I think a lot of the jackboot fantasies come from what academics see as collective action problems. To take a well-worn example, most academics dislike the current system of for-profit journals, but individuals have strong incentives to publish in Cell/Science/Nature and so they do, and so publishing in those places remains a strong signal, and so the incentive persists. True collective action are surely one of these cases where "dictatorial" powers are more justified.
That said, there should surely be a strong presumption against taking such measures, and in practice, I agree with you that most (all?) of these ideas don't meet the bar. As much as I hate the for-profit journal system, I don't think it would be a good idea to make it illegal to publish in them or whatever. Better if everyone just agreed that publishing non-open-access papers was cringe.
My problem with major for-profit journals that enjoy legacy network effects isn't the fact that they're for-profit, it's the fact that they're investor-owned. I'm happy to pay the actual costs of publishing. I'm not happy to pay oligopoly extortion prices to line the pockets of parasitic rent-seeking investors. A solution would be to offer the employees of legacy journals a low-interest loan to convert the company to an ESOP model. A case I argue in more detail here:
The people who run those journals don’t understand that a well run business is a win-win-win proposition.
Business in the medium and long term is a positive sum game. Profit is confirmation from objective reality that your output is worth more than the sum of your inputs; that you add wealth to the world.
I know the thinking behind "centralize all publishing to a single website". It's a good example of failing to grasp dynamism and the invisible wages of freedom. *Right now*, arXiv.org is the unofficial central repository of several hard sciences (certainly of mathematics) and offers a de-facto seal of approval that rivals that of many journals. But its nonbinding and informal nature are a crucial part of the reason why it has this authority! Try to make it formal and force every author to go through it, and all the demons that only mildly and occasionally affect it at this moment (censorship, favoritism and somewhat baroque requirements) will descend upon it with claws bared and teeth sharpened. Many of the scientists enthusiastically using it will then declare war on it. I think something similar happened with France's arXiv analogue (HAL).
Something similar happened when automated plagiarism detectors evolved from a useful tool to a formally required part in the process for students and scientists, with few if any opportunities for manual override.
This is very much analogous to a point that often comes up in semi-casual political debates: if we had the power to change the system the way you are proposing, we could just use that same power to solve problems using the current system.
This is really good, Adam. Even before you said "ecosystem," my inner monologue / visualization was 'forests, bugs, corals...don't have a Central Committee." I would push back ever so slightly on your concluding characterization of The Good being "slow and annoying." If we are reframing things, perhaps Sisyphus can help us. But, I understood what you meant.
This beautiful article mirrors the idea for which Frederik Hayek received a Noble Prize in Economics. In his substantial body of work (example: The Road to Serfdom), Hayek laid out the reason markets are always superior to central planning- as long as market price can be established. The reason? Knowledge is dispersed among millions of individuals, and when each makes decisions in his or her self-interest, markets coordinate these choices to an unparalleled efficiency known as the invisible hand. No committee of central planners can achieve this, ever.
A theory is deemed superior to alternatives when it explains more observations. The theory of dispersed knowledge vs authoritative government-knows-better explains both Dr Mastroianni argument and the success of free markets. Readers will find examples of Dr Mastroianni's admonishment as denouncing their political enemy (say, Trump, anyone?) but ironically, the common element between advocates of despots in science and despots in the economy is that they typically belong to the "enlightened" Left that truly believes what they decide is "good for society as a whole." It never is.
Your knack for expressing what I've been thinking means you are now on the top of my list of "fantasy dinner party guests". If you're ever in Ireland gimme a shout and I'll feed you and invite my friends (though it might be tricky to get a word in edgeways in a dinner party in my house - maybe we could just go for beer?)
It's a short article but I will summarize it here.
* Because science is so valuable, scientific fraud causes more harm than most types of crimes, yet fraudulent scientists are rarely held accountable.
* We could copy the Danish model and empower the already-existing Office of Research Integrity to conduct more non-criminal investigations of research misconduct. The scope would be specifically limited to fabrication and falsification, and not to murkier questionable research practices. Scientists would have all the ordinary forms of due process, including the right to appeal. You may note that Denmark has not turned into an authoritarian hellscape where scientists live under jackboots.
* In some cases, clear forms of scientific fraud could be prosecuted, using statutes that are clearly constrained to fabrication and falsification, not questionable research practices like selective reporting. Right now scientific fraud is hardly ever prosecuted, but a more specified statute would help guide courts. As with ordinary commercial fraud, our justice system would do a reasonable job of balancing false positives (extremely rare) and false negatives (more common).
Readers would be better informed if they read the original post, not your odd mischaracterization.
We agree that scientists shouldn't do fraud, but government agencies don't do a great job choosing which scientists to fund, so I don't trust them to decide which scientists to jail. In the long run, progress depends on doing more good work, not on preventing more bad work. https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-link-problem
I get the strong-link / weak-link distinction, but I think it obscures something important. You are right that in the long run, strong links are the only things that matters. But, critically, weak links slow down how long it takes us to find the strong links. It’s incredibly hard to build theories in research fields where half the findings are false, and you don’t know which half. That’s why science is not exclusively a strong link problem or exclusively a weak link problem.
A good analogy is capitalism. In the long run, only the best companies matter. But for them to fully bloom, they need to operate in a world where there are some basic levels of trust and where rules are followed. That’s why we have a legal system that enforces rules around fraud.
Creative and dynamic companies can operate freely and successfully not just in spite of fraud laws but *because* of fraud laws. They know that the laws around fraud are reasonably circumscribed and that prosecutors are not running around fabricating evidence against their political opponents. While some attempts at addressing weak links backfire, narrow rules around corporate fraud are not one of them. Why can’t we apply the same logic to science?
(And as a reminder, the proposal would be specifically circumscribed to data fabrication and falsification, not selective reporting or p-hacking, which I agree can get murky.)
I like the capitalism analogy, but the main thing that makes capitalism run isn't aggressive policing of fraud, it's fair market competition. Sure - it's good to put Elizabeth Holmes in jail - but in a strange parallel universe with no fraud police Theranos' inferior non-product would eventually have been weeded out by competitive free market forces.
At root level, the way to weed out Theranoses is with a system where scientists are in the habit of independently verifying and then building on each other's key claims. Basically the thing Galileo first recommended 400 years ago. The idea-market competion of the original model A scientific method would have weeded out Holmes out a lot faster than the fraud prosecution.
Yeah, I definitely wouldn't say fraud rules are the "main" thing that makes capitalism run, but it certainly helps and may even be somewhat essential. I don't think the parallel universe you describe will run particularly well. Relying *exclusively* on independent verification is a lot less efficient than coupling some independent verification with some up-funnel rules against fraud.
My lab is currently doing a third repeat of a months-long vaccine experiment that has five replicate mice per group. There are three control groups and two test groups. It doesn't feel very "efficient" - and it will feel even less efficient when other labs have to independently slog through multiple repeats of exactly the same experiment all over again. But I don't think we have any choice - immunology is noisy and even without any fraud at play any given lab could be missing some hidden confounder.
I'm suddenly feeling unsure about how bad the alternate universe would be. In our universe, aggressive anti-fraud laws didn't deter Holmes from inefficiently burning up half a billion dollars. The fraud-police-free alternate universe might have recognized its vulnerabilties and chosen to develop the Consumer Reports for Everything approach I advocate here:
The alternate universe might also have addressed the problem that nobody ever feels like going through huge amounts of effort and expense to publish negative data. They might have developed a culture where every scientist has a 'stack where they feel comfortable quickly saying "I tried to replicate published experiment X and it didn't really work out in ways Y and Z." If the whole scientific community served as deputy fraud police wielding the sword of independent verification then the centralized-fraud-authority-free alternate universe might be way nicer than ours.
Please increase the production of this dust of righteousness that Denmark has sprinkled on its magisterium in the Office of Research. Down here on Earth we have government employees who are merely human, so this would fix a lot of issues. Thanks!
I believe that the regulatory capture explains why government doesn't do a good job in deciding which scientists to fund. And the Danes, not being captured, can still do a good job. Thus the problem doesn't seem to be 'this is impossible' but 'how can we build organisations which are resistant to regulatory capture? I believe they need to be decentrallised, and not dependent upon the goodwill of those who fund them, be they the government, industry, or some philanthropic organisation. I am now reading _the Starfish and the Spider_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starfish_and_the_Spider seeing if the ideas in there could be usable for this problem.
Footnote 2 (embracing authoritarianism in childhood) seems like an over-generalization. It's probably true for some people, but I have specific childhood memories of hearing adults wax nostalgic about the joyous carefree days of childhood and making the mental note that the adults were lying to themselves. I remember hating at the boot of authority on my neck circa age seven. And it wasn't the sort of thing embodied in the over-generalized House of Cards quote, "the slave doesn't dream of being free, he dreams of being the master." The issue is that throughout my life I've always been revolted by the idea of anybody mindlessly bossing anybody else around. Sure, we need individuals to assume leadership roles so we can coordinate team action - but authority? Yuck, no! Feels like a mental reflex.
A better model could be that some people are born leaning toward authoritarianism and other people are born with an inclination toward egalitarianism. It's a dismal idea because you can never talk anybody out of their chromosomal inversion events:
another beautiful piece! some lines that leapt out at me:
"Power is not awarded to truth; power comes from truth. Believing true things ultimately makes you better at persuading people and manipulating reality, and believing untrue things does the opposite. The best ideas don’t need bayonets."
"It turns out that even global superpowers can’t change reality by fiat"
"We yearn for an enlightened despot because the world is complicated and change is slow and incomplete and frustrating. But that’s exactly why we shouldn’t have one person in charge. What are the chances that all of the correct beliefs happen to coexist inside one person’s brain? Or even within a few people’s brains, however expert they may be?"
shouted to the world that we should "Mount an academia-wide inquisition to identify the data-fakers, the p-hackers, and the over-claimers, and march them off to Science Jail!¹". Except Chris did not advocate Science Jail. He provides an enlightening, careful discussion of very serious scientific misconduct with severe consequences for misleading the medical community about a common disease (not run-of-he-mill over-claimers and p-hackers). He quantified the damage done.
Chris lists some ways to address this very serious faking of data, but does not himself advocate jail.
Chris advocates: "Danish-style independent committees
As with many things in life, we could start by copying the Danish. In 2017, Denmark passed a law establishing a non-criminal independent expert committee to investigate scientific misconduct, a stronger alternative to in-house investigations. If the committee determines misconduct occurred, it may take actions like notifying the university, publisher, and funding agency, and sometimes even the police. Due to its independence, expertise, and narrowly defined scope, committee decisions are considered more credible than decisions from universities. The U.S. Congress could accomplish this by giving more teeth to the existing Office of Research Integrity."
Adam, you are outstanding for making your writing humorous, which you explained as a happy outcome of your Improv training. More scientists should write this way. But your humor leads to exaggerations. You undermine the quality of your message with misrepresentations like what you said about Chris' blog post.
I see Chris already reached out about your mischaracterization. Your response to him should have been "My bad" and changing the link could have been a footnote, "Check out this person's ideas."
The one actual publicly-available position cited to motivate the post, which comes in a footnote, is to 1) modify the current system incrementally by creating more independence from the investigated scientists for misconduct investigation committees, and giving another (the already-existing Office of Research Integrity) more resources, which I've always heard described as under-funded, and 2) criminalizing publishing fake data in the way that many other types of fraud are criminal. Would you suggest that laws against other kinds of fraud are some kind of fascism, or Central-Committee type misguided fantasy?
Adam is addressing core philosophical assumptions that motivate behaviors at a large scale and therefore produce very significant consequences. It's highly cost effective to start there.
Meanwhile your proposal is to require even more files and data for peer reviewers to ignore. And maybe we'll catch a few more cheaters, a decade or two later. That's what you've come up with after a decade of thinking about this problem?
Thomas Sowell calls it the constrained vision. Christians call it Original Sin. The wonder is not that there is strife and discord in the world, but that it is so constrained. Even if education could save us, our lives are too short and our heads are to small to stuff in all the education that would be required.
I suspect, thought, that the authoritarian impulse that has beset us for the last couple of centuries and shows no sign of abating, is a symptom of our reaching the limits of what is possible. In the West, at least, I think we came near to the ceiling of what can be achieved in the pursuit of peace and prosperity. We reached the point where any more freedom would result in anarchy and any less in inefficiency and therefore poverty. And having reached that point, the evident progress that led us to this ceiling ended, and ended far short of the utopia we can imagine but cannot attain.
And it is precisely when you reach a ceiling that the crackpots and the crackpot ideas come out of the woodwork. We can start progress again, they proclaim, and since progress seems stalled, may are willing to lend them an ear. And so I suspect that we are fated to frequent plunges into authoritarianism, with, hopefully, rebounds into principled liberty. And perhaps this is not a reaction to the ceiling, but a feature of the ceiling itself.
Other people paid the price for lysenkoism. Innocent people. The guilty were entirely insulated from the consequences of their decisions and profited from them. The entire world is built like this. Truth survives but so does untruth. And untruth always rides opportunistically on top of truth, at the apex of power. This is a real problem that needs to be solved and may require some violence.
I think a lot of the jackboot fantasies come from what academics see as collective action problems. To take a well-worn example, most academics dislike the current system of for-profit journals, but individuals have strong incentives to publish in Cell/Science/Nature and so they do, and so publishing in those places remains a strong signal, and so the incentive persists. True collective action are surely one of these cases where "dictatorial" powers are more justified.
That said, there should surely be a strong presumption against taking such measures, and in practice, I agree with you that most (all?) of these ideas don't meet the bar. As much as I hate the for-profit journal system, I don't think it would be a good idea to make it illegal to publish in them or whatever. Better if everyone just agreed that publishing non-open-access papers was cringe.
My problem with major for-profit journals that enjoy legacy network effects isn't the fact that they're for-profit, it's the fact that they're investor-owned. I'm happy to pay the actual costs of publishing. I'm not happy to pay oligopoly extortion prices to line the pockets of parasitic rent-seeking investors. A solution would be to offer the employees of legacy journals a low-interest loan to convert the company to an ESOP model. A case I argue in more detail here:
https://cbuck.substack.com/p/consumer-reports-for-medicines
The people who run those journals don’t understand that a well run business is a win-win-win proposition.
Business in the medium and long term is a positive sum game. Profit is confirmation from objective reality that your output is worth more than the sum of your inputs; that you add wealth to the world.
I agree:
https://cbuck.substack.com/p/i-support-the-friedman-doctrine
I know the thinking behind "centralize all publishing to a single website". It's a good example of failing to grasp dynamism and the invisible wages of freedom. *Right now*, arXiv.org is the unofficial central repository of several hard sciences (certainly of mathematics) and offers a de-facto seal of approval that rivals that of many journals. But its nonbinding and informal nature are a crucial part of the reason why it has this authority! Try to make it formal and force every author to go through it, and all the demons that only mildly and occasionally affect it at this moment (censorship, favoritism and somewhat baroque requirements) will descend upon it with claws bared and teeth sharpened. Many of the scientists enthusiastically using it will then declare war on it. I think something similar happened with France's arXiv analogue (HAL).
Something similar happened when automated plagiarism detectors evolved from a useful tool to a formally required part in the process for students and scientists, with few if any opportunities for manual override.
so that's what happened to HAL !
This is spectacular analysis - the authoritarian perspective only seems to work if it's "your side" that gets it.
> So when you’re like, “We should make sure that science is good!”, there is no one to receive your request.
I like to call this kind of normative statement with no clear subject the ‘missing agent fallacy’
This is very much analogous to a point that often comes up in semi-casual political debates: if we had the power to change the system the way you are proposing, we could just use that same power to solve problems using the current system.
This is really good, Adam. Even before you said "ecosystem," my inner monologue / visualization was 'forests, bugs, corals...don't have a Central Committee." I would push back ever so slightly on your concluding characterization of The Good being "slow and annoying." If we are reframing things, perhaps Sisyphus can help us. But, I understood what you meant.
The next email I read after your article was this: https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/vaccine-cheerleader-dr-peter-hotez?publication_id=264299&post_id=147159703&isFreemail=true&r=eto4&triedRedirect=true. I'm sorry, I don't know how to share the link properly, but this guy is authoritarian AF. So you're not being hyperbolic. Very creepy.
Oh, after I posted my comment, the link showed up correctly.
This beautiful article mirrors the idea for which Frederik Hayek received a Noble Prize in Economics. In his substantial body of work (example: The Road to Serfdom), Hayek laid out the reason markets are always superior to central planning- as long as market price can be established. The reason? Knowledge is dispersed among millions of individuals, and when each makes decisions in his or her self-interest, markets coordinate these choices to an unparalleled efficiency known as the invisible hand. No committee of central planners can achieve this, ever.
A theory is deemed superior to alternatives when it explains more observations. The theory of dispersed knowledge vs authoritative government-knows-better explains both Dr Mastroianni argument and the success of free markets. Readers will find examples of Dr Mastroianni's admonishment as denouncing their political enemy (say, Trump, anyone?) but ironically, the common element between advocates of despots in science and despots in the economy is that they typically belong to the "enlightened" Left that truly believes what they decide is "good for society as a whole." It never is.
This is exactly what I was thinking as I listened to this (in podcast form).
If Adam has not read Hayej it is amazing how much Hayek is present in this post.
In either event it suggests that referring this this generically as "the knowledge problem" was spot on!
Your knack for expressing what I've been thinking means you are now on the top of my list of "fantasy dinner party guests". If you're ever in Ireland gimme a shout and I'll feed you and invite my friends (though it might be tricky to get a word in edgeways in a dinner party in my house - maybe we could just go for beer?)
Adam, I wrote the one post that you link to that is supposed to have these views.
The ideas you attribute to it are unrecognizable. I'd encourage anyone to read the post and decide for themselves.
https://chris-said.io/2024/06/17/the-case-for-criminalizing-scientific-misconduct/
It's a short article but I will summarize it here.
* Because science is so valuable, scientific fraud causes more harm than most types of crimes, yet fraudulent scientists are rarely held accountable.
* We could copy the Danish model and empower the already-existing Office of Research Integrity to conduct more non-criminal investigations of research misconduct. The scope would be specifically limited to fabrication and falsification, and not to murkier questionable research practices. Scientists would have all the ordinary forms of due process, including the right to appeal. You may note that Denmark has not turned into an authoritarian hellscape where scientists live under jackboots.
* In some cases, clear forms of scientific fraud could be prosecuted, using statutes that are clearly constrained to fabrication and falsification, not questionable research practices like selective reporting. Right now scientific fraud is hardly ever prosecuted, but a more specified statute would help guide courts. As with ordinary commercial fraud, our justice system would do a reasonable job of balancing false positives (extremely rare) and false negatives (more common).
Readers would be better informed if they read the original post, not your odd mischaracterization.
We agree that scientists shouldn't do fraud, but government agencies don't do a great job choosing which scientists to fund, so I don't trust them to decide which scientists to jail. In the long run, progress depends on doing more good work, not on preventing more bad work. https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-link-problem
I get the strong-link / weak-link distinction, but I think it obscures something important. You are right that in the long run, strong links are the only things that matters. But, critically, weak links slow down how long it takes us to find the strong links. It’s incredibly hard to build theories in research fields where half the findings are false, and you don’t know which half. That’s why science is not exclusively a strong link problem or exclusively a weak link problem.
A good analogy is capitalism. In the long run, only the best companies matter. But for them to fully bloom, they need to operate in a world where there are some basic levels of trust and where rules are followed. That’s why we have a legal system that enforces rules around fraud.
Creative and dynamic companies can operate freely and successfully not just in spite of fraud laws but *because* of fraud laws. They know that the laws around fraud are reasonably circumscribed and that prosecutors are not running around fabricating evidence against their political opponents. While some attempts at addressing weak links backfire, narrow rules around corporate fraud are not one of them. Why can’t we apply the same logic to science?
(And as a reminder, the proposal would be specifically circumscribed to data fabrication and falsification, not selective reporting or p-hacking, which I agree can get murky.)
I like the capitalism analogy, but the main thing that makes capitalism run isn't aggressive policing of fraud, it's fair market competition. Sure - it's good to put Elizabeth Holmes in jail - but in a strange parallel universe with no fraud police Theranos' inferior non-product would eventually have been weeded out by competitive free market forces.
At root level, the way to weed out Theranoses is with a system where scientists are in the habit of independently verifying and then building on each other's key claims. Basically the thing Galileo first recommended 400 years ago. The idea-market competion of the original model A scientific method would have weeded out Holmes out a lot faster than the fraud prosecution.
Yeah, I definitely wouldn't say fraud rules are the "main" thing that makes capitalism run, but it certainly helps and may even be somewhat essential. I don't think the parallel universe you describe will run particularly well. Relying *exclusively* on independent verification is a lot less efficient than coupling some independent verification with some up-funnel rules against fraud.
My lab is currently doing a third repeat of a months-long vaccine experiment that has five replicate mice per group. There are three control groups and two test groups. It doesn't feel very "efficient" - and it will feel even less efficient when other labs have to independently slog through multiple repeats of exactly the same experiment all over again. But I don't think we have any choice - immunology is noisy and even without any fraud at play any given lab could be missing some hidden confounder.
I'm suddenly feeling unsure about how bad the alternate universe would be. In our universe, aggressive anti-fraud laws didn't deter Holmes from inefficiently burning up half a billion dollars. The fraud-police-free alternate universe might have recognized its vulnerabilties and chosen to develop the Consumer Reports for Everything approach I advocate here:
https://cbuck.substack.com/p/consumer-reports-for-medicines?r=5cli6
In the long run, tedious independent replication seems more efficient than relying on a central anti-fraud authority (see: Galileo).
The alternate universe might also have addressed the problem that nobody ever feels like going through huge amounts of effort and expense to publish negative data. They might have developed a culture where every scientist has a 'stack where they feel comfortable quickly saying "I tried to replicate published experiment X and it didn't really work out in ways Y and Z." If the whole scientific community served as deputy fraud police wielding the sword of independent verification then the centralized-fraud-authority-free alternate universe might be way nicer than ours.
Please increase the production of this dust of righteousness that Denmark has sprinkled on its magisterium in the Office of Research. Down here on Earth we have government employees who are merely human, so this would fix a lot of issues. Thanks!
And you're just going to let your gross mischaracterization of Chris's position stand?
I believe that the regulatory capture explains why government doesn't do a good job in deciding which scientists to fund. And the Danes, not being captured, can still do a good job. Thus the problem doesn't seem to be 'this is impossible' but 'how can we build organisations which are resistant to regulatory capture? I believe they need to be decentrallised, and not dependent upon the goodwill of those who fund them, be they the government, industry, or some philanthropic organisation. I am now reading _the Starfish and the Spider_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starfish_and_the_Spider seeing if the ideas in there could be usable for this problem.
Footnote 2 (embracing authoritarianism in childhood) seems like an over-generalization. It's probably true for some people, but I have specific childhood memories of hearing adults wax nostalgic about the joyous carefree days of childhood and making the mental note that the adults were lying to themselves. I remember hating at the boot of authority on my neck circa age seven. And it wasn't the sort of thing embodied in the over-generalized House of Cards quote, "the slave doesn't dream of being free, he dreams of being the master." The issue is that throughout my life I've always been revolted by the idea of anybody mindlessly bossing anybody else around. Sure, we need individuals to assume leadership roles so we can coordinate team action - but authority? Yuck, no! Feels like a mental reflex.
A better model could be that some people are born leaning toward authoritarianism and other people are born with an inclination toward egalitarianism. It's a dismal idea because you can never talk anybody out of their chromosomal inversion events:
https://cbuck.substack.com/p/can-self-cleaving-dna-resurrect-lamarck
dear adam,
another beautiful piece! some lines that leapt out at me:
"Power is not awarded to truth; power comes from truth. Believing true things ultimately makes you better at persuading people and manipulating reality, and believing untrue things does the opposite. The best ideas don’t need bayonets."
"It turns out that even global superpowers can’t change reality by fiat"
"We yearn for an enlightened despot because the world is complicated and change is slow and incomplete and frustrating. But that’s exactly why we shouldn’t have one person in charge. What are the chances that all of the correct beliefs happen to coexist inside one person’s brain? Or even within a few people’s brains, however expert they may be?"
thank you for sharing your thoughts!
much love
myq
You claimed that the author of the blog Chris Said, via this link,
https://chris-said.io/2024/06/17/the-case-for-criminalizing-scientific-misconduct/
shouted to the world that we should "Mount an academia-wide inquisition to identify the data-fakers, the p-hackers, and the over-claimers, and march them off to Science Jail!¹". Except Chris did not advocate Science Jail. He provides an enlightening, careful discussion of very serious scientific misconduct with severe consequences for misleading the medical community about a common disease (not run-of-he-mill over-claimers and p-hackers). He quantified the damage done.
Chris lists some ways to address this very serious faking of data, but does not himself advocate jail.
Chris advocates: "Danish-style independent committees
As with many things in life, we could start by copying the Danish. In 2017, Denmark passed a law establishing a non-criminal independent expert committee to investigate scientific misconduct, a stronger alternative to in-house investigations. If the committee determines misconduct occurred, it may take actions like notifying the university, publisher, and funding agency, and sometimes even the police. Due to its independence, expertise, and narrowly defined scope, committee decisions are considered more credible than decisions from universities. The U.S. Congress could accomplish this by giving more teeth to the existing Office of Research Integrity."
Adam, you are outstanding for making your writing humorous, which you explained as a happy outcome of your Improv training. More scientists should write this way. But your humor leads to exaggerations. You undermine the quality of your message with misrepresentations like what you said about Chris' blog post.
I see Chris already reached out about your mischaracterization. Your response to him should have been "My bad" and changing the link could have been a footnote, "Check out this person's ideas."
What a straw-man post!
The one actual publicly-available position cited to motivate the post, which comes in a footnote, is to 1) modify the current system incrementally by creating more independence from the investigated scientists for misconduct investigation committees, and giving another (the already-existing Office of Research Integrity) more resources, which I've always heard described as under-funded, and 2) criminalizing publishing fake data in the way that many other types of fraud are criminal. Would you suggest that laws against other kinds of fraud are some kind of fascism, or Central-Committee type misguided fantasy?
As for what people say "behind closed doors", I've been following scientific fraud for over a decade and have been involved with many of the people that others think of as extreme, and worse (https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/bjop.12541), and never heard the views you cartoon in the beginning of the post. Anyway, here's my partial solution (https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-to-stop-academic-fraudsters / https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/2024/03/30/committing-research-fraud-is-easy-lets-make-it-harder/).
Adam is addressing core philosophical assumptions that motivate behaviors at a large scale and therefore produce very significant consequences. It's highly cost effective to start there.
Meanwhile your proposal is to require even more files and data for peer reviewers to ignore. And maybe we'll catch a few more cheaters, a decade or two later. That's what you've come up with after a decade of thinking about this problem?
Currently cheating can be detected only very rarely. Under proposals like mine, cheating could much more easily be detected.
Thomas Sowell calls it the constrained vision. Christians call it Original Sin. The wonder is not that there is strife and discord in the world, but that it is so constrained. Even if education could save us, our lives are too short and our heads are to small to stuff in all the education that would be required.
I suspect, thought, that the authoritarian impulse that has beset us for the last couple of centuries and shows no sign of abating, is a symptom of our reaching the limits of what is possible. In the West, at least, I think we came near to the ceiling of what can be achieved in the pursuit of peace and prosperity. We reached the point where any more freedom would result in anarchy and any less in inefficiency and therefore poverty. And having reached that point, the evident progress that led us to this ceiling ended, and ended far short of the utopia we can imagine but cannot attain.
And it is precisely when you reach a ceiling that the crackpots and the crackpot ideas come out of the woodwork. We can start progress again, they proclaim, and since progress seems stalled, may are willing to lend them an ear. And so I suspect that we are fated to frequent plunges into authoritarianism, with, hopefully, rebounds into principled liberty. And perhaps this is not a reaction to the ceiling, but a feature of the ceiling itself.
Other people paid the price for lysenkoism. Innocent people. The guilty were entirely insulated from the consequences of their decisions and profited from them. The entire world is built like this. Truth survives but so does untruth. And untruth always rides opportunistically on top of truth, at the apex of power. This is a real problem that needs to be solved and may require some violence.