Plagiarism is bad. This is even worse. | Wrong Number
Academia values the appearance of truth over actual truth.
https://reason.com/video/2024/05/07/academics-use-imaginary-data-in-their-research
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After surviving a disastrous congressional hearing, Claudine Gay was forced to resign as the president of Harvard for repeatedly copying and pasting language used by other scholars and passing it off as her own. She's hardly alone among elite academics, and plagiarism has become a roiling scandal in academia.
There's another common practice among professional researchers that should be generating even more outrage: making up data. I'm not talking about explicit fraud, which also happens way too often, but about openly inserting fictional data into a supposedly objective analysis.
Instead of doing the hard work of gathering data to test hypotheses, researchers take the easy path of generating numbers to support their preconceptions or to claim statistical significance. They cloak this practice in fancy-sounding words like "imputation," "ecological inference," "contextualization," and "synthetic control."
They're actually just making stuff up.
Video Editor: Adani Samat
Audio Production: Ian Keyser
Photo Credits: Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA/Newscom, Walter G Arce Sr Grindstone Medi/ASP, Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA/Newscom
Music Credits: Strange Connection by Nobou, Digital Dreams by Jimmy Svensson, Nothing Can Stop Us by Nobou, Hero Is Born by idokay, Sneaky Shenanigans by Charlie Ryan
https://reason.com/video/2024/05/07/academics-use-imaginary-data-in-their-research
---
After surviving a disastrous congressional hearing, Claudine Gay was forced to resign as the president of Harvard for repeatedly copying and pasting language used by other scholars and passing it off as her own. She's hardly alone among elite academics, and plagiarism has become a roiling scandal in academia.
There's another common practice among professional researchers that should be generating even more outrage: making up data. I'm not talking about explicit fraud, which also happens way too often, but about openly inserting fictional data into a supposedly objective analysis.
Instead of doing the hard work of gathering data to test hypotheses, researchers take the easy path of generating numbers to support their preconceptions or to claim statistical significance. They cloak this practice in fancy-sounding words like "imputation," "ecological inference," "contextualization," and "synthetic control."
They're actually just making stuff up.
Video Editor: Adani Samat
Audio Production: Ian Keyser
Photo Credits: Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA/Newscom, Walter G Arce Sr Grindstone Medi/ASP, Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA/Newscom
Music Credits: Strange Connection by Nobou, Digital Dreams by Jimmy Svensson, Nothing Can Stop Us by Nobou, Hero Is Born by idokay, Sneaky Shenanigans by Charlie Ryan
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