h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

i think i'm suffering from split personality, in that i am both a 'perfect angel' and an awful devil at the same time. let me explain.

you see, i'm a research student, so all of my work is done in the laboratory. the biggest temptation i've ever had to face in all my life (honestly) is - fraud. the thing with research and experiments is that things sometimes just don't turn out the way you want it to. even when you *know* you' supposed to get such-and-such results. and when it gets bad enough, when you've done it multiple times and it keeps on failing, there are times when you are just tempted to fake your results so that they show what you know should be the results.

i must confess that, being human, this temptation plagued me all through my honours year when i was trying valiantly to get something to work the way it should. i'd open my files with the photographs, toy with the idea... and then set it all aside. of course, i eventually decided that if i ever started on something like this, that i would eventually make a habit out of me, and one day someone would catch me and that would be the end of my career. so i never did cheat. i swear. (oh, and things *did* pick up sometime after that, and my stuff *did* end up working after all. and i got an 'a' for honestly explaining in my thesis why the remaining bits *didn't* work)

so the thing is, i would *never* cheat where my own work is concerned, no matter how tempted i get. unfortunately, my ethics don't quite extend to other people's work. the reason why i even got tempted to fake results in the first place (but never did) is that i'm pretty darned good with corel photo-paint and doctoring photographs. and... because of this, sometimes my friends seek me out to help *them* doctor *their* results. well, not exactly *fake* results, but to clean up photographs of their results, or to paint out cracks in their gels when it happens. (those who do sds-page or agarose gel electrophoresis will know what i mean when i say - awful smears, primer dimers and such) but the thing is - when they ask, i comply. with no guilt getting in the way.

so is that still considered cheating? i can't help but think that it's wrong of me to sin other people's sins for them, but well...

Don't be so hard on yourself they are the ones fooling themselves into thinking that they are doing the right thing you are simply using your talents. I don't have much of a problem with that. At least you are true to your own work and are not afraid to admit when a thing works. I'm a teacher and i try to teach my students that i'd rather see an item not work with an explination as to why they think it does not work instead of falsfying the results to show that it might. the result of messing with results is that the person reading the results or testing the item is usually more experienced and can see when an item will not or could not be right and they fall flat on their faces

yeah lol

i had this ecology and physiology lecturer who loved it when our experiments failed because we would then have to explain why they failed in our lab reports... it would give us something to discuss in class. he's right, i guess. i suppose if something works right, you end up only knowing how to go on making it work; but if something fails, you get to learn how the thing actually works, and how certain conditions can affect it. i guess it's because of him that i'm not too afraid to say that my stuff doesn't work, and to postulate why...

And let's face it, it's better to admit a failure, than to have every body you know think you're bent. That tends to stick with one for a very long time, and takes a thousand time longer to make up for than one failure.

yep - kind of what happened to that reporter who won a pulitzer, what's her name, jennifer something, who reported a case of an 8-year-old heroin addict. they found out that she'd jimmied her resume, and so they dug further... and found out that she'd faked the case. ouch. (i think i wrote something about it in A974171 - why people lie) i'd much rather live down a failure than live down a series of lies to cover the failure.

And dont forget the cold fusion foasco from a few years ago where two scientists said they had cracked room temperature cold fusion. their resultsd have yet to be repeated.

sorry that should be fiasco

don't even *go* there. not only did fleischmann and pons fail to admit that their experiments were bogus, they've attracted quite a following... which is still active, btw. the only reason i know is because at some time i'd toyed with the idea of writing a guide article about the fallacy of cold fusion, and had consequently dug up a whole lot of material on it.

I have to disagree on the ethics of "cleaning up" other people's work... By helping them with it, aren't you being instrumental in fraud?

It reminds me of an argument I had with a friend once. We were talking about fidelity. My position is that, if you wilfully sleep with a married man, you are being instrumental in his infidelity, and therefore potentially harming another woman. Therefore I all against sleeping with attached guys, or even snogging them. She said it's all the fella's responsibility, his decision to be unfaithful, not yours, you've got nothing to do with it; meaning that he'd go and sleep with somebody else anyway.

So your friends would probably turn to somebody else for a bit of "doctoring", but at least you'd have done nothing wrong. And maybe they could't find anyone to do the dirty work for them and would be forced to own up to their failures.

I'm a bit like that in everything, me.

hence the dilemma and identity crisis the devil and the saint are unable to settle the problem...

Well about the broken gels i wouldn't worry too much, long as the bands aren't "nudged" or slightly er edited, what?

I had once a supervisor who would very subtly press people to get out "results" in order to publish, this pressure could build up to a quite unsupportable level, when true results weren't forthcoming. All i can say to that is resist, resist! It is never worth it. Never.

As for the errant husbands, i used to subscribe to the same high standard as Greta. But honestly, why am i responsible for their morals? A cheater is a cheater. Bit like a public commodity. The only problem i have is that i tend to lose respect of that sort very quickly. And when i lose respect, suddenly their nose doesn't seem quite right, and i begin disliking the way they laugh or eat...

I can see your point about respect being crucial. The fact is, I really couldn't live with myself if I deliberately slept with somebody who is seeing somebody else. I nearly did last weekend and I'm glad it didn't happen, although I really really really liked the guy. You see, somebody pinched my boyfriend, and I was hurt. I wouldn't want to do the same to somebody else.

I agree in that i wouldn't do it either if i knew and liked the other woman. Just similar to you, i know it may happen to her anyway, but not through me.
However, i don't have objections to perpetrating the deed per se. Like i said, what happens is that i loose respect, and with that the man becomes less attractive to me.
Different mores, same result what?

It's different with me. It doesn't make a difference if I know the woman or not. I just won't touch another girl's guy. End of story. My ex's new girlfriend didn't know me. Still, that's no excuse.

Hm, i would, if i really wanted to. What i wouldn't do is "take" a man from another woman "for keeps". Because a guy who plays around is not for keeps. He is somebody to be played around with.

And the same standard would apply to myself if i was dishonest while being in a working relationship. I may find several men attractive at the same time, but if i like somebody enough to be in a relationship with them, i would religiously consider their feelings.

(And when it then turns out that he has done me a dirty trick, boy would i feel a fool about having passed up on the candy myself. I think that would annoy me most... i hope.)

For keeps?
Like, he would actually keep me? When a guy cheats, he just does. He will cheat on you like he cheated on the one before you.

I'd really rather they came to me with a free heart.

To come back to Farlanders plight, what i won't do is falsifying scientific results. And even with those gels, i'd repeat the experiment to get a clean shot.

No, "for keeps" Like I would actually keep him. I wouldn't.
I don't like that sort of thing any more than you do.

Nobody does... but still... even if you wanted to keep him, a cheater's a cheater.

re: gels - which i did, delicia. by the end of which time i had set the unbeatable lab record for total sds-page runs. (not to mention really crisp bands) as i said, i don't falsify anything that belongs to me. in the case of the fellow i helped, *his* gel had cracked in about five pieces (it was a maxi gel, and he didn't roll it the way i told him to), so what i did was get rid of the ugly lines. does that count as falsification?