Joe Simmons
Appearances
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.