Hi All,
This paper was just published yesterday in PNAS:
The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly
As one who gets perhaps a dozen or more e-mails per week with solicitations for manuscripts, which as a non-academic consultant, I do not do alone in either case, I found this new paper of keen interest. I suspect others here get similar and likely higher volumes of such solicitations.
The lead author of the PNAS paper, Reese Richardson, has published a blog post here:
A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise
which I read with interest. He also provides a link to a PDF of the PNAS paper, expressing some frustration over the publishing fees and the 6 month period before the paper becomes open access.
Given the current state of affairs vis-a-vis science and the increasing problems, politically motivated and otherwise, that have given rise to the lack of trust in the broad fields of scientific endeavors, this paper is quite timely.
I thought that the group would find this topic of interest and perhaps spark some level of discussion.
5 Likes
Iâve read the blog post and the paperâs Discussion. The defection concept seems a useful designation for the widespread cynicism in professional biomedical science. But the authors focus too narrowly on the industrialization of scientific fraud, overlooking the industrialization of science itself as problematic.
Ivan Illich opens his book Tools for Conviviality with a chapter titled âTwo Watershedsâ, where he suggests that industries pass thru 2 transitions, in which:
At first, new knowledge is applied to the solution of a clearly stated problem and scientific measuring sticks are applied to account for the new efficiency. But at a second point, the progress demonstrated in a previous achievement is used as a rationale for the exploitation of society as a whole in the service of a value which is determined and constantly revised by an element of society, by one of its self-certifying professional elites.
After pointing to the âself-defeating escalation of powerâ of the Vietnam War, the chapter concludes:
While evidence shows that more of the same leads to utter defeat, nothing less than more and more seems worthwhile in a society infected by the growth mania. The desperate plea is not only for more bombs and more police, more medical examinations and more teachers, but also for more information and more research. ⌠The pooling of stores of information, the building up of a knowledge stock, the attempt to overwhelm present problems by the production of more science is the ultimate attempt to solve a crisis by escalation.
My own sense is that degrowth toward a more convivial science may be the answer. Thus, the massive funding cuts bemoaned by the authors may well accelerate reform.
3 Likes
This is an excellent take David.
I have discovered through much research that in the modern era a degenerating programme does not die a natural Kuhnian death because the sociological and linguistic layers prevent access to and therefore prevent natural self-correction of the core. There is lexical capture of the domain, as per Ellis. Non-domain workers (eg statisticians) have no access below the capturing level.
The synthetic lexicon and discourse remains superficial to the degenerating core, transforming normal scientific decay into institutional pathology which generates the research inflation. The healthy paths rightfully remain but so do the pathological paths creating expansion which unlikely to be controlled without reform.
Obviously the only two requirements for the maintenance of synthetic science are:
- synthetic debate (which emulates scientific discourse but stays above the self-correcting layer of the core) and
- a self-referential funding system.
Once you have those two components itâs a self perpetuating grant rendering enterprise and the sky is the limit.
2 Likes
Curious about Ellis and this âlexical captureâ concept; is there a good reference youâd recommend on this idea, Lawrence?
1 Like
Sorry Innis not Ellis (The bias of communication 1951)
Innis argues that media shape the form and reach of knowledge, âlexical captureâ in my âin-printâ review of the history of critical care research means that language (the symbolic terms, syndromes, labels) constrains causal reasoning by embedding assumptions in the terms themselves.
Innis emphasises that those who control the medium (scribes, print, institutional discourse) also control what counts as valid knowledge.
The experts in the Critical care task-forces are Issisâs scribes generating consensus definitions and defining the language (syndromes, thresholds) that then this shapes what kinds of trials, what âcausesâ are treated, what âknowledge generation effortsâ are grantable. This produces measurements and cause equivalents in the BH sense which are not accessible to the statisticians (or as @Stephen taught in 2009, are âneglectedâ ).
I am extending Innisâs beautiful notion of a âmonopoly of knowledgeâ as âpathological consensusâ and as a means of perpetual grant generation for generations of scientists. The language and definitions become entrenched, gatekeeping causal inquiry.
This lexical capture relates to the Lakatosian belt with which is adjusted in synthetic science providing the appearance of real science while protecting the inaccessible degenerative core from self correcting.
From a meta epistemic perspective the taskforce derivation of the gate is the core. The locus of epistemic control within the pathological consensus. Thus assures that the funds will always flow to the locations directed by the scribes if the taskforce and that the synthetic science itself is unassailable as discourse pertaining to failure only leads to synthetic debate and cycles of modification of the protective belt.
I donât argue that this is volitional in critical care although it is my opinion that it is in sleep apnea measurement science. When a pathological system emerges without funding oversight, which favors the leaders and their mentees, such systems do not need to be volitionally pathological for deeply anchored maintenance scaffolding to emerge.
1 Like
David, to see the brilliance of Innis, note that I have been trying to hack through (and deconstruct) the critical care research lexicon here on datamethods for about 5 years and still apparently few understand what i am teaching or donât care because âthe standard is the standardâ.
The synthetic syndromes. The fake measurements, The synthetic debate. Itâs all protecting the core. The core is the dogma that a critical care syndrome S=1 for RCT can be defined using Delphi.
If I am unsuccessful in bringing it down it could last for another few decades because the lexical capture is now capturing AI.
1 Like