The Academic Culture of Fraud

> The most influential philosopher of recent times is Eliezer Yudkowsky ... The adoption of his thinking contributed to the formation of major AI labs such as OpenAI and later Anthropic.

Minor point, but I don't think one can reasonably credit Yudkowsky with this. Yudkowsy was no booster of neural nets and was quite surprised by their recent success. He's certainly said a lot of important things about artificial intelligence (mostly regarding the potential dangers of such), but his ideas haven't really contributed to current methods of constructing them.

(And yes you could say that Yudkowsky's ideas about the dangers of AI were influential on Anthropic specifically, but this quote is obviously not referring to that.)

disclaimer: I'm a university professor, though in a european country and not in health-rrlated area

The article is excessively negative in tone, and very dramatic and aggressive. I have found many people adjacent to academia, drop outs, or even some inside, very disenchanted and angry at how it works. And it's true, the sets of incentives, structures and political organisation in academia don't relate at all to academic excellence, and are something we have to "suffer". I wish we could come up with a better set of incentives, but it's very hard to do in a mostly vocational and passion-based activity. So what people have come up is structure the incentives along the chores (eg teaching) and easily measurable results (eg publications). And whenever you come up with an incentive structure, some people will game it. And the current state of publication stress (publish or perish) is extreme and counterproductive. But please note that these measurement requirements and incentives are imposed from outside academia. Of course, I'm not saying leave us to our devices, academia is nepotistic and political enough. But the system sure could use some overhaul. Suggestions welcome.

On the other hand, this "fraud" is incentive fraud, but not "truth" fraud. The way science Truth works is by accumulation of imperfect, even erroneous results, leading to an ever more refined understanding of the world. Scientists don't just blindly trust others, even if they cite each other (nowadays, citations are a political and incentive-gaming tool more than actual references). So these massive scale frauds don't bother us so much because they don't make understanding necessarily go backwards. Of course the payer feels it's a waste of money, but in academia we see money as support for research, which is mostly failed anyways because you only make discoveries by failing and failing again.

And progress in knowledge is nowadays still going on, even in the medical fields. And academia still works, much as healthcare and compulsory education, becausemany people feel a calling to do these professions properly, even if it doesn't seem so from outside. So let's be optimistic, even while trying to come up with improvements to the current model.

PS: So sorry for the wall of text

I wouldn't be as pessimistic as this. Having been in relatively low-pressure parts of academia (polisci, behavioural economics, behavioural genetics), I can't say I've ever seen clear fraud or direct pressure to commit fraud. Bad research, bullshit, politics, yes... but those are maybe not unique to academia.

Anyway, quite a wake-up call to be told we should model ourselves on finance. Ow.

Every day it gets harder for me to believe that the medical and pharmaceutical industrial system's configuration of incentives can ever lead to improvements in health for people.

I don't doubt there are many, many researchers and physicians who genuinely want to help people. It's possible to me that virtually everyone does.

But if that's the case, the incentive structure has apparently gotten away from everyone and become some sort of monster working at cross-purposes toward them at all times, keeping them from succeeding.

I don't know the specific numbers, but what fraction of the U.S. workforce and economy is involved in medical/pharmaceutical or related insurance research, treatment, or administration? It has to be well into the double digits.

If people started actually being cured of things, actually being well, whole segments of this structure would collapse--and if that percentage figure is high enough, so would the economy.

I don't think we even need to posit that there are actually malevolent people involved who are trying to keep people sick. It could all just be a consequence of a whole system that depends on it to keep operating, and consequentially nudges just enough of every benevolent, neutral, or merely self-interested person's work in a direction that keeps it from making people well.

Well that's the long term consequence of treating academia as a means of social mobility; a gravy train, rather than a dispassionate search for the truth and knowledge.

Palladium magazine is published by The American Governance Foundation. I couldn’t find out much about it by Googling, does anybody know what its deal is?

Most of the negative examples are med/bio-related (including psychology here), whereas the single positive example is in CS/Engineering. Systematically med is dealing with a harder replication problem. Moreover, "light involvement from the academic system " is a significant stretch. Not all but most of the people doing the work have been trained within academia instead of within industry and the work has been from an academia-industry collaboration. Thinking about the proportion of people that go into academia vs industry makes the ratio more meaningful as well.

The replication crisis is clearly a big issue, but the conclusions I would draw from the examples presented are more difference between fields than a condemnation of academia. To just say "move it to private instituions" is shortsighted.

Disclaimer: have a PhD, went to industry

I think the biggest institutional mistake of the academic system is the over-production of academic bound PhDs.

People are strung along for years thinking they have a shot at some professorship, so they work for low pay over their prime societal contribution years before realizing there are no spots left.

Academics afraid of their future security will be more prone to fraud, and more of them need enough FU money to try things that go against the grain.

If we pre-filtered academics half way through their training based on the number of faculty positions that are available it could help curtail the fraud ridden rat race.

A real model of rigorous analytical thinking here: there are cases of fraud in academia, therefore all of academia is entirely fraudulent and should be dispensed with. Or it should take lessons from... the financial sector?!

Yes, there should be effort to address academic fraud. But no, we should not buy into conservative propaganda and torch our institutions of higher education.

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My mother has Alzheimer’s and I would love to be able to blame her condition and lack of treatment on anyone at all. It would be immensely, primally satisfying - which to me is a warning flag for cognitive bias.

I think the logical pathway between “two 20 year old papers that ‘sparked’ the Amyloid hypothesis are responsible for the entire research agenda and billions spent on ineffective drugs” is strained. “Sparked” may be true, but the idea that a few twenty-year old fraudulent images tricked Big Pharma into spending two decades chasing this hypothesis and developing drugs, and all along the way the whole thing was based on fake data that nobody every bothered to test in a subsequent experiment? That seems deeply unlikely to me. If true I would like to see that case made with evidence.

TL;DR What I am not saying: fraud is acceptable. What I am saying is that there are many replication and error correction systems in science, and people with an axe to grind really don’t want to understand that.