The case for criminalizing scientific misconduct(chris-said.io) |
The case for criminalizing scientific misconduct(chris-said.io) |
I agree that something stricter should be done, but it should not be about bringing the legal system into play. I see a fundamental issue with bringing science to trial courts, where rhetoric, appeals to emotions, and other different priorities are paramount, not technicalities about overenthusiastic interpretations, data fudging, p-hacking, empirical anomalies and wilful data manipulation.
Science works by different norms of truth (I would call this statistical) than the judicial system does (beyond reasonable doubt/preponderance of evidence). I believe an international peer scientific committee ostracising a person from publication for X number of years, or forever, might be a better measure than a criminal trial and punishment in open court.
I'd say that at the moment there's a bit of an issue with the way the community handles this kind of thing, in a way which is akin in structure (I'm not comparing severity/morality) to sexual assault in many communities (science also among them): it's sadly common that someone is widely known or suspected within their field to engage in scientific fraud, but it's only known within that because that person has enough power to make it dangerous to overtly make an accusation, as well as a general fear that it will discredit the field in general. And someone with a bad reputation there still often gets to engage with the community. It seems that only in the really high-profile cases are there actual consequences, and even then they often only come out long after the offender has retired.
(I'm not entirely convinced criminalising it will actually reduce the problem, though. The idea that harsher punishments = less misbehaviour is a bit of a fallacy in part because people who do this don't expect to be caught)
Willful data manipulation? They may see it more often with financial data, but they've seen it, rather often. And they aren't finance experts either, but they still deal with it competently.
The alternative is that science exists outside the legal system. A scientist can engage in misconduct in a way that gets believed for a while and results in multiple deaths, with no legal consequences? That can't be right.
Isn't that true about white collar crime in general? Some frauds or tax evasion schemes are very elaborate. We still (try to) prosecute them.
As I once said:
"Perjury must be a crime. There is only one sin in science, and that sin is faking data, and faking evidence is faking data. Perjury is surely a crime."
I'll leave out the unfortunate context in which this needed saying.
E.g. no fines or prison, but "banishment" from scientific circles until the perpetrator repents publicly, explains all the details and asks for absolution.
This would be somewhat shameful, but people fear shame more than death, and there would also be a path towards restoration + more knowledge of how the fraud actually worked and what led to it.
I think it would lead to worse outcomes, and is likely to end up based more on whether people like the person accused, or like their results than on what they actually did.
Social shame is a tricky mechanism.
We also don’t want a cottage industry of performative, ladder climbing researchers siphoning funding from real ones.
At a minimum, the public could stop funding researchers with faked data or images. It’s unacceptable that the NIH keeps funding known frauds. If you doctor images, you’re done.
[1] https://retractionwatch.com/2023/12/21/what-analyzing-30-yea...
Of course these are just the wildly successful instances of such fraud. Many such fraud probably represent just one more quickly ignore paper. But still, the crime matters because it has this potential to derail a field. The magnitude of the crime is not represented by calling it "fraud".
Given it relies on institutions (I assume this includes universities) sending it complaints, I’m not sure how we get over the conflict of interest mentioned.
> Sylvain Lesné, the lead author on the Alzheimer’s paper, remains a professor at the University of Minnesota and still receives NIH funding
Okay, maybe you permit anonymous complaints. If the anonymous complaint results in an adverse finding, the institution is penalised. If not, just the researcher.
Penalties should include fines. But also a term during which they are blacklisted from NIH funding.
[1] https://ufm.dk/en/research-and-innovation/councils-and-commi...
The nature of science is that there are a lot of papers. Not all are replicated but generally “we pursued this direction for 16 years” type of hypothesis are based on many results, which acts as an error correcting code on mistakes and fraud — and is exactly how the system is supposed to work.
How much time could have been saved towards an effective treatment? It could be as high as a decade, but of course more likely it was zero years. I averaged it out to 1 year.
Now suppose you think that 1 year is orders of magnitude too high, and that in expectation it averages out to a 1 day delay. Even then, I estimate 100,000 QALYs would be lost, making this a tragically high impact case of misconduct.
--- Final point: Nobody doubts that science is error correcting. The point is that the errors are corrected far too slowly and many never get corrected at all. It's incredibly hard to develop good theories when you know that 30-50% of the results in your lit review are false.
Still these people are criminals and clearly need to be treated as such. To say there are larger problems doesn't at all diminish the need to deal with criminals as we do in ALL walks of life.
Maybe civil charge to pay back the public funding, in the case of there being public funding. Turning researchers into debt serfs may reach better compliance and sustain access to their cognitive abilities on behalf of the public, as opposed to prison
In the end there could be the undesired collateral effect of nobody wanting to do science anymore by the perceived risk. Only the very rich people could afford the lawfare
The threat of permanently withholding future funding is probably enough to curb casual fraud.
Maybe it's overall better to let science sort out science things.
Reproducibility is the test suite of science. Make experiments reliably, repeatably testable.
Wonder if computable research will become a requirement for publication. Will that make a slow process slower?
Beyond that though, these are cases of blatant fraud that steals money from the taxpayer.
If one fraudulent actor is massively setting back a field then there is too much trust in published results.
What is the precise, singular meaning (or implementation) of "science is error correcting"?
Is there one?
It just adds a new member in the table sucking researchers dry. Who will pay for this insurance?, the grants earned by this scientific? Then this is less money that goes to the researcher one year later. Those that hire researchers will need to either increase the funds or to allow some free hours in the contract so the researcher can double jobs working in McDonalds.
they are still going to gave the threat of a public records civil charge from the government
That said, what the culprits do is really very shameful and professional organizations used to treat shameful behavior of their members in this way, rather than handing them over to standard public courts.
At the very least, if other scientists are publicly involved, the public gets an impression that the community doesn't "wash its collective hands" over its own bad actors and tries to remedy the problem actively.
Maybe both should be combined. "A trial by your peers" would be trial by a non-judicial panel made of other scientists (who are the real peers of the culprit), and it could only mete our punishments of specific and relevant type: research bans, public apologies etc.
I certainly don't think that people should be jailed for scientific misconduct. Prisons are useful in isolating dangerous people from the rest of the society, but their restorative effect is minuscule even in Europe, much less in the USA. And fraudulent scientists don't have to be isolated from society, unlike rapists or muggers. They just have to lose their credibility.
I see your point about wanting to reserve prison for strictly violent offenses, but there is such a thing as serious yet non-violent crime, which is the entire reason why low-security prison is there.
Scientists, even dishonest ones, are very highly educated people with important and hard to replace skills. Locking those skills away is a huge loss, much higher than when you lock up a run-of-the-mill Ponzi schemer.
I would prefer some punishment that would still make use of their talent and skills to benefit humanity. Perhaps they should be required to design better research methods that prevent their own sort of fraud etc.