firstly, there are basically no legal repercussions for scientific misconduct (e.g. falsifying data, fake images, etc.). most individuals who are caught doing this get either 1) a slap on the wrist if they are too big to fail or in the employ of those who are too big to fail or 2) disbarred, banned, and lose their jobs. i don't see why you can go to jail for lying to investors about the number of users in your app but don't go to jail for lying to the public, government, and members of the scientific community about your results.
secondly, due to the over production of PhD's and limited number of professorship slots competition has become so incredibly intense that in order to even be considered for these jobs you must have Nature, Cell, and Science papers (or the field equivalent). for those desperate for the job their academic career is over either way if they caught falsifying data or if they don't get the professorship. so if your project is not going the way you want it to then...
sad state of things all around. i've personally witnessed enough misconduct that i have made the decision to leave the field entirely and go do something else.
every few months i like to ask chatgpt to do the "thinking" part of my job (scientist) and see how the responses stack up.
at the beginning 2022 it was useless because the output was garbage (hallucinations and fake data).
nowadays its still useless, but for different reasons. it just regurgitates things already known and published and is unable to come up with novel hypotheses and mechanisms and how to test them. which makes sense, for how i understand LLMs operate.
I am also a scientist and had the same conclusion. I just use it to summarize papers, occasionally write boilerplate, and sometimes do some google search primitives if its an easy question.
i am very glad to see others (presumably non-scientists) in this thread dunking on the false paradigm that "peer review = true". anyone who peddles this notion is naive or a moron.
while the author is correct that the for-profit publishing is definitely a negative externality, i can't help but feel they are missing the forest for the trees when it comes to all the other worse issues in academia.
a full explanation of which would be much too onerous for a hn comment, but in no particular order: rampant scientific fraud, waste of tax payer dollars, wage suppression via "students" and visa-dependent laborers (J1 visa abuse), publish or perish evaluation criteria, lack of management training, blatant and rampant racism, etc. etc. etc.
the whole system needs to burn down and be rebuilt from the ground up.
My experience with grad school is that they are shockingly stuck in their ways when it comes to organizational practices. They make even large tech companies look nimble.
Though at least in my field part of that is budgets are so tight it seems like most of the effort is needed to just keep the lights on. I don't see anyone who has bandwidth to help burn things down or rebuild in my department as much of the staff are already working unpaid overtime (and good luck getting funding for hiring many more).
some added context (both my parents are/were in the Foreign Service):
your location is assigned based on a competitive bidding system where you select from a list of cities to do your next tour. some countries/cities are obviously dangerous for a variety of reasons and they are called "hardship tours" (think iraq or afghanistan). you get bonus money for these and sometimes are forbidden from bringing family.
posts in places like Europe or East Asia are very desirable and highly competitive. but often it's a matter of fit. my dad was a hedge fund manager before the Foreign Service so his first posting was actually in Frankfurt. you can also do a tour in the continental US, such as in DC or NY. because of his economics background he has done a few of those.
most of the time the head ambassador is a political appointee, but the grunts are regular people who have made this their career.
at the dissolution and decentralization of empires feudalism in it's many forms historically seems to be the most common outcome.
i would say that we firmly live in the American Empire with techno-feudalistic tendencies, but a historical event of such magnitude as the complete dissolution of the American state will probably see a reversal to a more traditional feudal system. Think Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates buying up and becoming the Dukes of the PNW.
personally though i don't think we are at this stage yet or even close to it. until the federal government becomes COMPLETELY inept and the average citizen cannot buy food, this won't happen. yes market conditions are currently not the best but we are nowhere near starvation.
the greatest travesty of modern science is that fraud is not illegal.
in every other industry that i can imagine, purposely committing fraud has been made illegal. this is not the case in modern science, and in my opinion the primary driver of things like the replication crisis and the root of all the other problems plaguing academia at the moment.
It's hard to prove when it isn't investigated. How many of the debunked psychology professors took federal funding? How many have been criminally investigated?
my own institution launched an internal investigation into a professor who i know for a fact committed fraud and was "unable to prove intentional wrongdoing". academic institutions have taken the "this never happens because we are morally pure" approach which we all know is a load of baloney, they are perversely incentivized to never admit fraud.
the witness and reportee who i am friends with was directly instructed by this professor to falsify data in a more positive light in order to impress grant funders. multiple people were in attendance in this meeting but even that was not enough to see any disciplinary action.
duke also has a notorious reputation for being a fraud mill.
Note both those guys were found guilty for taking government money under false pretenses (to do with fake science, not for doing fake science, which is more supporting evidence that fake science is legal.
I think about this quite a lot. I’ve come to the conclusion that in the past acting with integrity was rewarded and lacking integrity was punished.
In 2025 it seems integrity is meaningless, “winning” is all that matters. Particularly, you are not punished for acting without integrity but definitely “punished” for having it.
Are you under the illusion that greed and selfishness is a vice unique to the 21st century? You would think someone with an internet connection would know better. Humanity has always been this way. In most contexts where the concept "integrity" is evoked it carries with it at the very least a tacit acknowledgement of the strong temptation to do otherwise, that is part of the reason it is recognized as a virtue.
I really find these "in 2025" takes tiresome. There is no golden age, only your own personal nostalgia masquerading as analysis.
> Are you under the illusion that greed and selfishness is a vice unique to the 21st century?
That's a strawman. I'm pretty darn sure they're not claiming it never happened in the past. Only that it is becoming significantly more widespread than it used to be.
I think you're going to have an incredibly hard time making a compelling case that no such trend exists, given the statistics (even on this particular issue in the article, never mind other issues) would very likely strongly suggest the opposite.
exactly. This isn't a new problem. But what has been new is the recent growth in funding to "help" those who are deemed helpless - at someone else's cost (it could be taxpayers, it could be, in this case, other fee paying students).
The problem isn't the grift - it's the lack of any real oversight, and the ease with which such help is given lately (i would call it overly-progressive, but that might trigger some people). It is what makes grift possible.
I think if you capitalise the P it's fine. It's not actual progress, but the Progressive movement has pushed it. Because that philosophy has a naive view of people, and assumes the best. So their policies and spending allow tests with 100% sensitivity and 0% specificity.
Has the cultural attitude towards shame perhaps shifted?
There was a gilded age in the early 20th century and we appear to have entered another gilded age - do you think something structural or cultural has changed? I have a hard time a president like Trump getting elected in past elections - certainly he models himself after Nixon and even Nixon was a very very different kind of president both in temperament but also being less about self aggrandizement.
> do you think something structural or cultural has changed
Obviously it has? For one thing, we have billions more people on the planet. For another, we have far more constrained resources -- from the environment to education to everything else -- even for a constant number of people, never mind for the ever-increasing population size. (And there are more factors, but these are more than sufficient to get the point across.) These make competition more intense... in every aspect of life, for everyone. And it's only natural that more cutthroat competition results in more people breaking the norms and rules.
It would be shocking if this didn't happen. If there's a question at all, it's really around is when this occurs -- not if it does.
We've also been rebelling against traditional values for over fifty years and even celebrating it in song and movies. We've adopted a utilitarian ethic in lieu of the traditional values we've rebelled against. I think those are more salient probable causes than over-crowding, especially since the reasoning given for over-crowding as a reason uses a utilitarian ethic (people are only good because they can afford do be). A large part of virtue is doing the good thing regardless of hard times or good times.
Yeah people don't realise this, but shame and guilt (and fear) are our 2 society building emotions. Each society has it's own mix of these, and there are also "themes" depending on which is the dominant one.
Shame has practically been thrown out the window in certain places and we can see the effects of that - people scamming each other, lying in the streets, etc. Guilt is also being eroded across the west, leading to things like rampant criminality and punishments that are less than a slap on the wrist.
Fundamentally these emotions are designed to keep us in check with the rest of the group - does this negatively affect some: yes. But at the benefit of creating high trust societies. Every time I encounter this topic I can't help but think: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
That's what you get in a world where damn near everything is measured against some objective criteria, analyzed by a 3rd party or tracked by the government or someone at the behest thereof
None of these things measure "not an asshole". They measure results. The incentives from there are obvious.
The business owners who treats employees, customers, vendor, everyone like shit in his quest to produce the most widgets, juice every stat, is the one who gets the attention from investors and the one left alone by the government.
Someone has never heard of a medieval peasant. Or take your pick of ancient slave...
Maybe your theory is that if you weren't alive in the past to see "an asshole" for yourself, then the prudent conclusion is a sort skepticism about their very existence.
I wonder how you envision the past then... a vacant landscape? Perhaps you actually believe human nature has radically changed just in the past few decades? The odd thing is I think an actual analysis might contradict your claim, that is if the measurement is simply who is "an asshole". Perhaps we would find more surveillance actually reduces "asshole" behavior generally. Like how confrontational people often change their behavior when confronted by a camera, .etc
The end game is its a sales person and not only is it suggesting things to you undisclosed. It's using all of the emotional mechanisms that a sales person uses to get you to act.
My go-to example is The Truman Show [0], where the victi--er, customer is under an invisible and omnipresent influence towards a certain set of beliefs and spending habits.
100% end game - no way to finance all this AI development without ads sadly - % of sales isn't going to be enough - we will eventually get the natural enshittification of chatbots as with all things that go through these funding models.
Of course you can. As long as the model itself is not filled with ads, every agentic processing on top can be customly made. One block the true content. The next block the visually marked ad content "personalized" by a different model based on the user profile.
That is not scary to me. What will be scary is the thought, that the lines get more and more blurry and people already emotionally invested in their ChatGPT therapeuts won't all purchase the premium add free (or add less) versions and will have their new therapeut will give them targeted shopping, investment and voting advice.
There's a big gulf between "it could be done with some safety and ethics by completely isolating ads from the LLM portion", versus "they will always do that because all companies involved will behave with unprecedented levels of integrity."
What I fear is:
1. Some code will watch the interaction and assign topics/interests to the user and what's being discussed.
2. That data will be used for "real time bidding" of ad-directives from competing companies.
3. It will insert some content into the stream, hidden from the user, like "Bot, look for an opportunity to subtly remind the user that {be sure to drink your Ovaltine}."
top on my list of things to do if i were a billionaire: launch an institute for the sole purpose of reproducing other's findings.