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I had a somewhat similar experience- was a postdoc for a pre-tenure professor at berkeley. after writing up a paper based on her methods, with poor results, I handed the draft to her. She rewrote it- basically adding carefully worded/presented results that made it look as good as possible. And then submitted it (to a niche conference where the editor was a buddy of hers). When I read her submission I asked her to remove my name from it and she immediately withdrew the submission. I left her lab shortly after because I am not going to tarnish my publication record with iffy papers like that.

Over time I learned that most papers in my field (computational biology) are embellished to some extent or another (or cherry-picked/curated/structured for success) and often irreproducible- some key step is left out, or no code is provided that replicates the results, etc. I can see this from two perspectives:

1) science should be trivially reproducible; it should not require the smartest/most capable people in the field to read the paper and reproduce the results. This places a burden on the people who are at the state of the art of the field to make it easy for other folks, which slows them down (but presumably makes overall progress go faster).

2) science should be done by geniuses; the leaders in the field don't need to replicate their competitors paper. it's sufficient to read the paper, apply priors, and move on (possibly learning whatever novel method/technique the paper shows so they can apply it in their own hands). It allows the field innovators to move quickly and discover new things, but is prone to all sorts of reliability/reproducibility problems, and ideally science should be egalitarian, not credentials-based.

by renewiltord4 hours ago|

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My cousin (with whom I am very close) had a similar experience that I posted about years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32969092

I have repeated it many times on this site but here’s the reality of human experience: if the rate of fraudulent labs is even as high as 10% you should expect that any viewpoint that it’s widespread would be drowned out by views that it’s not real.

Also, the phenomenon you observed where people are champions till the rubber meets the road is more common than one thinks.

by Noumenon722 hours ago|

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> if the rate of fraudulent labs is even as high as 10% you should expect that any viewpoint that it’s widespread would be drowned out by views that it’s not real.

If "it" is fraud here I would expect the viewpoint that it's widespread to be less and less drowned out as it approached 10% since everyone would know that it's real. I think I'm misunderstanding the sentence.

by renewiltord17 minutes ago|

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No, the guys at fraudulent labs and the guys at honest labs will both claim no fraud. The only ones who will claim fraud are those who cross over. So you’ll get a vast majority telling you it’s not happening and a tiny minority (even when as high as 10% are fraud) telling you the fact. All rare things have this effect. There will be so many people telling you it’s not real “as someone in the field”. They will be adamant about it. You need someone who has seen both.

To be clear, not “as it approaches 10%”. I mean “even as high as 10%”.