields of expertise.
I left Academia after 10 years because I hated lying in grant proposals and using statistics to justify conclusions that were at best iffy or at worst wrong.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you tell you that one of the purposes of universities was supposed to insulate science from politics.
But when the people running these centers are postmodern lefties, everything is political. 😕
Why did you choose to pervert your own scientific results? Did someone force you to do what you claim you did? Please provide their names, positions and all your valid evidence. Were you awarded any money as a result of your lying? From which body and for which project did you steal it?
@@niblick616 Do you actually think he's going to answer any of those questions? I don't think he will. I wouldn't.
@@briancrawford8751
1/ If the OP wants to be taken seriously, yes I do.
2/ That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed in the same way.
3/ Any fool can make up allegations.
4/ Providing at least some valid and verified evidence is what helps separates the conspiracy theorists from the honest.
5/ I note that you wouldn't provide any evidence for any similar claims either. Thanks for making my point.
i'm not saying you're wrong, but...we're in a public forum. you're asking him to admit to details of committing a crime he was coerced into committing by the government and/or corporations. maybe you haven't been watching the news lately? do you know what happens to people who blow the whistle on government and corporate corruption? they go to prison forever. the guy who testified against hunter biden just got indicted...not with any evidence, but simply on a claim by the FBI that he made it up. the fbi colluded with amazon to put a guy in prison for refusing to lie under oath admitting a crime he didn't commit, among other things, and that legal battle is still ongoing. julian assange has been in prison for over a decade without being charged for a crime because he embarrassed the US armed forces, the CIA and hillary clinton as well as leaking that the 2016 democratic primary was rigged. we're living in a dangerous time and you're asking him to lay his neck in a guillotine.
the wikipedia thing is well known. they regularly change articles based on current events to support a narrative. it's not just wikipedia. all the popular dictionaries regularly change definitions for the same reason. if you don't believe me, look up the definition of marriage before 2000 and compare it to now in all major dictionaries. @@niblick616
Promotion and pay depend upon publication. Nothing else matters, and certainly not truth or ethics.
and when the paymaster has an agenda to push it is the perfect storm.
"...we own the science...", "... I am the science...", "....solid science...", "...scientific consensus...", "...trust the science..."... are all common platitudes pushed time-and-again.
@@templarroystonofvasey "science is settled"😅 the hallmark of a snake oil salesman
@@rhetorical1488 Nice, I think Brian Cox likes that one.
@@templarroystonofvasey "scientific consensus" is a very real thing and should not be dismissed without serious counter evidence. The others are red flags.
It is only the very top of a very large iceberg.
planetary size large iceberg me thinks.
But the part of the iceberg which you don't see - the underwater part - becomes visible when it begins to matter. That's the good news. The truth will out, when we need it.
Imagine seeing the bottom of the iceberg?
When there is fraud is 1 example how science ceases to be science.
Popular science writers, videomakers must teach ignorants about the scientific method and "what is science according to Isaac Asimov ", knowing there are not many asimovs ....
Remember...we have to trust "the science". Don't listen to those people who deny "the science".
Most people who deny science aren't doing it because they have issues with modern publishing practices. They deny things like evolution, climate science, medical science, and so forth. Their denial is motivated by some religious or anti-science bias, or some conspiracy theory, or willful ignorance; not reasonable skepticism.
No one who has issue with modern publishing practices can be called a science denialist. But those who use that problem to make blanket reductionist statements about science in general are science denialists. And they indeed should not be listened to.
This is why I'm calling for all raw datasets to be freely available for all papers.
It should be said that last year more than 5 million scientific papers were published. This is a problem in itself.
After recently retiring, I was curious how things were going in my former field. Twenty years ago, I could easily keep up with all relevant publications. Ten years ago, not so much. Now, not a snowball's chance in heck. It used to be all serious researchers. Based on my recent revisiting of my old field , there's stuff that's now published that's really more appropriate for a homework problem, and it takes way too long to sift through the nonsense to find the good stuff.
Maybe we shouldn't have forced everybody into getting a degree and then told them "go STEM and go home" just to be able to make a living wage to sustain a one bedroom flat in the inner city. Too many idle degrees = too many people looking into their own ways to make good, ethics be damned.
My field is medical statistics. Forty years ago someone doing methodology might be one of the authors of a paper every year. Now it is several papers per year. What they now do is develop methodology for data they haven’t seen.
Wow 5 million new unique insights a year! Science is on a roll!
@@slizzysluzzer I don't think it matters, you and everyone affected by these policies and developments are a drop in a bucket. Most papers are Chinese and Indian by a huge huge margin. It's a side effect of them increasing their standard of living and not wanting to be left behind again. Though these papers are usually... well i pretty much don't have words to describe a typical Indian paper today, still, do you want to be the one lagging behind India in 20-30 years? Of course all of this is going to generate inefficiencies. But progress is also the foundation of prosperity. So what's the solution?
As a peer reviewer for the major journal in my field, I don't run into too many of these faked papers, but I do run into a lot of researchers who can't get the basics of a technical paper right. What is a hypothesis, what is a null hypothesis, how to construct a method to test the both of them, and how to interpret the results.
In my hodunk college they couldn't even check papers properly for plagiarism. It appeared to be an automated check, so if it wasn't in their article database, they didn't care. Some chick in one of the groups I was in just copied paragraphs straight off a website, no problem.
In reviewing papers, I came across more than one example of people who couldn't convert units correctly. This used to be high-school chemistry stuff. A couple of decades later, a friend who was the dean of our vet school complained that his students couldn't do unit conversions. Add another decade or two and...
I agree. I am doing a PhD and my masters was more rigorous than my PhD courses. The students don’t know the basics. I was asked to TA a course and was asked to pass through students who didn’t know the basics. I kind of feel like not finishing the program because it feels like a joke, but I also don’t like the idea of my colleagues being the ones becoming professors teaching the next generation.
As a physicist, I long ago made the decision to decline to review for certain publishers like MDPI, Hindawi, Frontiers, and others. Also, I do not submit my papers there…especially MDPI.
Anytime financial incentives are involved in a system, there will always be some motivation for cheating. Seems like publishers should be financially penalized for not properly vetting papers before publishing them.
Absolutely! And it should be legislated to include the mainstream media as well so that they are incentivized to actually vet the stories they promote too.
i guess you aren't too familiar with how academic publishing works. Publishers (at least privately owned ones) are interested in selling subscriptions (mostly sold to consortia of universities). The vetting process is done "for free" by academics themselves! The editor at the journal after a brief initial assessment of the suitability of a submitted manuscript in their journal, (if not they reject immediately), sends the paper to anonymous (to the manuscript authors) reviewers, who are typically themselves academics in the field from which the paper originates. They spend some hours looking at the paper, its data, and the background literature and send their assessment of the manuscript back to the editor. The editor then decides if the paper should be published in the journal. If so, The authors get a copy of these reviews and are requested to respond to them and send a revision to the editor. If editor and reviewers are satisfied it gets published. The whole chain relies on the good will of those involved. If the publisher, editor, and authors are only interested in publishing and don't care about the quality, you get garbage published, and everyone profits. One way to disincentivize this practice is for university consortia to separate journals with good practices from those that are just publication mills. However, this is more easily said than done, and some publishers (notably the one mentioned by Sabine) are quite litigious, and so you need a legally speaking strong case to do this. It is a big problem and the academic community is grappling with how to deal with it. Science has always relied on publication to disseminate new knowledge and to build on existing knowledge with further work.
@@tokenghost7777
Fox News took a big hit from Dominion Voting Machines, but they’ve profited so much from their MO, they just paid the fine and continue to put their spin on things. Executives don’t fear financial penalties because it rarely impacts them directly. If criminal charges were in the mix, and sometimes they are, that’s a different ball game. Unfortunately, however, the first amendment is very important, so it should be a difficult task to impugn someone for making false claims unless you can show that malice was involved and not simply error. The Fairness Doctrine was overturned in the eighties. This required all media outlets to give equal airtime to both sides of an issue to prevent an excessively biased narrative. I don’t think this applies to the news itself, but opinion segments where talking heads discussed a political or social topic. The new should be delivered with sobriety and as little hype or sensationalism as possible, but that doesn’t get the ratings. This is nothing new, however. Yellow journalism got us into the Spanish American War and Americas foray into imperialism. The market place of ideas is supposed to guard against bias as well, but it really doesn’t work very well. People tend to go to sources that support their ideology and are dismissive of others.
@@tokenghost7777Not only mainstream media... ANY news source, whether they own a skyscraper or live in my mom's basement (don't get me started) should have to vet their stories, and be punished for repeatdly lying. We'd therefore need fact checkers, and since people can't seem to agree about what's real, people from each cartel would try to bribe the fact checkers. Therefore, I volunteer to be a fact checker.
maybe we should punish those that are at fault of spouting bogus "science"... We could start with Anthony Fauci over here in the states.
I've seen a lot of what amounts to corruption in environmental science, specifically in relation to producing work making predictions of the consequences and costs of sea level rise in regions. Making a set of predictions is forecasting not research, the forecasts depend on a lot of assumptions with lots of leeway to swing the results, forecasts are often subject to little or no effective peer review, and unsurprisingly their forecasts often support the views of those providing funding to them. Add to that the tendency to produce books of papers by invited authors and you have published "science" which is sometimes functionally indistinguishable from propaganda. Unfortunately one sees non-profits engage heavily in this as their core business model.
non - profits my arse... lol
In the past we had crystal balls, I'm wondering if we shouldn't go back to using them.
I guarantee you that for every fraud found more than a dozen gets through. This is as old as humanity.
Then prove it! You forgot to do so.
I'm trying to recall the major US newspaper that publishes a page 1 story to support its agenda then retracts/corrects it quietly on page 12 a week later. I think it's in New York.
Oh it's a lot more than 1 paper from new york. :(
There's some uncertainty about the location. Every time you make a measurement you get a different city.
Not US but I think it's been observed in several cities in the UK.
That's a good point. The retraction/correction ought to be on the same page that the original story was on.
I live in a tiny rural redneck town in Colorado. Same crap here. Doesn't matter WHERE, it's a common practice of editors. A great click bait story is just one more lie. Sadly, it takes more than a week, sometimes it's months later.
I think that newspaper is all of them everywhere. 50 years ago, Florida Today had a front page story with click bait headline, and the next week buried a correction where no one would notice. It concerned a hot button issue coming up for election and the retraction made it irrelevant to that issue. They at least printed my letter to the editor calling them out for it.
Maybe we peaked at Wikipedia
Well that’s depressing
its edited by athoritative sources its no different than the rest of the naritive.
@@HaakonOdinsson I will say that I believe what will happen is that people will become less and less interested in the news as they realize that it can’t even be trusted anymore. And this will simply lead to a world where people live in real life way more than they ever lived online, while still using online for their entertainment and stuff. I’m willing to bet the future of this country (The US) will be very outdoors and very physical and concrete. It would make sense too, as it would be a cultural pendulum sort of thing.
@@HaakonOdinsson My other reply TO YOU got deleted as well! Jesus Christ
It’s POSSIBLE that Sabine has it set up herself to delete comments with certain keywords in it, as I am very certain I have read comments saying something similar to yours on other videos which have not gotten removed. I suppose it is possible an AI is determining which comments to remove using some esoteric principle other than just keywords, but I have no reason to believe that’s happening _just_ yet. I’ve seen straight up hate speech that doesn’t use slurs not get deleted before.
@@VerbDoesStuff I would argue that news hasn't been trustful already for quite some time even without any AI.
Meanwhile…. Trust the science bro.
Long ago I came to realize the wisdom in Charlie mungers quote “you show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome”. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.
Confirmation of the old axion “ Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome”.
Frank Wilczek approves.
But if you lie, you'll get caught eventually, and then, someone will show you the inside of a prison cell.
@@ColonelFredPuntridge In the world I would want to live in, yes that would happen. However this problem will not go away with a simplistic solution. Some of the lies are so deeply ingrained people would actually defend the deception instead of accept the truth. For example: Secondhand smoking. If you ask any doctor "How many cases of lung problems or anything can you link back to sencondhand smoke?" I guarantee you you will NEVER find one. I know that is a silly one and obviously it is a good idea to limit exposure to people who don't want to be around it and not have it around those who shouldn't be exposed at all, but honestly I don't think there is enough evidence or data other than it sounds like a good idea to not accidentally inhale smoke you aren't smoking lol
@@ColonelFredPuntridge lol, on what planet?
Isn't climate change the biggest example. When you have a Dept. of Climate Change at a university, how many of their articles are going to claim it's no big deal?
Very sad, but, in my opinion, part of a much larger problem. I suppose I'm so dated and old fashioned, that my opinion has little relevance, but it seems that greed, self-promotion, and shamelessness have become virtues over the past 40 years, while basic morality has disappeared. This is evident throughout society - not only in science. I did not stay in academic science, after finishing a PhD, as a result of observing really awful behaviors and lack of ethics as a grad student, but it's no better in corporate environments, law firms, and government.
You're not dated and old fashioned, the people that think that of people like you are the problem themselves. This moral relativism coming out of this thinking that the new is always better, that progress only moves forward, etc.. is what took us to this mess. I am those who think morality and ethics are absolutes and are not to change with times. And this is a scientific forum, so you will not agree with me on this, but atheism and Godlessness is the problem with the new generations. Feel free to disagree on that one.
rwb I agree with you and had the same experience. But there is a place for us. Resilient small communities where we can rebuild civilization. We need to find like minded others and do this. I went to a small island in Japan and welcome others of like mind.
@@kuba2ve The problem with moral relativism is also self-solving... when enough people realize they can 'morally' justify purging the 'immoral'. It's happened before... that's how Rome became the Catholic Church in a nut-shell, after all. Constantine was like, "Sayyyyy... if I embrace this popular new religion, make a few tweaks here and there... I can get rid of all the trouble makers and the populace will back me up on it! Now to make sure I get a military 'miracle' for propaganda.."
Alondro knows... ALONDRO WAS THERE... whispering into Constantine's ear. >:}
@@Alondro77 You need to read Church History from the start, but from valid sources, not the secular sources that are always intent on blackwashing it for obvious purposes. Again, this is not the place to evangelize people, or talk about Religion (I know your kind). Have a good day, and God Bless you.
@@Alondro77Yeah; It was all to take back control of the populace. Too many people knew the true, original teachings of Jesus. It was done purely to edit the bible. That's why no one but clergymen were allowed to read Latin centuries later. And they remained pagan in private.
"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."
- Valery Legasov (HBO's Chernobyl)
Scientists seem to be under a lot of duress to conform and to push approved narratives.
The change to short term contracts over the last few decades is the culprit. The pressure to publish is so great now that more researchers are willing to take risks and present papers of low standard or even fraudulent. In Australia we've had some mindboggling cases where good scientists have commited scientific misconduct. Some have even completely fabricated experiments in attempts to win grant funding. Lifetime tenure may have had its problems but now there is a serious problem with quality.
"Publish or perish."
Many of the problems start at the post graduate level, where students know that to get a postdoctoral degree they need a certain number of publications that have been accepted. What seems to happen is that there is a design problem with their experiments, usually the number of observations is too small. So then they try different analysis methods to get them p
Which scientists?
You get what you pay for. Low paying, fickle, short-term contracts, dished out by well-paid careerist administrators are below the paygrade of aspiring researchers who know they're getting paid less than someone working at McDonnald's lol
1) Forcing researchers to become sleazy salemen chasing grants. Tying Researchers salary directly to the funding they bring in.
2)Phd.oversupply resulting in a absurd scientific career,half life of 6 years and no prospects for 95% of them.
3)Publish or perish culture with absurd h index requirements.
These issue want to make barf. How can the scientific community, which is supposed to be the most honest and most intelligent group of people fall this low. I wanted to become a researcher all my life. Now, I am just depressed at the state of science. I'm not jumping into this cesspit willingly.
About 8 years ago, as a lecturer, I detected fraud on a thesis, I brought it before the ethics committee where the fraud was confirmed, yet after a visit to st-petersburg of the academic director (the student was russian) the student passed and was given the best student price, and a few months later most people part of the ethics commission got sacked.
This was a privately funded, yet regulated university.
I believe you are right on the money. Politicisation is the main issue and it penetrates the entire body of society and therefore also science. Thruth is relative.
The legacy status. Let's not forget universities are country clubs for some kids. The Wharton School of Business has produced some amazing people, who lose 350 million dollars because they such great businessman.
@@kareanderssonTruth is not THAT relative.
Yikes. That sounds like it might not have been politics as much as outright blackmail or extortion.
@@kareandersson Truth isn't relative, it's just not affordable to the average household.
Sadly, lying is becoming the new default skill required by EVERY company/discipline/relationship. Honesty is just to hard, especially when you are the only one?
If we made truth the goal, there wouldn't be so many problems. Unfortunately, not so.
You know what's also a problem?
People who like over exaggerating like you
@@reformed_attempt_1? go away? what kind of nonsense reply is this
Yep
@ILLUMINATED-1 well at least they told the truth in their name 😆
Hi Sabine,
A related problem is when journals are controlled by scientists with a particular viewpoint who then suppressed dissenting viewpoints. This is problem is especially evident in climate science. Read Andrew Montford's books for examples. For example, Michael Mann's famous hockey stick paper, upon auditing, proved to be riddled with errors and worse.
Money trumps everything - scientific integrity included.
pedo island trumps money
This issue runs way deeper than just "quantity over quality". There is plenty of politics involved here, the least of all people seeking promotions. Corporations trying to insulate their products from contrary research; political parties trying to falsely legitimize questionable public policy; biased scientists steeped in dogma trying to push their own precious ideologies. Science is not as 'objective' as people like to think it is.
Never has been. I am not sure where this deified moral scientist trope comes from. Perhaps the massive propaganda we are pumped all the time.
We have so many examples to reference, they are people as well. But let's pretend not; there's money to be made.
I'm sure all of those exist somewhere, but I don't think they're the driving factor compared to simple career incentives ("publish publish publish"). Your perspective on this does seem a bit politically driven to me though...
@@ska042 Maybe the cause for publish or perish takes it roots into politics/profit-based-economy. Then both of you would be right.
@@ska042it's my observation that people who accuse others of motivated reasoning usually have motivations for their reasoning 😎
Scientists and academics are human. They have all the same pettiness, ego and self-interest issues that the general population has. They have to make a living like everyone else, but the way research is funded, both in universities and the private sector, creates incentives for scientists to do whatever is necessary to keep their job and/or reputation, even if it means steering conclusions in a particular direction or just pushing as many papers out the door as possible, regardless of quality. While the effort they put in to developing a deeper knowledge of their field should be respected, and most of them do act ethically, they shouldn't be put on a pedestal.
That said, if you want to argue about science being dogma, ideological, or an illegitimate basis for public policy then you are probably being a hypocrite, because ideology is almost certainly what you are bringing to the argument. Individuals and groups of scientists can be dogmatic, but that doesn't mean science is dogma. Unless you have more expertise than the scientists you are condemning, you're just trying to inject the opinions of a layperson into a contest of evidence you don't have the ability to definitively interpret.
We just need to take science for what it is. Science is a consensus of view of many scientists and people that otherwise identify as scientists , who also happen to be horribly conflicted due to outside influences which pay them to claim studies which confirm propaganda as science while blackballing those that refuse to lose their integrity.
Somebody needs to look up the definition of science, again... and again... and again. ;-)
Yeah, that's not what science is. Science is a methodology and a way of thinking, not academic consensus.
That's what the covidians and libshits have turned 'science' into. In the same way they turned men into woman and failed brown cultures into future "engineers".
I think it was ever so. In my career I sometimes reproduced experiments in published papers and they didn't do what the paper claimed. I always put it down to either the author's incompetence or mine, but could have been falsified results. Even years ago there was so much pressure on academics to publish or lose funding that a lot of dross got published and survived peer review. The only real test is independently reproducing the results.
If one can line up referees to review a fake paper, one can line up friends to repro the fake results. Just moves the problem around.
@@SkorjOlafsenthe more people involved the harder it is to keep the secret though.
in programming we are required to write automated testing for our assertions that code is correct. I feel like there could be something like this, but in some fields it's not quite as simple.
It would also highlight several quite serious measurement issues we have going on currently in which I fully believe any prediction made upon complex systems gets lossier and lossier the further you look into the future. I admit this is my bias and my research bleeding in here, but I think we'll come to find more often than not any prediction 10~ years out is basically a guaranteed falsehood.
Anyone who publishes fake data needs to be drummed out of science once and for all. Trust is key; once violated, there is no good way to restore it.
Absolutely. The elephant on this thread is that so few people ever provided any valid and verified evidence for their claims and conspiracy theories.
The present is not a good time for dedicated scientists. It's like the return of the dark ages.
@@Bob_Adkins Where is your evidence, because you have provided none?
@@niblick616 Don't let your bias get in the way. Step back and ask yourself if someone will profit from research being skewed in a certain way. Organizations buy research, and it's very expensive. For a few dollars more, they can get the results they were hoping for. Don't be lazy, it's all over the Internet, from very honest people like Dr John Campbell, Dr John
@@niblick616 I tried, but YT won't allow it. I'll try again: Dr John Campbell, Dr John Robson, and Pete Judo are good sources.
Dr. P. Boghossian’s ridicules (and hilarious) gag papers that got published in a liberalized journal, was a real eye-opener on the kind of crap that can be published by a biased publication.
Raw data files and measurement parameters should be provided with manuscripts for publication. This would solve the problem in many instances and allow for better scrutiny of the results.
+1
The trend is heading that way, we have been told to expect to have to upload everything within the next 2 years when we publish. Not sure it will help, AAAS and Nature have both required more uploaded data than most other papers. I have tried to download data only to find it is not really there, or the samples have working ID's with no map to the final ID making it useless.
Is it getting worse are we just getting more suspicious and looking deeper? My field is nutrition 'science' and while fraud is one issue, the appalling quality of published papers, deeply influenced by industry funding, going back seventy years years is an indictment to both scientists, 'peer reviewers' AND publishers. Worryingly, this has has influenced community advice/guidance with catastrophic results.
I am sad to have watched all the promise of the Information Age sour into the cynicism demanded by the Manipulation Age. The golden dawn of an era with unsurpassed potential for collaboration and free exchange of knowledge has prematurely dimmed to the grim dusk of an era characterized by the constant con. I am trying to stay sad rather than becoming bitter.
I remember my excitement as a student, sending an email from my university to another to ask the author of a paper questions about their research. By the end of the day, and a couple of email exchanges later, I’d received generously thoughtful replies and a table of data that their group had not included in their publications. I can still remember sitting in the computer lab feeling a kind of reverence and thinking, “this is like being alive to see the first printing presses turning out copies of a book; the internet is one of human kind’s greatest advances.” The possibilities were writ large. Today m however, who can trust the information that is shared?
great topic. As you state, the problem stems from reward systems which emphasize quantity or stature of the journal instead of the content of the research. Part of the cause of this development is the sheer mass of publications and inability of editors, reviewers, and faculty search committees to digest it all, or even assess the value of work represented by a set of publications. When 100 applicants submit their CVs for a faculty position for example, the committee first tries to sift the grain from the chaff by eliminating those with fewer than a certain number of publications, or only including those who publish some minimum number of papers in a prestigious journal. This practice, and similar phenomena in grant review encourage researchers to focus on quantity or journal prestige instead of the quality of research. Then you have institutions who encourage this by financial incentives and ofcourse someone wants to make a buck on that.
Bribery in scientific journals is horrible. But, what percentage of reputable scientists would accept a bribe to promote a commercial product in a science video?
Bribery is science is only likely because we have given away all of an individuals rights. The rights that really matter like our ability to sue for meaningful sums or in actual courts with actual juries(you give up this right any time you sign a terms and conditions form.. online or off. That's because of right wing psychopaths systematically bamboozling y'all. )The rights limited that cause bribery though? Are that they gave rights to corporations and they abuse it. Scientific achievements never result in any single individual or even multiple hands on scientists having any legally binding right to sell their creations. They always belong to the corporations and even if you decide to leave a corporation with policies you don't agree with? You aren't legally allowed to discuss things you invented or even seek work in a remotely related field. They destroy their ability to create income yet not one single conservative seems to give a shit despite jobs & keeping Americans employed bbeing something they pretend to care about most.
This is very very serious indeed. It may endanger the scientific and publishing community, worse it may sow seeds to destroy the publics confidence in science and other academic discipline.
Hope something can be done to address this problem. Thanks dr. Sabina pointing out the issue. Your great work is greatly appreciated and keep up the good work.
We all think you are idiots. No thinking person has trusted acedemia for over a century. The brightest minds in the world have the most contemptible and corrupt system in place, so very contrary to its empirical roots, and finding are whatever you want them to be. Institutionalized hypocrisy at the highest levels. "May induce distrust" is a long gone conclusion we troglodites settled on eons ago.
"Papers or bust" going on in academia could have only led to this.
"Publish or perish" is the phrase.
If the Chinese had to use paper to publish there would be no trees in China
@@infinitytoinfinitysquaredb7836 Right. Couldn't quite remember it on the spot, so invented my own spin. Thanks for reminding.
@@alexxx4434 You mean it wasn't a joke derived from the "irritated word sequences" section of the video?
@@Sonny_McMacsson Not even a little bit. It's one of the reasons I dropped out of academia, along with the stunningly bad career prospects for even capable researchers. The current system is just broken.
Too be honest, I see fraud everywhere. It doesn't matter if it's a single person or a large corporation. It happens until they are caught and held accountable.
I cracked up at ‘breast peril’ and then the understatement of ‘kidney disappointment’ had me laughing a little too loud!
The problem is that the journal publishers care more about money than truth.
Ding, ding, ding... winner. They system is broken. many "scientist" have become just as dirty as politicians.
The truth sets you free. But too many people don't want free: they want money.
We built are whole society around wealth and money. Then act surprised when money corrupts everything. I don’t know why. I’m never surprised to find corruption in any Institute.
I received my Ph. D. in a Science many decades ago and decided to go into the private sector. You have to understand that to get to the level were you are paid a reasonable salary and have some security you have to spend typically a decade, maybe two decades living like a student. When I was in graduate school, I knew a few post-docs in their late 30s. The competition to get one of those few Academic jobs, after so much sacrifice, is incredible. I'm not shocked that there is so much fraud in Science and I'm shocked that su*cide is not sky high.
Would you accept hosting me in your house for six months (food and lodging)? No charge of course. Let's put that pesky "wealth and money" thing behind us. Never thought of traveling this way before, but your reply sparked this insanity. What is it in spanish? Mi casa, su casa?
thats true, money and filthy finances literally corrupt everything, institutions, processes, minds, people
you may not have understood that most money for "science" comes from out of control governments around the world, and yes that includes the USA, who always want more power. there's a reason why almost every politically relevant paper basically says we have catastrophic problems and we need the governments to solve them. if they didn't say that they'd lose their funding.
Money and wealth are not the problem. The selfishness already there in the hearts of people is the problem. When was the last time anyone had to teach a child to lie, to steal, or to be rude when doing so suits their selfish ends?
A couple of internships while in college quickly removed any interest in pursuing physics as a career. All they did was beg for money.
Well, if you organize startup, you'll be begging investors for money as well.
@@dmitripogosian5084 And if you work in R&D for a large company, you have to beg for money as well--at the organization, department, group, and project levels.
I have learned an incredible amount from your channel, Sabine. Your channel is one of the worthy few.
The idea that it might "become worse" seems to focus in an unfortunate way on perception, rather than reality.
It is the exposure of existing corruption that will become worse, the corruption, bribery, censorship, in other anti-scientific behavior has been increasingly the norm for decades. If anything it's wonderful that it's becoming exposed now.
For a field on which people rely to understand the world but also drug interactions and risks, it becoming worse is not something to be looked forward to because credibility is being questioned industry wide. People will avoid vaccines in future because of what happened over the last few years. Even if there is solid evidence, people may have to wait decades for reproducibility in clinical studies. This has huge repercussions.
It’s not like exposing financial corruption which hurts the people who have lost money now but helps everyone relatively soon after. This will have long running repercussions, people avoiding treatments because of lack of faith (see the last 4 years), clinical studies having to be reproduced and taking longer to get cleared, for example.
@@TheBaumcm GOOD! People should avoid treatments that were not scientifically sound in their studies, because the whole point of the ACTUAL scientific method is that most things the "experts" decide are wrong, if they are not subjected to rigorous testing.
The last four years, people who foolishly accepted the lies and incompetence of the "experts", and their treatments, have died far faster than those who did not trust them. The latter have been proven correct at every turn.
And it's even better if all those studies that were untrustworthy must be done over. There is NO progress in studies with bad methodology. Their very existence is LOST ground.
@@TheBaumcm Credibility MUST be questioned. The foundation of credibility must be EARNING credibility, it must never be given by default, and credence especially must never be given to scientists or authorities unless they constantly, at every turn, prove they deserve it.
The last few years have been proof that the authorities must NEVER be trusted by default. They were wrong, and killed huge numbers of people with their bad responses and treatments.
Without reproducibility there IS no solid evidence. Your kind of anti-science attitude is deadly.
Two former editors of medical journals like the lancet have said over 50% of published peer reviewed papers are rubbish.
and by over they ment... most...
With or without AI, cheating and dishonesty is common in academia. The public only gets to see the high profile cases. But there are numerous cases that involve "nobody" scientists with such low impact that it's not worth the time and effort to bring them to justice. Several years ago, I was on a rank and tenure committee and discovered that 2 associate profs, going up for promotion to prof, plagiarized two chapters of a neurobiology textbook. The chapters were originally published in the preceding edition of the textbook by another author. The associate profs replaced the name of the original author with their own and modified less than 1% of the original text and figures. The updated chapters did not include an acknowledgment to the original author. I reported the plagiarism to the committee and Dean. We did not recommend promotion for the associate profs, but they appealed and got promoted anyway
As a biologist who worked in academia, I also want there to be coverage over abuses in science, especially of phds and post docs who often can’t leave without compromising their careers. I’ve seen people destroyed by the abuse and one friend of a friend even self-exited
what's rising isn't bribes, it's awareness of the corrupt publishing system bribes 😂
Publishing bribes are usually called "advertising". The whole Lot of Media, which uses adverts for income generation, is bribed, essentially. And YES, i mean ALL media. not just scientific.
Back in 1990's I was told that the great number of Chinese engineers would be publishing more than every other country - seems to be true -
don't worry, the free market will figure it out ;)
It's a direct result of emphasis of number of publications, rather than quality in grant applications and promotion.
Those funding the research get the result they want to support whatever endeavor they are embarking upon. That's how it works. If they don't get the result they want then they just trash the "study" and find another institute willing to give them what they want. This is how paid research at universities works as well, and I learned that from a research scientist at a prestigious university in Canada. It's how we have so many pharma drugs on the market that are dangerous or do little or nothing beyond placebo. Sadly, many scientists are somewhat religious in their conviction that "science" is pure and not wrought with corruption, they that is changing, slowly and surely.
Much worse are the papers that write something that a journal wants to see.
Back in 1993, there was a book titled Galloeos revenge detailing junk science. Nothing new here
When an article starts with computer models PROVE, I know I have to take everything that follows with much salt.
A Himalayan rock salt lamp sized lump of salt.
and peper, lots of peper...
Or, the science is settled!
@@knerduno5942 With a computer model? You, my friend, have never designed a computer model.
--Bill Nye the so-called "Science" Guy@@atillathehungry3145
I've been fighting against "publish for promotion" my entire career. Fortunately, I'm a U.S. civil servant, so it hasn't been "publish or perish" for me. Still, I've seen some people get ahead by publishing lots of garbage, and it is admittedly disheartening. There is some comfort for me that most of those frauds are now in management, which to me is a punishment despite the higher pay. However, other frauds are still in research, and have better support for their dubious work since they can be relied upon to pad the lab's publication numbers, making the frauds in management look good for the higher ups who only know how to count.
On the bright side, most of my peers are honest, ethical, and talented. The frauds distress them also. There is hope for science, at least at my lab.
And people wonder why some don't "believe science."
This is why you should always question the science, not trust it.
Unless it has to do with some political agenda I agree with /s
One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)
- Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996), 31.
💯
Especially global warming
No, this is a stupid and unproductive attitude to have. You are pretending like every paper out there is faked nowadays which it absolutely isn't.
Trust, but verify. That's the only sensible way to operate.
This may have started 50 odd years ago when the 'publish or parish' rule was embraced by academia. It becomes really difficult to produce original papers/information when so much has already been produced.
‘Publish or parish’. Absolutely hilarious.
Politics and corporations has ruined medicine and scientific discoveries
The core motivation for fabricating papers is to *game* *the* *system* *of* *metrics* *used* *to* *assess* *researchers'* *track* *records* . I was always struck by how, in the sciences of all places, people would accept a measurement system that was so obviously flawed. Yet due to time constraints (and obviously those on funding and job security), it has become unavoidable for basically anyone without a Nobel prize (or a successful YT channel?) under their belt.
To be clear, there are many ways in which this system can be gamed, the easiest is to simply pad author lists. Since metrics do not account for the *weight* of contribution, your best strategy is to do *just* enough to get your name on a bunch of papers, rather than do tons of work on a single paper. Any researcher in a medium/large group can multiply their research outputs (and thus their "performance") many times over this way without really risking their academic reputation at all.
Yes, it's hard to be a really good scientist. Pitfalls and monsters of error lie in wait for you, lurking under the weeds, everywhere. The life of the mind is not an easy one.
This has always been true in every directed hierarchy. The British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars way horribly corrupt, nepotistic, cruel, and arbitrary. The question is: was it good enough to win the war in the end? (Spoiler: the answer is yes it was, _even though_ it was corrupt, nepotistic, cruel, and arbitrary.)
Re ivermectin, it would interesting to hear you talk with either Pierre Kory about his clinical experience with ivermectin or Alexander Marinos on his analysis of the shenanigans in the TOGETHER trial (such as arbitrarily limiting the dosage to patients over 90kg such that it slips below 400 mcg/kg for those with higher BMIs and therefore most at risk).
she cant know everything
gotta cope with being a vaxxtard
She doesnt know what she is talking about.
I have read most of the papers and it is sad to see how easy it is to manipulate the scientific discourse.
Let's not give any spotlight to liars.
This has been going on for decades; it is already very bad.
Disappointing one’s audience or family is bad, but it’s the kidney disappointment that can be life-ending.
Lets just hope they dont bury the victims near a subterrainian insect province.
Reading the comments after listening to the video, it's clear that science can't do without something that science can't generate, the moral obligation to tell the truth and to follow through with its supposed methodology of actual and honest review and replication. If they don't do both then science will become increasingly discredited.
The one thing the world didn’t need was more efficient ways to spread lies and disinformation and more incentive to do so.
As a senior scientist, Dr. Sabin, what do you suggest? What can be done to prevent this? The reason why this is so prominent in the East, because, science institutions are still on shakey ground there, and its far easire to climb up the "metric" ladder. We all know how the publication and impact factor "metric" has polluted science in general. But since the institution behind science is what can bring the things on the right path, is there any way to measure scientific progress via them?
Impact Factor sounds very crucial, right🙂 Let's wait for Dr. Sabin giving an appropriat answer to your question.
I just watched a video about an excellent paper that was retracted. Full of inconvenient truth about the harms of a procedure we all had our arms twisted to take in recent years. Harm covered up, profits ongoing.
And most importantly for them, consequences avoided as tens of thousands expire.
"Trust THE Science!"
That clip at 5:11 made me laugh so hard.
The best chemical experiments are always done over top of a keyboard, right? 🤣
Thanks, I had to go back to see how ludicrous the setup was.
because handwriting denotes ... denotes.
Rubbish publications were a problem 25 years ago. The University systems need to be torn down.
In the meantime, the gods need more engineers.
Just look at the plagarism outbreak that plagues the highest level of 'Murican universities. It's all a scam.
ive essentially stopped putting any trust in published 'peer reviewed' work beyond that of a decent newspaper
Studies show that the results of a study are dependent upon the outcome that the financiers of the research want the results to be… now more than ever.
Precisely , the results will show exactly what who paid for them desire, regardless of how that data has to be manipulated or omitted in order to achieve that end.
“The first thing a man will do for his ideal is lie”
― Joseph Schumpeter
One note: Ivermectin itself is not controversial; I have a prescription of Ivermectin for rosacea. What is controversial are non-approved issues such a covid-19 and use of veterinary Ivermectin for humans.
Approved by who? The drug companies at 50 cents a dose?
It was administered to humans (nobel prize) before it was approved for animals.
It’s the same drug.
this is true! why did you pick the one drug that big pharma hates?? Who fed you that??
Right, when it is actually used to treat *parasites* (such as skin mites in your case) it is totally fine. That's what it was intended for.
The problem and controversy is when people trying torture the data to make it seem like it magically works for things that aren't related to parasites at all.
It's been really bad for 30 years thanks for finally noticing
Don´t you know her book "Lost in Math", published 2018? She describes the problem very accurately there.
Kinda like our U.S. senator that says there's science that proves reducing food production feeds more people. Just one example of many.....
ugh so hindawi is the temu of journals? a sad world..
Don't know anything about Hindawi but Temu works fine...to the US anyway.
WOW, follow the science is really follow the money? No way! Some people have been saying science has been bought for years.
No university can live without external money now. You deliver what you get paid for.
The new particle smasher will get built, otherwise they will make a lose on the specialist equipment made to build such tunnels. Its operating on sunken costs
How was this not obvious? Seriously, they make bold claims & never Show Their Methodology. We know they’re openly biased. What makes you think their ‘studies’ can stand scrutiny.
Complicated times indeed.
When I was working on my course conclusion work, which here in Brazil is not optional and needs to follow the scientific guidelines, my biggest difficulty was exactly to find papers, scientific articles. Like, I'd find a citation and then tried to find it, without much luck. That's where I spent the most of my time, instead of writing the work, writing the source code, working on the testing and so on...
My college didn't have any subscriptions to those services, at least that I knew of. So... It was hard.
And I don't have a solution either, because you need a huge infrastructure for that.
Anyway, thanks, Sabine! 😊
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
OK. Como o Português é a língua filha mais próxima do Latim e do Grego Antigo, aqueles de nós que usam e pensam em Português têm uma vantagem inicial na epistemologia e na ciência. Mas no Brasil se faz mais pensamento baseado no crânio sem ajuda porque tem menos máquinas para nos ajudar a pensar. Se todo brasileiro tivesse IA e a nação tivesse mais poder computacional que o resto do mundo, e o problema da corrupção fosse minimizado a um nível aceitável, qual seria a sua experiência?
@@josedelnegro46 Boa pergunta. Nunca pensei à respeito... Mas a vida seria melhor, sem dúvidas.
Attractive Reverberations would be a pretty good indie rock band name.
It has always been there.... Fraud
the vaccines are safe and effective 😢
"I represent science," Dr. Faucci. Questioning "the science," even when justified, has become the equivalent of heresy in Middle Ages Europe.
A quote by Donnella Meadows comes to mind. It wen something like "Ultimately a complex system will always follow it's main system goal." Thinking about it that can be a true Dilemma! It means that as soon as one factor, one system goal, begins to dominate, the entire system behavior will sooner or later orient in that direction. Is a hospital's main purpose to provide the best possible healthcare? Or to maximized profit? Same with science: is it mainly a grand project to understand the world ormainly just another economic factor? Or the economy itself: the meaning of the word suggests it is about householding with scarce resources to provide a good livelihood for all. The very term "Capitalist Economy" has long become an oxymoron. It strikes me that either an economy can be economic, householding, homeostasis oriented (growth becomes meaningless beyond a certain saturation point). Or we talk about Capitalism, the main system goal not the lifelihood of people or householding with scarce resources but single mindedly increasing capital. What for? And research scientists accepting bribes just fits into the latter picture. Science is supposed to be an open and transparent endeavor. Otherwise it is a dying corpse.
They should model their actions on those that are used to sanction drug cheats in sports. 1st Offence 18 month suspension from having their group on any scientific publication, 2nd Offence 5 year ban, 3rd Offence lifetime ban.
A lot of errors and untruths published science are the fault of the principal investigators' underlings, who don't want to admit to errors and cause the principal investigator to have to waste time cleaning them up and correcting them. This sounds like a dodge, but it's inevitable, because the reason principal investigators _hire_ underlings is to save their (the PIs') time.
In other words, you need to make very sure that you punish the truly guilty, not the culprits' bosses at the time when the error or untruth gets published.
I see the scientist often the PIs themselves as the biggest problem in modern scientific research. Faced with difficult situations, many scientists will either just fail to acknowledge their previous errors (since, it negates or partially negates much of their scientific careers) or even fabricate data (or covertly have underlings do it... they'll know its incorrect, but don't have a direct hand in this) . Underlings who don't provide evidence that supports their superior, will often not be retained and will return to their country of origin in many cases, whereas one's who somehow manage to support their PI 's hypotheses, will be retained and rise to the top. If you do an experiment and the results don't match your hypothesis (or that of your group/PI), and this hypothesis has been dealt a possibly fatal blow. This means you must at least revise, or abandon this initial hypothesis. This is the very basis of the true scientific method. The search for the truth. However, this is where the problems arise. A worker in such a position may be sent back to the laboratory bench with instructions to find appropriate results that fit the PI's hypothesis, or a career orientated rival will certainly do so. If this 'data' is not achieved the worker, in the very worst they may not continue to work for much longer in the lab/country, where they worked so hard to get to. Personally, I loved unexpected results, to me this meant the 'Universe was speaking to me' and I was about to discover something. However, from 3-4 decades of working at the laboratory bench (never rising above this position), I have come to the sad conclusion, that the cheats (largely concerned with their personal careers) rapidly rise to the very top, and almost always get away with it. I have known people who got 'great', but not controversial scientific findings, got a publication in a prestigious journal based on this data. This then catapulted their scientific careers on to tenure track positions at prestigious schools... However, their earlier work could not be reproduced, and negative data is much harder to publish, plus the original researcher will argue (if ever challenged) that their exact cell line or clone is no longer available etc., so their earlier work can't be tested. By the time it's finally known it was all BS (honest mistake at best/artifact/fluke/or fabrication at worst).... they are in an unassailable position as a World authority with 100s of publications to their name via large research teams. From my time at the laboratory bench I would say as much as 2/3rds of scientific manuscripts contain significant scientific errors.@@ColonelFredPuntridge
Getting nonsensical papers published in Postmoderist journals should be promoted as an ethical alternative to creating false science papers.
I think we should let go of the reins when it comes to people using A.I. to produce papers, editorials, movie scripts, TV shows etc... just pass them and add them to the pile that the A.I.'s learn from. So that it's stock from which it derives it's material will become increasingly dumb, as will the resulting products.
Name one reputable scientist who has produced any "...false science papers...". You forgot to say.
What's new? The former editor of the NEJOM has stated she believed half the articles published in the journal are fraudulant.