Never forget, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy; the professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.
by R.Nixon and cited again by J.D.Vance in 2021
Rechtzeitig zur Olympiade kommt eine ARD Dokumentation zu Doping, der kriminellen Abkürzung zu Ruhm und Ehre.
Irgendwie erinnert die SZ Filmbesprechung daran, wie aktuell Betrug in der Wissenschaft gehandhabt wird:
Ausführlich zu Wort kommt im Film der spanische Blutpanscher Eufemiano Fuentes, ein verurteilter Superdoper, dessen Dienste das Vaterland bereits in den Achtzigerjahren diskret anwarb. Sportärzte verstehen was von Muskeln und Gelenken, Gynäkologen wie Fuentes was von Blut und Hormonen…Anfragen der Rechercheure zu Fuentes’ Aussagen ließen alle Betroffenen unbeantwortet. Gewagt sei aber die Prognose: Bei den Spielen, die in keinem Halbsatz ohne Floskeln zu Fairness, Ethik und Erziehung auskommen, wird die Causa totgeschwiegen.
Wo immer Ethik gepredigt wird, liegt die Moral im Argen.
Twitter integration has been suspended by WordPress after renaming to X … but here is an announcement as screenshot
Program at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/open-research-summer-school-tickets-910343470827
Unforgotten the testimony of Eysenck’s peer Grossarth-Maticek in Heidelberg
Science relies on controversy. Disagreement is part of research, solid consensus is overturned, celebrated researchers enter shady territory. Most of the time, this proceeds more or less smoothly, without all too much of an outcry. Most of the time…
Found at futirism.com
Google researchers have come out with a new paper that warns that generative AI is ruining vast swaths of the internet with fake content — which is painfully ironic because Google has been hard at work pushing the same technology to its enormous user base.
The study, a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper spotted by 404 Media, found that the great majority of generative AI users are harnessing the tech to “blur the lines between authenticity and deception” by posting fake or doctored AI content, such as images or videos, on the internet. The researchers also pored over previously published research on generative AI and around 200 news articles reporting on generative AI misuse.
The authors painfully collected 200 observed incidents of misuse reported between January 2023 and March 2024 and find
– Manipulation of human likeness and falsification of evidence underlie the most prevalent tactics in real-world cases of misuse…
– The majority of reported cases of misuse do not consist of technologically sophisticated uses … requiring minimal technical expertise.
– The increased sophistication, availability and accessibility of GenAI tools seemingly introduces new and lower-level forms of misuse that are neither overtly malicious nor explicitly violate these tools’ terms of services, but still have concerning ethical ramifications.
Das DÄ schreibt über die “Hängepartie für den Deutschen Ethikrat”
Der Deutsche Ethikrat bleibt vorerst arbeitsunfähig. … Entsprechend des Ethikratgesetzes muss die Hälfte der normalerweise 26 Ratsmitglieder von der Bundesregierung vorgeschlagen werden, die andere Hälfte vom Parlament. … Momentan sind lediglich vier Mitglieder im Ethikrat verblieben, deren Amtszeit noch nicht beendet ist: die Theologin Elisabeth Gräb-Schmidt, der Physiker Armin Grunwald, der Bioethiker und Philosoph Mark Schweda und die Philosophin und IT-Expertin Judith Simon. Ihnen gehe jetzt Arbeitszeit verloren, so Vetter. Da es bis zur Neuberufung des Rates keine Sitzungen gebe, müssten sie untätig warten, bis ihre neuen Kolleginnen und Kollegen berufen seien.
Ich fürchte, weder Bundesregierung noch Parlament hat allzu großes Interesse mehr an den Stellungnahmen, die oft reichlich apodiktisch herkamen und – trotz oder wegen des akademischem Backgrounds nahezu aller Mitglieder/innen – nicht immer so qualifiziert waren wie man:frau sich das gewünscht hätte. Statt mehr externe Experten einzubinden, gab es unzählige PR Alleingänge der Vorsitzenden [vgl Dabrock, Buyx, u.v.a.m.]. Der Ethikrat steht sicher nicht vor der Auflösung – er ist immerhin gesetzlich legitimiert – aber als Gremium hat er an Bedeutung verloren.
Why was the Cambridge’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology so successful?
It was not by increasing administrative staff or new programme oriented funding research as many German research managers believe. It was by scientific (not primarily cultural) diversity
The LMB sets a coherent culture by promoting scientific diversity among its staff, encouraging the exchange of knowledge and ideas and valuing scientific synergies between different areas of research… It encourages the recruitment of groups with diverse but aligned interests that are complementary.
What did we do instead in Germany? We increased competition among groups and develop more hierarchical structures while the LMB is
promoting shared values and common aims helps researchers to feel part of the LMB community and proud to belong to it, fostering long-term loyalty. The LMB has always had a non-hierarchical structure — one in which emphasis lies in the quality of the argument, rather than in the status of the proponent.
So, indeed the incentives are different… While we laudate the number of external EU grants a group leader has been securing, LMB does the opposite
… resources are allocated in ways that encourage innovative collaboration between internal teams and divisions. For example, limits are set for research groups to bid for external grants, because these tend to have short-term, results-oriented requirements that might not align with the LMB’s longer-term ambitions.
The former BMJ editor Richard Smith is writing about a new book by Carl Elliott “The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No” that is on backorder now. Most interesting for me is not his book review but his own insights.
Over the years I’ve been rung by potential whistleblowers, and I say to them two uncomfortable things: you have a duty to act but you are likely to be badly damaged as a result… What I haven’t said to them but will now after reading Elliott’s book is that the damage you experience is likely to affect your whole life. It’s a matter of power: “doctors have it and their subjects don’t.” Elliott quotes John Pesando, a whistleblower in the Cincinnati case, who says “Every whistleblower is an amateur playing against professionals.” […]
Most of us don’t blow the whistle because we recognise where the power lies. The state, the university, our employer, or the professor will crush us. But some people do blow the whistle. What drives them? Elliott concludes that there is no whistleblower “type” but that they usually act for deeply held moral reasons. He invokes the somewhat old fashioned idea of “honour” as the best way to explain why they act. […]
An alternative explanation offered by political scientist Fred Alford is “narcissism moralised.” Perhaps that’s close to honour. When I think of whistleblowers I know I think of people with a much greater sense of right and wrong than most of us have. I could use words like “exaggerated” or even “pathological,” but I like the concept of honour. I certainly admire whistleblowers.
I’ve witnessed an ongoing expansion of science administration personnel at local, national, and international levels. What’s more concerning is that this administration is becoming increasingly disconnected from the day-to-day realities at the laboratory bench. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as Parkinson’s Law, first elucidated 1955 by C. Northcote Parkinson (not to be confused with James Parkinson).
In summary, employees like to talk to each other in the administration office, they want more subordinates (and not competitors from the lab) while even little work is expanded to fill the time available for its completion.
After Parkinson, the annual increase in staff, regardless of variations in workload, ranges from 5.2% to 6.6%. He even goes so far as to claim that core tasks could be completely eliminated without the administration shrinking as a result.
Parkinson formulated this in the 1950s. In modern administrations, new terms have been introduced, such as Controlling, New Management Models, business indicators, etc. Often, the proportion of staff in these areas of work increases, while for the actual core tasks, staff remains stagnant or even decreases.
MDPI changes the content of a published paper even without any correction note – read yourself
We are completely loosing track if “deemed by the Editorial Office to be a reasonable request” is leading to modifications of text, images or data. And this happened already as I learned recently.
James Clear adds the reason
Truth and accuracy are not the only things that matter to the human mind. Humans also seem to have a deep desire to belong … Humans are herd animals. We want to fit in, to bond with others, and to earn the respect and approval of our peers. Such inclinations are essential to our survival. For most of our evolutionary history, our ancestors lived in tribes. Becoming separated from the tribe—or worse, being cast out—was a death sentence.” … Convincing someone to change their mind is really the process of convincing them to change their tribe … If you want people to adopt your beliefs, you need to act more like a scout and less like a soldier. At the center of this approach is a question Tiago Forte poses beautifully, “Are you willing to not win in order to keep the conversation going?”
Hard to accept for a scientist but probably true.
“Life is too short to be serious all time”, GILE Journal of Skills Development, Vol. 4 No. 1 (2024)
In this food for thought article, we introduce the ‘Donald Duck Phenomenon’ to consider ten of the more unconventional reasons for publishing in academia. These include
(i) symbolic immortality,
(ii) personal satisfaction,
(iii) a sense of pride,
(iv) serious leisure,
(v) cause credibility,
(vi) altruism,
(vii) collaboration with a friend or family member,
(viii) collaboration with a hero,
(ix) conflict or revenge, and
(x) for amusement.
The article was inspired by the lead author’s social media search for a co-author with the surname ‘Duck’. Through LinkedIn, the lead author, Associate Professor William E. Donald, who is based in the UK and specialises in Sustainable Careers and Human Resource Management, found a collaborator, Dr Nicholas Duck, who is based in Australia and specialises in Organisational Psychology. While the collaboration may appear to be somewhat ‘quackers’, per one of Donald Duck’s famous phrases “Life is too short to be serious all the time, so if you can’t laugh at yourself then call me… I’ll laugh at you, for you”. We hope that this article offers some interesting insights and acts as a way to stimulate conversation around unconventional reasons for publishing in academia.
At this point, I feel bleak at the prospect of typing them out again. The problems with overpublication, ‘publish or perish’ culture, abusive lab environments, analytical flexibility, p-hacking, clinical trial registration games, grant front-running, intellectual capture, nonsense journals, fake journals, peer review manipulation, moral entrepreneurship, etc. precede the present discussions of paper mills and active falsification/fabrication cases…
I have tried at least four times in my memory to write out and codify how I would start an institute to combat these problems. Specifically, a formal organization under a 501c3 structure designed to address the problem.
In Germany we have the IQWIQ, an independent Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care who examines the benefits and harms of medical interventions for patients. But they don’t care about all the medical nonsense studies around. And without PubPeer we wouldn’t even know the nonsense…
Lior Pachter has an interesting observation
which goes back to an old article of Richard Guy extracting four major issues in interpreting data
Unfortunately this seems to describe the way we think and even worse – this is what the science system promotes: the spectacular, the unexpected, the fascinating news.
To continue his story, what is the lifetime of the spurious idea? In many instances effects are declining rapidly for example in intelligence research. It took me some time to find the first paper that I remember – it was in 2001 that John & Despina wrote that the results of the first study correlate only modestly with subsequent research on the same association. This was confirmed in 2005
Of 49 highly cited original clinical research studies, 45 claimed that the intervention was effective. Of these, 7 (16%) were contradicted by subsequent studies, 7 others (16%) had found effects that were stronger than those of subsequent studies, 20 (44%) were replicated, and 11 (24%) remained largely unchallenged.
A scandal? The list of failed studies is long, including all areas of biomedicine already back in 2015.
Es tut der Wissenschaft nicht gut, wenn man probiert, sie auf politische Ziele festzulegen, selbst wenn diese weithin gesellschaftlich akzeptiert sind. Was ist die Alternative? Eine altmodische Idee von Max Weber. Sie heißt: Werturteilsfreiheit. Damit wollte Weber die Sozialwissenschaften gegen eine Vereinnahmung durch links und rechts bewahren. Wissenschaftler, so Weber, sollen erforschen, wie die Welt ist, nicht ihre Autorität nutzen, um anderen einzureden, wie die Welt sein sollte. Denn wo sich Werte widersprechen, kann man nicht wissenschaftlich entscheiden, welche richtiger sind. Forscherinnen und Forscher sollten sich deswegen aus politischen Diskussionen fernhalten.
oh ja, das hatte ich auch einmal im Ärzteblatt geschrieben was ich denn von Umweltepidemiologie halte, die vor 30 Jahren gegen und nun im Mainstream Nonsense Ergebnisse produziert.
Und nun auch in der neuesten ZEIT “warum eine Universität überhaupt eine politische Haltung hat”.
Also Positivismusstreit reloaded?
Nein, bestimmt nicht. Ohne einzelne Werturteile geht es natürlich nicht, sie sollten im Zweifel aber als “Conflicts of Interests” am Ende jedes wissenschaftlichen Artikels stehen. Wo die Tatsachen enden und wo die Interpretation anfängt.