The Real Meaning Of The ‘Stanford Scandal’
Competition DESTROYS Scientific Research.
A few damning mainstream articles were released last month.
There’s far more scientific fraud than anyone wants to admit (GuardianUK) ….. Stanford president resigns after fallout from falsified data in his research (NPR)… Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract at least three papers (StanfordDaily) …. Science Corrects Itself, Right? A Scandal at Stanford Says It Doesn’t (ScientificAmerican)
We can’t recall what we were doing when the Sanford Scandal broke out, but we have caught up a bit. We no longer need to spend weeks of investigation as our point of view is validated 95% of the time.
We have explained how to fix these clearly systemic issues in our article “Pondering the LOVE Of Doing”
Academia is broken and nothing new; it has been so for a long time. Indeed it goes much deeper than the Stanford Scandal. Although its president is definitely guilty of fraud, we need to be able to step backward and scrutinize the system itself. Incentivizing the best researchers is a terrible idea.
It all starts with a bit of cheating here and there to get attention or even published, and then things begin to go out of hand because experiments cannot be reproduced. One is thus forced to come up with a bigger lie. And so on. Even universities compete by racing for the number of papers released each year—more money, more influence… more power.
The only way to compete in this UNFAIR system is to cheat too… states the video below.
And we agree.
We disagree with the speaker here when he states that most scientists have a deep integrity. How can this be if they don’t recognize the wrong data? While the statement is partially correct if some of the most important and prestigious papers are tainted, it merely means that students take falshoods for granted and might be tempted to cheat because they cannot reproduce an experiment they read about.
As far as we can see, alternative thinkers digging into this sordid affair are already ostracized, and censorship is the elephant in the room. We found this video titled “The Perfect Crime — Scientific Fraud in America” highly informative about how lies are being uncovered.
Make no mistake; another real scandal is that this high-end corruption should be trending on all TV broadcasts until those fraudulent peer reviews are fully exposed as taxpayers fund so many university studies. But corruption in science only makes headlines briefly.
The culprits often get demoted or resign. They very rarely go to jail. It is a way to buy their silence, though fake research may injure or kill nonetheless. The wise move here is that we should start paying serious attention to the side effects of all drugs.
Not to mention that Pharma does too incentivize its lab employees, but that merely amplifies fraud. Lab culture tends to reward the production of positive results and punish the losers who cannot generate successful data.
Harvard professor who studies dishonesty is accused of falsifying data (NPR June 2023)
The entire peer review system depends on grant funding. There is just too much money sloshing around. Today we learned that somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 papers have been retracted so far. Secrecy makes it difficult to obtain the correct number. Go figure?
The compounding issue here is that they are often retracted a long time after their release, and by that time, the “incriminated data” has been taken as absolute truth by its followers. All of which fuels more wrong scientific thinking and, therefore, more fraud. And so on.
Two percent of scientists admitted to faking their data at least once. And 14% reported anonymously that they have seen others falsify data. (video above)
One question comes to mind: are those surveyed lying, and is the crisis even more acute?
The real question here speaks for itself: fake data is a systemic issue and should prompt us to look into the root cause because, as it stands, law enforcement cannot operate as intended.
The ramifications of the problems are too pervasive, and it is getting ugly out there!
