I was a finalist at the 2017 ISEF and it was quite an experience. A lot of super smart kids there and we all had fun living it up in Los Angeles.
There was a stark contrast between those of us who had designed our projects completely ourselves, and those who had significant mentors/lab affiliations. No hate to high schoolers getting valuable STEM experience at local universities, but Regeneron should do more to differentiate between these different projects.
I never judged ISEF, but it was highly predictable that the kids with university mentorship made it from my circuit to there. Felt really unfair to the smart self-motivated kids who didn’t have connections. IMO the fairs should take a much harder stance on this, as it defeats the spirit of such competitions.
> There was a stark contrast between those of us who had designed our projects completely ourselves, and those who had significant mentors/lab affiliations.
Love to see someone confirming my cynicism. In high school, a science teacher asked me if I were interested in doing something for the (then) Intel Talend Search. I looked up the previous finalists / winners and noticed that an overwhelming majority of the kids were in cities with top tier research universities (or did math stuff, those kids' locations varied a bit more). At that point, my spider sense told me that it wasn't worth the effort to try to compete without the backing / mentoring of a credentialed adult.
Honestly, in my country (the Netherlands) this whole attitude changed within 1 generation. My parents left met largely alone with my school stuff. Now I hear all my friends complaining that their kid's school "is so much work" for them.
Crazy right? When I ask them: Why help them at all (my kids are younger btw), they tell me that "sure we can just not help them, they won't make it into university (but something "lower"), whereas other kids that get help/coaching will."
It's a super bad trend because the parent won't be around after school (during their adult life I mean) and in a way these parents are also taking something away from their kids, namely the feeling that they made it on their own merit.
My generation is also known as "helicopter parents" and this is just another expression of it. Maybe because we have less kids later and those we have (often after fertility treatments) are our princesses and princes? Maybe because we have more time?
Correction: Regeneron is the sponsor, it is the Society for Science that is responsible. When I was there the sponsor was Intel, so I didn't immediately recognize the meaning of "Regeneron"
Heh now wait until you realize what it's like for kids coming from areas near the poverty line. I entered ISEF at a local level on a whim, my science teacher knew I was his brightest but didn't know what to do with me, I borrowed a rundown pair of shirt/slacks my dad retired from job interviews. The experience left such a deep mark on me that even now in the middle of a very successful tech career I remember it. I did a project on perceptrons which I learned about at the local community college library (from a copy of Mitchell's Machine Learning!) because my parents knew it kept weird 'ol me busy and off the streets. Fun times!
>Everyone makes mistakes — Lord knows I did plenty of stupid, immoral things when I was 17 — and there is always the opportunity for growth and redemption.
when did the definition of 'mistake' change to encompass actions done on purpose? a mistake is when your data is invalid because you did the math wrong, not when all your data is simultaneously false and plagiarized.
i don't mean to disagree with the notion that his entire life shouldn't be ruined over one incident at a science fair when he's a teenager, but let's not make it sound like this is a careless blunder that could happen to anybody.
My kids attended the same high school district that this student's school, Canyon Crest Academy (CCA), is part of. My youngest has friends that attended CCA and I asked him once why he didn't want to attend (it's an open school district) -- his reply is "all they do is study for AP tests."
So I'm thinking there might be other pressures (i.e. parental) to perform, and this student may have responded in a desperate fashion.
Raising my kids in the Bay Area, I certainly am aware of what I call unhealthy competitiveness in even the public schools.
If you think this is an unfortunate way to raise a child — in that kind of overly competitive environment – then there is a lot of blame to go around. The difficulty of getting into a UC school being an obvious place to start.
When I was 16 I did a project on whether plants could be used to remove heavy metals from soil. I don’t know why I did this but I did a nitrate test on the plants (because I had been putting lead nitrate into the soil) and drew the conclusion that it must’ve worked.
About 2 weeks before the city science fair I realized my error (none of my teachers had said anything).
So in an attempt to lose, I made my backboard as bad as possible. I didn’t use scissors or glue, I just tore the paper and used masking tape.
Long story short, I have no idea how, but despite my best efforts, I won the city science fair including an HP-48 graphing calculator and a trip to the state science fair.
At the state science fair my backboard (you had to use the same one as the city contest) was mocked by much more studious 8-year olds. I found out that teachers weren’t allowed in the exhibition hall so I just abandoned my space and went to the beach.
One of the details that strike me is that the cheater comes from a fairly wealthy background and has no need for that prize money at all. They have much more to lose than gain and this doesn’t seem rational at all.
It's for university admissions. It's not that surprising. There's a lot of fraud in admissions. I've met students who have given TED talks on subjects they have no idea about, written science books with fake reviews on Amazon, etc. all for admissions.
In reading this, I am reminded of a YouTube video by CGP Grey about how anger is more viral than any other emotional reaction online, including love. But then I think, isn't this one of those times where at least some level of annoyance is justified?
Except, there's nothing I can do about it. Does making more people aware, that can't do anything about it, improve the situation? Or is awareness pointless because of how transient it is?
And, what if the next great filter isn't great, but a series of smaller exponential filters pulled into a tight timeframe by the advancement of technology?
I wrote an earlier reply to someone about how all I learned from the several mandatory ethics courses is that the people who cheat tend to be winners even after their punishment, if any.
I bet that even after all this, that kid will still be better off having cheated than not.
I am curious, what is the definition of winners here? Do they make more money or do they invent more successful products/ideas or is it something else?
> The image boxed in red above is a falsified image taken from online, and has had mirroring performed in the hopes that no one would notice.
This probably won't happen in the future... because future competitors will learn from this mistake and know to run their image generation through AI so that their images are "novel"...
> Don't mentors have to sign off along the way? That part I don't get...
Can someone explain this? Is it plausible the mentors genuinely had no idea?
Science fairs always have hints of fraud around them. Many of the children putting out incredibly advanced research, beyond their capacity, are benefiting from their parents’ expertise, or friends of family, or access to labs, and such. It’s not talked about much but has been an issue for decades.
As a side note, the criticism around this incident seems to have some racial tones. It’s weird to see tweets referring to participants as the “Indian guy” and “Chinese guy”. Or is that just me?
> As a side note, the criticism around this incident seems to have some racial tones.
Noticed that as well. I feel like it has unfortunately become somewhat socially acceptable to be slightly racist against Indians and Chinese people due to a mix of politics and demographics in tech.
It probably does. For every solid guy from Indian background who was living in the USA that I worked with, there were always at least 5 horror stories involving e.g. some back office tasks that involved one of 3000+ people working in India (at a previous company of > 30k total employees). It's not fair to the guys in the USA for sure.
Agree with the last bit. This is the perfect way to start racially stereotyping.
For the first bit, unfortunately that's hard to control and is actually talked about quite a bit (speaking as a HS student). I would be interested in alternative suggestions to limit these advantages, but I don't think it's realistically possible.
> Many of the children putting out incredibly advanced research, beyond their capacity, are benefiting from their parents’ expertise, or friends of family, or access to labs, and such.
Do we have a solution for this, and do we need a solution?
Lets go nuts, lets go hyperbolic: should we ban kids from learning from their parents?
I don't know if it's still the case, but decades ago when I was at ISEF (and somewhat fewer years ago when I judged...) the judges would get to talk to the students.
Definitely racial tones. Asian countries are frequently accused of copying, cheating, and stealing intellectual property from others, so it matches what people assume about members of those races.
Isn't this equally embarrassing for the people that decided to award him? I mean just looking at those images or even imagining the sort of research and equipment that would take to achieve something like this, shouldn't have raised red flags easily?
Sure, but it happens all the time with "professional" science too. This guy did nothing that isn't seen every day in the literature.
The reason these people didn't check the claims is because they have an extremely strong culture of never checking any claims. If they did they might discover the claims were false, and then they might feel obliged to attack a colleague who realistically will be protected by their institution, and who might be a peer reviewer or even colleague in future. So, ignorance is bliss.
Consider the distribution of the entered projects. Due to the selection process (think evolution-style selection rather than "human judging" selection), all the projects, whether purely-student-driven, student-driven with just a dash of parental help, half-and-half, and the student basically along for the ride as the parent runs a project, are in one big pile. Is there going to be a bright, sharp dividing line? Especially in light of the fact that quality is only going to be loosely correlated with external help?
Perhaps this is an unpopular call but my personal opinion is that the whole idea of a "national scale" science project contest is irredeemably flawed and the correct answer is simply to discard it. It is a common flaw in thinking, often expressed by many commenters zealous to "correct" other people, that if you can't draw a bright sharp unarguable line between the various elements of a group of some sort that you can't claim the group "exists". This is nonsense; almost every practical grouping scheme will always have borderline cases or exceptions. But there does need to be some sort of actual grouping, or some sort of relatively objective way to sort and categorize the elements, that is accessible to the sorter. In this case, while from the objective divine perspective maybe we could create an objective standard for who got "too much help" to be qualified, there is no conceivable world in which the contest judges could ever get sufficiently accurate information to be presented with anything other than a very smooth gradation that they simply will have no handle to make a correct decision with. So the incentives will always be to get as much help as possible and then have human-intelligent agents doing their best to fool the human-intelligent judges, and that's just a hopeless situation.
Of course, the contest will not be shut down. But what can happen and what may well happen is that it will get more and more embroiled in controversy each year as the game-theoretic local optimum approach for the contestants each year becomes more and more to accuse their competition of being "too helped" and thus take out the competition until it is simply a farce. This is the worst game-theory case for cooperation; very limited repetition of plays by any given participant, most likely one, so no reason to care about the integrity of the contest for next year when they won't even be participating most likely.
> These actions, while serious, should not define Pai’s entire life
Too late for that. Very late. Unluckily his mind is set on pretending too much. Which is ubiquitous and actually encouraged in life to a great degree (not like this should be an excuse for adapting).
What is not late is to seek a different career in life. Be an influencer, praised youtuber or a political adviser perhaps, but the science world needs much different mindset. His reputation is annihilated by himself beyond repair anyway. The useful side of the story: be it a learning experience for the others.
I wish reality were closer to how you see it, but there are people who do far worse to their reputation, but continue to have careers. In the US a doctor can tell their patients that the diseases they have are caused by demon sperm and that alien technology is in their medications/treatments and that doctor still gets to keep their practice/medical license. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Immanuel) Police officers can lie, steal, rape, or murder forcing them to resign or causing them to get fired, but they have no problems getting another job as a police officer the next county over (https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/fired-cops-routinel...). Scientists can repeatedly fabricate evidence for corporations and have long careers doing so. The scientists hired by the tobacco industry to lie are also used by the oil industry and are deciding what chemicals are safe to put in our food (https://publicintegrity.org/politics/food-safety-scientists-...)
This guy probably has a long and profitable career as a scientist ahead of him.
This is pretty similar to some fraud in professional science that's more common than it should be. A few people have started to make it a hobby to detect copy-and-pasted and altered images in published research:
So I'm dismayed but not surprised that the incentives driving fraud in research science are trickling down into pre-college science fairs. A cynical person might conclude that we're just training the next generation of scientists to be better at fraud.
Many, many years ago I participated in ISEF, so this is personally disappointing to me. I'll echo some of the sibling comments about the difference between kids who did the project alone versus parents/lab mentors who ... ahem ... contributed significantly to the project. In contrast, my project was entirely self-made and therefore not very impressive, but it had some gimmicks in how I presented it which managed to impress judges at the school and regional levels, enough to send me to ISEF.
ISEF was an amazing experience, especially as a kid from a school that was nothing special. Our school was so excited that they hired a public speaking specialist to work with me to prepare. Looking back, that training in public speaking directly contributed to many successes in my career decades down the line. Plus the experience of going to ISEF still brings back positive memories. I never felt like I belonged - there were some amazingly smart kids there - but the social camaraderie and the ability to meet kids that thought it was cool to be smart was eye opening.
As far as "making mistakes when you're 17" - yeah, I made mistakes then too, but I certainly paid the price for them. Especially when you make conscious decisions to defraud and falsify, if these allegations can be proven. There should be serious consequences for this.
The elephant in the room is that 17 years old should not be writing long scientific articles witha lot of supporting material. They are not paid for that and they are expected to study first.
We should definitely expect to see short, brilliant discoveries from teenagers when they notice a gem in a heap of data adults discarded.
But not that kind of bureaqucratic nightmare style scientific papers where the result is attained mostly through prespiration, not inspiration. 100% great for already learned and paid adults, being fraud or exploitation of adolescents.
I will take the liberty to expreas my most profound cynicism. Didn't Google fake some of its AI showcases recently? Didn't Apple fake stuff about their iPhone on some presentation? I believe this goes beyond a young person "mistake". And no. It's not just to the universities. There are plenty of institutions involved. There are commercial successes from technology corporations to take inspiration from. The lack of consequences stems from a judicial power that's made in an extreme conservative set of rules. So, everything is on fire. Or should be. And don't get me started on research journals and editorials...
I'm baffled by the idea of making science competition with so much prize money for teenagers. For me it's antithetic with the goal of scientific research and can only fail in the long term. As a side note, the real responsible here is not the tennagers, but the organizers that didn't manage to catch a fraud so obvious
[+] [-] uneekname|1 year ago|reply
There was a stark contrast between those of us who had designed our projects completely ourselves, and those who had significant mentors/lab affiliations. No hate to high schoolers getting valuable STEM experience at local universities, but Regeneron should do more to differentiate between these different projects.
[+] [-] georgeburdell|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] levi-turner|1 year ago|reply
Love to see someone confirming my cynicism. In high school, a science teacher asked me if I were interested in doing something for the (then) Intel Talend Search. I looked up the previous finalists / winners and noticed that an overwhelming majority of the kids were in cities with top tier research universities (or did math stuff, those kids' locations varied a bit more). At that point, my spider sense told me that it wasn't worth the effort to try to compete without the backing / mentoring of a credentialed adult.
[+] [-] teekert|1 year ago|reply
Crazy right? When I ask them: Why help them at all (my kids are younger btw), they tell me that "sure we can just not help them, they won't make it into university (but something "lower"), whereas other kids that get help/coaching will."
It's a super bad trend because the parent won't be around after school (during their adult life I mean) and in a way these parents are also taking something away from their kids, namely the feeling that they made it on their own merit.
My generation is also known as "helicopter parents" and this is just another expression of it. Maybe because we have less kids later and those we have (often after fertility treatments) are our princesses and princes? Maybe because we have more time?
[+] [-] uneekname|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Karrot_Kream|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] snickerbockers|1 year ago|reply
when did the definition of 'mistake' change to encompass actions done on purpose? a mistake is when your data is invalid because you did the math wrong, not when all your data is simultaneously false and plagiarized.
i don't mean to disagree with the notion that his entire life shouldn't be ruined over one incident at a science fair when he's a teenager, but let's not make it sound like this is a careless blunder that could happen to anybody.
[+] [-] relwin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|1 year ago|reply
If you think this is an unfortunate way to raise a child — in that kind of overly competitive environment – then there is a lot of blame to go around. The difficulty of getting into a UC school being an obvious place to start.
[+] [-] paulcole|1 year ago|reply
About 2 weeks before the city science fair I realized my error (none of my teachers had said anything).
So in an attempt to lose, I made my backboard as bad as possible. I didn’t use scissors or glue, I just tore the paper and used masking tape.
Long story short, I have no idea how, but despite my best efforts, I won the city science fair including an HP-48 graphing calculator and a trip to the state science fair.
At the state science fair my backboard (you had to use the same one as the city contest) was mocked by much more studious 8-year olds. I found out that teachers weren’t allowed in the exhibition hall so I just abandoned my space and went to the beach.
I did not win the state science fair.
[+] [-] jmercouris|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tocs3|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] acheong08|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] onetimeusename|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bigbacaloa|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] notjoemama|1 year ago|reply
Except, there's nothing I can do about it. Does making more people aware, that can't do anything about it, improve the situation? Or is awareness pointless because of how transient it is?
And, what if the next great filter isn't great, but a series of smaller exponential filters pulled into a tight timeframe by the advancement of technology?
I probably just need more sleep.
[+] [-] throwawaysleep|1 year ago|reply
I bet that even after all this, that kid will still be better off having cheated than not.
[+] [-] capybara_2020|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fattegourmet|1 year ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethos
[+] [-] hilux|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dataflow|1 year ago|reply
This probably won't happen in the future... because future competitors will learn from this mistake and know to run their image generation through AI so that their images are "novel"...
> Don't mentors have to sign off along the way? That part I don't get...
Can someone explain this? Is it plausible the mentors genuinely had no idea?
[+] [-] pstrateman|1 year ago|reply
Maybe community service equivalent to 50,000.00 at federal minimum wage would sort him out.
[+] [-] blackeyeblitzar|1 year ago|reply
As a side note, the criticism around this incident seems to have some racial tones. It’s weird to see tweets referring to participants as the “Indian guy” and “Chinese guy”. Or is that just me?
[+] [-] _ncyj|1 year ago|reply
Noticed that as well. I feel like it has unfortunately become somewhat socially acceptable to be slightly racist against Indians and Chinese people due to a mix of politics and demographics in tech.
[+] [-] shrubble|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] luyu_wu|1 year ago|reply
For the first bit, unfortunately that's hard to control and is actually talked about quite a bit (speaking as a HS student). I would be interested in alternative suggestions to limit these advantages, but I don't think it's realistically possible.
[+] [-] deely3|1 year ago|reply
Do we have a solution for this, and do we need a solution? Lets go nuts, lets go hyperbolic: should we ban kids from learning from their parents?
[+] [-] nullc|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tbyehl|1 year ago|reply
Click around on Karlstack some more.
[+] [-] throwawaysleep|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sgerenser|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaymaths|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] liendolucas|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mike_hearn|1 year ago|reply
The reason these people didn't check the claims is because they have an extremely strong culture of never checking any claims. If they did they might discover the claims were false, and then they might feel obliged to attack a colleague who realistically will be protected by their institution, and who might be a peer reviewer or even colleague in future. So, ignorance is bliss.
[+] [-] jerf|1 year ago|reply
Perhaps this is an unpopular call but my personal opinion is that the whole idea of a "national scale" science project contest is irredeemably flawed and the correct answer is simply to discard it. It is a common flaw in thinking, often expressed by many commenters zealous to "correct" other people, that if you can't draw a bright sharp unarguable line between the various elements of a group of some sort that you can't claim the group "exists". This is nonsense; almost every practical grouping scheme will always have borderline cases or exceptions. But there does need to be some sort of actual grouping, or some sort of relatively objective way to sort and categorize the elements, that is accessible to the sorter. In this case, while from the objective divine perspective maybe we could create an objective standard for who got "too much help" to be qualified, there is no conceivable world in which the contest judges could ever get sufficiently accurate information to be presented with anything other than a very smooth gradation that they simply will have no handle to make a correct decision with. So the incentives will always be to get as much help as possible and then have human-intelligent agents doing their best to fool the human-intelligent judges, and that's just a hopeless situation.
Of course, the contest will not be shut down. But what can happen and what may well happen is that it will get more and more embroiled in controversy each year as the game-theoretic local optimum approach for the contestants each year becomes more and more to accuse their competition of being "too helped" and thus take out the competition until it is simply a farce. This is the worst game-theory case for cooperation; very limited repetition of plays by any given participant, most likely one, so no reason to care about the integrity of the contest for next year when they won't even be participating most likely.
[+] [-] nsajko|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|1 year ago|reply
What gets me, is there are clear scientific errors (talking about RNA fragments but should have been protein fragments).
This would have been immediately caught by someone with a basic knowledge of the field.
How do they judge the projects if not having subject matter experts closely review them and the results?
[+] [-] mihaaly|1 year ago|reply
Too late for that. Very late. Unluckily his mind is set on pretending too much. Which is ubiquitous and actually encouraged in life to a great degree (not like this should be an excuse for adapting).
What is not late is to seek a different career in life. Be an influencer, praised youtuber or a political adviser perhaps, but the science world needs much different mindset. His reputation is annihilated by himself beyond repair anyway. The useful side of the story: be it a learning experience for the others.
[+] [-] autoexec|1 year ago|reply
This guy probably has a long and profitable career as a scientist ahead of him.
[+] [-] thaumaturgy|1 year ago|reply
Fabrication discovered in prominent Alzheimer's research: https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio...
"Sleuths" uncovering fraud and getting retractions for thousands of papers: https://apnews.com/article/danafarber-cancer-scandal-harvard... and https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-a-sharp-eyed-... and https://retractionwatch.com/2022/07/22/papers-in-croce-case-...
So I'm dismayed but not surprised that the incentives driving fraud in research science are trickling down into pre-college science fairs. A cynical person might conclude that we're just training the next generation of scientists to be better at fraud.
[+] [-] isef_researcher|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ipython|1 year ago|reply
ISEF was an amazing experience, especially as a kid from a school that was nothing special. Our school was so excited that they hired a public speaking specialist to work with me to prepare. Looking back, that training in public speaking directly contributed to many successes in my career decades down the line. Plus the experience of going to ISEF still brings back positive memories. I never felt like I belonged - there were some amazingly smart kids there - but the social camaraderie and the ability to meet kids that thought it was cool to be smart was eye opening.
As far as "making mistakes when you're 17" - yeah, I made mistakes then too, but I certainly paid the price for them. Especially when you make conscious decisions to defraud and falsify, if these allegations can be proven. There should be serious consequences for this.
[+] [-] fransje26|1 year ago|reply
To earn $55,000...
[+] [-] thriftwy|1 year ago|reply
We should definitely expect to see short, brilliant discoveries from teenagers when they notice a gem in a heap of data adults discarded.
But not that kind of bureaqucratic nightmare style scientific papers where the result is attained mostly through prespiration, not inspiration. 100% great for already learned and paid adults, being fraud or exploitation of adolescents.
[+] [-] adr1an|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] poulpy123|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]