12 ms·
A study on dishonesty was based on fraudulent data
- renewedrebecca 5y agoMeanwhile, a study on irony was found to be based on allegory.
- hashkb 5y agoBut that was just a coincidence.
- RachelF 5y agoDan Ariely's reputation is now in tatters.
- seibelj 5y agoIs it? My wife was studying in a lab (real science, not social science) and there were only a handful of labs in the world working on the problem. One of the labs had a key paper that no one could ever replicate and it was widely understood to be fraud. The drama was even written up in one of the blogs focused on these issues. The PI to this day claims it’s all true and nothing was faked, still respected in their field. Every grad student working on that protein knows that result and the subsequent papers published by the same lab based on that result are complete lies.
- zzt123 5y agoMind sharing which paper/PI you’re talking about?
- seibelj 5y agoMy wife is asleep now but I set a reminder to ask her tomorrow. I believe it was this one https://retractionwatch.com/2018/03/23/caught-our-notice-the-first-author-cut-the-thermoprinter-paper-printout-into-pieces-and-reassembled-them/ https://retractionwatch.com/2018/03/23/caught-our-notice-the... Posted in 2018 but people knew about it for years. I will try to get all the details as the link is fairly dry but basically they are working on this protein and this paper and the science that followed set back many grad students wasting time and money trying to create more science based on the fake science.
- zzt123 5y agoHmm, the conclusion that "mitochondrial ferredoxin is required for assembly of cytosolic iron sulfur proteins" does seem to hold up though. Unless I'm mistaken.
- seibelj 5y agoMy wife says that this is complicated and there is a lot of nuance, but there are specifics of their work that cannot be replicated, and in fact my wife's lab came to opposite conclusions for some of the results. So the labs that do work on this pathway simply ignore or refute in their future papers the Lill lab results that conflict. She said that whole paper is ignored and there was a meeting in Germany with the labs that work on this pathway and all the grad students agreed they did not trust work coming out of the Lill lab. She said she thought the paper was fully retracted and was surprised when I sent her the link that it wasn't fully retracted.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gautamcgoel 5y agoInteresting. I read his book Predictably Irrational and quite liked it (of course that doesn't imply he's a good scientist). Are there any other scandals he is involved in?
- gingerlime 5y agoI was also wondering, because there were some other vague mentions, but couldn’t find anything concrete. The only thing[0] I could find was one person who questioned how he could technically make a shredder do what he said he did in one experiment (and there were even photos of the shredded-but-only-at-the-edges papers) [0] https://fraudbytes.blogspot.com/2021/08/top-honesty-researcher-dan-ariely-has.html?m=1 https://fraudbytes.blogspot.com/2021/08/top-honesty-research...
- robocat 5y agoInteresting hearing Dan Ariely explain how he broke the shredder: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZTIm9nmurRm96kWKwxrl5dI3t7e1QZpZ/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZTIm9nmurRm96kWKwxrl5dI3t7e... Anybody with a good talent for picking up liars from a voice recording willing to share an opinion?
- ajb 5y agoThey contacted him and he apparently claimed that he broke the teeth on a shredder with a screwdriver. The teeth on shredders exist only to make "cross cuts". The previous generation of shredders did not have them, and cut the paper into long strips instead of confetti; which is fine for most purposes. So a claim that removing teeth prevents shredding is bogus. (Edited to add) thinking about it, this could be an honest mistake. You could "remove the teeth with a screwdriver" by disassembling the shredder and removing some blades from the axle, which corresponds to how the shredder in this paper was supposed to work. If Dan Ariely got a grad student to modify the shredder, he could simply have misunderstood their explanation of how they did so. How the shredder was modified was not, after all, important to the experiment. (Edit 2) Although, those who ran the experiment would need to keep the missing teeth out of the line of sight of the subjects.
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- spoonjim 5y agoBut seems like it was a rational play from him. He made tons of money from his book and speaking engagements, and is not going to go to jail over this. He might be laughing all the way to the bank
- DantesKite 5y agoDon’t know why you’re downvoted. He had every incentive to lie and has historically shown dubious judgments and hyperbole. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/dan-ariely-honesty-study-retraction https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/dan-ariel...
- r721 5y agoRecent discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210642 (51 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28257860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28257860 (90 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264097 (104 comments)
- dang 5y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Noted study in psychology fails to replicate, crumbles with evidence of fraud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28264097 - Aug 2021 (102 comments) A Big Study About Honesty Turns Out to Be Based on Fake Data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28257860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28257860 - Aug 2021 (88 comments) Evidence of fraud in an influential field experiment about dishonesty - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210642 - Aug 2021 (51 comments)
- JamesAdir 5y agoWhat's interesting is that Ariely is the chief behavioral officer to Lemonade (LMND) an insurtech company https://www.lemonade.com/blog/oh-behave/ https://www.lemonade.com/blog/oh-behave/
- chirau 5y agoThis is Dan Ariely's response to the case: http://datacolada.org/storage_strong/DanBlogComment_Aug_16_2021_final.pdf http://datacolada.org/storage_strong/DanBlogComment_Aug_16_2...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- warent 5y agoThis is very helpful. Assuming Dan is being honest, it seems pretty obvious the insurance company is at fault here. It's so hard to know though. He could be covering for the whole group, or a teammate, or even himself. Frankly I'm fine believing it was the insurance company though. Auto insurance has already screwed me before and now I have an irrational and emotionally charged inclination to view them as villain
- drno123 5y agoHowever, car insurance company has nothing to gain from faking the numbers. Researches who publish an influential study that gets a lot of citations, and because of it they can get tenure, big contracts or lucrative job offers, have everything to gain from faking numbers.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y agoThat's a good point, but it could be that the person tasked with gathering the numbers had something to gain (their own time, if they felt they could fudge and still get paid), and nobody checked the work. Still seems like a long shot. Typically we ask, "Cui bono?"
- vlovich123 5y agoThe guy who’s now a senior executive at a very large public company making quite good money and was very well regarded in the field for a long time for making a breakthrough discovery?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- badmadrad 5y agoThe things that jumps out to me is how statistics and studies like this shape the larger cultural discussions, legal discussions, and public policy discussions. It really shows how data can be munged, cherry picked, and altered to fit any narrative you want to send. Luckily over time scientific method should correct this but these can do serious damage in the short term.
- tpoacher 5y agoYou mean diligent humans can correct this. The Scientific Method is but a tool. One used during the fraudulent phase of research as much as during the detection one.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gnicholas 5y ago> “I did not fabricate the data,” he insists. “I am willing to do a lie detection test on that.” I imagine a world-famous psychologist probably knows how to beat a lie detector test. Not that it proves he's lying, just that this statement doesn't mean much.
- BoHerfIIIJrEsq 5y agoIt's another layer of humor to this thing, that the proposal is to resolve the issue with a phrenology-ouija board type of thing, known to be incredibly unreliable. Why would anyone even mention a lie detector?
- gnicholas 5y agoThey're only unreliable when administered to laypeople. When administered to psychologists, polygraphs reliably prove them to be truth-tellers!
- wesleywt 5y agoNot surprising that a psuedoscientist wants to take a psuedoscientific test.
- cik 5y agoI'm a huge believer in letting the chips fall, but let's see what investigations yield prior to castigating any individual. Now personally, reading about Dan's career, his writing, his talks, and even knowing one of his friends from the army, I fully believe, and want to continue to believe that he's innocent. His research, and his writing have proven fundamental to my world view in so many ways. He's frequently helped change how I think about things, approach problems, and generally view possibilities. That however is anecdotal. Dan would be the first to say let's look at the data. So, let's wait, and look at the data.
- Borrible 5y agoAh, come on. They just wanted to test if anyone notices. A meta-experiment on the Replication Crisis, so to speak. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis Or some Excel BS. As I already said elsewhere: Nothing is true, everything is Excel... http://web.archive.org/web/20160827085658/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/26/an-alarming-number-of-scientific-papers-contain-excel-errors/ http://web.archive.org/web/20160827085658/https://www.washin... Just wait for his next book...
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.is/kSZmX https://archive.is/kSZmX
- neilv 5y agoIntuitive argument against suggestions that Ariely might have faked the data... It seems unlikely to me that someone of Ariely's mathematical knowledge and research experience would fake data in such an obvious manner. (Full disclosure: I've met with Ariely a couple times, 20 years ago, about cross-disciplinary research, and have a favorable impression of his character.)
- ALittleLight 5y agoThis seems like a "It's too obvious" defense. I tend to think that very obvious explanations are usually right. Besides, contrary to the fraud being too obvious, it went undetected for a decade. From what I can tell the data was faked by Ariely or the insurance company. Why would the insurance company fake data to support Ariely's hypothesis? What do they gain from that? Presumably, the insurance company is trying to find interventions to make customers behave more honestly - faking data to get spurious answers seems counter productive. Ariely on the other hand has clear benefits from faking the data. He has the means, motive, and opportunity. On top of that, there's no other plausible suspect.
- neilv 5y agoWhat sounds obvious (from how it was described in one of the articles) is that the data is fake. And that someone fabricated data that anyone who hadn't slept through the first day of Stats 101 would understand is fake data. If I'm being creative for a moment, I can totally imagine a few other plausible scenarios, which also seem more likely than Ariely knowingly publishing obviously fake data. I'm not going to mention those scenarios, because, in the kind of court of public opinion/speculation like we're seeing even in this very HN post, people are effectively convicted and executed upon speculation. These are real people, consider they might be innocent, and therefore treat them as we'd like to be treated, were we innocent yet suddenly fell into the crosshairs of the Twittersphere loose canons.