In October 2020, Nature published a paper reporting room-temperature superconductivity under pressure [1], one of the so-called ‘Holy Grails’ of condensed matter physics.
Brilliantly written and highly disturbing. I do agree that that STEM research has become too corporate, which is attracting crooks like Dias. Vanity magazines such as Nature and Science contribute to this. Remember arsenic DNA?
Thank you Anna! I’ve also very much enjoyed reading your work.
While I agree to some extent with the term ‘vanity magazine’, we do need some sort of marketplace in publishing… there is a sea of crap out there now :-(
Nature in particular has lost the plot though- see also their piece on Stonehenge this week (worth reading the referee reports for alternative interpretations of their results). A shame, since they had a particular place in British science once upon a time.
Science magazine is not much better, particularly under the guidance of Holden Thorpe. I regularly cringe when I see Thorpe's ridiculous editorials.
I am contemplating a review of a debate that Holden Thorpe had at the start of the pandemic that is linked here on Heterodox STEM. As one might expect, Thorpe did not cover himself with glory. But if one knows Thorpe's background, which is somewhat similar to that of Dias, I guess it is sort of "par for the course". Thorpe previously was an enthusiastic advocate for the lowering of standards of all kinds in STEM, as I recall.
How we can allow our most prestigious journals to fall so far is just beyond me. We are in real trouble.
You're absolutely right about Science. It's equally as problematic as Nature in this regard. The structure of scientific research is indeed in serious trouble.
This was an exquisitely distressing piece and I loved every minute of it. I studied social sciences many years ago and dropped out of a Ph.D. program for reasons that had nothing to do with my passion for my research. I can't explain it with any clarity right now, but I felt a parallel in what I just read. Things have got much worse since I left in 1998, especially with the wholesale capture of humanities and social science by identitarian politics. Although I still feel a deep shame and regret over not completing my Ph.D. and becoming a successful academic, I know I could never have stood the American system. It would have killed my love of the subject.
My father got his Physics Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1962, completed a one year Postdoc at the Clarendon Lab, then eventually got a job doing pure research on low temperature superconductivity at Bell Labs. 33 years later Lucent (he called it "Loose Ends") came in and corporatized everything, offering early retirement to anyone like my father who did pure research that could not possibly lead to a product. They even let him take his entire lab with him with all the equipment. He continued collaborating with physicists from around the world for the next 15 or so years, including six years at a Nuclear research center in Japan.
Until governments, universities or corporations go back to funding pure research with no aim of corporate profit, we are going to see a continuing decline of scientific discovery and standards. When the powers that be lose their integrity, the entire system can't be trusted.
I agree with the suggestions at the end but would add one more fundamental recommendation. Part of the problem with science is peer review that is limited to "peers" in the field in question. The problem with such peer review is it is prone to group think, personal political pressure/intimidation and corruption as the "peers" support each other's work regardless of merit knowing that what goes around comes around. The solution to this is to place normal citizens in the review process either before grants are given or in post grant analysis. These folks will not have the expertise to assess every nuance of technique and procedure, but will be able to catch group think that fundamentally doesn't pass the smell test or proposes research that is of highly questionable merit for the investment of public tax dollars. (There is no right to public support of your research despite the entitled attitude held by academics. If you can't convince others that your work has merit to society, then fund it yourself.) As the author suggests, there is a moral culpability for all those involved in a scandal like this. One good solution and way of reinforcing moral behavior is to punish fields that allow such misconduct by massively reducing funding to that field. That gives everyone an incentive to police their colleagues and themselves to avoid such miscoduct.
Wow, what fantastic insight and expression of pure truth. A couple of things that stood out:
"A guy with magic hands" - No one interfacing with science/technology, including admin personnel, should think such words are a fair way to express a scientist's/researcher's abilities. The connotation of such a statement is that it would be too difficult for others to do, and thus we (the community) would have to infer that reproducibility is limited.
The University of Rochester acted shamefully in their conduct and behavior. As an R1 institution, their only directive should be the pursuit of knowledge and truth. They should not engage in promoting, marketing, or "pumping up" research results. They need to simply act as a facility and conduit for making research possible.
"During the Dias affair, they ignored or attacked the critics. Most of all, they judged them. Judged their status. Judged their opinions. Judged their motivations." - This is why I think APS and other organizations need to issue a formal apology to Professor Jorge Hirsch. In many communications, both formal and informal, he was treated as an outsider with a grudge. As a theorist who was upset that his SC theory was rejected. But in reality, he was acting as a scientist/physicist who respected integrity and truth, despite hoping that Dias' results would turn out to be true!
"Managing - instead of doing - is now the route to the top" - My god, is this a problem today in both academics and technology companies. In my short professional career, I have seen countless occurrences where my manager completely lacks the technical skill to do the work they asked to lead or propose. Usually, upon request by their management to work on some technical project, they immediately pivot into how we can get the budget to hire a person to do this. The same thing happens in academia and national labs: Professors build grants and projects around cheap doctoral students and post-docs, but they couldn't even get the project off the ground if they had to step into the lab or write some simulation code. The managerial class, both in academia and industry, is lazy; they are not willing to do the grunt work alongside their less experienced colleagues but instead drive these said colleagues to the breaking point. And what is the outcome? You get celebrity PIs and Executives who are touted as brilliant and innovative, who are publicized as key in making our future. Sure, ideation is important—ideas are what seed innovation—but an idea is as good as the paper and pen that it is written with, not very useful if you can't actually build it!
The associated issue here is the takeover of academia by the midwit class. What you're advocating is the creation of a post-academic class that can act independent of obscene amounts of bureaucratic oversight. Everything in academia has become subjected to the managerial revolution just like every other organization in the West. It's the structure of that revolution that has caused many of the failures we're observing now. It's always in the best interest of a bureaucrat to expand the bureaucracy.
Your analysis of the structural issues plaguing science in academia is spot on. Journals like Nature and Science prioritize flashy headlines over rigorous integrity. Deans have become more focused on prestige, the appearance of "diversity", and fundraising rather than the advancement of genuine scholarship. Harvard is a prime example of this decline. Claudine Gay’s weak publication record and incidents of plagiarism should have prompted a nationwide reckoning, but academia continues to ignore its deep-seated problems.
It's alarming how many scientific papers now list over 10 co-authors, many of whom haven’t even read the work. Yet, the administration carries on, producing videos and public relations content instead of addressing these core issues.
This is an excellent piece of writing. And it describes a very troubling situation.
I am contemplating creating a new form of R and D organization, as I have previously mentioned. I might post some descriptions of some of its features here on Heterodox STEM.
The basic principle is that technical staff should be more like actors, after the studio system collapsed, or sports figures with free agency. They should control the institutions, rather than the institutions controlling them. And they should get to eat what they kill, basically, and self-endow.
If someone cannot or will not produce anything of value, they are gone.
I personally have had large amounts of my "funding" (well over 95%) effectively "stolen" by the institutions I was working for. And I have been lied to and my signature forged on legal documents. I was in an 8.5 year lawsuit where the judge was paid under the table. The institution I was suing collapsed into bankruptcy after spending upwards of 30 million dollars in mid-1990 dollars to destroy me. I have been repeatedly physically assaulted and threatened. So I know a little bit about the game that is played. I have watched my colleagues go through similar stuff. Our current R and D systems are a nightmare.
Now working quietly on a startup, I am far more productive than I ever was as part of a big glamorous institution. And I was at some well-known institutions: MIT, Princeton University, Bell Labs, University of California, Livermore Labs, FFRDCs, etc.
We better start thinking of ways to reform ourselves as STEM professionals, or we will be relegated to the dustbin of history.
I favor an experimental approach. Let's try a bunch of different new structures for R&D, and watch them carefully. Let's make observations about how they perform. And let our findings guide us.
Thank you for sharing your side of the story in such an entertaining (and sourced ) way despite the appalling story. And thanks for sharing the "reddmatter" video, which is really shamefull for the university and should continue to haunt them (except for the poor students involved).
A few comments from someone who regularly guest lectured for the MBA program at Leavey School in Santa Clara.
1. We must set up an independent entity to handle research misconduct that reports to the Department of Justice. Such fraud is criminal, but unlikely to be prosecuted. The current system in which a few people with academic backgrounds and prejudices in favor of professors and established parties --- is broken.
I speak from experience, and direct knowledge that multiple universities (possibly almost every major one) are quietly saddled with "responsible officials" as part of consent decrees entered into to avoid prosecutions. These responsible officials, like most academics that serve on committees evaluating misconduct, know precisely what their job is. Their job is to bury, befuddle, and otherwise eliminate any possibility of financial impact on the university, and reputational impact as well.
Reality is that grad students and some undergrads are the ones that know what is really going on. Grad students that stand up and speak receive grievous treatment by their professors and their universities. I helped a grad student report an extreme abuse by a post-doc. That eventually hit the pages of scholar-sheet press, and it was denied that a Joseph Mattapallil had falsified data from whole cloth for a paper that got him a professorship in immunology. How did the grad student know this? Because she had access to the primate center records, and those records had no blood draws that could align with the dates given in the paper. The head of that lab was aware.
I reported some matters as well in that lab, that I was pressured to write a "good paper" based on data that was screwed up and could not justify what it was supposed to, and then fired for saying so. (And nobody at the university told me that the professor was not allowed to do that once the accept you.) I was told by the NIH ORI, "The statute of limitations is over," and words to the effect that, "grad students are below post-docs and the professor running the lab." I note that the "statute of limitations" of 6 years is something they just made up. If that idea was abroad in the past in science, the "Case of the midwife toad" would have never been.
The problem is visible in this article --- the investigative academic in charge had a conflict of interest.
2. It is important to understand the view of the money-perns at VCs. Even the better VCs will take a flyer on something that they don't know if it's bullshit or not --- for instance, quantum computing. A party who worked in quantum mechanics and experimental physics was asked his opinion at a lunch. The question was, "Is it impossible?" He had to allow that he couldn't say that. But he took them through the problems of things like decoherence.
Why do VC's have this attitude? This is because they know that even if it is bullcrap in toto, if the calliope can just go long enough to get to IPO (the situation now with AI) they can reap great rewards. The poster-child for this is Uber, a corporation that has never had a plan to get to profitability, and has always projected and reported massive losses. Uber as a business is quite insane. And yet, Uber has enough money in the bank to continue to lose billions per year for a very long time. The main thing is that the VCs all got out, made money, and nobody lied about the business model.
The job of a VC is not to be right all the time. Their job is to pursuing being right about investments, but they have to be wrong often enough that they don't miss that one time that it financially explodes and makes them filthy rich. VCs trade on the uncertainty of the future.
I wrote money-perns because these days there are female venture capitalists. Some of them are even as obnoxious as their male counterparts often are. So far, it's a smattering and no female human has made the billions that Peter Thiel did on Facebook. (Peter then proceeded to set his fortune on fire because he believed neo-classical economics about FOREX. But he pulled out of that with 10% of his fortune left, which is why people still listen to him. Yes, Mr. Thiel is capable of learning when hit over the head with an anvil.)
The VC field attracts a lot of people who go into it for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks, and this shows in the results. The top quartile of VC funds make all the money. Most VCs lose money or barely break even and return the principal to their limited partners (LPs). There's a good paper by Mulcahy "We have met the enemy and he is us" analyzing the Kauffman Fund's investments in VC. She's great. I love that paper - she skewers the J-curve, skewers the 5 year turn (meaning invest and sell in 5 years), and a number of other things.
There is an element of hype in a lot of investments. Familiarity with the madness of crowds is helpful for some. Skilled, practiced liars learn they can get away with lying. They usually aren't the sharpest tool in the shed, (a trait they share with terrorist leaders) but they are cunning, and very knowledgeable about people and how to manipulate them. Science is really the last place such people should go, but when they do, they wreak havoc because most scientists are... avoidant personalities. Sort of the opposite of cops.
"On an individual level, all were exonerated by the NSF sponsored investigation at Rochester. That is correct. I am one of them."
True, the co-authors were exonerated. But there remain the editors who accepted dubious articles, and all the people who defended fraud when it should have been obvious something was wrong. We need a system where such people are so shamed they resign from their positions. How do we get there? The first step is to name them and propose they resign. They won't resign, but they'll know somebody thinks they should. That's easy for me to say, but I know it's unpleasant to do.
NSF exonerating all co-authors made me cringe. Strictly speaking they did not really investigate them, but the report has some mild words for their position. I believe this is fine for many of the co-authors. But definitely not for some.
Take Ashkan Salamat. Assistant professor at the University of Nevada, so not some vulnerable student. Co-author on many Dias papers, including the two retracted Nature ones. Stood by Dias till the end. Salamat submitted a pre-print of which he is corresponding author: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11883. The pre-print is caustic, calling out Hirsch and van der Marel for "lack of scientific understanding", a "failure to appropriately analyze raw data", and " false representations". An update of that pre-print was retracted by arXiv for being too agressive. And that pre-print is by now thoroughly debunked, also by NSF. It is just smoke and mirrors, authors trying to safe their skin. I have no idea why Salamat escaped any investigation.
Rusell J. Hemley probably also deserves attention. In this arXiv, published after the 1st nature paper was retracted and just before the 2nd was published, he pledges support to the CSH superconductivity: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.08622. And after the 2nd Nature paper on LuNH was published and got heavily criticized, Hemley published https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.06301. It claims to show LuNH is superconducting. Dias was there to help Hemley measure it (from NSF report). The results look like what the NSF report called measuring a loose contact.
Great piece. I understand the desire for thoroughness, so a primer / precis could be in order. A lot of the details are very true but overall, by being comprehensive, it reads to an outsider a bit like how your friend will rant on and on about how his or her ex was such an asshole "and here's another example!"
Edit: It is difficult for an outsider to understand the sense of _betrayal_ in such circumstances. We spend our whole careers searching for truth, and what is right. Those who break the code deserve all that they get...
Until you have personally confronted the malfeasance and dishonesty that runs through parts of STEM, it is a bit difficult to understand. But having been in the trenches for decades, and dealt with physical threats and personal assaults and illegal behavior and massive cheating and theft, that seems to steadily get worse, it is clear that we have some problems to address. Ignoring them will not make things any better. The public is starting to wise up to the nonsense going on. How much longer will they tolerate it?
And if you have not been paying attention, with the current efforts to drive any competence and merit out of STEM, do you really think it will survive? Will it even deserve to survive?
Brilliantly written and highly disturbing. I do agree that that STEM research has become too corporate, which is attracting crooks like Dias. Vanity magazines such as Nature and Science contribute to this. Remember arsenic DNA?
Thank you Anna! I’ve also very much enjoyed reading your work.
While I agree to some extent with the term ‘vanity magazine’, we do need some sort of marketplace in publishing… there is a sea of crap out there now :-(
Nature in particular has lost the plot though- see also their piece on Stonehenge this week (worth reading the referee reports for alternative interpretations of their results). A shame, since they had a particular place in British science once upon a time.
Science magazine is not much better, particularly under the guidance of Holden Thorpe. I regularly cringe when I see Thorpe's ridiculous editorials.
I am contemplating a review of a debate that Holden Thorpe had at the start of the pandemic that is linked here on Heterodox STEM. As one might expect, Thorpe did not cover himself with glory. But if one knows Thorpe's background, which is somewhat similar to that of Dias, I guess it is sort of "par for the course". Thorpe previously was an enthusiastic advocate for the lowering of standards of all kinds in STEM, as I recall.
How we can allow our most prestigious journals to fall so far is just beyond me. We are in real trouble.
You're absolutely right about Science. It's equally as problematic as Nature in this regard. The structure of scientific research is indeed in serious trouble.
This was an exquisitely distressing piece and I loved every minute of it. I studied social sciences many years ago and dropped out of a Ph.D. program for reasons that had nothing to do with my passion for my research. I can't explain it with any clarity right now, but I felt a parallel in what I just read. Things have got much worse since I left in 1998, especially with the wholesale capture of humanities and social science by identitarian politics. Although I still feel a deep shame and regret over not completing my Ph.D. and becoming a successful academic, I know I could never have stood the American system. It would have killed my love of the subject.
My father got his Physics Ph.D. at Berkeley in 1962, completed a one year Postdoc at the Clarendon Lab, then eventually got a job doing pure research on low temperature superconductivity at Bell Labs. 33 years later Lucent (he called it "Loose Ends") came in and corporatized everything, offering early retirement to anyone like my father who did pure research that could not possibly lead to a product. They even let him take his entire lab with him with all the equipment. He continued collaborating with physicists from around the world for the next 15 or so years, including six years at a Nuclear research center in Japan.
Until governments, universities or corporations go back to funding pure research with no aim of corporate profit, we are going to see a continuing decline of scientific discovery and standards. When the powers that be lose their integrity, the entire system can't be trusted.
"More time to think". Imagine that.
Bravo!
Two thoughts.
Cheating is obviously bad. Is cheating in STEM more prevalent than in the past, or is it just being revealed more by social media, or both?
"Focus on ability."
100% correct, and 180 degrees opposite to filthy woke DEI.
I agree with the suggestions at the end but would add one more fundamental recommendation. Part of the problem with science is peer review that is limited to "peers" in the field in question. The problem with such peer review is it is prone to group think, personal political pressure/intimidation and corruption as the "peers" support each other's work regardless of merit knowing that what goes around comes around. The solution to this is to place normal citizens in the review process either before grants are given or in post grant analysis. These folks will not have the expertise to assess every nuance of technique and procedure, but will be able to catch group think that fundamentally doesn't pass the smell test or proposes research that is of highly questionable merit for the investment of public tax dollars. (There is no right to public support of your research despite the entitled attitude held by academics. If you can't convince others that your work has merit to society, then fund it yourself.) As the author suggests, there is a moral culpability for all those involved in a scandal like this. One good solution and way of reinforcing moral behavior is to punish fields that allow such misconduct by massively reducing funding to that field. That gives everyone an incentive to police their colleagues and themselves to avoid such miscoduct.
Wow, what fantastic insight and expression of pure truth. A couple of things that stood out:
"A guy with magic hands" - No one interfacing with science/technology, including admin personnel, should think such words are a fair way to express a scientist's/researcher's abilities. The connotation of such a statement is that it would be too difficult for others to do, and thus we (the community) would have to infer that reproducibility is limited.
The University of Rochester acted shamefully in their conduct and behavior. As an R1 institution, their only directive should be the pursuit of knowledge and truth. They should not engage in promoting, marketing, or "pumping up" research results. They need to simply act as a facility and conduit for making research possible.
"During the Dias affair, they ignored or attacked the critics. Most of all, they judged them. Judged their status. Judged their opinions. Judged their motivations." - This is why I think APS and other organizations need to issue a formal apology to Professor Jorge Hirsch. In many communications, both formal and informal, he was treated as an outsider with a grudge. As a theorist who was upset that his SC theory was rejected. But in reality, he was acting as a scientist/physicist who respected integrity and truth, despite hoping that Dias' results would turn out to be true!
"Managing - instead of doing - is now the route to the top" - My god, is this a problem today in both academics and technology companies. In my short professional career, I have seen countless occurrences where my manager completely lacks the technical skill to do the work they asked to lead or propose. Usually, upon request by their management to work on some technical project, they immediately pivot into how we can get the budget to hire a person to do this. The same thing happens in academia and national labs: Professors build grants and projects around cheap doctoral students and post-docs, but they couldn't even get the project off the ground if they had to step into the lab or write some simulation code. The managerial class, both in academia and industry, is lazy; they are not willing to do the grunt work alongside their less experienced colleagues but instead drive these said colleagues to the breaking point. And what is the outcome? You get celebrity PIs and Executives who are touted as brilliant and innovative, who are publicized as key in making our future. Sure, ideation is important—ideas are what seed innovation—but an idea is as good as the paper and pen that it is written with, not very useful if you can't actually build it!
It is sadly true that too many scientists are cogs in a machine where the cogs are described by this sentence "We were credulous, and unquestioning."
The associated issue here is the takeover of academia by the midwit class. What you're advocating is the creation of a post-academic class that can act independent of obscene amounts of bureaucratic oversight. Everything in academia has become subjected to the managerial revolution just like every other organization in the West. It's the structure of that revolution that has caused many of the failures we're observing now. It's always in the best interest of a bureaucrat to expand the bureaucracy.
I advocate something similar, but I don't think that we'll be able to implement these ideas until we pass through a civilizational crisis, collapse, and resurgence. My article on the subject is linked here: https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/a-future-beyond-materialism-holistic
Your analysis of the structural issues plaguing science in academia is spot on. Journals like Nature and Science prioritize flashy headlines over rigorous integrity. Deans have become more focused on prestige, the appearance of "diversity", and fundraising rather than the advancement of genuine scholarship. Harvard is a prime example of this decline. Claudine Gay’s weak publication record and incidents of plagiarism should have prompted a nationwide reckoning, but academia continues to ignore its deep-seated problems.
It's alarming how many scientific papers now list over 10 co-authors, many of whom haven’t even read the work. Yet, the administration carries on, producing videos and public relations content instead of addressing these core issues.
This is an excellent piece of writing. And it describes a very troubling situation.
I am contemplating creating a new form of R and D organization, as I have previously mentioned. I might post some descriptions of some of its features here on Heterodox STEM.
The basic principle is that technical staff should be more like actors, after the studio system collapsed, or sports figures with free agency. They should control the institutions, rather than the institutions controlling them. And they should get to eat what they kill, basically, and self-endow.
If someone cannot or will not produce anything of value, they are gone.
I personally have had large amounts of my "funding" (well over 95%) effectively "stolen" by the institutions I was working for. And I have been lied to and my signature forged on legal documents. I was in an 8.5 year lawsuit where the judge was paid under the table. The institution I was suing collapsed into bankruptcy after spending upwards of 30 million dollars in mid-1990 dollars to destroy me. I have been repeatedly physically assaulted and threatened. So I know a little bit about the game that is played. I have watched my colleagues go through similar stuff. Our current R and D systems are a nightmare.
Now working quietly on a startup, I am far more productive than I ever was as part of a big glamorous institution. And I was at some well-known institutions: MIT, Princeton University, Bell Labs, University of California, Livermore Labs, FFRDCs, etc.
We better start thinking of ways to reform ourselves as STEM professionals, or we will be relegated to the dustbin of history.
I favor an experimental approach. Let's try a bunch of different new structures for R&D, and watch them carefully. Let's make observations about how they perform. And let our findings guide us.
Thank you for sharing your side of the story in such an entertaining (and sourced ) way despite the appalling story. And thanks for sharing the "reddmatter" video, which is really shamefull for the university and should continue to haunt them (except for the poor students involved).
I agree on the video- absolutely excruciating to watch now!
A few comments from someone who regularly guest lectured for the MBA program at Leavey School in Santa Clara.
1. We must set up an independent entity to handle research misconduct that reports to the Department of Justice. Such fraud is criminal, but unlikely to be prosecuted. The current system in which a few people with academic backgrounds and prejudices in favor of professors and established parties --- is broken.
I speak from experience, and direct knowledge that multiple universities (possibly almost every major one) are quietly saddled with "responsible officials" as part of consent decrees entered into to avoid prosecutions. These responsible officials, like most academics that serve on committees evaluating misconduct, know precisely what their job is. Their job is to bury, befuddle, and otherwise eliminate any possibility of financial impact on the university, and reputational impact as well.
Reality is that grad students and some undergrads are the ones that know what is really going on. Grad students that stand up and speak receive grievous treatment by their professors and their universities. I helped a grad student report an extreme abuse by a post-doc. That eventually hit the pages of scholar-sheet press, and it was denied that a Joseph Mattapallil had falsified data from whole cloth for a paper that got him a professorship in immunology. How did the grad student know this? Because she had access to the primate center records, and those records had no blood draws that could align with the dates given in the paper. The head of that lab was aware.
I reported some matters as well in that lab, that I was pressured to write a "good paper" based on data that was screwed up and could not justify what it was supposed to, and then fired for saying so. (And nobody at the university told me that the professor was not allowed to do that once the accept you.) I was told by the NIH ORI, "The statute of limitations is over," and words to the effect that, "grad students are below post-docs and the professor running the lab." I note that the "statute of limitations" of 6 years is something they just made up. If that idea was abroad in the past in science, the "Case of the midwife toad" would have never been.
The problem is visible in this article --- the investigative academic in charge had a conflict of interest.
2. It is important to understand the view of the money-perns at VCs. Even the better VCs will take a flyer on something that they don't know if it's bullshit or not --- for instance, quantum computing. A party who worked in quantum mechanics and experimental physics was asked his opinion at a lunch. The question was, "Is it impossible?" He had to allow that he couldn't say that. But he took them through the problems of things like decoherence.
Why do VC's have this attitude? This is because they know that even if it is bullcrap in toto, if the calliope can just go long enough to get to IPO (the situation now with AI) they can reap great rewards. The poster-child for this is Uber, a corporation that has never had a plan to get to profitability, and has always projected and reported massive losses. Uber as a business is quite insane. And yet, Uber has enough money in the bank to continue to lose billions per year for a very long time. The main thing is that the VCs all got out, made money, and nobody lied about the business model.
The job of a VC is not to be right all the time. Their job is to pursuing being right about investments, but they have to be wrong often enough that they don't miss that one time that it financially explodes and makes them filthy rich. VCs trade on the uncertainty of the future.
I wrote money-perns because these days there are female venture capitalists. Some of them are even as obnoxious as their male counterparts often are. So far, it's a smattering and no female human has made the billions that Peter Thiel did on Facebook. (Peter then proceeded to set his fortune on fire because he believed neo-classical economics about FOREX. But he pulled out of that with 10% of his fortune left, which is why people still listen to him. Yes, Mr. Thiel is capable of learning when hit over the head with an anvil.)
The VC field attracts a lot of people who go into it for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks, and this shows in the results. The top quartile of VC funds make all the money. Most VCs lose money or barely break even and return the principal to their limited partners (LPs). There's a good paper by Mulcahy "We have met the enemy and he is us" analyzing the Kauffman Fund's investments in VC. She's great. I love that paper - she skewers the J-curve, skewers the 5 year turn (meaning invest and sell in 5 years), and a number of other things.
There is an element of hype in a lot of investments. Familiarity with the madness of crowds is helpful for some. Skilled, practiced liars learn they can get away with lying. They usually aren't the sharpest tool in the shed, (a trait they share with terrorist leaders) but they are cunning, and very knowledgeable about people and how to manipulate them. Science is really the last place such people should go, but when they do, they wreak havoc because most scientists are... avoidant personalities. Sort of the opposite of cops.
"On an individual level, all were exonerated by the NSF sponsored investigation at Rochester. That is correct. I am one of them."
True, the co-authors were exonerated. But there remain the editors who accepted dubious articles, and all the people who defended fraud when it should have been obvious something was wrong. We need a system where such people are so shamed they resign from their positions. How do we get there? The first step is to name them and propose they resign. They won't resign, but they'll know somebody thinks they should. That's easy for me to say, but I know it's unpleasant to do.
NSF exonerating all co-authors made me cringe. Strictly speaking they did not really investigate them, but the report has some mild words for their position. I believe this is fine for many of the co-authors. But definitely not for some.
Take Ashkan Salamat. Assistant professor at the University of Nevada, so not some vulnerable student. Co-author on many Dias papers, including the two retracted Nature ones. Stood by Dias till the end. Salamat submitted a pre-print of which he is corresponding author: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11883. The pre-print is caustic, calling out Hirsch and van der Marel for "lack of scientific understanding", a "failure to appropriately analyze raw data", and " false representations". An update of that pre-print was retracted by arXiv for being too agressive. And that pre-print is by now thoroughly debunked, also by NSF. It is just smoke and mirrors, authors trying to safe their skin. I have no idea why Salamat escaped any investigation.
Rusell J. Hemley probably also deserves attention. In this arXiv, published after the 1st nature paper was retracted and just before the 2nd was published, he pledges support to the CSH superconductivity: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.08622. And after the 2nd Nature paper on LuNH was published and got heavily criticized, Hemley published https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.06301. It claims to show LuNH is superconducting. Dias was there to help Hemley measure it (from NSF report). The results look like what the NSF report called measuring a loose contact.
And more on the subject of sausage-making, the NSF program director who funded Dias (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1809649 ($485K) and https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2046796 ($794K)) gave another $98K to fund a conference on scientific reproducibility (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2326983) and placed himself as a panel moderator for the Reproducibility and Integrity in Natural Sciences Discussion Panel (https://www.pqi.org/reproducibility-and-integrity-natural-sciences-discussion-panel). That's how it's done.
Great piece. I understand the desire for thoroughness, so a primer / precis could be in order. A lot of the details are very true but overall, by being comprehensive, it reads to an outsider a bit like how your friend will rant on and on about how his or her ex was such an asshole "and here's another example!"
You had to be there man ;-P
Some of the writings of Dan Garisto might be interesting to you (in rough chronological order):
https://physics.aps.org/articles/v16/40
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00716-2
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00976-y
Some stuff from the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/science/retraction-ranga-dias-rochester.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/science/superconductor-retraction-ranga-dias-rochester.html
Enjoy :-)
Edit: It is difficult for an outsider to understand the sense of _betrayal_ in such circumstances. We spend our whole careers searching for truth, and what is right. Those who break the code deserve all that they get...
Until you have personally confronted the malfeasance and dishonesty that runs through parts of STEM, it is a bit difficult to understand. But having been in the trenches for decades, and dealt with physical threats and personal assaults and illegal behavior and massive cheating and theft, that seems to steadily get worse, it is clear that we have some problems to address. Ignoring them will not make things any better. The public is starting to wise up to the nonsense going on. How much longer will they tolerate it?
And if you have not been paying attention, with the current efforts to drive any competence and merit out of STEM, do you really think it will survive? Will it even deserve to survive?