So what this fraud does is convince you to give these antibodies a chance when you otherwise wouldn’t have. You should validate them yourself and show they only bind your target before doing an experiment, but now you’re just wasting time and money evaluating something that’s guaranteed to fail.

Antibodies are notoriously unreliable, so you might have to give two or three vendors a try before you get one that works. Now I’m starting to wonder how much of that reputation is due to fraud and not just nature.

It’s like reminding someone they shouldn’t say “bicycle” but should instead say “fahrrad”.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47811131

Points: 2

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But even having a PhD isn't enough to establish credibility during the interview process, as there are plenty of PhDs who are incompetent. It's really more of a thing that gets your foot in the door - a signal that it's plausible that this candidate could have the juice.

The solution is that after the usual interview steps (resume, phone screen, etc), the candidate gives an hour long seminar on their research to 10-20 people (really 45 minutes of material + 15 minutes of questions). It's basically impossible to talk for that long about your research and the prior literature with a critical audience of experts and not reveal whether you actually know your stuff.

So in a sense, your vision has actually been achieved, but only within the group of people who have traditional credentials. The question of how to open this up to anyone regardless of credentials is not something I'm going to be able to answer, but I certainly hope it does.

In terms of frameworks for evaluating competence, here's the questions I ask when deciding if someone is an expert (and what I get out of these questions in parentheses):

1) Has this person spent years doing something where they constantly discovered that they were wrong? (if you're never wrong, you're not learning and you're certainly not doing anything interesting, and might be a crank)

2) Did they have a mentor or group of expert peers who helped them grow and critiqued their work? (this both helps them grow on a daily basis and also plugs gaps in their knowledge and skills, and gives them new ways of thinking)

3) Have they built or discovered something non-trivial, and in the LLM era, do they actually understand what they built? (You can't really be sure your knowledge and skills are meaningful until you apply them)

4) Can they hold their own when being grilled by other people with deep experience in the same field, or adjacent fields? (This assumes the experts are arguing in good faith, but if you can either answer critical questions or convince someone that their questions are flawed, that's a great sign)

5) Do they have both depth and breadth in their knowledge of their field? (I think this one might get downplayed as it smacks of gatekeeping, but it's so easy to make huge errors or reinvent the wheel when you don't know what other people have already done, and don't know how your contribution fits into the work of others)

6) Can they explain their work on multiple levels of complexity? (Filters out people who are just trying to hide their incompetence with jargon)

7) Are they willing to say they don't know, when asked a question they don't know the answer to? (Cranks will never admit this)