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What the author classifies as "intellectual dishonesty" is what I'd usually call "lack of scientific rigor." If the problem or discussion at hand is one that r

What the author classifies as "intellectual dishonesty" is what I'd usually call "lack of scientific rigor." If the problem or discussion at hand is one that requires rigor to be meaningful or productive, then lack of rigor is definitely a problem, but it's not an action in bad faith. Lack of rigor becomes bad-faith acting at the exact moment someone says "interesting result, send me your data and method of collection so I can try to duplicate" (i.e. 'send me the serialized representation of your rigor') and your response includes an excuse for why that isn't available anymore, or can't be shared, or will cost the asker a prohibitive amount of money or time, etc.

jonnathanson 15y ago
I would define intellectual dishonesty, in its most basic form, as lying to oneself. If you're intentionally lying to others, you're being dishonest with them. But if you're glossing over your own second-guesses, or taking shortcuts you know to be lazy, or not bringing as much rigor to a situation as you know you are capable of bringing, then you are in some ways "lying" to yourself. Either you are not using your full intellectual capabilities, or you are convincing yourself that you have when you have not. In this sense, "lack of scientific rigor" would be a subset of intellectual dishonesty. It's not always undertaken in bad faith, but when it's undertaken consciously, then it's dishonest.
flatline 15y ago
This brought to mind Mendel's experiments on inherited traits, which I don't believe anyone has been successful at reproducing as they were stated. It's unknown whether he got extremely lucky with his pea experiments or fudged the data, but he should not have had a large enough sample to provide the kinds of results he used to extract his laws of inheritance. This was during a different era in scientific research that did not demand nearly the kind of rigor we see today, yet somehow we still got along. The more egregious kind of dishonesty is something like the Bell Curve, where a single exceptional example from a study (one out of 21 if memory serves) was used to essentially propose that minority racial groups were genetically inferior.

jonnathanson 15y ago

I would define intellectual dishonesty, in its most basic form, as lying to oneself. If you're intentionally lying to others, you're being dishonest with them. But if you're glossing over your own second-guesses, or taking shortcuts you know to be lazy, or not bringing as much rigor to a situation as you know you are capable of bringing, then you are in some ways "lying" to yourself. Either you are not using your full intellectual capabilities, or you are convincing yourself that you have when you have not. In this sense, "lack of scientific rigor" would be a subset of intellectual dishonesty. It's not always undertaken in bad faith, but when it's undertaken consciously, then it's dishonest.

flatline 15y ago

This brought to mind Mendel's experiments on inherited traits, which I don't believe anyone has been successful at reproducing as they were stated. It's unknown whether he got extremely lucky with his pea experiments or fudged the data, but he should not have had a large enough sample to provide the kinds of results he used to extract his laws of inheritance. This was during a different era in scientific research that did not demand nearly the kind of rigor we see today, yet somehow we still got along. The more egregious kind of dishonesty is something like the Bell Curve, where a single exceptional example from a study (one out of 21 if memory serves) was used to essentially propose that minority racial groups were genetically inferior.