DEFCONConference
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2018–2025
1:56:08 · 184K views · Sep 18, 2018
A DEF CON 26 talk by investigative journalists and hackers on the fake science industry, with bogus conferences and predatory journals that give studies false credibility. It draws on a large investigation into the money behind them.
Recommended as a funny but depressing investigation, and the usual link in threads on predatory publishing and fake citations.
8 comments from Hacker News
Inside the Fake Science Factory (2018) is an amazing DEFCON talk, by 3 people who stumbled on and investigated an unbelievably huge worldwide network (400,000 scientists involved) of fake-scientific conferences, journals, websites raking in money and enabling people to make claims that their products are scientifically proven. The presenters got hackers to track down the people behind one of the largest organizations, and analyze the huge numbers of conferences/papers. They present/publish nonsensical talks on graphs and bees+cancer to see what peer review there is... A must watch. Very funny, if depressing. this video
Inside the Fake Science Factory is an amazing 2hr talk talk from DEFCON 2018 by 2 German journalists and a British science guy about an investigation into the world of predatory fake journals, conferences, websites. 400,000 scientists involved. Unbelievably huge scam. They wrote bogus papers and presented one at a fake conference. It's a funny talk, if depressing. A great investigation. Maybe the worst is that these fake scientific credentials are then used to sell useless products to dying people. this video
Inside The Fake Science Factory from DefCon 26. First you'll laugh. And then you'll weep for humanity! this video Also really dug Jeremy Rifkin's The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy. Outlines the rollout of a possible new engineering platform consisting of free energy, satellite internet, and AI. [LINK] Keep the links coming, please. Terrific counter-programming for holiday down time ;)
This presentation from Defcon in 2018 on “Fake Science Factory” was fantastic and pretty funny as well: this video
Another possibility would be to prop-up a fake journal/conference cycle, which is used by some interest groups to publish and thus "validate" dishonest research which then goes toward their own business/political interests. Think "money laundering", but for scholarly credentials. There is a very interesting DEFCON talk[1] called "Inside the fake science factory" about this. [1] this video