Later that evening at the local tavern.
“So then when it fails for the third time, he drinks a cup of acid, tips his hat to the crowd, and then collapses.”
“Haha! That’s gold!”
The tavern falls silent.
There are a couple great video essays by Bobby Broccoli on YouTube where they dive into the history of people who faked human cloning and discovering a new element
Link for those interested:
Amazing video. Thanks for sharing.
I love bobby broccoli. For me, one of the very few instant-click long format channels.
See, replication isn’t a problem if your entire field is vibes-based. A lot of economics papers I come across are like that (so much so that I am close to writing off the entire decipline as unscientific). The diff in the level of rigour you would see in e.g. particle physics versus in economics is baffling.
It used to be psychology as well but I am noticing they are more than aware of their replication crisis lately. Whereas economics feels pseudoscience with a maths clothing.
Economists are just maths/stats nerds that like gambling, don’t bother to cmv.
I see the same issues also in computer science especially when looking into recent trends such as AI or blockchain/NFTs before that. There are definitely areas that are more rigorous than others but the replication crisis is a problem in many many scientific fields. If your results are not completely outlandish and don’t go against the vibe, no one will ever bother to check your results.
There are so many different areas of computer science though… Everything from pure mathematics (e.g ‘we found a new algorithm that does X in O(logx)’) to the absurdly specific (‘when I run the load tests with this configuration it’s faster’). The former would get published. The latter wouldn’t. And the stuff in the middle ranges the gamut from ‘here’s my new GC algorithm that performs better in benchmarks on these sample sets’ to ‘looks like programmers have fewer bugs when you constrain them with these invariants’. All the way over on the other side, NFT/Blockchain/AI announcement crap usually doesn’t even have a scientific statement to be expressed, so there’s nothing to confirm or deny. There are issues with some areas, but I’m not sure that replication is really the big one for most of these. Only one it commonly applies to IMO are productivity or bug-frequency claims which are generally hella suss
A field that definitely has a problem with replication is Computer Human Interaction. There are a lot of user studies in that field and you basically never see a study done twice. The setup of the studies usually doesn’t even allow it to be repeated as it hinges on some proprietary software written for that very study that is not released to the public.
Yeah that’s a very good point. I was kinda thinking of HCI at the end there but I’m a software engineer so I was only talking about dev experience 😅. Definitely the same ballpark though and 100% agree with you
Yeah, I read about the Stanford prison experiments being widely cited, and it likely has influenced our culture in some way.
Mercury to silver is an easy transformation. You just take a vial of quicksilver, and make it run laps until it’s really tired.
But that’s not all that useful, since it’s not stable and will turn soon into quickersilver
That’s why you break mercury’s legs instead.
Mercury to gold is an easy one, you just hide gold in your stir stick behind a wax cap.
Well, this is extreme.
But in all seriousness, it’s rare for someone to commit fraud on this scale, and even rarer for someone to expect fame from it.
It’s much more common to be in a position where your grant obligations require you to publish 4 articles in a year, and the topic didn’t turn out to be as good as you initially expected, so what do you do? Just take the samples that actually worked at least barely, at least once, apply the logic of “well, it did work once, it doesn’t matter that two other replication attempts brought the catalysis efficiency twice as low, one sample is enough for a proof of concept, let’s write a whole paper based on that”, and here we have a manuscript that contains inflated data, maybe because the conditions were successful this time, or maybe because someone had previously polished platinum on the same surface that the electrode for the catalysis was polished on. Who knows? Who cares? At least you won’t starve for a year until you have to do it again.
Not trying to justify such behaviour, just providing some sort of explanation of why this happens at least in some cases.
But in all seriousness, it’s rare for someone to commit fraud on this scale, and even rarer for someone to expect fame from it.
Fair. But this is an example of something egregious by all standards. Sure, we can also remember Jacques Benveniste. Or recent ivermectin fiasco. And are we considering that superconductor story from last year fraud or just negligence?
Maybe a handful others can be found active today, but the number of those that attempted such a risk would be very small — probably several hundred bold enough to disrupt their area, virtually unnoticeable from outside perspective, and a couple dozens willing to try to act at a scale visible by popular media (well, like example you provided).
That’s what I mean by rare. I would call these outliers in terms of scale/frequency because incidents like these were allowed to happen and did not pop out of thin air. They are not a root of the problem, but rather a byproduct of how academic publishing, financing, and recognition work as a system. The random article you would try to replicate would with a certain far-from-zero probability fail not because the authors had a grandiose idea of how to fool the academic community and gain fame, but likely tried to fit in their poor results in the publishing process that requires novelty and constant publishing regardless of the quality of research, or else they lose their position/group/lab/not gain tenure/not gain next grant/not close the report etc. And that is more problematic and brings far more distrust in science, even among academics themselves, than any vaccine- or water memory-related nonsense.
Yeah, I guess there are two sides to the problem here. People that do fraught on a level that is hard to perceive and those that do fraught on a grandiose level. I agree with all of your comments, especially what you say about how the harder to perceive fraught is actually more damaging to science.
But I guess the question initially posed why some people would do these high risk frauds. Why would someone say they’ve got a working room temp/low pressure supercomputer? Why would someone say they’re able to turn anything into gold? As you say, these are just some spectacular outliers though. And some people are just in it for the short time of grandiosity and fame and don’t care about the consequences I guess?
I’d say yeah, I agree with you, at least in some cases that must be true. It’s so hard to imagine what must go through their heads.
I can’t even say they aren’t doing it for science, because at times there’s such insistence that you can’t help but feel they are sincere in their beliefs (well, same applies to ‘psychics’ or ‘telepaths’, so ehh).
damn the guy lied himself into a pretty deep hole. it is a shame he felt suicide was his only option. sure his reputation was ruined, but he was young. he could have started a new life elsewhere
That’s hydrogen cyanide, for those who are wondering wtf prussic acid is.
I’ll ask Andrew Wakefield what he thinks
He was probably suffering from mercury poisoning anyway which made him think he could get away with what he was doing.
Jokes on us, he really did figure out long lost secrets of transitive matter and took it to his grave in spite. /s
Looks like he paid the “Price” for his bullshit 😎
White mode screen shots nooo my eyes !
*by drinking cyanide cutely