I think that a massive trend of scientific theft would actually make for compelling journalism.
Going counter-narrative might be compelling narrative in the sense that people want to read the story but it’s not a story that a newspaper wants to publish. How many US newspapers tell you that one of the most reputable US investigative-journalists wrote a story that about how the US military didn’t kill Osama bin Laden? It’s a compelling story, but not one that the US media wants to touch as it goes counter-narrative, so he had to publish it outside of the US while the US media mostly ignored it.
To argue for a massive trend you also have to do a lot of work to document every case and therefore open a lot of fights against powerful people.
I also think you’d hear about it through the academic whisper network.
The academic whisper network is not the place where I would expect a lot of talk about how academics rip off non-academics.
If academia is a immoral maze as you suggested in Survival in the immoral maze of college you wouldn’t expect people in academia to talk about it because talking about it gets you shut out for being indiscrete.
I think Nassim Taleb talks about it a bit when he says that a lot of what academics do boils down to teaching birds to fly.
One of Taleb’s examples is the Black–Scholes equation. According to Taleb, the equation was used by traders before Black and Scholes did their work. Black–Scholes work was basically about how when you make a bunch of assumptions that don’t apply to real financial markets you can derive the formula. Afterwards they tanked a headfund, that they capitalized with the reputation they got from a Nobel prize, because they acted as if all those assumptions are true.
Going counter-narrative might be compelling narrative in the sense that people want to read the story but it’s not a story that a newspaper wants to publish. How many US newspapers tell you that one of the most reputable US investigative-journalists wrote a story that about how the US military didn’t kill Osama bin Laden? It’s a compelling story, but not one that the US media wants to touch as it goes counter-narrative, so he had to publish it outside of the US while the US media mostly ignored it.
To argue for a massive trend you also have to do a lot of work to document every case and therefore open a lot of fights against powerful people.
The academic whisper network is not the place where I would expect a lot of talk about how academics rip off non-academics.
If academia is a immoral maze as you suggested in Survival in the immoral maze of college you wouldn’t expect people in academia to talk about it because talking about it gets you shut out for being indiscrete.
I think Nassim Taleb talks about it a bit when he says that a lot of what academics do boils down to teaching birds to fly.
One of Taleb’s examples is the Black–Scholes equation. According to Taleb, the equation was used by traders before Black and Scholes did their work. Black–Scholes work was basically about how when you make a bunch of assumptions that don’t apply to real financial markets you can derive the formula. Afterwards they tanked a headfund, that they capitalized with the reputation they got from a Nobel prize, because they acted as if all those assumptions are true.