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An MIT Student Awed Top Economists With His AI Study—Then It All Fell Apartwww.wsj.com/economy/aidan-toner-rodgers-mit-ai-research-78753243?st=7kXCrW&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
933 sats \ 8 comments \ @SimpleStacker 15h econ
Apparently an MIT student fabricated data on an AI study that got a lot of traction and even made its way to being cited by Congress.
The fabrication was egregious. It didn't just make up a few numbers here or there, fix a few outliers, y'know? It literally made up the existence of an AI tool that companies were supposedly using, but didn't exist. Can't understand why anyone would go to such extreme lengths to make stuff up.
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30 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined 15h
I understand when people do this to make a statement about a field of study.
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42 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 15h
it was never published though...
which is kinda concerning that Congress would cite unpublished graduate student working papers. People need to realize that arxiv and SSRN, and even the NBER working paper series, don't really have quality checks!
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 14h
This happens a lot in other fields, like medicine.
I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, working papers aren't nothing (they're not unlike other reporting that has no peer review) and peer review is a pretty flawed process. On the other, people probably assume things like this have undergone the heightened scrutiny of other published results.
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42 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 14h
Yeah, plenty of frauds made it past peer review as well, after all
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30 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 14h
Like many things in modern life, the edifice of academia is built on norms and cultural standards that no longer obtain. The body is dead but the corpse isn't entirely cold yet. Will be interesting to see what follows once it is.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 14h
indeed, despite being in academia, i've been jaded about it for a long time
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @OT 13h
Can't understand why anyone would go to such extreme lengths to make stuff up.
It's probably because no one is verifying anything anymore.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker OP 13h
Knowledge production has become cheaper than knowledge verification. It's a real problem
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