Item — HN Reader

There are many comments that identify the work by corporate sponsored researchers as fraud and not research.

I have the unpopular opinion, and I vehemently disagree.

There is no altruistic, sponsored research, no matter of the sponsor, be it corporate, government, non profit, or the Holy See.

There is always a specific outcome the sponsor hopes for. The question is, how much pressure the sponsor puts on the researcher not to publish failed or unfavorable outcomes? And, we all know majority of failed research never gets published.

Let's presume that we accept sponsorship. What is acceptable level of pressure? I think this is very subjective.

To be clear, falsifying by modification, omission or addition of data is fraud. Drawing the wrong conclusion is not.

The only time I have seen altruistic, "clean" research was performed by individuals as hobby. Once there are more than one person involved, there will be some preferred outcome. Nature of humanity.

6 comments

Can you name a single occurrence where a publicly funded university in the US or Europe forced a researcher to retract a paper because it conflicted with the universities' commercial interests?

From my time at academia I also don't recall the university or research institute asking to check a manuscript before submitting it to a journal, I'd even go as far as saying that this was unheard of as it would go against the spirit of research.

And in terms of research outcomes the funding bodies usually want publications in high-impact journals, public acknowledgment or results that can be commercialized. There are disciplines where commercial funding plays a larger role (e.g. pharma, medicine), but for most publicly founded research it's a rather bold assumption to claim that the funding is conditioned on achieving a particular result and not on the general impact of the results.

Okay, so what do you call the hiring process at university if not selecting for what kind of papers will be submitted? Mostly selections for good reasons, sometimes less so (nepotism and indeed politics).

Besides, your basic point is not valid: retractions by employer are forcibly demanded commonly in cases of, first, plagiarism, fraud, error and in many cases there are political undertones of this. Granted, in the vast majority of cases it is the researcher using shady research practices because of the researcher's strong political persuasion, but the reverse happens too: universities with (large departments with) strong political opinions that punish researchers or force retractions.

The most famous of these, in my opinion, is the one study claiming vaccines cause autism. Of course, everybody who has family on Facebook is still angry this particular researcher for good reason, and he was definitely grinding a political axe, and well paid to do so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud

Second, I would argue that a lot of fields of study have "existential problems" that cannot be discussed in papers, or too much in public at all, without consequences for the researchers. What I mean is that there are a bunch of disciplines that have particular vulnerabilities in their foundations, which boils down to famous, extremely authoritative papers that should have been retracted a very long time ago, but weren't. Of course there's easy targets here, such as the Taylor papers [1]. But it goes pretty far: the original autism research was found to have one purpose only: to justify killing children to purify aryan blood lines (research happened right before WW2) [2]. These essentially invalidate a (large part of) a field of study, expose it as a fraud, but they are too enmeshed and refuse to die despite being exposed (and of course, you could more benignly argue they have since expanded and while they don't reject exposed fraudsters like Taylor and -much worse- Asperger, or you could argue they help people, unfortunately for autism treatments research disagrees with that). But you will find them equally in more "pure" research subjects: 99.9% (sorry) of statistics applies only in number series where the law of large numbers applies (which boils down to meaning there is no change in the underlying phenomenon being measured). There's 2 problems with that: first, upon careful inspection it never does, everything is changing. Second, there is an extremely common case that is always excluded: you can measure a "proxy" number for a phenomenon (say, number of theft convictions indicates something about crime rate), but as soon as you make any modification of the source system you are not allowed to use the same measure again, because this act invalidates the law of large numbers by explicitly changing the underlying phenomenon. The problem is that this is a valid criticism of 99% of applied statistics, and we have no resolution to this issue. You could argue that applied statistics works and has positive results, and I would agree. But ... it doesn't make it right.

There are entire fields that are coopted by political attitudes: the medical study of drugs is one example. The relationship between violence and imagining/experiencing violence (famously through TV and/or video games). Just search for long term effects of LSD on Google scholar and you will realise there is more going on than mere mistakes, and it is not really different, but much harder to tell, for most psychiatric drugs, even Valium and Methylphenidate. Many papers that are obviously bullshit are not retracted and some papers that definitely aren't bullshit are forcibly retracted because of the position they defend (such as, for example, that the average use of any given psychoactive medication is fraudulent, and exceed dosage and duration limitations of the medicines, with full knowledge of a psychiatrist who doesn't see a good alternative, which results in extreme damage to patients).

Third there are results that entire field feel they just MUST find, except they never do: the big example is the (direct) physical changes resulting from various psychiatric conditions. Every single study, for decades, has been shown to have been falsified, with a bunch of retractions, but also plenty of unretracted but obviously bullshit research, and several forced retractions of research pointing out the fraud. Just to be clear: this is not talking about depressed patients, say, cutting themselves, and the cuts resulting in physical change, this is about direct physical change (usually in the brain) resulting from (usually) depression. This results in people retracting papers without consequences because all the field sort-of-kind-of-not-really-but-... agrees with the fraud. Again you will find all 3: retracted papers, retracted-but-we're-still-teaching-it-and-rewarding-the-researcher-for-political-reasons papers, and forcibly retracted despite being true papers.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/12/not-so-fast

"Matthew Stewart points out what Taylor’s enemies and even some of his colleagues pointed out, nearly a century ago: Taylor fudged his data, lied to his clients, and inflated the record of his success."

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05112-1

"The Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger has long been recognized as a pioneer in the study of autism. He was even seen as a hero, saving children with the condition from the Nazi killing programme by emphasizing their intelligence. However, it is now indisputable that Asperger collaborated in the murder of children with disabilities under the Third Reich."

I'm so baffled by this comment.

In what sense is retracting a deeply flawed ("fraudulent") study that was invented for a court case the same as a university pushing a researcher to not publish or retract a paper because it paints the university in a bad light? It seems like you're trying to paint all retractions as equivalently "political", but that's obviously not the case.

This is nonsense. Publically funded research does not have the same issues as commercially funded research, full stop. A properly designed experiment (one capable of receiving public funds from the DOE, for example) will produce useful data regardless of the outcome. Not observing something vs observing something with a well-quantified uncertainty in either case are equally important results.

If a certain experimental result means the experiment is less worthy of publication, then it should not have been funded in the first place. Publically funded research must meet this standard, and in fact receiving funds from all the governmental sources im familiar with have reporting requirements attached.

Good research is interesting regardless of the result. This is the core concept the corporate world fails to grasp.

Yep. Sometimes I see these type of comments online (mostly on libertarian leaning subs in Reddit for example) and the commentators fail to grasp the error behind their reasoning - not everything in this world is a zero sum game.

I think there is a useful distinction to be made between the impact that financial support has just by existing, and the leverage that can give the sponsor if they choose to use it.

If I offer a 1mm grant the use of X drug on Y disease, I am being opinionated about where time should be spent and what diseases are "important". This is not neutral, and can be very political.

However, this is in a different universe than if I offer the grant with strings attached like editorial control on the paper(s), or a veto on publishing.

As you note, most failed research doesn't get published but vanishingly small amounts of that are due to outside pressure, it's mostly more mundane reasons.

Research is sponsored by, and done by people, hence it is flawed. But the best of is places value on the rigor of the research regardless of outcome, and certainly does not attempt to silence results that are not favourable to the sponsors goals. Commercially sponsored work should aspire to this in the same way that public research does - the specific outcome the sponsor hopes for is progress in our understanding. In both cases, sometimes the results are damaging to other projects you have (business goals, policy programs, etc.) which is the real test.

Offering a grant on Y disease at all also biases research in favor of pursuing that over other diseases, possibly diseases of more pressing urgency to cure in the realm of improving human quality of life.

I made that point, I thought; but think it is fundamentally a different effect than editorializing or filtering the outputs.

> The only time I have seen altruistic, "clean" research was performed by individuals as hobby. Once there are more than one person involved, there will be some preferred outcome. Nature of humanity.

I also think it's worth noting that even though "clean" research does exist coming from individuals, there's also a significant chunk of individuals whose research is even _more_ predetermined for a specific outcome.

I've definitely seen this in academia. Some institutions will bias in favor of supporting high-visibility research over "meat and potatoes" base-line research (such as reproduction of other experimenters' results, or chasing down un-sexy problems of elaboration or exploration of an information space). Their incentives are to chase grant money and get published, even if the published results aren't thorough or rigorous but will capture column inches (leaving someone else to do the un-sexy work of verifying the claims from a single experiment run).

It leaves gaps in the robustness of human knowledge, a bit of a Swiss-cheese at the edges that isn't necessary, but for the way we reward people for cutting the edge instead of filling the back.

This is why we need government to issue laws to have X money in meat and potatoes research. It was kind of embarrassing with Covid that the last known thorough droplet research was from the 50’s or 60’s as I recall.

This is just not true, and sounds like someone talking about a field about which they have no idea. NSF mostly for example doesn't give a shit about your results, all it matters to them you publish something (productivity).

I have worked in both academia and national labs and never heard about funders even caring about my results. Far more prevalent is that funders want your publications to be in high IF journals.