Joe Simmons
Appearances
Freakonomics Radio
Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia? (Update)
Joe Simmons. I'm a faculty member at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Freakonomics Radio
Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia? (Update)
This guy, Daryl Ben, published a nine study paper with eight studies worth of statistically significant evidence that people have ESP. And most people were like, what is going on? Like this, this cannot be. A true finding.
Freakonomics Radio
Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia? (Update)
So we were surprised when the paper got accepted. And then the immediate aftermath was shocking. Like there were so many people for whom this resonated. And then there were lots of people who were really not very happy. Like, why are you giving the field a bad name?
Freakonomics Radio
Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia? (Update)
Look, I definitely had moments after this where I was scared for myself and my family. And that is Joe Simmons. Like, just the amount of money involved, I didn't quite appreciate that at the very first moments. I mean, this is not the way to adjudicate these things. There's a million chances to show we're wrong. A million. Like, earlier. A lot. There's a lot of chances.
Freakonomics Radio
Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia? (Update)
And this is what you're going to do. You're going to sue three individuals for $25 million. That seems... That seems not great.
Freakonomics Radio
Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia? (Update)
My very first thoughts were like, oh my God, how's anyone going to be able to do this again? If you can get sued for conducting these kinds of investigations, and we are business school professors at very good institutions that have a lot of resources. We're definitely in a position to bear the brunt of this more than, say, the average person in the field.
Freakonomics Radio
Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia? (Update)
And so just the chilling effect on scientific inquiry and criticism, it's like, is everything we've been working for for 10 years, is that now gone?
Freakonomics Radio
Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia? (Update)
It could be anywhere from hundreds of dollars to even thousands of dollars per paper. And they're publishing tens of thousands and sometimes even more papers per year. So you can start to do that mass.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
My very first thoughts were like, oh my God, how's anyone going to be able to do this again?
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
I think that people need to wake up and realize that the foundation of at least a sizable chunk of our field is built on something that's not true. And if a foundation of your field is not true, what does a good scientist do to break into that field? Like imagine you have a whole literature that is largely false. And imagine that when you publish a paper, you need to acknowledge that literature.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
And that if you contradict that literature, your probability of publishing really goes down. What do you do? So what it does is it winds up weeding out the careful people who are doing true stuff. And it winds up rewarding the people who are cutting corners or Even worse, so it basically becomes a field that reinforces, rewards bad science, and punishes good science and good scientists.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
This is about an incentive system. And the incentive system is completely broken. And we need to get a new one. And the people in power who are reinforcing this incentive system, they need to not be in power anymore. You know, this is illustrating that there's sort of a rot at the core of some of the stuff that we're doing.
Freakonomics Radio
Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped? (Update)
And we need to put the right people who have the right values, who care about the details, who understand that the materials and the data, they are the evidence. We need those people to be in charge. Like, there can't be this idea that these are one-off cases. They're not. They are not one-off cases. So it's broken. You have to fix it.