Why are all of these comments about China vs the West (whatever that means) Who brought up the "west" in this context? and why is it so important?
There are some interesting points about academic motivation here, I dont see why we have to make this a red vs blue issue. Are people offended we are talking about a particular nation? Are shills or bots steering the conversation?
The article itself already brought that comparison, it's a pro-western outfit dumping on what they consider our adversary.
We could ask why articles like this have multiplied in recent years and that's interesting, but people here are just running with the implied comparison.
>Who brought up the "west" in this context? and why is it so important?
Anybody interested to see if this is anything special about this case, or just the standard amount that goes on everywhere.
Singling out some country for something that happens everywhere, wouldn't be that different than someone saying "immigrants from X did Y amount of violent crimes" to paint them as particularly violent, when the number might be totally proportional to their share of the population and/or some controls for income level.
Good observation! I think we generally imagine China as an adversary too often. Instead, we should sometimes think of it as a neighbor country, where people that are similar to us are faced with an interesting system.
But I think even then, the best way to understand would be to make comparisons to your own culture.
What's the point of saying country X has for example vehicle accident rate of y if you don't compare it to other countries? Comparisons are important, otherwise what are you even discussing in a void.
> Who brought up the "west" in this context? and why is it so important?
Because the "west", with all its flaws, created the scientific method, also shortened as "science".
Trying to explain science while excluding the Greeks, or Roma, or France, or UK, or Germany, Sweden, Spain, USA, etc... is a total nonsense. Western societies are the standard measure to compare anything related with science, because they were shaped by science.
Whilst I have no doubt in the truth of this claim, the fact is all over the west we have research conducted by businesses for business benefit, whether its big corps telling you why their products are healthy for you or even in the 60s when there was research conducted that claims "smoking was good for you" and it took years for research to prove it actually causes cancer.
There's a big difference between "private research intended for public consumption" (marketing / PR / legal), and "private research for private consumption" (R&D / engineering / product development). Companies usually keep the latter to themselves, and the public space gets filled with the former. (To be fair, it's quite possible the first type also has bigger budgets, unfortunately).
There's a specific issue with doctors in China that doesn't exist elsewhere, namely that even for practicing doctors they are required to publish research to get promoted. But that's hard, because they're busy healing people. Cue lots of bought papers that describe medical cases or research that never happened.
One Chinese doctor who was rumbled pleaded with the (anonymous) guy who spotted the bad papers:
“Hello teacher, yesterday you disclosed that there were some doctors having fraudulent pictures in their papers. This has raised attention. As one of these doctors, I kindly ask you to please leave us alone as soon as possible.
Being as low as grains of dust of the world, countless junior doctors, including those younger me, look down upon the act of faking papers. But the system in China is just like that, you can’t really fight against it. Without papers, you don’t get promotion; without a promotion, you can hardly feed your family. I also want to have some time to do scientific research, but it’s impossible. During the day, I have outpatient surgeries; after work, I have to take care of my kids. I have only a little bit time to myself after 10 pm, but this is far from being enough because scientific research demands big trunks of time. The current environment in China is like that.
You expose us but there are thousands of other people doing the same. As long as the system remains the same and the rules of the game remain the same, similar acts of faking data are for sure to go on. This time you exposed us, probably costing us our job. For the sake of Chinese doctors as a whole, especially for us young doctors, please be considerate. We really have no choice, please!”
There's similar incentives in some parts of medicine in the West. Some physicians get into academic medicine not because they want to be researchers, but because they like teaching residents and/or the high complexity that academic medical centers attract. The result usually isn't fraud, but fluff papers that don't meaningfully contribute to the field.
huge difference in degree, intent and real-life effects on the author.. raw numbers and basic economic conditions as a backdrop. It is notable IMHO but not closely comparable
CCP wanted to catch up with the west in terms of scientific output. They set targets for quantity, which were duly met: China now produces more research papers than the USA.
China has a history of things like this, e.g. the way that villagers melted down their pots and pans to increase "steel production" during the Great Leap Forward and ended up with unusably low grade steel combined with no cooking implements.
Too many people competing for everything AND no system to check whether what they publish makes sense. Peer review only works if these doctors are not part of the same system, if they are then all of them are equally interested in covering up for themselves and for others.
If the system existed, it would actually make the expectations more realistic and make doctor's lives easier rather than increase the amount of research. But I assume the government isn't interested in the truth, i.e. realistically to fix this situation you would also need to admit that plenty of work done was basically bullshit and your numbers go down as a consequence.
I know everywhere it holds a lot of weight, but I think that in Europe/US an additional huge factor for academic career is the ability to raise funding.
Maybe in China there's less need to find private funding for research thus scientific impact based on papers may hold more weight.
But I'm 100% that fake research and cheating is rampant in all of natural science everywhere in the world, and I myself had spent 6 months of my life in a lab trying to reproduce fake results from a previous researcher in my lab.
We only caught up it was fake data way later, when we spotted one single outlier number, an impossibly high voltage generated by his system (a 5/10% open current voltage that compounded all the other results).
> But I'm 100% that fake research and cheating is rampant in all of natural science everywhere in the world, and I myself had spent 6 months of my life in a lab trying to reproduce fake results from a previous researcher in my lab.
A single anecdote doesn't support having 100% certainty for such a broad claim.
I can't speak to incentives in China, but India had national publication requirements for post grads. These requirements drove an industry of predatory pay-for-publish journals, 'cause you aren't getting your degree without it.
In the US marginal students can take a degree and leave academia without churning out fake garbage.
There are plenty of conferences and journals publishing low quality articles in the US too lol. I'd say majority of phd and thesis based master's programs have publication requirements in the US.
Rather poor article because it doesn’t answer the question of why fake research is so prevalent in China.
There are a few reasons but they include 1) almost everybody is committing massive fraud making actual policing difficult (are you going to fire everybody ?) 2) strong incentives to publish papers without quality (in the us judging aspiring faculty applicants on total papers is taboo)
Same reason why all sorts of gnarly scams (melamine milk, gutter oil, etc) are/were so prevalent in China: there were no consequences. But some of the melamine people were sentenced to death, and the article notes that the government is starting to clamp down on fake research too.
It feels that Chinese govt. is complacent in that scheme however: allowing scientific scams have helped to increase interest in science domestically and create illusion of productivity internationally. Now it has began hurting, so they are cracking down.
Imagine reading the entire article, subscribing to the Economist, and only getting this tiny fragment that could be otherwise found on a passing HN comment.
Honestly, I agree that the article doesn't do a satisfactory job of answering "why?". Simply stating that researchers have an incentive to is true of everywhere.
Incentivizing quality over quantity always leads to more fraud. It happens in academia, and it happens in sales (e.g. Bank of America scandal). If I need more of X to get promoted or to get my bonus, then it's easiest to just create fake X.
This is a generalized problem because back in the "good old days" science was done by a select elite of passionate individuals (think physics between 1900-1950). Nowadays science is dominated by midwits that were forced to do "science" because of societal expectations that everyone needs to go to university and become "educated". The end result is an endless tsunami of grifters and people who cargo cult science by making a few pretty graphs and dropping some massaged data sets so that they can get their pretty baubles and titles. This is the full extent of modern scientific thought for 99% of people doing "science". Of course the passionate 1% are still there pushing the envelope further but more often than not they are inconvenienced by the modern academic system and all that it entails (think Grigori Perelman or others like him)
That's survivorship bias. Of course the results that have survived a century of scrutiny look better than the average high-profile research published today. But there were also plenty of unremarkable and outright false results back in the "good old days", as well as ideologically motivated garbage such as scientific racism. Or Lysenkoism, which killed millions.
Much agreed with this. There is no area of science nor social science that we don’t understand better today than we did 70 years ago.
For one thing, we understand statistical methods much better. We have a much better sense of what theories only sound good and what theories actually have support in data. Even in psychology, we understand the problems with non-replicating results much better.
The callback to the good old days when only the elite had the privilege of contributing to science rings very off to me.
Good point. But please consider that certain cultures may be inherently more transparent and accepting of dissent (see global indices that measure freedom of speech and degree of liberal democracy). Plus, different cultures have different attitudes towards honesty and commitment to truth (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17160). In addition, the last decade saw the emergence of colossal national programs that explicitly seek to inflate output metrics (e.g. China, Saudi Arabia, etc.).
I’d trust a paper coming out of the Netherlands way more than I’d trust one from China. For the same reasons I’d trust a paper from a reputable publisher over predatory one.
Unfortunately, you're not wrong. Since a long time, I'm convinced universities need to scale down, and quite a lot too. Higher education, as far as it's needed, should be relegated to schools without a research function. Universities should be primarily research facilities, only training those students who can become good researchers.
That doesn't solve the publication treadmill, but it would expect it to be a step forward.
Hyper competition and perverse incentives is present in western academia also. The only difference is in the amount, not if it is present or not at all. I don’t get how a bunch of HN readers could fall into the trap of binary thinking.
Replication crisis != poorly done studies != fake research. Related, but not the same.
Research may fail to replicate for many reasons. Especially in areas like social science. Test subject (person) randomly selected from a population in say, the '50s, was different from similarly selected test subject today.
Bad incentives & outright fakery just add to that mix of possible causes.
Good old days like lying about sugar and tobacco? The unscientific racism in the US and Germany? Lusenkoism?
If any, from 1970 we got RMS, Linus Torvalds, GCC, Emacs, Gnuplot, Perl, Python, BLAS/Lapack and so boosting scientific research to unthinkable levels...
Also quite hilarious that your example exemplifies my point that a scientific discipline like computer science has its peak when its still in the domain of a few elite contributors. Which for computer science was at its very start, compare that to how it is today when when we invent ever more byzantine ways to create CRUD applications since the masses have been attracted to "computer science" to make money.
Yup there has been junk science in the past due to bad incentives. Thats why its a very good idea to double down on these counterproductive incentives and also push everyone with a pulse into university so that he does cargo cult science based on these incentives because in this way we will uhh... make science better or something.
What I notice a lot happening is established researchers with reputable pasts wasting funds on research directions that are basically designed to fool the funding agencies and their bosses and their naive PhD students, but which to anyone initiated in the field are obvious dead ends.
The problem is not one of "midwits". The problem is that in science one is supposed to be in search of the truth and nothing but the truth, but we do not reward honesty. We only reward new discoveries or what appears to be new findings. Then it is no wonder that people are being dishonest.
You might need to take another humanities major before understanding why I put the good old days in quotes, dont forget to publish a few papers on it to get that citation count up though!
a) Real economic research funded by Koch brothers and other fossil fuel companies write all policy: trickle down economics, no taxes on rich people, billionaires must become trillionaires first for us to see the trickle down effects.
b) Tobacco cartels funding scientific research purporting the health benefits of tobacco[1], a playbook now employed by all industries.
c) Lead is a gift of God and is healthy funded by auto, fossil and chemical companies which poisoned the world from early 1920s to early 2000s[2]. Though its banned now, there is lead everywhere on the planet now and is only banned because of the work of Claire Patterson[3].
"After Patterson completed his work with calculating the age of the Earth, he turned his attention to a problem he had discovered during his research. He was perplexed at the amount of lead contamination in the atmosphere. Furthermore, he was surprised that the general population was not aware of the effects of lead on the human body. This was mainly because for the last forty years, all studies done on the effects of lead had been done by doctors with no specialized training in chemical pathology and who were primarily funded by the manufacturers of lead additives, notably the Ethyl Corporation. One of these doctors hired by the Ethyl Corporation was a man named Robert Kehoe. His job was to perform scientific research to raise doubt in the public that lead was poisonous. Some of his reports stated that there was no evidence that lead was toxic, that since it was naturally occurring it could not be deadly, and that if workers are overexposed to it, then it is simply an issue of regulations within a company. Kehoe was able to persuade the public that lead poisoning should not be seen as an issue.": https://publish.illinois.edu/clair-patterson/fighting-for-a-...
d) All chemicals are healthy until proven harmful, anything can be added to food, and the environment polluted with no consequences. And there is always industry sponsoring research that whatever substance is in question is in fact healthy. Well know harmful substances take at least 3 - 5 decades (or never!) to be banned or regulated! (a) above gives the foundational basis to let rich people (aka companies) do whatever they want with the same playbook employed by tobacco and lead.
