I'd be pretty wary of stretching wire fraud law to cover this. Prosecutors deciding whether scientific results are fraudulent sounds like it could create its own set of ugly incentives

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mike_hearn a day ago | parent | next [-]

Fraud law doesn't need to be stretched, academic fraud is covered and criminally prosecutable in the USA for decades. It has to be because they're using these results to apply for grants paid from tax monies.

Occasionally someone is even prosecuted! Unfortunately, even when the government wins, the institutions just treat the resulting fines as a cost of business. See the Dana Farber Cancer Center: prosecuted by a third party on behalf of the government, found guilty of faking their science for a decade+, paid the fine - and nothing anywhere on the DFCC website mentions anything about it.

	▲	hn_throwaway_99 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks for this comment, and I totally agree. Only important things I'd add > and nothing anywhere on the DFCC website mentions anything about it That doesn't really surprise or bother me - I wouldn't exactly say it was a coverup just because they aren't heralding some major Fed case against them on their own website. But I do find it shitty that the Wikipedia page of Dr. Laurie Glimcher, who was president of the institute at the time, had some papers retracted and apparently resigned over the issue, makes it sound like she just retired because she completed her mission and has no mention of the scandal. The bigger issue I see is that someone wasn't prosecuted, just the institution. I didn't spend a ton of time looking, but AFAICT no individual faced any serious consequences beyond "reputational damage". This is why the "corporations are people" shit is so aggravating. If corporations are people, then some people who committed these crimes should have faced legal consequences, not just have their malfeasance paid out by the organization.

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hn_throwaway_99 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Prosecutors (and juries) already are expected to adjudicate fraud across cases that IMO are much more ambiguous than this.

I think it's fair to debate whether it's a good thing that, as I heard it put once, "everything is wire fraud" (i.e. lots of crimes require lying on documents that are sent electronically and thus become federal crimes), but I see zero reason to think that committing academic fraud (which, again, is done for personal gain and causes real, measurable harm to others) is any less of a crime than lots of other things that are prosecuted as wire fraud.

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Calazon a day ago | parent [-]

Perhaps we need a new/updated law to cover this kind of thing. This sort of academic fraud should absolutely be criminalized, but I'm not sure I'm the biggest fan of the "everything is wire fraud" approach to achieving that.

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coldtea a day ago | parent [-]

If it gets so bad that a society/academic system needs to criminalize such fraud, they have already lost that race.

The only thing that really works is a culture where this rarely if ever happens, because of the peer respect and self-respect of academics.

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daymanstep a day ago | parent | next [-]

Peer reputation and self policing works in a system where no money is at stake.

In the old days scientific research was only done by self-funded rich people with tons of money and free time.

Nowadays science is mostly done by people whose income and food depends on getting grants.

When your career and income are at stake, why would you take the risk of opposing Dan Ariely? Only someone who was already rich could do that.

	▲	coldtea a day ago \| parent [-]
		>Peer reputation and self policing works in a system where no money is at stake. It works in systems where money is at stake too. You need a high trust, conscientous society. Doesn't mean that having one solves the issue entirely. The ocassional bad apple will fraud there too, but it wont be rampant enough to be a systemic problem. >When your career and income are at stake, why would you take the risk of opposing Dan Ariely? Only someone who was already rich could do that. You don't need independently wealthy scientists to expose fraud. You just need an environment where if regular salary dependent scientists expose fraud, they're not punished for it. If you don't have that, sure, then you need independently wealthy scientists to dare.

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Calazon 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure, if culture were different, or human nature we different, we wouldn't have the problems we currently do.

However, given the culture we have, and the human tendencies we have, I think laws can make things better. Like criminalizing various sorts of fraud.

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inigyou a day ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

	▲	coldtea a day ago \| parent [-]
		>Do you know a trick to pay my bills in self-respect? Most of my creditors demand I pay in money. Nobody said that shit. You can pay your builds with the monetary salary from doing your job honestly. That was my first point. If many people discover that such a salary is not enough to get by, or if many people aren't content with "enough to get by" and decide to perform academic fraud for extras, then that's a society that already lost the plot. That was my second point.