Michael Hendricks 🇨🇦

Ignaz Semmelweis and hand washing ?

To have this paper appear the same day that RFK Jr is canceling all mRNA vaccine funding is further indication that irony is not dead, even though we might all be soon.

Biological warfare against everyone who will outlive Trump and RFK Jr.

“a local admininstrative reward system that can count but can't read”

…is why every journal’s most common Google co-search term is ‘Impact Factor’

Anyway, this kind of thing has long been a pet peeve of mine: Yes, “predatory” journals are bad. Yes, we’re inundated with AI faux “scholarship”. But there are so many bigger fights to fight and some of the rhetoric around all this is easily taken up by folks whose side we don’t want to be on.

My hottest rigor/integrity/whatever take is that outright fraud (which is obviously awful and should be strongly condemned) isn’t even close to the biggest problem for the literature right now. Journals have literally been sent threatening letters from the Department of Justice!

I know for some it is a dream to have all knowledge ingested, catabolized, evaluated, disseminated, and applied without ever having to rely on close reading, understanding, or expertise-based judgements. That dream is bullshit for many reasons, and this is one of them.

tl;dr. I think fake articles in fake journals are a different (and much lesser) problem than fraud in real articles in real journals. The former is growing a lot because of new technology. No technology is needed for the latter, and I know of no strong evidence it's growing.

Think of a regular scientist keeping up with their field, trying to do honest work. They read papers highly selectively, they go to conferences, discuss with colleagues. There is no way their work is being affected by the (admittedly large volume of) nonsense in dump journals with no human audience.

If you are deeply invested in automation of literature analysis or shoving more shit into the LLM machine or otherwise eager to abandon human expertise, paper mill crap in garbage dump journals might be a big concern. But it's basically invisible to in-field practitioners.

This arises from personal characteristics and career incentives within the realm of peer-adjudicated science in reputable venues. You are trying to deceive your peers and mislead your field, not just score fake points in a local admininstrative reward system that can count but can't read.

The more concerning fraud (for science)--99% of which is invisible--is people who fabricate data or evidence with the express purpose of influencing their field: a high IF journal paper, a patent or regulatory approval, having your model/ideas gain currency, etc.

But, honestly, based on what these papers/journals are like, it's hard for me to see them as a top 10 threat to science. It's unreadable garbage barely pretending to be anything else. It's a kind of closed ecosystem that I doubt influences scientific progress much.

Both are bad, but they are VERY different. Many scientists work in contexts where career incentives are not organized around peer assessments, but around "objective" productivity metrics. This is exploitable by papers mills and LLM sludge bc anything can be published somewhere and "count."

1) Career pressures that lead to fraud in papers that someone is trying to pass of as legit science. 2) Paper mill / LLM sludge in predatory/fake/dump journals that are meant to game metrics but would be unlikely to ever fool (or even be read by) scientists in that field.

Hmm. I think there are separate--but perhaps a little overlapping--things going on here that are being somewhat conflated...

I honestly can't tell if he is a liar or if he doesn't understand what is happening at NIH where others (DOGE, Memoli, other political appointees?) are implementing policies without regard to what he says.

Of course, these are not mutually exclusive.

He is definitely a liar.

The worst ones are people like Hassett, who are very aware that they are lying to the American people week after week on Sunday shows to cover for Trump, but do it effortlessly with a smile. In many ways worse than the brainless cultists. bsky.app/profile/atru...

Whether it's conservatives assassinating State Senators in Minnesota or liberals refusing to sell Alan Dershowitz pierogis in Martha's Vineyard, both sides have taken incivility to an extreme.

Not the point, but I've never gone wrong with used objectives or other microscope parts from Spectra.
share.google/h4InO1sAgR7b...

I believe these things anyway, but even if we're just being pragmatic, stealing the right's clothes, including their framing of social issues, is often a losing strategy (unless you want to promise the same things the right does, which is just... moving to the right)

See if you can spot when tariffs were announced.

Associating with Colossal should get you some combination of laughed/booed out of any serious academic setting. Frivolous attention-seeking nonsense but with a nasty undercurrent of sweaty investors.

cannot be emphasized enough: Colin Wright (whose publications were retracted because of fraud on the part of his co-author, and who boasted about not learning how to use research tools he was told to master) did not in any meaningful sense try to get a tenure-track job

Well, it's Colin Wright. Who put himself on the academic job market for exactly one year. He has spent the following five years trying to get great far-right mileage out of that one year's worth of application work. I see there's no end to it; he's now officially trying for racial discrimination. 1/

Yeah I meant without violence. 🙁