What's racist about recognizing the well-earned reputation for quackery from institutions in the former soviet bloc? The Soviets invested quite a lot of time and energy in pushing psuedoscience through the 1970s and then backed off for a while. Putin picked up on this for much the same reason and in the last ten years Russian and Russian-aligned scientists have come to lead the scientific world in quackery. There's nothing racial about that, it's pretty much just the Russians trolling everyone.
You tar all Kasakh scientists ( and now include Russian scientists) with the same brush, you are derogatory about the country of Kasakhstan for no sound reason and you make sweeping generalisations. I would suggest taking a moment to consider whether this is behaviour typical of a rational person or of a racist.
Well, there was that time the president of Khazakstan asked his country's scientists to discover the secret of immortality, and then there were those two guys who claimed to have developed a solar panel that was 80% efficient before reviewers tore their paper apart. Back in the 90s there was a shit ton of scientists from uzbekistan and tajikistan pushing articles about gamma ray bursts having provable extraterrestrial origin, always -- coincidentally -- around the same time they were plugging for more funding for radio telescopes or renovations thereof.
There wasn't much confusion in those cases, the researchers were trying to make the case that GRBs were evidence of some kind of massive interstellar war, arguing that their intensity was too great to be naturally occurring.
Two occurs, like, a lot.
I just had the thought that you could probably come up with a predictive model for the probability of researchers engaging in fraud in relation to a country or political bloc's. Generally, for example, you could expect researchers in the United States to be unusually likely to discover a lack of correlation between, say, gun ownership and the rate of gun violence, or between the use of beta blockers and positive outcomes for clinical depression.
In the UK, with tenure having been largely abolished, there is a great deal of pressure on academic researchers to publish frequently or lose their jobs. There is a tendency for low quality research to be published in whatever journal will accept it. The quality doesn't matter to management, only the quantity. Hence the Russian joke about British scientists, based on research papers into subjects such as "Do duck quacks echo?" The ultimate culprit for the assault on the academic system was Mrs Thatcher, who did research in the chemistry of soft-scoop ice cream before she decided to impose herself on the nation as a politician. The bitch is dead but her legacy lingers on.
Agreed on all points.
I suspect that in Russian the term for "American scientist" is usually meaningless except as the punchline of a joke.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure the most common number would turn out to be either 2 or 4. I suspect 37 is cherrypicked from carefully filtered data because it seems less likely to be random.
Yep, and I expect they follow a power law or Zipf distribution.