ewok on Nostr: That’s not my read of the situation. Sabine’s original nature commentary is ...
That’s not my read of the situation.
Sabine’s original nature commentary is arguing for more funding for her field of theoretical research because the experimentalists’ side of particle physics keeps publishing mistakes and this causes hype bubbles to from based from bad data (eg taking statistical instrumental errors to be true which spawns tons of follow-up work that is incorrect and soaking up funds). To be clear, not even Sabine calls that fraud, it’s a runaway hype bubble with a lack of self-correction.
The author to her letter is not admitting to widespread fraud, they are admitting that they have had to jazz up the marketing of their own models to get funding and attention on incremental advances. I’ve seen that in my own field— when DNA sequencing became low cost for example, you had to have some kind of genomics spin to your paper or it just wasn’t going to be considered significant enough by the journal/academic community. That’s a hype bubble, so people doing good genetic work with no high-throughput deep sequence data would get overlooked. Something to moan about, something to address in the wider scientific community, but certainly NOT fraud.
When the letter author is talking about jobs etc, they are recommending that Sabine offer a solution in her commentary rather than just call out bad science for her own short-term gain (eg pulling funds from experimentalists to theorists). They even say that the funders do not fully understand their work anyway so they are tasked with putting a strong spin on it to make it sound big and ambitious. Even if you disagree with the unavoidable necessity of marketing (we have entire mandatory courses on the ethics of science communication in grad school), you cannot say this is some kind of engineered handshake and wink between funders and scientists to keep people fed. The grants people are generally trying to make the biggest wave in deploying that money and the scientists are generally trying to make the case for their own research over others.
All Sabine did was say, hey we need to pump the breaks on these particle smashers because a ton of money is going into work based on incorrect numbers, and someone in that community said to her, privately, yeah, I had to “write to the grant”. Not fraud.
If you’re not familiar “writing to the grant” is something you learn about early in academics, where you have to fit your interests into those of what the grant asks for. So say you’re really interested in autophagy, but there is no grant available for that— but there is a cancer grant and you come across a few papers saying autophagy is altered in certain cancers. Well now you write to the grant by explaining why you should get paid to run these autophagy experiments in cancer models. Not fraud.
Sabine’s original nature commentary is arguing for more funding for her field of theoretical research because the experimentalists’ side of particle physics keeps publishing mistakes and this causes hype bubbles to from based from bad data (eg taking statistical instrumental errors to be true which spawns tons of follow-up work that is incorrect and soaking up funds). To be clear, not even Sabine calls that fraud, it’s a runaway hype bubble with a lack of self-correction.
The author to her letter is not admitting to widespread fraud, they are admitting that they have had to jazz up the marketing of their own models to get funding and attention on incremental advances. I’ve seen that in my own field— when DNA sequencing became low cost for example, you had to have some kind of genomics spin to your paper or it just wasn’t going to be considered significant enough by the journal/academic community. That’s a hype bubble, so people doing good genetic work with no high-throughput deep sequence data would get overlooked. Something to moan about, something to address in the wider scientific community, but certainly NOT fraud.
When the letter author is talking about jobs etc, they are recommending that Sabine offer a solution in her commentary rather than just call out bad science for her own short-term gain (eg pulling funds from experimentalists to theorists). They even say that the funders do not fully understand their work anyway so they are tasked with putting a strong spin on it to make it sound big and ambitious. Even if you disagree with the unavoidable necessity of marketing (we have entire mandatory courses on the ethics of science communication in grad school), you cannot say this is some kind of engineered handshake and wink between funders and scientists to keep people fed. The grants people are generally trying to make the biggest wave in deploying that money and the scientists are generally trying to make the case for their own research over others.
All Sabine did was say, hey we need to pump the breaks on these particle smashers because a ton of money is going into work based on incorrect numbers, and someone in that community said to her, privately, yeah, I had to “write to the grant”. Not fraud.
If you’re not familiar “writing to the grant” is something you learn about early in academics, where you have to fit your interests into those of what the grant asks for. So say you’re really interested in autophagy, but there is no grant available for that— but there is a cancer grant and you come across a few papers saying autophagy is altered in certain cancers. Well now you write to the grant by explaining why you should get paid to run these autophagy experiments in cancer models. Not fraud.