No "system" can ever overcome such problems. Sure, some political orders are better than others in various respects, but nothing will overcome the basic origin of our problems, which is us! The "system" itself is made from the crooked timber of our humanity, and even if some perfect "system" could be made, its perfection could only be actualized by a perfect people.

Hence the need to focus less on systems and more on personal virtue. You want to find your greatest enemy? Look within.

To quote Solzhenitsyn: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.”

You could argue that the church tried it and we had the inquisition, but I think it's different. We have way more benefit of hindsight and the population is way more educated than it was in the middle ages.

Not advocating for a renaissance of the Christian kingdom, but for embedding care and charity as first class moral values in economics.

A zero-sum system based around a fixed pool of grants and positions that everyone competes for, and a terminal job ladder position where, once reached by successfully having competed for aforementioned grant $$, I become un-fireable.

I would have to sleep with a gun under my pillow in such a world.

There's already plenty of cheating in business, which is full of positive-sum win-win opportunities. I don't even want to imagine how badly I might behave in academia just in order to survive.

If there's more than one human, you have politics.

It just wasn't my thing.

Academia/Science has always been quarrelsome.

I opted out when all three of my advisors during my first year of graduate work told to get out and that the whole field of academia was not the romantic vision I had aspired to be. It was quickly becoming toxic. One of my advisors had stopped taking money from universities, and was leaving to go work for a large pharmaceutical company doing research out in Siberian Russia. Another was quietly working on a degree in statistics to go work for the government.

These were people who I admired and fashioned myself after. It's quite a shock when people you respect suddenly warn you academia is not where you want to be. I was lucky, the other two guys I was in grad school with went ahead anyways. Years later, I found out neither lasted more than a few years for exactly what you described and what I was warned of.

I've also occasionally heard of entire academic departments who should be in jail, for being pieces of crud.

Then there's what I'm guessing is the bulk of academia: care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be.

That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.

If: (a) students paid 1/10 of what they pay today[0], (b) all the on-campus expensive perks were ended (new buildings sold, etc.) and the administration headcount dropped to 1 per every 50 students, (c) tuition went directly to professors, research, and basic groundskeeping, (d) some kind of financial arrangement were put in place so universities had skin in the game with regard to the success of their graduates[0]

then I'm positive the academic system would become far more effective at educating students and preparing them for life, and there would be a positive trickle-down effect to scientific research and the politics there.

[0] State-funded secondary education in European countries costs far less than university education in the US. There's a reason for that - unlike students with easy access to debt, the government won't pay such exorbitant fees.

[1] A very rough stab at an idea for making universities have skin in the game: make tuition for degrees conferred refundable by some percentage (50%?) if more than a certain fraction (10%?) of graduates with B- or higher GPA in their majors are collectively unable to find a job in their field within 2 years of graduation. If a university needed to withhold that guarantee for some majors, that would be a very helpful signal for prospective students.

But the point isn't the specifics, it's that just the presence of such a lever (and its absence at some universities or majors) would be a powerful signal to prospective students, better align the university's incentives, and cause a lot of necessary changes.

I'll summarize it like this:

- join one of the most prestigious laboratories for my master's thesis in the world

- be assigned work based on a paper published in the same lab by a previous researcher

- can't replicate the results for s*t for months, put in insane overtime hours getting ridiculously good at all the processes, still nothing

- randomly talk about my issues with a random phd in the lab (great scientist with tens of thousands of citations) which quickly scans the data and notes that the voltage obtained by the system in the publication is literally impossible, but by raising the voltage you can easily fake out the amount of electricity generated by the system. Nobody really caught it before because you need some very intimate experience with those systems, and it's just one random (albeit important) point.

- ask why this happens

- she explains that only high impact numbers get citations, only citations get you a chance to progress in the academia pyramid

- she explains that only professors that run labs with a huge number of citations can find good funding

- only good funding can allow you to get the material, equipment and countless number of bodies (phds) to run as many experiments as possible and thus grow your position in the scientific world

Essentially there's way too many incentives to cheat and ignore the cheating for all the people involved.

And due to the fact that as soon as you enter a niche (and literally everything is a niche in science) everybody knows each other toxic things happen all around.

I wanted to be a researcher, but having wasted ultimately 7 months of my life trying to get numbers that were impossible to get, and having understood it was ALL about money (no funds -> no researchers/equipment -> papers -> citations -> funds) and politics I called it quits.

I don't know how to fix it other than several governments and their education ministries making a joined effort to have scientific papers where each result has to be thoroughly reviewed by multiple other labs. It's expensive, but I don't see other ways.

I'm still mostly in academia but nowadays, I focus on teaching and infrastructure. Especially with teaching, I feel that I can make more of a long-term impact that I ever could as a researcher - not least because I have way more freedom for discussions and interesting projects with students (I still have to deal with way more hostile, petty and sometimes outright dangerous BS than I feel comfortable with - but it's better than in the even-higher-pressure parts of the system).

It has probably been like this for centuries.

The loftier aims that academia is supposed to enable are crushed by lesser appetites.

Unless there's some way to discriminate between the failed and successful review processes it has failed in its purpose.

The only people who can’t get fired are the few people with tenure. Most people struggle to get that.

Perhaps we just need institutions set up to do replication of papers?

Not really, but it does mean you shouldn’t trust individual papers blindly.

Anyone who follows research already knows this. Individual papers appear all the time with remarkable findings which seem revolutionary, but then nobody can replicate or commercialize it.

Some communities eat these isolated results up, like supplement and health podcasters (Rhonda Patrick, Huberman). They should know better than to take some random mouse study at face value, but it’s too good of a story to pass up.

In medicine and the industry, anyone experienced knows not to get excited about singular results unless it’s from a trusted source or until it’s replicated.

This in turn allows certain people in institutions to trade legitimacy for agenda pushing, creating the current crisis of institutional trust, which the legitimate "Trust the science" crowd suffers from.

Science itself is all about testable hypotheses and facts. If we can't rely on it, chances are we are doing something wrong and science itself is perfectly fine.

But the findings are often not replicated.

Junk science has been around since, well, even before we coined the word science really. In some ways I think the situation has improved. People seem far more aware of misconduct, and willing to make retractions than they used to.

That is the check you are looking for and indeed how we realized there's some fraud and reproducibility issues, btw. I'll be waiting for the day actual religions gets the same level of scrutiny.

"In December 2023, a PubPeer user commented on 13 tortured phrases the Problematic Paper Screener had flagged in the article, such as the use of “Parkinson’s illness,” “Parkinson’s infection,” and “Parkinson’s sickness” rather than Parkinson’s disease.

"“These typically result from an attempt to avoid plagiarism detection using a paraphrasing software,” the commenter wrote about the phases. “How come these incorrect wordings survived proofreading by the coauthors, editors, referees, copy editors, and typesetters?”"

https://retractionwatch.com/2024/11/11/all-the-red-flags-sci...

These fraudulent papers are identified like this:

> For instance, of the 79 papers that one editor had handled at PLOS ONE, 49 have been retracted.

That's not what's happen at top conferences.

Press your face against the glass, and it's much more complicated. The institutions that we have made for funding science don't reliably channel money towards the best ideas. All the experts in the field have figured out how to work the system well enough to build lives for themselves, and this leads to the tautology that "experts" support the status quo. We don't consider someone an expert if they aren't thriving in the current institutions.

Anytime someone mentions new institutions e.g. prediction markets that might better allocate funding, or even enrich the best scientists, there is a visceral backlash.

I did this to someone who ripped off my master's thesis, word for word, as a side trek on holiday and it was like steam came out their ears when they realized if they call the campus authorities to escort me out they'd generate an incident report of why I was there.

Edit: This was not in China btw -- ironically despite the stereotypes all the folks I've collaborated with from there have been pretty ethical and hardworking, it's a shame some ruin things for everyone.

Where a mistake in the Excel spreadsheet was used by many politicians to justify austerity measures to be a #2 or #3a problem (or both)?

Until the "industry" (defined vaguely as scientists, their institutions, universities, funding entities, etc, etc) cleans house and punishes those researchers, we're quickly approaching a time where we'll have to take EVERY study skeptically until it can be replicated.

* Punishment could range from "no, we won't publish your stuff without data+methodology" to ratcheting back funding to "we publicly document your lying/incompetence" (hardest and riskiest) to a variety of other things.

In my experience, fabricated data is rare. But cherry-picking data and misuse of statistics to prove the desired hypotheses is extremely common in top journals from e.g. the Nature family. I'd say at least 1/5 of the articles in biology and medicine have serious methodological errors.

IMHO, the main reason are perverse incentives and power imbalance. If you are a student or a postdoc and you get pressure from your supervisor to obtain certain result and you refuse to engage in academic misconduct, you will get pushed out of most projects and this might be the end of your academic career.

In contrast, there are few, if any, consequences for the senior scientists and principal investigators who perpetuate this culture. There's no oversight, no integrity checks, nothing. Universities tend to ignore even cases of data fabrication and fraud, where e.g. images derived from experiments are fake. Ultimately, this creates selective pressure for misconduct, as those willing to bend the rules are rewarded.