15 ms·

Harvard dishonesty expert accused of dishonesty

292 points by hansmeierbaum 3y ago

necovek 3y ago
[flagged]
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36424373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36424373> In Comments ... Don't be snarky. ... Please don't sneer ... Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.... Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.... Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html> And finally, that would be her expertise.
  - necovek 3y ago
    My apologies for assuming it's a he: not sure exactly what of the rules do you think I broke, as I don't think I was snarky (sounds closest). I was mostly making fun of the language we humans tend to use sometimes: a car expert would be applying their expertise on cars, a botany expert would do it in botany, but it's not an "honesty expert" but a "dishonesty expert"? I do believe that's an interesting point to make, even if — obviously — at least someone has misread the joke as something else.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      HN members are generally presumed to be familiar with standard tools for subverting paywalls (see also HN Guidelines). Or simply reading the comments thread to find such a workaround. In this case the paywall link is now at the top of the comments thread, though it was posted a few minutes after your own comment. Commenting that you didn't read the article, then making a series of shallow and incorrect assumptions about the circumstances ... seems on the nose for shallow, dismissive snark. Further, it violates HN's prime directive: "What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404>. I'm not a mod, but thought I'd address why your comment might be engendering the response it has.
      - necovek 3y ago
        Part of the guidelines is also to assume best intent: my point was not about paywall (which was admittedly a bad and superfluous excuse, yet I care not to expend time on it further). My intent was to highlight an inconsistency in naming a skill with a negative connotation (dishonesty). How can I more explicitly direct the conversation to why is this skill a "dishonesty expertise" (or rather, an "expert on (ethics and) dishonesty")? I still believe my actual point is "intellectually curious". What other skills are there that are like this? Is there a bad-at-sewing expert who's actually good at sewing?
        dredmorbius 3y ago
        <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22Please%20don%27t%20pick%20the%20most%20provocative%20thing%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> Four replies deep into this thread, are we discussing topics of intellectual curiosity ... or ... something else? That itself is a strong indicator of the issue here. I strongly recommend pg's discussion of comments, particularly about their relationship to kudzu: <http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
askiiart 3y ago
https://archive.is/uZkrj https://archive.is/uZkrj
jamessb 3y ago
The FT article says: 'A group of academics who compile the Data Colada blog about the evidence behind behavioural science has started publishing a series of posts in which they say they will detail “evidence of fraud in four academic papers” co-authored by Gino'. The first two of these blog posts are: https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/110 https://datacolada.org/110
- Trombone12 3y ago
  From the second link: > students approached this “Year in School” question in a number of different ways. For example, a junior might have written “junior”, or “2016” or “class of 2016” or “3” (to signify that they are in their third year). All of these responses are reasonable. > A less reasonable response is “Harvard” [...] Nevertheless, the data file indicates that 20 students did so. Moreover, and adding to the peculiarity, those students’ responses are all within 35 rows (450 through 484) of each other in the posted dataset In addition, of these 20 very suspicious rows, most were strongly confirming the hypothesis of the authors. Likewise the first link shows that, in a spreadsheet containing outcomes sorted by treatment group, someone had manually moved rows from the span of rows containing one kind of treatment to a span containing outcomes from a different treatment. These provably manually reordered rows also contained most of the strong evidence for the predicted effect...
  - rossdavidh 3y ago
    It all suggests that, in addition to falsifying data, they had become so blase about falsifying data that they weren't particularly careful about it. Which suggests that they may have been falsifying data for a long time...
    - qup 3y ago
      Alternatively, they had such little practice that they weren't good at it.
      - rossdavidh 3y ago
evanb 3y ago
The primary explanation: http://datacolada.org/109 http://datacolada.org/109
hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
The title is clickbait in the sense that it suggests that we should expect this person to be super honest, and instead they were found to be dishonest. On the contrary, I think we should expect them to be dishonest, and they are. They literally have a book named “Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life”, what did you expect? Of course they're dishonest.
- rdlw 3y ago
  Yes, the title is clickbait because you're smarter than everyone else and so are not surprised.
  - hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
    Being surprised that an expert in dishonesty is dishonest is like being surprised that a lot of pyromaniacs become firemen or that a lot of pedos become teachers and priests - it's something they spend a lot of time doing and thinking about, it makes sense that they'd want to do it for a job if they can. No, I don't think spotting this pattern makes me smarter than everyone else.
    - xdavidliu 3y ago
      do experts in criminals commit crimes? Are experts in autism autistic? Are experts in military history bellicose?
      - hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
        "are" betrays a very black and white view of the world. I think they're all overrepresented, yes.
        xdavidliu 3y ago
        you're implying that an expert in criminology is more likely than non-experts in criminology to commit crimes, and similarly "more likely" for the other two examples?
anoxor 3y ago
We have decided we are a post-truth society. Turns out solving that problem is non-trivial when we rely on experts that are themselves human who view the world as post-truth.
- duxup 3y ago
  I don't know that any given lie(s) means someone believes in "post-truth". I suspect most lies are just short term convinces.
- jrockway 3y ago
  We've always been a post-truth society. I think it's just how humans are. We want easy answers, and if there are none, we invent them. I don't think that the human from 1AD is better than the human from 2023AD for example. What we used to blame on God we now blame on 5G or whatever. Same stuff, different details. What has changed in the past 2000 years is the availability of information. Nothing is 100% true other than defined Universal constants. Everything else is on a spectrum. Those that want to get closer to 100% truth have many tools to get them along. Those that don't care can ask ChatGPT and get something 25% true. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. That's just how people are, and AI isn't really changing that.
  - adamrezich 3y ago
    yeah but we had that really comfortable era for awhile there, where mass information dissemination was centralized in the hands of a few major institutions, so everyone was more or less on the same page—all you had to do was pick up a newspaper, or listen to the radio, or watch news on television. this gave us the illusion that we were in a world of Truth, because why would these centralized corporations ever lie to us, or massage the facts in any way? it's The News, of course it's inherently trustworthy. then the Web came about, causing some to see cracks in the foundations. then the iPhone was released, social media took off, and now the news monoculture is almost (but not quite) dead, and we're back to fending for ourselves in this onslaught of information.
    - 3y ago
drewda 3y ago
First reported in the Chronicle of Higher Ed: https://archive.is/0zOU8 https://archive.is/0zOU8
Dowwie 3y ago
That's weak-- accused. Also, who cares if they did lie? Knowing about dishonesty is not the same as positioning oneself as a beacon for morality. This is not front-page HN worthy material.
- einpoklum 3y ago
  Well, this way, we could have a followup story next week: "Harvard dishonesty expert dishonestly accused of dishonesty"
  - Dowwie 3y ago
    Hilarious!
- resolutebat 3y ago
  The actual blog posts make it crystal clear that the data was manipulated to make it provide the desired results. https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/110 https://datacolada.org/110
  - bombcar 3y ago
    This blog has a lot of detailed posts if you're interested in this sort of thing, deep dives into how you find fake data (helpful if you need to fake your data better!).
- pyrale 3y ago
  Reading the material proof and Harvard's reaction, the "accused of" is merely journalistic caution for a red-handed case. > Also, who cares if they did lie They didn't just lie, they tampered with collected data used for scientific research, harming their co-authors' work and reputation and giving fake leads to their field of study, thus wasting their peers' time spent on reproducing the case. It may also have had an effect on promotions that their peers should have gotten and on the way people got managed, based on these behavioral studies. Also the evidence collection displayed in another reply is technically interesting.
- 3y ago
einpoklum 3y ago
Well, isn't it ironic... don't you think? (and if you didn't catch that reference, have a look at Prof. Gino's photo.)
alexfromapex 3y ago
I am shocked to see no one has yet said "how can they be an expert if they aren't also a practitioner?" :D
timcavel 3y ago
[dead]
wittjeff 3y ago
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely, author of (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies, later accused of data fraud and academic misconduct.
- m463 3y ago
  I read his dishonesty book and now I wonder if any of it is actually wrong (although most of it made sense at the time)
  - tobinfricke 3y ago
    Is Dan Ariely implicated in any of this? My understanding was that he was cleared.
    - atchoo 3y ago
      Sounds like it. Take a look at his wikipedia page. The Gino/Ariely paper that was retracted in 2021 has this to say: > Dan Ariely was the only author to have had access to the data prior to transmitting it in its fraudulent form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely
  - taeric 3y ago
    There are few things out there as dangerous as arguments that "make sense." Lots of things can do that, all while being rather flawed. I am curious to know more on this one. Odd to see so much pointing fingers happening. I'm guessing that isn't as rare as I would assume it is?
- hammock 3y ago
  Also Jonah Lehrer, author of pop science books Imagine and How We Decide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Lehrer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Lehrer
  - renewiltord 3y ago
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
Adding to the irony: She is the best-selling author, most recently, of “Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules in Work and Life.”
- edgyquant 3y ago
  As the adage goes, “if you talk about it, be about it.”
- cebsoto 3y ago
  The book comes across as being very anecdotal....it is easy to mold anecdotes to whatever point of view you are trying to get across. In their zeal to find hard facts to back up their theories, did they play hard and fast with the rules?
- TylerE 3y ago
  Yet another example for assumption that all book titles with that sort of semi-colon + second sentence title are universally lowest common denominator crap, at best.
  - pxeger1 3y ago
    Not that it matters, but that's a colon, not a semicolon
- Kamq 3y ago
  That doesn't seem ironic. Someone writing a book arguing for breaking the rules is exactly who I would expect to break the rules. Or is the irony here that someone actually took an idea seriously and followed through on it?
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    I suppose the irony is in the fact that it evidently didn't pay off because I can't imagine that one book was worth ruining her career. I think the general thesis is questionable, for work especially, because in business contrary to the stereotype being honest and following the rules does pay off in the long run.
bluepod4 3y ago
I mean, it takes one to know one.
Y_Y 3y ago
Whoever is the most honest person on hn, I hereby accuse that person of being a dishonest, impolite dog-botherer.
StanislavPetrov 3y ago
Dishonesty is a prerequisite for working for any large, legacy institution.
paulpauper 3y ago
Maybe he is to blame, but the social sciences in general are inherently vulnerable to this sort of problem. There have been many instances of similar incidents over the past few decades or so. not just overt academic fraud but misconstruction of data, excel errors, poor methodology, publication bias, etc. This calls into doubt if anything in the social sciences can really be trusted.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  This is just you presenting your preexisting beliefs. We saw a widely publicized and long career of false data in biology over the past couple of years following roughly the same structure (just sticking garbage data into excel spreadsheets). Methodological errors and publication bias are also widespread in CS. When I was in grad school, the method I was told to use to choose tools was to choose the second best tool in a paper, since the authors' tool was invariably the best but their evaluations were inherently less likely to transition into my work. Drawing a further conclusion that whole entire fields of research are simply untrustworthy based on media coverage of bad actors, especially as a nonexpert, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The field that is actually tackling the reproducibility crisis even in a small way is Psychology. This is one reason why there are so many "X doesn't actually replicate" headlines. Yes, replication studies should be even more common. But it is hard to conclude that the social sciences are uniquely horrible when Psychology is actually ahead of the curve here.
- rossdavidh 3y ago
  Everything you say is true, except the part that implies it's just the social sciences. I don't know of any field of science that has looked into replicability in a serious way, that hasn't found similar problems.
- currymj 3y ago
  life sciences is just as bad if not worse -- you can read news stories about many cases of outright photoshopped images in biology papers by respected researchers in major journals. physics has a good reputation, but then you hear of things like apparent fraud in that quantum computing paper about Majorana fermions... computer science actually seems relatively okay as far as avoiding outright fraud, probably because there's such a strong norm of sharing code. plenty of questionable research practices though.
zetazzed 3y ago
Individual researchers have huge incentives for fraud, but large universities are the ones who most need to look inward here. HBS could become a beacon for stronger research practices in this area - requiring study preregistration and data collection methods that carefully trace provenance and changes. If HBS has fewer but better quirky marketing psychology studies, their reputation will do well. However for an individual researcher, the benefits to using extremely rigorous practices are not as clear, while the costs are high. A random grad student is not going to be able to establish a norm of data traceability. I worked in this area (at Harvard as well) a bit as a grad student and can absolutely understand the temptation for the lighter version of this. If you can drop one outlier group, you get a cool story and a job at a top 10 b-school. Or keep it, get a muddled result, and try again for a better paper next year. I ended up just leaving the field entirely as the whole "our system massively rewards dodgy practices" vibe really bummed me out.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  For similar reasons, I left academia. I joined academia for the pursuit of truth, and forth the glory of Knowing. But it turned out that academia doesn’t really do this anymore, it just sells itself as doing these things. Academia is entirely a “reputation” system, as it turns out, from paper publishing to student-evaluations to “public rankings.” As it turns out, the capitalist marketplace must also contend with these issues, but imho (and somewhat counterintuitively), it does so somewhat more honestly.
  - bwestergard 3y ago
    I'd like to hear more about how you've found more honesty in the private sector. "academia doesn’t really do this anymore" I've heard this from more than one current or former academic. Some argue it's due to market logic entering academia. It sounds like you take a different view?
    - 93po 3y ago
      I have no idea what I'm talking about but I would speculate that looking at how.much.freaking.money these schools have provides us a window into what these schools actually focus on. The focus seems to be making and having a ton of money. This compounded by the trends we see in fewer tenure positions, worse pay for associate profs, a glut of admin positions and admin pay, etc. So yeah, I'd say the observation that market logic is entering academia has some surface level reasons to support it.
seydor 3y ago
Well how else would she be an expert?
- mrstone 3y ago
  Francesca Gino is a woman.
JohnFen 3y ago
Hey, if you want a job done right, call in an expert.
AHOHA 3y ago
And then I’m accused of having trust issues!!
some_random 3y ago
I've lost a lot of confidence in the practice of science in the last decade or so from the Replication Crisis and worse, the response to the crisis from the scientific community (the phrase "methodological terrorist" comes to mind).
rqtwteye 3y ago
There is this pattern where things are always the opposite of their message: - Dishonesty expert is dishonest - Politicians who constantly talk about freedom want to restrict anything that doesn't fit their world view - Militant anti-gay preachers hire call boys - Diversity teams are the least diverse
- johntb86 3y ago
  At least ethicists are about as ethical as other people: https://qz.com/1582149/ethicists-are-no-more-ethical-than-the-rest-of-us-study-finds https://qz.com/1582149/ethicists-are-no-more-ethical-than-th...
- WalterBright 3y ago
  I've always wondered if ethics class impart any ethics at all. If you're not an ethical person, why would you become one after taking such a class? If you're already an ethical person, taking a class in it is pointless.
  - telotortium 3y ago
    The fact that the term "ethics" is used so much in a CYA way, or else as transparent rationalization of whatever worldview is currently dominant among the PMC, has given me an almost allergic reaction to that word.
  - fasterik 3y ago
    Ethical theory is an interesting subject in its own right. Even if studying it doesn't make you a better person, that doesn't make it useless, any more than studying abstract areas of math or physics is useless. That being said, some work in practical ethics has had a huge impact. Peter Singer's work on animal ethics started the modern animal rights movement, and his essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" has inspired many people to donate a lot more to charity than they otherwise would.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
DonHopkins 3y ago
Seriously, when the goin' gets tough, you don't want a criminal lawyer, all right? You want a criminal lawyer, know what I'm sayin'? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvlEqAjg8aU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvlEqAjg8aU
TheMagicHorsey 3y ago
A very very long time ago I did some programming to help a friend of a friend analyze a data set. The data set was from public schools and it was being used to inform some policies at the state level. All I can say is, the data submitted from many schools had very disturbing patterns of regularity (as in identical records on many unexpected metrics that you would not expect) ... like 10 or 15 records in a row, in the same rough geographic area (we didn't have exact addresses) with the exact same scores in all subjects as well as reading and match assessments. Basically it looked like someone had copy pasted rows of data over and over while keeping the original unique ID numbers (end result, different ID numbers representing different students, all having the exact same scores). And guess what ... whenever I saw that pattern, the scores were all very much above average. You didn't see that pattern with below average scores. I told the person I was working with about the data and suggested it was fraudulent and she became concerned and raised it with her supervisor. Within about 24 hours I no longer had access to the data sets. And the friend of a friend just said that she didn't need help anymore. I suppose I could have raised a fuss and contacted a journalist but all I had was columns of data without context. Plus at the time I'm ashamed to say I was playing a lot of World of Warcraft and not inclined to do much else that required effort.
- trabant00 3y ago
  This perfectly matches my experience in similar cases. Just not in academia but in business. Policy always represents somebody's interests. "Data driven" is an excellent cover when you control the data. You get to eat the cake and look good while doing it.
leoh 3y ago
Self-licensing strikes again https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing
ARandomerDude 3y ago
Oh look, her primary field is Behavioral Science. I'm shocked. Really. /s
- rossdavidh 3y ago
  I have the feeling that the difference between the social sciences, which have been rocked by the replication crisis pretty hard, and every other part of science, is that the social sciences are aware of their problem. I'm not aware of any field of science that has looked for problems with replicability, that has not found them. Most have not looked.
neilv 3y ago
Recent HN post over US holiday weekend: Data Falsificada (Part 1): “Clusterfake” – Data Colada (datacolada.org) | 37 points by malshe 4 days ago | 8 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374255
rossdavidh 3y ago
From the original Data Colada article (http://datacolada.org/109 http://datacolada.org/109): "We understand that Harvard had access to much more information than we did, including, where applicable, the original data collected using Qualtrics survey software. If the fraud was carried out by collecting real data on Qualtrics and then altering the downloaded data files, as is likely to be the case for three of these papers, then the original Qualtrics files would provide airtight evidence of fraud. (Conversely, if our concerns were misguided, then those files would provide airtight evidence that they were misguided.)" It does not appear that Harvard found any evidence that they were misguided...
neilv 3y ago
In situations like this, people should demand credible investigations, then wait quietly while that proceeds -- avoiding trial-by-Twitter and summary execution upon accusation.
- wpietri 3y ago
  You're putting the burden on "people" here. I think instead, the right way to look at it is that institutions should provide both prompt reactive investigations and proactive work to keep investigations from being necessary. The reason people get thoroughly upset here rather than waiting quietly is that this stuff gets ignored or covered up all the time.
  - neilv 3y ago
    What if I said "expect" rather than "demand"? I agree that one of the problems is that we've sometimes been given reason not to expect an institution to have integrity. One of the other problems is that public discourse is often lacking in integrity, as well.
fwungy 3y ago
Someone once told me that ethicists were often actually psychopaths, that people with a working ethical sensibility were not interested in studying it. Seems possible.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
uw_rob 3y ago
> (4) The evidence of fraud detailed in our report almost certainly represents a mere subset of the evidence that the Harvard investigators were able to uncover about these four articles. For example, we have heard from some HBS faculty that Harvard’s internal report was ~1,200 pages long, which is 1,182 pages longer than the one we sent to HBS. Great example that highlights the balance of presumption of innocence with the asymmetrical bullshit principal. This person should be referred to criminal prosecution for fraud as a deterrent to others. 1,200 page reports to provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt is not scalable.
Daub 3y ago
Time perhaps to post this classic from XKCD: https://www.r-bloggers.com/2018/09/xkcd-curve-fitting-in-r/ https://www.r-bloggers.com/2018/09/xkcd-curve-fitting-in-r/ To anyone who has worked in research, the various strategies it shows would be tragically familiar.
igmor 3y ago
well, he is supposed to be an expert in it. Why are you so surprised?
bcd3169 3y ago
I swear to god the biggest red flag for any academic work is association with HBS. They perfected the art of bsing and writing airport books
moi2388 3y ago
It’s behind a paywall.. also, just stop trusting anything anybody from a social science says. Pretty much everything they say is nonsense.
fsckboy 3y ago
TL;DR a number of different parties are stating pretty unequivocally that there is fraud here in her work; however, no evidence is presented for our inspection, so while I don't doubt it, it's just a lot of "he says/she also says". I'm not entirely clear on this but I don't think it's too wrong to say: the fraud concerns, for example, papers based on trials where people are asked to fill out questionnaires where some pledge honesty before and others pledge honesty after and these results are compared against actual insurance company data, and conclusions are drawn as to what makes people be honest.
- civilized 3y ago
  The evidence is available in the linked blog article from Data Colada, which is the real source of the story. https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/110 https://datacolada.org/110
justinclift 3y ago
Ahhh, they misunderstood something vitally important. This guy's speciality is Applied Dishonesty, so he's not the abstract sort with just theory and no practise. ;)
- throwaway744678 3y ago
  Pretty sure Francesca Gino identifies as a she! But then, who knows? [0] https://twitter.com/francescagino https://twitter.com/francescagino
  - johnwheeler 3y ago
    He’s talking about Ariely, who the first blog post seems to implicate by saying the xls files came from his computer and none of the coauthors were responsible (Gino listed as a coauthor). Does this implicate Ariely or did I read that wrong?
FreshStart 3y ago
All anti-corruption departments are either ousted by the growth or integrated. Or you are integrated, fail that, then ousted for failed integration. Conclusion: ablative process design. Everytime corruption sets in, the system sheds "skin" and starts anew with a fresh layer.
chalst 3y ago
Andrew Gelman has written about this case, drawing parallels with past cases and asking about the psychology of the fraudsters. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/06/21/ted-talking-data-fakers-who-write-books-about-lying-and-rule-breaking-whats-up-with-that/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/06/21/ted-talkin...
- chalst 3y ago
  He has returned to the topic, this time with a focus on those who are capable of exposing the fraud but instead turn a blind eye. He calls this 'passive corruption'. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/06/23/its-worse-than-it-sounds-passive-corruption-in-the-social-sciences/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/06/23/its-worse-...

292 points by hansmeierbaum 3y ago

necovek 3y ago

[flagged]

dredmorbius 3y ago
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36424373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36424373> In Comments ... Don't be snarky. ... Please don't sneer ... Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.... Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.... Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html> And finally, that would be her expertise.
- necovek 3y ago
  My apologies for assuming it's a he: not sure exactly what of the rules do you think I broke, as I don't think I was snarky (sounds closest). I was mostly making fun of the language we humans tend to use sometimes: a car expert would be applying their expertise on cars, a botany expert would do it in botany, but it's not an "honesty expert" but a "dishonesty expert"? I do believe that's an interesting point to make, even if — obviously — at least someone has misread the joke as something else.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    HN members are generally presumed to be familiar with standard tools for subverting paywalls (see also HN Guidelines). Or simply reading the comments thread to find such a workaround. In this case the paywall link is now at the top of the comments thread, though it was posted a few minutes after your own comment. Commenting that you didn't read the article, then making a series of shallow and incorrect assumptions about the circumstances ... seems on the nose for shallow, dismissive snark. Further, it violates HN's prime directive: "What Hacker News is: a place for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity and civil, substantive comments." <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404>. I'm not a mod, but thought I'd address why your comment might be engendering the response it has.
    - necovek 3y ago
      Part of the guidelines is also to assume best intent: my point was not about paywall (which was admittedly a bad and superfluous excuse, yet I care not to expend time on it further). My intent was to highlight an inconsistency in naming a skill with a negative connotation (dishonesty). How can I more explicitly direct the conversation to why is this skill a "dishonesty expertise" (or rather, an "expert on (ethics and) dishonesty")? I still believe my actual point is "intellectually curious". What other skills are there that are like this? Is there a bad-at-sewing expert who's actually good at sewing?
      - dredmorbius 3y ago
        <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22Please%20don%27t%20pick%20the%20most%20provocative%20thing%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> Four replies deep into this thread, are we discussing topics of intellectual curiosity ... or ... something else? That itself is a strong indicator of the issue here. I strongly recommend pg's discussion of comments, particularly about their relationship to kudzu: <http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]

askiiart 3y ago

https://archive.is/uZkrj https://archive.is/uZkrj

jamessb 3y ago

The FT article says: 'A group of academics who compile the Data Colada blog about the evidence behind behavioural science has started publishing a series of posts in which they say they will detail “evidence of fraud in four academic papers” co-authored by Gino'. The first two of these blog posts are: https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/110 https://datacolada.org/110

Trombone12 3y ago
From the second link: > students approached this “Year in School” question in a number of different ways. For example, a junior might have written “junior”, or “2016” or “class of 2016” or “3” (to signify that they are in their third year). All of these responses are reasonable. > A less reasonable response is “Harvard” [...] Nevertheless, the data file indicates that 20 students did so. Moreover, and adding to the peculiarity, those students’ responses are all within 35 rows (450 through 484) of each other in the posted dataset In addition, of these 20 very suspicious rows, most were strongly confirming the hypothesis of the authors. Likewise the first link shows that, in a spreadsheet containing outcomes sorted by treatment group, someone had manually moved rows from the span of rows containing one kind of treatment to a span containing outcomes from a different treatment. These provably manually reordered rows also contained most of the strong evidence for the predicted effect...
- rossdavidh 3y ago
  It all suggests that, in addition to falsifying data, they had become so blase about falsifying data that they weren't particularly careful about it. Which suggests that they may have been falsifying data for a long time...
  - qup 3y ago
    Alternatively, they had such little practice that they weren't good at it.
    - rossdavidh 3y ago

evanb 3y ago

The primary explanation: http://datacolada.org/109 http://datacolada.org/109

hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago

The title is clickbait in the sense that it suggests that we should expect this person to be super honest, and instead they were found to be dishonest. On the contrary, I think we should expect them to be dishonest, and they are. They literally have a book named “Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life”, what did you expect? Of course they're dishonest.

rdlw 3y ago
Yes, the title is clickbait because you're smarter than everyone else and so are not surprised.
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
  Being surprised that an expert in dishonesty is dishonest is like being surprised that a lot of pyromaniacs become firemen or that a lot of pedos become teachers and priests - it's something they spend a lot of time doing and thinking about, it makes sense that they'd want to do it for a job if they can. No, I don't think spotting this pattern makes me smarter than everyone else.
  - xdavidliu 3y ago
    do experts in criminals commit crimes? Are experts in autism autistic? Are experts in military history bellicose?
    - hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
      "are" betrays a very black and white view of the world. I think they're all overrepresented, yes.
      - xdavidliu 3y ago
        you're implying that an expert in criminology is more likely than non-experts in criminology to commit crimes, and similarly "more likely" for the other two examples?

anoxor 3y ago

We have decided we are a post-truth society. Turns out solving that problem is non-trivial when we rely on experts that are themselves human who view the world as post-truth.

duxup 3y ago
I don't know that any given lie(s) means someone believes in "post-truth". I suspect most lies are just short term convinces.
jrockway 3y ago
We've always been a post-truth society. I think it's just how humans are. We want easy answers, and if there are none, we invent them. I don't think that the human from 1AD is better than the human from 2023AD for example. What we used to blame on God we now blame on 5G or whatever. Same stuff, different details. What has changed in the past 2000 years is the availability of information. Nothing is 100% true other than defined Universal constants. Everything else is on a spectrum. Those that want to get closer to 100% truth have many tools to get them along. Those that don't care can ask ChatGPT and get something 25% true. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. That's just how people are, and AI isn't really changing that.
- adamrezich 3y ago
  yeah but we had that really comfortable era for awhile there, where mass information dissemination was centralized in the hands of a few major institutions, so everyone was more or less on the same page—all you had to do was pick up a newspaper, or listen to the radio, or watch news on television. this gave us the illusion that we were in a world of Truth, because why would these centralized corporations ever lie to us, or massage the facts in any way? it's The News, of course it's inherently trustworthy. then the Web came about, causing some to see cracks in the foundations. then the iPhone was released, social media took off, and now the news monoculture is almost (but not quite) dead, and we're back to fending for ourselves in this onslaught of information.
  - 3y ago

drewda 3y ago

First reported in the Chronicle of Higher Ed: https://archive.is/0zOU8 https://archive.is/0zOU8

Dowwie 3y ago

That's weak-- accused. Also, who cares if they did lie? Knowing about dishonesty is not the same as positioning oneself as a beacon for morality. This is not front-page HN worthy material.

einpoklum 3y ago
Well, this way, we could have a followup story next week: "Harvard dishonesty expert dishonestly accused of dishonesty"
- Dowwie 3y ago
  Hilarious!
resolutebat 3y ago
The actual blog posts make it crystal clear that the data was manipulated to make it provide the desired results. https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/110 https://datacolada.org/110
- bombcar 3y ago
  This blog has a lot of detailed posts if you're interested in this sort of thing, deep dives into how you find fake data (helpful if you need to fake your data better!).
pyrale 3y ago
Reading the material proof and Harvard's reaction, the "accused of" is merely journalistic caution for a red-handed case. > Also, who cares if they did lie They didn't just lie, they tampered with collected data used for scientific research, harming their co-authors' work and reputation and giving fake leads to their field of study, thus wasting their peers' time spent on reproducing the case. It may also have had an effect on promotions that their peers should have gotten and on the way people got managed, based on these behavioral studies. Also the evidence collection displayed in another reply is technically interesting.
3y ago

einpoklum 3y ago

Well, isn't it ironic... don't you think? (and if you didn't catch that reference, have a look at Prof. Gino's photo.)

alexfromapex 3y ago

I am shocked to see no one has yet said "how can they be an expert if they aren't also a practitioner?" :D

timcavel 3y ago

[dead]

wittjeff 3y ago

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely, author of (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies, later accused of data fraud and academic misconduct.

m463 3y ago
I read his dishonesty book and now I wonder if any of it is actually wrong (although most of it made sense at the time)
- tobinfricke 3y ago
  Is Dan Ariely implicated in any of this? My understanding was that he was cleared.
  - atchoo 3y ago
    Sounds like it. Take a look at his wikipedia page. The Gino/Ariely paper that was retracted in 2021 has this to say: > Dan Ariely was the only author to have had access to the data prior to transmitting it in its fraudulent form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely
- taeric 3y ago
  There are few things out there as dangerous as arguments that "make sense." Lots of things can do that, all while being rather flawed. I am curious to know more on this one. Odd to see so much pointing fingers happening. I'm guessing that isn't as rare as I would assume it is?
hammock 3y ago
Also Jonah Lehrer, author of pop science books Imagine and How We Decide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Lehrer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Lehrer
- renewiltord 3y ago

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

Adding to the irony: She is the best-selling author, most recently, of “Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules in Work and Life.”

edgyquant 3y ago
As the adage goes, “if you talk about it, be about it.”
cebsoto 3y ago
The book comes across as being very anecdotal....it is easy to mold anecdotes to whatever point of view you are trying to get across. In their zeal to find hard facts to back up their theories, did they play hard and fast with the rules?
TylerE 3y ago
Yet another example for assumption that all book titles with that sort of semi-colon + second sentence title are universally lowest common denominator crap, at best.
- pxeger1 3y ago
  Not that it matters, but that's a colon, not a semicolon
Kamq 3y ago
That doesn't seem ironic. Someone writing a book arguing for breaking the rules is exactly who I would expect to break the rules. Or is the irony here that someone actually took an idea seriously and followed through on it?
- Barrin92 3y ago
  I suppose the irony is in the fact that it evidently didn't pay off because I can't imagine that one book was worth ruining her career. I think the general thesis is questionable, for work especially, because in business contrary to the stereotype being honest and following the rules does pay off in the long run.

bluepod4 3y ago

I mean, it takes one to know one.

Y_Y 3y ago

Whoever is the most honest person on hn, I hereby accuse that person of being a dishonest, impolite dog-botherer.

StanislavPetrov 3y ago

Dishonesty is a prerequisite for working for any large, legacy institution.

paulpauper 3y ago

Maybe he is to blame, but the social sciences in general are inherently vulnerable to this sort of problem. There have been many instances of similar incidents over the past few decades or so. not just overt academic fraud but misconstruction of data, excel errors, poor methodology, publication bias, etc. This calls into doubt if anything in the social sciences can really be trusted.

UncleMeat 3y ago
This is just you presenting your preexisting beliefs. We saw a widely publicized and long career of false data in biology over the past couple of years following roughly the same structure (just sticking garbage data into excel spreadsheets). Methodological errors and publication bias are also widespread in CS. When I was in grad school, the method I was told to use to choose tools was to choose the second best tool in a paper, since the authors' tool was invariably the best but their evaluations were inherently less likely to transition into my work. Drawing a further conclusion that whole entire fields of research are simply untrustworthy based on media coverage of bad actors, especially as a nonexpert, is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The field that is actually tackling the reproducibility crisis even in a small way is Psychology. This is one reason why there are so many "X doesn't actually replicate" headlines. Yes, replication studies should be even more common. But it is hard to conclude that the social sciences are uniquely horrible when Psychology is actually ahead of the curve here.
rossdavidh 3y ago
Everything you say is true, except the part that implies it's just the social sciences. I don't know of any field of science that has looked into replicability in a serious way, that hasn't found similar problems.
currymj 3y ago
life sciences is just as bad if not worse -- you can read news stories about many cases of outright photoshopped images in biology papers by respected researchers in major journals. physics has a good reputation, but then you hear of things like apparent fraud in that quantum computing paper about Majorana fermions... computer science actually seems relatively okay as far as avoiding outright fraud, probably because there's such a strong norm of sharing code. plenty of questionable research practices though.

zetazzed 3y ago

Individual researchers have huge incentives for fraud, but large universities are the ones who most need to look inward here. HBS could become a beacon for stronger research practices in this area - requiring study preregistration and data collection methods that carefully trace provenance and changes. If HBS has fewer but better quirky marketing psychology studies, their reputation will do well. However for an individual researcher, the benefits to using extremely rigorous practices are not as clear, while the costs are high. A random grad student is not going to be able to establish a norm of data traceability. I worked in this area (at Harvard as well) a bit as a grad student and can absolutely understand the temptation for the lighter version of this. If you can drop one outlier group, you get a cool story and a job at a top 10 b-school. Or keep it, get a muddled result, and try again for a better paper next year. I ended up just leaving the field entirely as the whole "our system massively rewards dodgy practices" vibe really bummed me out.

IggleSniggle 3y ago
For similar reasons, I left academia. I joined academia for the pursuit of truth, and forth the glory of Knowing. But it turned out that academia doesn’t really do this anymore, it just sells itself as doing these things. Academia is entirely a “reputation” system, as it turns out, from paper publishing to student-evaluations to “public rankings.” As it turns out, the capitalist marketplace must also contend with these issues, but imho (and somewhat counterintuitively), it does so somewhat more honestly.
- bwestergard 3y ago
  I'd like to hear more about how you've found more honesty in the private sector. "academia doesn’t really do this anymore" I've heard this from more than one current or former academic. Some argue it's due to market logic entering academia. It sounds like you take a different view?
  - 93po 3y ago
    I have no idea what I'm talking about but I would speculate that looking at how.much.freaking.money these schools have provides us a window into what these schools actually focus on. The focus seems to be making and having a ton of money. This compounded by the trends we see in fewer tenure positions, worse pay for associate profs, a glut of admin positions and admin pay, etc. So yeah, I'd say the observation that market logic is entering academia has some surface level reasons to support it.

seydor 3y ago

Well how else would she be an expert?

mrstone 3y ago
Francesca Gino is a woman.

JohnFen 3y ago

Hey, if you want a job done right, call in an expert.

AHOHA 3y ago

And then I’m accused of having trust issues!!

some_random 3y ago

I've lost a lot of confidence in the practice of science in the last decade or so from the Replication Crisis and worse, the response to the crisis from the scientific community (the phrase "methodological terrorist" comes to mind).

rqtwteye 3y ago

There is this pattern where things are always the opposite of their message: - Dishonesty expert is dishonest - Politicians who constantly talk about freedom want to restrict anything that doesn't fit their world view - Militant anti-gay preachers hire call boys - Diversity teams are the least diverse

johntb86 3y ago
At least ethicists are about as ethical as other people: https://qz.com/1582149/ethicists-are-no-more-ethical-than-the-rest-of-us-study-finds https://qz.com/1582149/ethicists-are-no-more-ethical-than-th...
WalterBright 3y ago
I've always wondered if ethics class impart any ethics at all. If you're not an ethical person, why would you become one after taking such a class? If you're already an ethical person, taking a class in it is pointless.
- telotortium 3y ago
  The fact that the term "ethics" is used so much in a CYA way, or else as transparent rationalization of whatever worldview is currently dominant among the PMC, has given me an almost allergic reaction to that word.
- fasterik 3y ago
  Ethical theory is an interesting subject in its own right. Even if studying it doesn't make you a better person, that doesn't make it useless, any more than studying abstract areas of math or physics is useless. That being said, some work in practical ethics has had a huge impact. Peter Singer's work on animal ethics started the modern animal rights movement, and his essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" has inspired many people to donate a lot more to charity than they otherwise would.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

DonHopkins 3y ago

Seriously, when the goin' gets tough, you don't want a criminal lawyer, all right? You want a criminal lawyer, know what I'm sayin'? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvlEqAjg8aU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvlEqAjg8aU

TheMagicHorsey 3y ago

A very very long time ago I did some programming to help a friend of a friend analyze a data set. The data set was from public schools and it was being used to inform some policies at the state level. All I can say is, the data submitted from many schools had very disturbing patterns of regularity (as in identical records on many unexpected metrics that you would not expect) ... like 10 or 15 records in a row, in the same rough geographic area (we didn't have exact addresses) with the exact same scores in all subjects as well as reading and match assessments. Basically it looked like someone had copy pasted rows of data over and over while keeping the original unique ID numbers (end result, different ID numbers representing different students, all having the exact same scores). And guess what ... whenever I saw that pattern, the scores were all very much above average. You didn't see that pattern with below average scores. I told the person I was working with about the data and suggested it was fraudulent and she became concerned and raised it with her supervisor. Within about 24 hours I no longer had access to the data sets. And the friend of a friend just said that she didn't need help anymore. I suppose I could have raised a fuss and contacted a journalist but all I had was columns of data without context. Plus at the time I'm ashamed to say I was playing a lot of World of Warcraft and not inclined to do much else that required effort.

trabant00 3y ago
This perfectly matches my experience in similar cases. Just not in academia but in business. Policy always represents somebody's interests. "Data driven" is an excellent cover when you control the data. You get to eat the cake and look good while doing it.

leoh 3y ago

Self-licensing strikes again https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing

ARandomerDude 3y ago

Oh look, her primary field is Behavioral Science. I'm shocked. Really. /s

rossdavidh 3y ago
I have the feeling that the difference between the social sciences, which have been rocked by the replication crisis pretty hard, and every other part of science, is that the social sciences are aware of their problem. I'm not aware of any field of science that has looked for problems with replicability, that has not found them. Most have not looked.

neilv 3y ago

Recent HN post over US holiday weekend: Data Falsificada (Part 1): “Clusterfake” – Data Colada (datacolada.org) | 37 points by malshe 4 days ago | 8 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374255

rossdavidh 3y ago

From the original Data Colada article (http://datacolada.org/109 http://datacolada.org/109): "We understand that Harvard had access to much more information than we did, including, where applicable, the original data collected using Qualtrics survey software. If the fraud was carried out by collecting real data on Qualtrics and then altering the downloaded data files, as is likely to be the case for three of these papers, then the original Qualtrics files would provide airtight evidence of fraud. (Conversely, if our concerns were misguided, then those files would provide airtight evidence that they were misguided.)" It does not appear that Harvard found any evidence that they were misguided...

neilv 3y ago

In situations like this, people should demand credible investigations, then wait quietly while that proceeds -- avoiding trial-by-Twitter and summary execution upon accusation.

wpietri 3y ago
You're putting the burden on "people" here. I think instead, the right way to look at it is that institutions should provide both prompt reactive investigations and proactive work to keep investigations from being necessary. The reason people get thoroughly upset here rather than waiting quietly is that this stuff gets ignored or covered up all the time.
- neilv 3y ago
  What if I said "expect" rather than "demand"? I agree that one of the problems is that we've sometimes been given reason not to expect an institution to have integrity. One of the other problems is that public discourse is often lacking in integrity, as well.

fwungy 3y ago

Someone once told me that ethicists were often actually psychopaths, that people with a working ethical sensibility were not interested in studying it. Seems possible.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

uw_rob 3y ago

> (4) The evidence of fraud detailed in our report almost certainly represents a mere subset of the evidence that the Harvard investigators were able to uncover about these four articles. For example, we have heard from some HBS faculty that Harvard’s internal report was ~1,200 pages long, which is 1,182 pages longer than the one we sent to HBS. Great example that highlights the balance of presumption of innocence with the asymmetrical bullshit principal. This person should be referred to criminal prosecution for fraud as a deterrent to others. 1,200 page reports to provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt is not scalable.

Daub 3y ago

Time perhaps to post this classic from XKCD: https://www.r-bloggers.com/2018/09/xkcd-curve-fitting-in-r/ https://www.r-bloggers.com/2018/09/xkcd-curve-fitting-in-r/ To anyone who has worked in research, the various strategies it shows would be tragically familiar.

igmor 3y ago

well, he is supposed to be an expert in it. Why are you so surprised?

bcd3169 3y ago

I swear to god the biggest red flag for any academic work is association with HBS. They perfected the art of bsing and writing airport books

moi2388 3y ago

It’s behind a paywall.. also, just stop trusting anything anybody from a social science says. Pretty much everything they say is nonsense.

fsckboy 3y ago

TL;DR a number of different parties are stating pretty unequivocally that there is fraud here in her work; however, no evidence is presented for our inspection, so while I don't doubt it, it's just a lot of "he says/she also says". I'm not entirely clear on this but I don't think it's too wrong to say: the fraud concerns, for example, papers based on trials where people are asked to fill out questionnaires where some pledge honesty before and others pledge honesty after and these results are compared against actual insurance company data, and conclusions are drawn as to what makes people be honest.

civilized 3y ago
The evidence is available in the linked blog article from Data Colada, which is the real source of the story. https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/110 https://datacolada.org/110

justinclift 3y ago

Ahhh, they misunderstood something vitally important. This guy's speciality is Applied Dishonesty, so he's not the abstract sort with just theory and no practise. ;)

throwaway744678 3y ago
Pretty sure Francesca Gino identifies as a she! But then, who knows? [0] https://twitter.com/francescagino https://twitter.com/francescagino
- johnwheeler 3y ago
  He’s talking about Ariely, who the first blog post seems to implicate by saying the xls files came from his computer and none of the coauthors were responsible (Gino listed as a coauthor). Does this implicate Ariely or did I read that wrong?

FreshStart 3y ago

All anti-corruption departments are either ousted by the growth or integrated. Or you are integrated, fail that, then ousted for failed integration. Conclusion: ablative process design. Everytime corruption sets in, the system sheds "skin" and starts anew with a fresh layer.

chalst 3y ago

Andrew Gelman has written about this case, drawing parallels with past cases and asking about the psychology of the fraudsters. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/06/21/ted-talking-data-fakers-who-write-books-about-lying-and-rule-breaking-whats-up-with-that/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/06/21/ted-talkin...

chalst 3y ago
He has returned to the topic, this time with a focus on those who are capable of exposing the fraud but instead turn a blind eye. He calls this 'passive corruption'. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/06/23/its-worse-than-it-sounds-passive-corruption-in-the-social-sciences/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/06/23/its-worse-...