“Thus, I propose a new cause sub-area that should be highly worthwhile, which is checking for obvious frauds. An organization whose entire job is looking at papers and data that are cited, and asking ‘is this an obvious fraud?’ Bonus points for asking if there is a methodological flaw or whether they expect replication, but maybe we should narrow focus and simply check to see what things are and aren’t this kind of blatant fraud”
Academic approach: Find an institution that currently pays someone like Elizabeth Bik, organize a $10-100m EA endowment for a masters or phd program in finding obvious scientific frauds, grad students write phds on fraud detection methods, and examples of successful detects
Corporate approach: EAs offer a generic fraud bounty which scales quadratically with the impact factor of the fraudulent paper, appoints people like Elizabeth Bik as judges. Simultaneously offers MOOCs on academic fraud detection, and funds fraud detection research at universities.
Government approach: Congress funds scientific fraud analysis by GAO as a component of NIH grantmaking. An army of GS 9-11s make their careers by scouring papers.
“Thus, I propose a new cause sub-area that should be highly worthwhile, which is checking for obvious frauds. An organization whose entire job is looking at papers and data that are cited, and asking ‘is this an obvious fraud?’ Bonus points for asking if there is a methodological flaw or whether they expect replication, but maybe we should narrow focus and simply check to see what things are and aren’t this kind of blatant fraud”
Academic approach: Find an institution that currently pays someone like Elizabeth Bik, organize a $10-100m EA endowment for a masters or phd program in finding obvious scientific frauds, grad students write phds on fraud detection methods, and examples of successful detects
Corporate approach: EAs offer a generic fraud bounty which scales quadratically with the impact factor of the fraudulent paper, appoints people like Elizabeth Bik as judges. Simultaneously offers MOOCs on academic fraud detection, and funds fraud detection research at universities.
Government approach: Congress funds scientific fraud analysis by GAO as a component of NIH grantmaking. An army of GS 9-11s make their careers by scouring papers.
Should be doable, if there’s will.