Charles Gould: Debunking the data behind the "Chiral Majorana fermion modes" claim
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- Опубліковано 14 тра 2024
- International Conference on Reproducibility in Condensed Matter Physics
May 9-11, 2024 University Club, University of Pittsburgh, PA
www.pqi.org/international-con...
This looks like a paper where the authors convinced themselves, "It ought to work given the theory. So let's get a paper out right quick." They probably collected an early set of data, convinced themselves it was the right track, wrote up a paper and did the final data collect for the paper as it was being written.
The problem is that this would have been a highly referenced paper with an early validation of an important and believable theoretical observation.The paper was more valuable as currency to buy grants and promotion if it goes out sooner.
Publications serve two masters: 1) Communicate results; and 2) Print currency to buy professional advancement. You can't be surprised that (1) is not being served as well as it should as long as (2) continues to be accepted practice.
The data were already in the paper before they were allegedly collected
@@spinespresso I'm not going to rewatch but what I think was said was the data that appears in the final paper was collected June 1/2 and there were people pre-reviewing on June 1 and therefore, this was a problem.
This does not sound all that sinister to me. The timeline could be:
1) Get initial results decide to write paper. Start writing;
2) Write/refine scripts to run experiments and generate plots;
3) Have people look over paper June 1 with early results;
4) Do final run for journal the day before paper goes out and store off files.
This would involve running scripts and dropping images into a paper which would take very little time. If the lab was getting results repeatable results across runs, there is nothing wrong with this.
I don't know if that's what happened but it is not an obvious sign of malfeasance that the data was generated on the day the paper was submitted and that people had seen previews of the paper before the final journal article had been submitted.
There seem to be other issues and UCLA should probably look into them. But I was not convinced of unethical behavior based on the dates argument which he seems to think is a home run. This led me to doubt some of the other stuff. The speaker seems to know a great about the device they were using and maybe there's a problem. I can't say. The missing data might be an ethical problem or it might be crappy electronics interacting with a half-assed device driver. I don't know. The missing time stamp column might be someone opening a file and resaving or it might be that some grad student didn't use the right command line for that run. I cannot say. On the other hand, if he went to UCLA with "the dates don't line up," I can easily see UCLA going, "Nah. That's no big deal," and being right in doing so.
Data appeared in the draft before they were obtained. One of many problems but the simplest one to convey.
Likely one of the main drivers is when someone fails in their research the pressure to be successful, the desire to be at the top, and the fear being called a failure or losing ones safety net pushes people to do fraud. It likely starts early on in even in highschool but gets worse as one enters the professional world more. As more and more people do it it becomes more likely for people to do it(there is a feedback loop). This also happens in every area.
Humanity is no longer functioning in any reasonable way and is starting to break down due to the design of the systems and their inability to function to support society in a sane and rational way. It rewards psychopathic behavior which only means there is a net increase of psychopaths with power which then, because they are psychopaths, will use their power to do even more psychopathy with even less consequences.
There are many cases of frauds being detected now. It is likely an order or two worse than what people discover, if not more. Likely the source of the problem is by government/politics and finance where such lunatics are a dime a dozen. When frauds/criminals make it up to the top they corrupt and destroy everything(at the very least it is self-preservation).
One of the major issues is that the majority of "intelligent" people are extremely myopic and do not understand much of anything outside their fields. E.g., how many physicists read ancient roman history? How many study modern money finance(more than one would imagine but that is because of $$$ and markets are mathematical). Most do not know enough about how things really work to realize just how insane the system is and how it has been created to protect and amplify psychopaths in power. Hierarchical structures are extremely evil and capitalism has rewarded and embedded extremely destructive systems into humanity. It is very difficult for those without power to stop those with.
One must understand that the issue is not due to individuals but the systems that create them. If there is any benefit in doing evil it will be done and that evil will grow. It is a sink and completely mathematical in that it creates feedback loops. There is a net benefit to the cheater and so over time cheating will become the dominant mode of behavior if the system enables/supports it and eventually the cheaters will run the system and after a threshold is crossed the system will be transmogrified into one that completely empowers and protects the cheater while destroying anything that tries to stop them.