If you’re the same Sean Luke I’m thinking of:

I was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland when you were a graduate student there in the mid nineties. A lot of what you had to say shaped the way I think about computer science. Thank you.

A while back I wrote a piece of (academic) software. A couple of years ago I was asked to review a paper prior to publication, and it was about a piece of software that did the same-ish thing as mine, where they had benchmarked against a set of older software, including mine, and of course they found that theirs was the best. However, their testing methodology was fundamentally flawed, not least because there is no "true" answer that the software's output can be compared to. So they had used a different process to produce a "truth", then trained their software (machine learning, of course) to produce results that match this (very flawed) "truth", and then of course their software was the best because it was the one that produced results closest to the "truth", whereas the other software might have been closer to the actual truth.

I recommended that the journal not publish the paper, and gave them a good list of improvements to give to the authors that should be made before re-submitting. The journal agreed with me, and rejected the paper.

A couple of months later, I saw it had been published unchanged in a different journal. It wasn't even a lower-quality journal, if I recall the impact factor was actually higher than the original one.

I despair of the scientific process.

When I was a grad student I contacted a journal to tell them my PI had falsified their data. The journal never responded. I also contacted my university's legal department. They invited me in for an hour, said they would talk to me again soon, and never spoke to me or responded to my calls again after that. This was in a Top-10-in-the-USA CS program. I have close to zero trust in academia. This is why we have a "reproducibility crisis".

> it became clear that the journal's editor was too embarrassed

How sad. Admitting and correcting a mistake may feel difficult, but it makes you credible.

As a reader, I would have much greater trust in a journal that solicited criticism and readily published corrections and retractions when warranted.

Labeling people as villains (as opposed to condemning acts), in particular those you don’t know personally, is almost always an unhelpful oversimplification of reality. It obscures the root causes of why the bad things are happening, and stands in the way of effective remedy.

People are afraid to sound too critical. It's very noticeable how every article that points out a mistake anywhere in a subject that's even slightly politically charged, has to emphasize "of course I believe X, I absolutely agree that Y is a bad thing", before they make their point. Criticising an unreplicable paper is the same thing. Clearly these people are afraid that if they sound too harsh, they'll be ignored altogether as a crank.

I guess there isn't much utility in categorizing people as "good" and "bad," arguably. Better to think about the incentives/punishments in the system and adjust them until people behave well.

> I can't believe I just read that. What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"

This actually doesn't surprise much. I've seen a lot of variety in the ethical standards that people will publicly espouse.

I think the writer might enjoy Vonnegut's Mother Night.

> Vonnegut is not, I believe, talking about mere inauthenticity. He is talking about engaging in activities which do not agree with what we ourselves feel are our own core morals while telling ourselves, “This is not who I really am. I am just going along with this on the outside to get by.” Vonnegut’s message is that the separation I just described between how we act externally and who we really are is imaginary.

https://thewisdomdaily.com/mother-night-we-are-what-we-prete...

I was just following orders comes to mind.

Yes, the complicity is normal. No the complicity isn't right.

The banality of evil.

It is like in organisational error management (aka. error culture), there are three levels here:

1) errors happen, basically accidents.

2) errors are made, wrong or unexpected result for different intention.

3) errors are caused, the error case is the intended outcome. This is where "bad people" dwell.

Knowing and keeping silent about 1) and 2) makes any error 3). I think, we are on 2) in TFA. This needs to be addressed, most obviously through system change, esp. if actors seem to act rationally in the system (as the authors do) with broken outcomes.

I guess he means that the authors can still be decent people in their private and even professional lives and not general scoundrels who wouldn't stop at actively harming other people to gain something.

> What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"

When the good thing is easier to do and they still knowingly pick the bad one for the love of the game?

There are extremely competent coworkers I wouldn't like them as neighbours. Some of my great neighborhoods would make very sloppy and annoying coworkers.

These people are terrible at their job, perhaps a bit malicious too. They may be great people as friends and colleagues.

Connecting people's characters to their deed is a double edged sword. It's not that it's necessarily mistaken, but you have to choose your victories. Maybe today you get some satisfaction from condemning the culprits, but you also pay for it by making it even more difficult to get cooperation from the system in the future. We all have friends, family and colleagues that we believe to be good. They're all still capable of questionable actions. If we systematically tie bad deeds to bad people, then surely those people we love and know to be good are incapable of what they're being accused. That's part of how closing ranks works. I think King recognizes this too, which is why he recommends that Penalties should reflect the severity of the violation, not be all-or-nothing.

> I can't believe I just read that. What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"

For starters, the bar should be way higher than accusations from a random person.

For me,there's a red flag in the story: posting reviews and criticism of other papers is very mundane in academia. Some Nobel laureates even authored papers rejecting established theories. The very nature of peer review involves challenging claims.

So where is the author's paper featuring commentaries and letters, subjecting the author's own criticism to peer review?

I think calling someone a "bad person" (which is itself a horribly vague term) for one situation where you don't have all the context is something most people should be loath to do. People are complicated and in general normal people do a lot of bad things for petty reasons.

Other than just the label being difficult to apply, these factors also make the argument over who is a "bad person" not really productive and I will put those sorts of caveats into my writings because I just don't want to waste my time arguing the point. Like what does "bad person" even mean and is it even consistent across people? I think it makes a lot more sense to label them clearer labels which we have a lot more evidence for, like "untrustworthy scientist" (which you might think is a bad person inherently or not).

It's 2026, and social media brigading and harassment is a well-known phenomenon. In light of that, trying to preemptively de-escalate seems like a Good Thing.

"It was easier for me to just follow orders than do the right thing." – Fictional SS officer, 1945. Not a bad person.

/s

This is a symptom of woke culture/ideology.

If you defend a bad person, you are a bad person.

Seems fair in the frame of what is responded.

But there is a concern which goes out of the "they" here. Actually, "they" could just as well not exist, and all narrative in the article be some LLM hallucination, we are still training ourself how we respond to this or that behavior we can observe and influence how we will act in the future.

If we go with the easy path labeling people as root cause, that's the habit we are forging for ourself. We are missing the opportunity to hone our sense of nuance and critical thought about the wider context which might be a better starting point to tackle the underlying issue.

Of course, name and shame is still there in the rhetorical toolbox, and everyone and their dog is able to use it even when rage and despair is all that stay in control of one mouth. Using it with relevant parcimony however is not going to happen from mere reactive habits.

Interesting idea. How do you distinguish between critical and uncritical citation? It’s also a little thorny—if your related work section is just describing published work (which is a common form of reviewer-proofing), is that a critical or uncritical citation? It seems a little harsh to ding a paper for that.

I explored this question a bit a few years ago when GPT-3 was brand new. It's tempting to look for technological solutions to social problems. It was COVID so public health papers were the focus.

The idea failed a simple sanity check: just going to Google Scholar, doing a generic search and reading randomly selected papers from within the past 15 years or so. It turned out most of them were bogus in some obvious way. A lot of ideas for science reform take as axiomatic that the bad stuff is rare and just needs to be filtered out. Once you engage with some field's literatures in a systematic way, it becomes clear that it's more like searching for diamonds in the rough than filtering out occasional corruption.

But at that point you wonder, why bother? There is no alchemical algorithm that can convert intellectual lead into gold. If a field is 90% bogus then it just shouldn't be engaged with at all.

Going to conferences seeing researchers who've built a career doing subpar (sometimes blatantly 'fake') work has made me grow increasingly wary of experts. Worst is lots of people just seem to go along with it.

Still I'm skeptical about any sort of system trying to figure out 'trust'. There's too much on the line for researchers/students/... to the point where anything will eventually be gamed. Just too many people trying to get into the system (and getting in is the most important part).

Maybe there should be a different way to calculate h-index. Where for an h-index of n, you also need n replications.

Those citation rings are becoming rampant in my country, along with the author count inflation.

This is exactly how I felt when studying management as part of ostensibly an Engineering / Econ / Management degree.

When you added it up, most of the hard parts were Engineering, and a bit Econ. You would really struggle to work through tough questions in engineering, spend a lot of time on economic theory, and then read the management stuff like you were reading a newspaper.

Management you could spot a mile away as being soft. There's certainly some interesting ideas, but even as students we could smell it was lacking something. It's just a bit too much like a History Channel documentary. Entertaining, certainly, but it felt like false enlightenment.

I suppose it's to be expected, the business department is built around the art of generating profit from cheap inputs. It's business thinking in action!

Citations being the only metric is one problem. Maybe an improved rating/ranking system would be helpful.

Ranking 1 to 3 - 1 being the best - 3 the bare minimum for publication.

3. Citations only

2. Citations + full disclosure of data.

1. Citations + full disclosure of data + replicated

The same dynamics from school carry over into adulthood: early on it’s about grades and whether you get into a “good” school; later it becomes the adult version of that treadmill : publish or perish.

something something Goodhart's Law

Check out the “Jick Study,” mentioned in Dopesick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_Rare_in_Patients_Tre...

Definitely ignore single studies, no matter how prestigious the journal or numerous the citations.

Straight-up replications are rare, but if a finding is real, other PIs will partially replicate and build upon it, typically as a smaller step in a related study. (E.g., a new finding about memory comes out, my field is emotion, I might do a new study looking at how emotion and your memory finding interact.)

If the effect is replicable, it will end up used in other studies (subject to randomness and the file drawer effect, anyway). But if an effect is rarely mentioned in the literature afterwards...run far, FAR away, and don't base your research off it.

A good advisor will be able to warn you off lost causes like this.

This is a great paper but, in my experience, most people in tech love this paper because it allows them to say "To hell with pursuing reality. Here is MY reality".

John Ioannidis is a weird case. His work on the replication crisis across many domains was seminal and important. His contrarian, even conspiratorial take on COVID-19 not so much.

> I'm not sure how they count 6000 citations, but I guess they are counting everything, including quotes by the vicepresident. Probably 6001 after my comment.

The number appears to be from Google Scholar, which currently reports 6269 citations for the paper

> All comments, complaints, corrections, and retraction requests? Unmoderated? Einstein articles will be full of comments explaining why he is wrong, from racist to people that can spell Minkowski to save their lives. In /newest there is like one post per week from someone that discover a new physics theory with the help of ChatGPT. Sometimes it's the same guy, sometimes it's a new one.

Judging from PubPeer, which allows people to post all of the above anonymously and with minimal moderation, this is not an issue in practice.

labelling a person as "bad" is usually black and white thinking. it's too reductive, most people are both good and bad

> because they know they can get away with it

the point is that the paved paths lead to bad behavior

well designed systems make it easy to do good

> Exactly the opposite is taught.

"trained" doesn't mean "taught". most things are learned but not taught

As writers often say: there’s no such thing as a synonym.

“That’s a bad thing to do…”

Maybe should be: “That’s a stupid thing to do…”

Or: reckless, irresponsible, selfish, etc.

In other words, maybe it has nothing to do with morals and ethics. Bad is kind of a lame word with limited impact.

When everyone else does it, it's extremely hard to be righteous. I did it long ago... everyone did it back then. We knew the danger and thought we were different, we thought we could drive safely no matter our state. Lots of tragedies happen because people disastrously misjudge their own abilities, and when alcohol is involved doubly so. They are not bad people, they're people who live in a flawed culture where alcohol is seen as acceptable and who cannot avoid falling for the many human fallacies... in this case caused by the Dunning Kruger effect. If you think people who fall for fallacies are bad, then being human is inherently bad in your opinion.

Funny you say that, as medicine is one of the epicenters of the replication crisis[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#In_medicine

I agree. Most of the time people think STEM is harder but it is not. Yes, it is harder to understand some concepts, but in social sciences we don't even know what the correct concepts are. There hasn't been so much progress in social sciences in the last centuries as there was for STEM.

That's why double-blind review shohld be the norm. It's wild to me that single-blind is still the norm in kost disciplines.

Most of these studies get published based on elaborate constructions of essentially t-tests for differences in means between groups. Showing the opposite means showing no statistical difference, which is almost impossible to get published, for very human reasons.

Journals aren't really businesses in the conventional sense. They're extensions of the universities: their primary customers and often only customers are university libraries, their primary service is creating a reputation economy for academics to decide promotions.

If the flow of tax, student debt and philanthropic money were cut off, the journals would all be wiped out because there's no organic demand for what they're doing.

Not in academia myself, but I suspect the basic issue is simply that academics are judged by the number of papers they publish.

They are pushed to publish a lot, which means journals have to review a lot of stuff (and they cannot replicate findings on their own). Once a paper is published on a decent journal, other researchers may not "waste time" replicating all findings, because they also want to publish a lot. The result is papers getting popular even if no one has actually bothered to replicate the results, especially if those papers are quoted by a lot of people and/or are written by otherwise reputable people or universities.

> They pushed for a retraction ...

That's not right; retractions should only be for research misconduct cases. It is a problem with the article's recommendations too. Even if a correction is published that the results may not hold, the article should stay where it is.

But I agree with the point about replications, which are much needed. That was also the best part in the article, i.e. "stop citing single studies as definitive".

It’s much much more likely that she did something wrong trying to replicate it than the paper was wrong. Did she try to contact the authors, discuss with her advisor?

Pushing for retraction just like that and going off to private sector is…idk it’s a decision.

Once, back around 2011 or 2012, I was using Google Translate for a speech I was to deliver in church. It was shorter than one page printed out.

I only needed the Spanish translation. Now I am proficient in spoken and written Spanish, and I can perfectly understand what is said, and yet I still ran the English through Google Translate and printed it out without really checking through it.

I got to the podium and there was a line where I said "electricity is in the air" (a metaphor, obviously) and the Spanish translation said "electricidad no está en el aire" and I was able to correct that on-the-fly, but I was pissed at Translate, and I badmouthed it for months. And sure, it was my fault for not proofing and vetting the entire output, but come on!

This drove me nuts, but also the authors should like get to the point about what was wrong instead of dancing around it for page after page.

How would AI do anything to rectify it?

it will not, ai reads and "believes" the heavily cited but incorrect papers.

For original research, a researcher is supposed to replicate studies that form the building blocks of their research. For example, if a drug is reported to increase expression of some mRNA in a cell, and your research derives from that, you will start by replicating that step, but it will just be a note in your introduction and not published as a finding on its own.

When a junior researcher, e.g. a grad student, fails to replicate a study, they assume it's technique. If they can't get it after many tries, they just move on, and try some other research approach. If they claim it's because the original study is flawed, people will just assume they don't have the skills to replicate it.

One of the problems is that science doesn't have great collaborative infrastructure. The only way to learn that nobody can reproduce a finding is to go to conferences and have informal chats with people about the paper. Or maybe if you're lucky there's an email list for people in your field where they routinely troubleshoot each other's technique. But most of the time there's just not enough time to waste chasing these things down.

I can't speak to whether people get blackballed. There's a lot of strong personalities in science, but mostly people are direct and efficient. You can ask pretty pointed questions in a session and get pretty direct answers. But accusing someone of fraud is a serious accusation and you probably don't want to get a reputation for being an accuser, FWIW.

I haven't identified an outright fake one but in my experience (mainly in sensor development) most papers are at the very least optimistic or are glossing over some major limitations in the approach. They should be treated as a source of ideas to try instead of counted on.

I've also seen the resistance that results from trying to investigate or even correct an issue in a key result of a paper. Even before it's published the barrier can be quite high (and I must admit that since it's not my primary focus and my name was not on it, I did not push as hard as I could have on it)

I've read of a few cases like this on Hacker News. There's often that assumption, sometimes unstated: if a junior scientist discovers clear evidence of academic misconduct by a senior scientist, it would be career suicide for the junior scientist to make their discovery public.

The replication crisis is largely particular to psychology, but I wonder about the scope of the don't rock the boat issue.

I see this approach as a win win for science. Debunking bad science becomes a for profit enterprise, rigorous science becomes the only one sustainable, the paper churn gets reduced, as even producing a good one becomes a financial risk, when it becomes foundational and gets debunked later.

I have a Growing Concern with our legal systems.

> We need to throw all of this out by default. From public policy to courtrooms, we need to treat it like any other eyewitness claim.

If you can't trust eyewitness claims, if you can't trust video or photographic or audio evidence, then how does one Find Truth? Nobody really seems to have a solid answer to this.

The journal name ("Management Science") is a bit of a giveaway too.

In fact, religious ideas (at least in Europe) were often in opposition to the ruling elite (and still are) and even inspired rebellion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_(priest)

There is a reason scriptures were kept away from the oppressed, or only made available to them in a heavily censored form (e.g. the Slaves Bible).

That's a very good point. Some of what's called "science" today, in popular media and coming from governments, is religion. "We know all, do not question us." It's the common problem of headlines along the lines of "scientists say" or "The Science says", which should always be a red flag - but the majority of people believe it.

A little more complicated than that.

In the past, the elites said "don't read the religious texts, WE will tell you what's in them."

They do and there is nothing wrong with that. The papers published in this journal are peer-reviewed and go through multiple rounds of review. Also, note that Andrew King could carry out the replication because the data is publicly available.

Yes, that's the problem, many do, and they swear by these oversimplified ideas and one-liners that litter the field of popular management books, fully believing it's all "scientific" and they'll laugh at you for questioning it. It's nuts.