Longtime readers know that I am obsessed with the declining reliability of our scientific establishment.
I don't want to romanticize the past; it's not like science in the real world has ever matched the useful myths we built around it. As a human enterprise, it is vulnerable to the same flaws as any other human institution. Petty differences, ego-driven decisions, individual corruption, fraud, and all the maladies that inevitably plague us.
Still, the distance between the ideal version of science and reality has never been as large as it is today. Science is now a massive industry with few checks and balances, largely funded by unaccountable institutions like academic institutions and government, and the scale of the money involved is breathtaking.
The National Institutes of Health budget alone is almost $50 billion, and, as we saw during COVID and in the Alzheimer's research scandals, there is ample room for chicanery.
Chinese academic watchdogs and online detectives are exposing growing numbers of problematic papers in Nature journals
— Melissa Chen (@MsMelChen) May 22, 2026
⬇️Link to full articlehttps://t.co/4DS2wgtwUr
Fascinating to see that Chinese researchers and whistleblowers are exposing high profile science journals such as Nature for publishing fraudulent papers.
This same rot mirrors the replication crisis and distrust of scientific journals that's been going on in the US.
Prestigious journals like Nature, Science, and Cell have morphed into gatekeepers of narrative rather than truth, amplifying irreproducible work while sidelining inconvenient findings. Publish-or-perish incentives combined with ideological capture - DEI mandates, politicized climate and biomedical research - have all but eroded credibility.
Fraudulent papers proliferate because the system rewards quantity and alignment with prevailing orthodoxies over careful replication and falsification.
It's refreshing to see accountability surfacing in China. Maintaining public trust in science demands relentless scrutiny, not institutional sanctity.
Scientists used to work either alone or in small groups, with relatively small budgets, in an almost closed society of prestige and knowledge-driven rewards. The kind of groundbreaking research we all know about—Newtonian mechanics, relativity, quantum mechanics, and early medical advances came out of a scientific establishment fundamentally different from what exists today. Genius drove science.
There are many reasons why the current scientific establishment is so fundamentally different; some are institutional, and many are simply driven by the nature of the questions we ask and the capabilities required to investigate them. It's not like you can build space telescopes on a tight budget and without massive institutions, after all, and no supercollider can be paid for out of a scientist's or his patron's petty cash.
"In his journal, Sacks wrote that 'a sense of hideous criminality remains (psychologically) attached' to his work: he had given his patients 'powers (starting with powers of speech) which they do not have.' Some details, he recognized, were 'pure fabrications.'
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) December 12, 2025
Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan's insincerity.
Still, when about $200 billion in research funds flow through the government and are distributed by large bureaucracies, the incentive structure shifts from seeking prestige and knowledge to chasing funding and positions of power within the institutions that distribute that cash. Building empires becomes the priority for all but the very best scientists.
This has been a growing problem for a few generations of scientists, but I fear we have reached a tipping point where science is not at all the priority for many, if not most, of the people working in the industry. I am not referring to corporate science, which is unabashedly guided by the pursuit of profit and, ironically, held to a higher standard than academic science.
AI literally makes up citations --completely fabricates them: https://t.co/kG7K19USkD
— Nancy Pearcey (@NancyRPearcey) May 8, 2026
The advent of AI has only made things worse, not better. Rather than collating the breadth of human knowledge and making connections between not-so-obvious correlates, AI is often building on already questionable science, and doing what it often does: hallucinating.
Scientists living in the empire-building and publish-or-perish world are under enormous pressure to generate output, which often means output of any kind, including crap. The incentive to check your own or others' work is vanishingly small, and null results can be a disaster for one's career.
Academics are now openly defending the practice of citing papers they haven’t read. https://t.co/DPM4O4D0n7 pic.twitter.com/O6PnD3CfdL
— Hunter Ash (@ArtemisConsort) May 20, 2026
It has gotten to the point where scientists aren't even embarrassed about it, because they are not rewarded for advancing human knowledge, although the claim is made that they are; they are rewarded for sexy results or flattering the higher-ups. Younger scientists will form what amounts to citation cartels, boosting each other through arranged citations to increase their "research impact," and many scientific papers are read by almost nobody.
A new study finds that AI hallucinations produced nearly 150,000 fake citations appearing in research papers. https://t.co/kakQ9qiRPZ
— CNET (@CNET) May 21, 2026
Scientists will bolster their credibility with fake citations to papers they haven't read and that don't even exist. It is the same phenomenon we see where lawyers will cite case law that is an AI hallucination.
Low-quality papers based on public health data are flooding the scientific literature | Miryam Naddaf, Nature
— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) July 18, 2025
The appearance of thousands of formulaic biomedical studies has been linked to the rise of text-generating AI tools.
Data from five large open-access health databases… pic.twitter.com/WHn57mCKA4
Low-quality papers based on public health data are flooding the scientific literature | Miryam Naddaf, Nature
The appearance of thousands of formulaic biomedical studies has been linked to the rise of text-generating AI tools.
Data from five large open-access health databases are being used to generate thousands of poor-quality, formulaic papers, an analysis has found. Its authors say that the surge in publications could indicate the exploitation of these databases by people using large language models (LLMs) to mass-produce scholarly articles, or even by paper mills — companies that churn out papers to order.
The findings, posted as a preprint on medRxiv on 9 July1, follow an earlier study2 that highlighted an explosion of such papers that used data from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The latest analysis flags a rising number of studies featuring data from other large health databases, including the UK Biobank and the US Food and Drug Administration’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), which documents the side effects of drugs.
Between 2021 and 2024, the number of papers using data from these databases rose from around 4,000 to 11,500 — around 5,000 more papers than expected on the basis of previous publication trends.
The study’s authors warn that a large number of these papers — many of which have repetitive, template-like titles — are likely to be of low quality and could flood the scientific literature. Their analysis is intended as “an early warning system … so that peer reviewers, editors and researchers can understand where the vulnerabilities in the system lie”, says co-author Matt Spick, a biomedical scientist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.
Peer review is a joke, and grant funding is driven by priorities often unrelated to the quality of the proposed or completed research. Academic positions are driven by the ability to get grants, and one's ability to even maintain a job hangs in the balance on whether you catch the eye or the ego of the person distributing the money.
It's a civilizational disaster. Science is one of the pillars of Western Civilization, which has a particularly strong reliance on the pursuit of Truth.
There are civilizations held together by a commitment to shared myths; ours, since the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, has become ever more based on the idea that what holds us together is a shared commitment to free discourse based on rational arguments.
Our hierarchy is based on meritocracy and rationality, at least in theory. If the faith we have in truth-seeking erodes, as it has been, so does the entire social order.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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