It gets worse.. they've also attacked any researcher who has asked questions about their methodology, ethics, and data. I know because I was one of them. Very shady and toxic group.
I was more ambivalent about their "research" until I read that "clarification." It's weaselly bullshit.
>> The work taints the relationship between academia and industry
> We are very sorry to hear this concern. This is really not what we expected, and we strongly believe it is caused by misunderstandings
Yeah, misunderstandings by the university that anyone, ever, in any line of endeavor would be happy to be purposely fucked with as long as the perpetrator eventually claims it's for a good cause. In this case the cause isn't even good, they're proving the jaw-droppingly obvious.
What really happened (to the best of my understanding):
- Researchers submitted paper to IEEE.
- Researcher twitter about it.
- Tweet was deleted, because people pointed out it was bad humans subject researcher. (consent and deception)
- Other researchers not from UNM, filled complaints to IEEE.
- Researcher mislead (so far seems like) IRB, arguably IRB failed to do a job and just rubber stamped human subject
research exemption, after research was conducted ...
- Paper got accepted to IEEE.
- Researchers push more patches to Linux kernel.
- Plonk email from Greg.
- UNM response latter indirectly blaming only researchers but not IRB.
Agreed. You've have quite a list of arguments defending the researcher when only his track record should have been enough to prove his good will. Despite the landslide of evidence of good will, Facebook decided to act in bad faith. Unacceptable, I hope other researchers read and remember this story.
Which scientists were putting their careers on the line by posting 9 second clips on twitter?
I'm super curious about this list of people who threatened their careers by attempting to replicate a non-peer-reviewed paper for the sake of reviewing the science.
A fried of mine reported scientific misconduct (p-hacking) and, together with a few colleagues, left the research group, due to moral harassment by the head of that group.
The university removed all of them from the research group and said they could continue working on the data because it belongs to the university.
3 months later:
- investigations of scientific fraud against the people leaving (neglecting authorship because the data could after all not be used and the head wanted a say in the articles, i.e., change them completely). Also some random other allegations that didn't stick.
- police investigation of defamation (because they reported the scientific misconduct and some other misleading statements used by the head in sales for a research-related product)
- the university now expects them to contact the head of the ex-research group to clarify questions of authorship
If somebody with a colossal vested interest makes an angry tweet that also happens to point out the study author made basic errors (that's what this is about: the author of the study likely made invalidating errors; no amount of changing assumptions is going to fix that).
> fired a bunch of people for publishing research about the harms of AI
That paper was activism dressed up as science. It even tried to coin a derogatory term for language models. The authors were full of vitriol on forums against many respected researchers. After calling them out on their perceived ethical problems, they refused to have a dialogue in order not to "offer a platform" to their opponents. Never seen anything like it in 10 years of following the field. It was so sad to see people trying to have a sincere talk and being shut down.
If there is any good outcome from that scandal is that now papers devote 50% of their length to harm analysis. A bunch of better papers on harm reduction came out in the last year. The authors of the scandal paper moved on to exploit their new gained notoriety, so it wasn't necessarily a bad career step for them.
earlier in the week, someone posted that the person who posted the paper early is someone who wanted to fund the project, but the researchers didn't want to include him. So he took as much data as he could collect and posted it publicly with the addition of his name. He is not a researcher or scientist for the team.
It's the same in Korea where the research originated.
A bunch of professors belonging to a hastily formed academic committee are trying to monopolize the public debate, quibbling about errors in the arxiv paper and demanding that Lee & Kim turn over samples of LK-99 because the big-name professors are obviously too busy to make their own. It seems that their first priority is to avoid a repeat of the Hwang scandal than to touch any novel research.
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