What percent of univeristy / scientific research is just totally made up? Dr. Gregg Semenza, Ranga P. Dias & others exposed

What percent? I don’t know. I do know, however, that LOTS of people in high school, college, academia, and industry/corporate America play a lot of “go along to get along” or follow some Goldilocks-like version of reality in which those who try to do the right thing are either naive or attached to an unreasonable sense of rectitude, while they themselves are “just right” — but will then turn around and balk at others who don’t play by their version of the rules,

Eff y’all.

The incentives and process of peer-review is a terrible one. In a way, these types of stories coming out may be a positive in the long run

Two big differences between athletics and academics:

1) In athletics, people might reasonably conclude they need to dope in order to be able to compete with others who are doping. In academics, that pressure isn’t there. Dissertation writing isn’t a competition.

2) In athletics, if you get caught cheating, you get suspended and then come back. In academics, scholars who get caught plagiarizing are DONE. Nobody wants to hire someone or award research grants to someone who has been caught plagiarizing or publishing falsified research. Academic integrity is taken very seriously.

I have a PhD in engineering and have worked in research in a few different places on a few different projects, and there is virtually zero fraud. There is almost always at least one other person in any research project that knows enough about it to notice and question odd results. The rarity of fraud is why it’s such a big deal when it’s discovered.

I've heard most of it.

If not, at least a lot is misguided when better solutions exist outside the field they're funded by.

That is anti-science nonsense. Of course this whole thread is kind of a right wing talking point. The idea that there’s massive fraud in science totally unconnected to reality.

If it can't be reproduced it is eventually caught. Rojo this is something you don't need to worry about, stop listening to conspiracy radio.

It is the same in all areas of life. Those who have no idea about what is going on think that those who do know what is going on must be somehow frauds.

Thus, the DEEP STATE, the all powerful oligarch overlords, the evil ELITES, the unscrupulous scientists, . . .

Yes indeed. Of course there are frauds. At least one became President of the US. He lied and lied and lied and claimed it was others who were lying. Same as it ever was.

No one doubts that there exist frauds. The question is, what percentage among scientists are frauds. The answer is a very small percentage. And the reason that the warped perception exists is as I said it is.

Well if you are insinuating that ignorance and paranoia are a dangerous combination sure…they are ubiquitous.

Oh, most definitely. We've created a very structured and organized society which means it's easy for unscrupulous people to exploit it so they can climb the ladder at other people's expense.

I mean, look at Rudy, the famous American Football player who had a movie done in his "story". We'll, that story was made up. The groundsman wasn't real, neither was his childhood friend Pete, his brother Frank in the movie wasn't real which also means his girlfriend never left him for Frank since Frank didn't exist, nor did the Notre Dame players do the thing with their jerseys to force the ND head coach, Dan Devine, to let Rudy play. Dan Devine was always up for letting Rudy in on a play. But the con man wanted to score maximum pity points with the audience and made all this crap up for the movie.

One more "Just Asking Questions" Rojo's threads. Nothing to see here. Just some stuff that made me wonder, you know?

Oh please. The biggest fraud named Rudy was once mayor of NY.

With the number of degrees the education industrial complex pumps out each year, the odds that there is a significant amount of plagiarism taking place is extremely high.

Here's one that no one talks about for obvious reasons.

Martin Luther King Jr. authorship issues (from Wikipedia)

Boston University, where King received his Ph.D. in systematic theology, conducted an investigation that found he appropriated[3] and plagiarized major portions of his doctoral thesis from various other authors who wrote about the topic.[4][5]

According to civil rights historian Ralph Luker, who worked on the King Papers Project directing the research on King's early life, King's paper The Chief Characteristics and Doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism[6] was taken almost entirely from secondary sources.[7] He writes:
Moreover, the farther King went in his academic career, the more deeply ingrained the patterns of borrowing language without clear attribution became. Thus, the plagiarism in his dissertation seemed to be, by then, the product of his long established practice.[7]

How is there going to be much fraud in engineering? Is your research so theoretical that it can't be quickly tested?

A more subtle problem in academia is that peer review itself isolates a field and insulates it from outside influence. This delays potentially useful paradigm shifts.

Physics and cosmology are like this. Many of their fundamental concepts are ridden with hand-waving and hocus pocus. Particles, space-time, etc, descriptions imported from abstract math about what things do, that don't really explain what the thing itself actually is.

most as in wrong. Certain fields certainly have this problem. Fraud maybe not. Weak theories, yes.

Three types of frauds:

Those that publish questionable material for a profit (ex oil, tobacco, some pharmaceutical people) either maliciously or out of ignorance. I’d say this is 3-5%.

Those that publish bs for notoriety. They may make up data or completely fabricate experiment. This is a lot smaller group and the ones usually caught, probably less than 1%.

Honest researchers that overstate the significance of their work or cherry pick outlier data and make claims based on that. This is the biggest group and what peer review is designed to capture. After years of collecting hundreds of data points, it’s hard to admit you really have nothing of significance, but if you have enough data there will be some outliers just by chance. It’s hard not to assign significance. I’ve definitely had to temper some people excitement about outlier data. A well run university will have checks in place to minimize this. Problem is the ‘data people’ are often stats grad students and they’re having to push back on tenured faculty so it can be a tricky dynamic.