Jemist's Shortform

J Bostock

This is a special post for quick takes by J Bostock. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

As much as the amount of fraud (and lesser cousins thereof) in science is awful as a scientist, it must be so much worse as a layperson. For example this is a paper I found today suggesting that cleaner wrasse, a type of finger-sized fish, can not only pass the mirror test, but are able to remember their own face and later respond the same way to a photograph of themselves as to a mirror.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208420120

Ok, but it was published in PNAS. As a researcher I happen to know that PNAS allows for special-track submissions from members of the National Academy of Sciences (the NAS in PNAS) which are almost always accepted. The two main authors are Japanese, and have zero papers other than this, which is a bit suspicious in and of itself but it does mean that they're not members of the NAS. But PNAS is generally quite hard to publish in, so how did some no-names do that?

Aha! I see that the paper was edited by Frans de Waal! Frans de Waal is a smart guy but he also generally leans in favour of animal sentience/abilities, and crucially he's a member of the NAS so it seems entirely plausible that some Japanese researchers with very little knowledge managed to "massage" the data into a state where Frans de Waal was convinced by it.

Or not! There's literally no way of knowing at this point, since "true" fraud (i.e. just making shit up) is basically undetectable, as is cherry-picking data!

This is all insanely conspiratorial of course, but this is the approach you have to take when there's so much lying going on. If I was a layperson there's basically no way I could have figured all this out, so the correct course of action would be to unboundedly distrust everything regardless.

2J Bostock1y

So I still don't know what's going on but this probably mischaracterizes the situation. So the original notification that Frans de Waal "edited" the paper actually means that he was the individual who coordinated the reviews of the paper at the Journal's end, which was not made particularly clear. The lead authors do have other publications (mostly in the same field) it's just the particular website I was using didn't show them. There's also a strongly skeptical response to the paper that's been written by ... Frans de Waal so I don't know what's going on there! The thing about PNAS having a secret submission track is true as far as I know though.

The editor of an article is the person who decides whether to desk-reject or seek reviewers, find and coordinate the reviewers, communicate with the authors during the process and so on. That's standard at all journals afaik. The editor decides on publication according to the journal's criteria. PNAS does have this special track but one of the authors must be in NAS, and as that author you can't just submit a bunch of papers in that track, you can use it once a year or something. And most readers of PNAS know this and are suitably sceptical of those papers... (read more)