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Harvard professor Francesca Gino was accused of faking data

133 points by robtherobber 3y ago

DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
Personally I'm less worried about outright-fake data than sloppiness. The article mentions Brian Wanskink; AFAIK he never deliberately invented anything but he did a whole bunch of p-hacking and his lab was so sloppy that data got mislabeled (one study allegedly done on 8-11 year olds was actually done on pre-schoolers). He was "caught" when he published a blog post[2] giving advice to young scientists and it went viral. Clearly no misconduct intended. Most of this garbage research takes place in domains that don't matter, where people are hardly taking the results seriously anyway (see also power posing). Typically when somebody actually cares about the truth of a result, they kick the tires and vet the result pretty thoroughly. The fraudulent LeCour and Green study from a few years ago was exposed by Brookman and Kalla, who were attempting a related study (rather than being science "vigilantes"). But not always. Clearly people acting on Gino's bogus research. The Reinhart-Rogoff paper [0] was discussed globally, and may have actually influenced fiscal policy. They used Excel for analysis, made a click-and-drag mistake, and improperly excluded a couple datapoints. It appears this exclusion was accidental [1]. Nevertheless, including those points changes the conclusion. Catching this error took 3 years. It probably would've been caught faster if they had published their data alongside the paper, although apparently they actually did provide it upon request, so if people checked these things more frequently it would've been caught earlier. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt [1] "A coding error in the RR working spreadsheet entirely excludes five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark, from the analysis.5 The omitted countries are selected alphabetically and, hence, likely randomly with respect to economic relationships." http://peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_301-350/WP322.pdf http://peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_p... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20170312041524/http:/www.brianwansink.com/phd-advice/the-grad-student-who-never-said-no https://web.archive.org/web/20170312041524/http:/www.brianwa...
- juujian 3y ago
  One of the problems is that if you run more studies, you are statistically more likely to eventually yield a statistically significant result. The tests that folks run are not designed for series of statistical tests, but for individual tests. So when you run a ton of experiments and throw away all the statistically insignificant results, you are engaging in the form of p-hacking that the discipline of psychology is currently struggling with. The overarching replication crisis. And you may be thinking that's all harmless, but it's really not. Folks running experiments are competing for jobs with other folks who might do more worthwhile research. Because psychologists are good at running the pipeline, and they have found a nearly inexhaustible source of publications (experiments run on undergrad students), the up the bar for everyone else. I remember just a few days ago a discussion on this site about how a hiring committee skipped over the "better" applicant with more publications and citations than the successful candidate. The reality is that there are plenty of faculty on hiring committees out there who are looking for candidates with a good publication record, because that is how they assess if someone is a good researcher. Psychologists have already succeeded in pushing out most of the less experiment-prone folks in their discipline. The pressure extends to adjacent fields.
  - DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
    100%. Theoretically one can account testing multiple hypotheses, but shockingly nobody wants to do that.
rdtsc 3y ago
> When discussing Gino with Insider, multiple people brought up the idea of "me-search" — that researchers gravitate to topics that are of personal interest to them. "We're our own therapists, in a sense," Gordon Pennycook, a behavioral-science professor, said. I guess that might be common with students picking psychology as a major, too. Noticed it with a few acquaintances of mine. > In a study about "contagious dishonesty" that Gino coauthored with Ariely, the researchers found that students were more likely to cheat if they saw someone they believed to also attend their university cheating. That’s fascinating since both of them fabricated data. At least they can add themselves as the N+1 data point to their study. It’s retracted already, but still good enough for a TED talk or a book probably. /s Wonder if we have many sincere “coming clean” stories where they explain the thought process behind it. Why they did it, at what point did they decide to go through with it? Did they share their secret with others. Did they feel shame, etc.
- thumbuddy 3y ago
  I've never seen a coming clean story. But this has been going on at every scale for decades. The scientific method isn't broken but the institutions that surround it and the people riding the tops of it tend to be. It'd be easy to fix but you'd instantly make a million high power enemies with psychopathic tendencies. Oh well.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- iamandoni 3y ago
  The book Faking Science by Diederik Stapel is an excellent view behind the scenes of a serial academic fraudster.
  - 19870213 3y ago
    That's one way of turning a vice into a virtue... "Right, I've been found out to have fabricated years of research, entire PhDs are now junk. How can I make some more money out of this?"
andersco 3y ago
Podcast that describes many of the specifics of how her and another researcher faked their data: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id290783428?i=1000622594562 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id2907834...
- ipsum2 3y ago
  If you don't want to listen to it, the podcast description is a nice summary: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190568472/dan-ariely-francesca-gino-harvard-dishonesty-fabricated-data https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190568472/dan-ariely-frances...
  - MengerSponge 3y ago
    Holy hell that statement from The Hartford is devastating. Insurance companies are famously risk-averse, so for their legal team to sign off on that...
- deleted 3y ago
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runarb 3y ago
https://archive.is/dY6PE https://archive.is/dY6PE
ipsum2 3y ago
In a similar vein, UPenn professor Angela Duckworth of "Grit" fame was caught misrepresenting statistics to embellish her claims a few years ago: https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/05/25/479172868/angela-duckworth-responds-to-a-new-critique-of-grit https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/05/25/479172868/angela-.... Who knew psychology had such questionable science?
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  > Who knew psychology had such questionable science? Well given psychology is one of the two epicenters for the replication crisis, I didn't think this should be too unexpected.
  - tgv 3y ago
    It is to the merit of psychology. Other branches of social sciences don't dare to propose such a thing. They know that their replication numbers are going to be worse than psychology's.
    - qsort 3y ago
      Most social sciences have numbers that are far better than psychology's. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.200566 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.200566 For fuck's sake, marketing and management has better numbers than psychology. It is to their merit they're admitting they have a problem, but it is 100% a problem of the field of study.
      - begemotz 3y ago
        You misrepresent the linked article which doesn't report replication rates but forecasted replication rates from participants "recruited through a number of mailing lists, Twitter and blog posts".
        qsort 3y ago
        They used a prediction market, which at the time the article was published was still to resolve. This is standard practice and methodologically sound. They didn't go around asking people on Twitter.
veave 3y ago
Trust the science.
- friendzis 3y ago
  Believe in science*
  - dekhn 3y ago
    Have faith that science is the least bad option we have
    - somedude895 3y ago
      When it comes to social psychology I think common sense trumps "science."
acatton 3y ago
> Many researchers are privately terrified of being falsely accused by the "data cops," one scientist said. But no one wants to criticize them because no one wants a target on their own back — including this individual, who was granted anonymity for this reason. "Batman is a vigilante," the scientist said. "So is the Joker." > For collaborators, it's a stressful and infuriating time. When a paper is retracted, the research is erased, and all related citations are lost. > Others who attempted to build on Gino's studies are grappling with having wasted time, money, and energy. It feels, to me, that they're making Data Colada (the data vigilante group) the bad guys here. It's like blaming the Police for stopping a criminal because they took away the criminal's source of income... I'm kinda uneasy with this line of editing :/
- tgv 3y ago
  Indeed. That's nasty. They throw in a detracting bit of racist accusations as well. > all related citations are lost What an extreme BS argument. It's really grasping at straws.
  - prepend 3y ago
    The citations aren’t lost though, are they. They still exist in the paper, they just point to a retraction. You can still find the papers that cited the retracted paper. And I suspect you’ll still get new citations since it’s not unheard of that people cite a paper based on seeing it in some other paper, rather than reading the paper directly. I don’t think people should do that, but they do.
    - tokai 3y ago
      The citations won't be counted by the big databases like scopus and web of science, which are often a prerequisite when being measured for grants etc.
      - casey2 3y ago
        Next to nothing related to scientific research is tracked in scopus and web of science anyway, so your point is moot.
DrNosferatu 3y ago
She just faked it until she made it...
michaelhoney 3y ago
The Very Bad Wizards podcast talked a little about this case in a recent episode (https://verybadwizards.com/episode/episode-263-free-yoel https://verybadwizards.com/episode/episode-263-free-yoel - main topic is also interesting, about a professor not getting hired for what seem like not-great reasons). The podcast notes include a link to the Data Colada post about the Gino fraud: http://datacolada.org/109 http://datacolada.org/109
LatteLazy 3y ago
It amazes me that in modern times people are not required to publish their raw data. Doing so would (a) prevent errors in stats going unnoticed (b) remove the incentive to use statistics creatively (c) make it much easier and faster to find errors (d) make fraud detection easier. Increasingly I think we should be offering either direct funding or bounties to groups that DO actually check this stuff, attempt replication etc. The days of "a gentleman's word is his bond" are long gone (if they ever existed).
- karencarits 3y ago
  This becomes quite complicated if you do research on actual humans as privacy regualtions - especially for health related data - can be quite strict
macinjosh 3y ago
Why aren't these scientists jailed for fraud? These people are low-life criminals and should face consequences for fraud, wasting grant money and peoples time. But they aren't poors so they get special treatment.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  They didn't steal money, so they don't face jail. They stole reputation, which is not a crime that the laws deal with.
  - macinjosh 3y ago
    They stole the money used to fund their fake study and the studies of people who cited them in their own studies. That is a big deal.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Fair.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Knee_Pain 3y ago
Everyone in academia knows that academia is shit. People are warned well in advance by peers, professors and everywhere online, and yet they still do it. Then, once the sunk cost creeps in, you can't help but partake into the rotten system and wish to keep it as such. Just leave and do private research, it's not worth it
- sn41 3y ago
  Even if you do private research, you still need your work to get peer-reviewed. The pressure comes because we need to make the results sound more dramatic, rather than "meh. some effect is visible, but nothing to lose sleep over" - that will not get you the awards, the grants, and the Nature publications. Almost all these carry over (more so) if you are doing private research, since in addition to publications, funding is a more pressing need. Is corporate life any better? I've tried both. And in terms of autonomy, it is a huge relief not to be bound to quarterly evaluations and KPAs and trying to belittle others' work just so that you don't get axed and so on.
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
Everybody putting down academia as shit. But somehow we still have GPS satellites, fibre optics and AI machinery that can nearly think. I'd guess the shittiness may be isolated to a few disciplines, but that's just a guess based on data.
- mistermann 3y ago
  What data type does isShit() return? A boolean? Is that adequate to accurately represent the inherent complexity of reality?
- jahsome 3y ago
  It's rather funny you seem to make the case that you can't generalize an entire population based on the actions of individuals, then go on to... generalize entire populations based on the actions of individuals.
- kipchak 3y ago
  There's also gov and private research, and the things in between. GPS for example is DoD, the gov gov has funded lots of companies that make new things, like In-Q-Tel funding Keyhole which made the precursor to Google Earth[1], or Oracle which gets it's name from the program it was developed for.[2] This is not to disparage academia and fundamental research, but it's not the only possible way to make new stuff. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel [2]https://gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-project-1636592238 https://gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-p...
- lowkey 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 3y ago
    You posted this comment 8 times, which is abusive. In addition, you've continued to use HN primarily for flamewar after we asked you to stop (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36796469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36796469). You can't do these things on HN, so I've banned the account. I hate to ban an account that has been here for 15 years, but we don't have much choice when an account is behaving like this—it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
prepend 3y ago
I’m a big fan of open data but struggle to articulate its value in a quantified way other than just my gut feeling of more transparency leads to more collaboration leads to more research leads to more knowledge. But I think examples like this mean that we’re getting closer to if a study doesn’t release all its data- raw, cleaned, and analytical tables- then it will be discounted or ignored. And there’s fame and money to be made in finding data irregularities. We still need some way to audit and confirm data regularities, but that is boring and I think no money there. I’m not sure if there will be some chore assignment for students to pick a dataset, analyze it for rigor, and post results somewhere so every paper has a link to people who checked data and found it appropriate. I hope this means 99.9% of studies have proper data and not just when we hear about the (hopefully) rare studies that falsify or just don’t work with properly and make inaccurate conclusions.
- arsome 3y ago
  Honestly, most of these studies are getting caught simply by not having the expected distribution on their data. I suspect improving this analysis will more often just lead to better fakes. Unfortunately I think this means we need to disregard these popsci papers, especially in the social sciences unless there's a clear, uninterested party providing the data as well.
  - somedude895 3y ago
    Sociological studies should be disregarded and remain uncited until they're reproduced by an unaffiliated team that isn't ideologically aligned with the original researchers. Which isn't gonna happen for most studies since it's prohibitively expensive and most sociologists share the same biases.
- hilbert42 3y ago
  "We still need some way to audit and confirm data regularities," See my post that mentions Benford's Law, it's damn good a sussing out fraudulent data. Moreover, it's quite old and has stood the test of time.
hgsgm 3y ago
Why is is this old story getting frontaged so many times in one month? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=true&query=Honesty&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...
- 0xDEF 3y ago
  Libertarian techbros are on a mission to make us doubt (climate) science.
fortran77 3y ago
Maybe our “top schools” really aren’t.
profsummergig 3y ago
Might be worth mentioning that while not considered "fake" data per se, Amy Cuddy's famous Power Poses research (one of the most popular TED talks) was debunked and she eventually left Harvard.
hilbert42 3y ago
I simply don't get this. I say the same thing every time I hear of research/scientific fraud. I can understand why researchers want to commit fraud but why do they actually do it? Is it because they actually believe they can get away with it indefinitely, or are they gambling they can do so long enough to meet their goals—fool everyone long enough to get through their careers after which they couldn't care less about their reputations? I find it hard to believe these smart people actually believe they can get away with it. Surely they don't and they must know their reputations will be ruined when they're found out. As sure as day follows night, they'll eventually get caught out by others who are researching their papers and comparing their data with other researchers whether it's within weeks of publication or decades later. And they must know that AI will expose them as it can automate comparisons with similar research and their data will be found to be anomalous.
- klntsky 3y ago
  You are assuming that the rest of the researches are interested in exposing them. They may be in the same boat (institutions), paid by the same people to produce similar "research".
- bwing 3y ago
  A lot of factors: 1) People definitely did get away with this, all the time. Historically, researchers had no obligation (at least that was practically enforced) to maintain and share their data and code. Peer review would check for specific methodological flaws and nothing deeper. If someone emailed you about your 1995 study in 2005, you'd say "I no longer have the code," or, more likely, simply never email them back. 2) In a highly competitive landscape where cheating is effective, the "winners" will be heavily selected for willingness to maximize the use of cheating. Even if only 1% of the population is willing to commit explicit fraud, that 1% is going to be heavily overrepresented in a world where explicit fraud gets you the top-tier publications that bring you to prominence. 3) Ariely and Gino both made millions of dollars from their fraud that they will not have to give back. It's worth emphasizing how poorly Ariely's fraud was executed -- he did the laziest possible fraud and easily converted it into money and prestige. 4) Related to the first point, it's hard to overstate how much the culture has shifted since the '08-'12 time period. The replication crisis was just kicking into gear, and only among people who were paying attention to that type of thing. Ariely didn't come up reading Andrew Gelman's blog. There's simply far more light on any paper today than there would've been 10 years ago -- statistical and methodological understanding have come a long way as cohorts of academics came up in the shadow of the replication crisis. Having established credible groups like Data Colada to centralize these analyses has also been a big deal; tenured profs can't bully Data Colada by threatening their career progression the same way they could if accused via email by a random grad student.
jp57 3y ago
The "multi-million dollar empire" is a big part of the problem here. When scientists build a lucrative business that is based on the truth of some hypothesis they've been studying it immediately creates a conflict of interest. How can they ever be trusted to report results that would falsify the hypothesis?
ColoursofOSINT 3y ago
For those of you interested in the accusations, here are the primary sources for them[1]. The are multiple (it is a 4-part series) and it looks quite damning. [1] [[109] Data Falsificada (Part 1): "Clusterfake"](https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/109) [2] [[110] Data Falsificada (Part 2): "My Class Year Is Harvard"](https://datacolada.org/110 https://datacolada.org/110) [3] [[111] Data Falsificada (Part 3): "The Cheaters Are Out of Order"](https://datacolada.org/111 https://datacolada.org/111) [4] [[112] Data Falsificada (Part 4): "Forgetting The Words"](https://datacolada.org/112 https://datacolada.org/112)
efitz 3y ago
I find it ironic that we have a reproducibility problem in many scientific disciplines, that we find that many notable scientists have been less than 100% honest in their research, that peer review fails to catch many of these errors, and still there are many people running around saying stupid bumper sticker slogans like “trust the science” and “I believe in science” and “95% of scientists agree…” What we’ve learned is that scientists are human and they have all the human weaknesses and venality as any other group. The practice of science in the modern day (publish or perish, beg for grants, non-blind peer review, financial conflicts of interest, politically charged university atmosphere) is rife with incentives to predetermine desired outcomes rather than let the chips fall as they may. Individual scientists of course will fall all across the distribution of integrity. I think the scientific method is one of, if not the greatest gifts the minds of the Renaissance gave us. BUT I refuse to be browbeaten by priests in lab coats or their acolytes. If you cite scientific papers in front of me trying to make a political case for a course of action, I will use my own judgment, informed by he paper as well as other factors like motivations and so forth.
- deleted 3y ago
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- nerdponx 3y ago
  It's not ironic. It's a reflection of the fact that "scientists" are not an homogeneous group, and we are currently living through a slow-moving revolution in which some scientists are, broadly, taking a stand against fraud and attempting to dismantle the power/incentive structures that make it possible to perpetuate. The system is imperfect, and the work is in progress. "Trust the science" is a poorly-phrased attempt to counter the persistent conspiracy theories that various science disciplines, and the scientists that work therein, are part of this or that conspiracy to reduce your freedoms, mislead the public, etc. Or the related conspiracy theory that science broadly is bullshit and that the primary motivation of any scientific study is the continued justification of funding, rather than pursuit of knowledge. The fact that scientists can be wrong, some studies are faked or their results are overstated, etc. has little or nothing to do with it. > I refuse to be browbeaten by priests in lab coats or their acolytes. If you cite scientific papers in front of me trying to make a political case for a course of action, I will use my own judgment, informed by he paper as well as other factors like motivations and so forth. And this is exactly the kind of attitude that I described above. It's the ACAB approach applied to scientists, where it makes no sense if you look at what scientists actually do and care about. A huge number of scientists are persistently and actively fighting against the "priest in lab coat" archetype.
ny711 3y ago
Lock em' up
jfghi 3y ago
I think it’d be quite nice to celebrate process more than results. Investigating a topic and demonstrating lacks of correlation or causation is remarkably useful for future investigators. The opposite can be said if a result falsely gets promoted which causes others to waste time in attempts of reproduction or continuing a mostly failed path of analysis.
wudangmonk 3y ago
In the 6th grade I had a science project due, I of course had done nothing until the day before so I made up weeks of data in the form of journal entries from which bar and line charts were created since I was good with computers back when having pictures off the internet was considered fancy. My aim was just a passing grade and not being found out. Lo an behold do I not only get put into the school's science fair, I actually end up winning second place. This is actually how I became the science kid from then on and to live up to this name I went and invested more time into both math and science classes from then on. Eventually I went from an okay student to a top student and becoming a real scientist was something I always wished I had done. Moral of the story?, there isn't one... I just never realized just how much 'real' science I was doing back then.
say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
Can everyone stop focusing on accused persons? The court of public opinion should not rely on accusations. Donald Trump made a lot of accusations, and did you believe all of them upfront?

133 points by robtherobber 3y ago

Personally I'm less worried about outright-fake data than sloppiness. The article mentions Brian Wanskink; AFAIK he never deliberately invented anything but he did a whole bunch of p-hacking and his lab was so sloppy that data got mislabeled (one study allegedly done on 8-11 year olds was actually done on pre-schoolers). He was "caught" when he published a blog post[2] giving advice to young scientists and it went viral. Clearly no misconduct intended. Most of this garbage research takes place in domains that don't matter, where people are hardly taking the results seriously anyway (see also power posing). Typically when somebody actually cares about the truth of a result, they kick the tires and vet the result pretty thoroughly. The fraudulent LeCour and Green study from a few years ago was exposed by Brookman and Kalla, who were attempting a related study (rather than being science "vigilantes"). But not always. Clearly people acting on Gino's bogus research. The Reinhart-Rogoff paper [0] was discussed globally, and may have actually influenced fiscal policy. They used Excel for analysis, made a click-and-drag mistake, and improperly excluded a couple datapoints. It appears this exclusion was accidental [1]. Nevertheless, including those points changes the conclusion. Catching this error took 3 years. It probably would've been caught faster if they had published their data alongside the paper, although apparently they actually did provide it upon request, so if people checked these things more frequently it would've been caught earlier. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt [1] "A coding error in the RR working spreadsheet entirely excludes five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark, from the analysis.5 The omitted countries are selected alphabetically and, hence, likely randomly with respect to economic relationships." http://peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_301-350/WP322.pdf http://peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_p... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20170312041524/http:/www.brianwansink.com/phd-advice/the-grad-student-who-never-said-no https://web.archive.org/web/20170312041524/http:/www.brianwa...

juujian 3y ago
One of the problems is that if you run more studies, you are statistically more likely to eventually yield a statistically significant result. The tests that folks run are not designed for series of statistical tests, but for individual tests. So when you run a ton of experiments and throw away all the statistically insignificant results, you are engaging in the form of p-hacking that the discipline of psychology is currently struggling with. The overarching replication crisis. And you may be thinking that's all harmless, but it's really not. Folks running experiments are competing for jobs with other folks who might do more worthwhile research. Because psychologists are good at running the pipeline, and they have found a nearly inexhaustible source of publications (experiments run on undergrad students), the up the bar for everyone else. I remember just a few days ago a discussion on this site about how a hiring committee skipped over the "better" applicant with more publications and citations than the successful candidate. The reality is that there are plenty of faculty on hiring committees out there who are looking for candidates with a good publication record, because that is how they assess if someone is a good researcher. Psychologists have already succeeded in pushing out most of the less experiment-prone folks in their discipline. The pressure extends to adjacent fields.
- DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
  100%. Theoretically one can account testing multiple hypotheses, but shockingly nobody wants to do that.

rdtsc 3y ago

> When discussing Gino with Insider, multiple people brought up the idea of "me-search" — that researchers gravitate to topics that are of personal interest to them. "We're our own therapists, in a sense," Gordon Pennycook, a behavioral-science professor, said. I guess that might be common with students picking psychology as a major, too. Noticed it with a few acquaintances of mine. > In a study about "contagious dishonesty" that Gino coauthored with Ariely, the researchers found that students were more likely to cheat if they saw someone they believed to also attend their university cheating. That’s fascinating since both of them fabricated data. At least they can add themselves as the N+1 data point to their study. It’s retracted already, but still good enough for a TED talk or a book probably. /s Wonder if we have many sincere “coming clean” stories where they explain the thought process behind it. Why they did it, at what point did they decide to go through with it? Did they share their secret with others. Did they feel shame, etc.

thumbuddy 3y ago
I've never seen a coming clean story. But this has been going on at every scale for decades. The scientific method isn't broken but the institutions that surround it and the people riding the tops of it tend to be. It'd be easy to fix but you'd instantly make a million high power enemies with psychopathic tendencies. Oh well.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
iamandoni 3y ago
The book Faking Science by Diederik Stapel is an excellent view behind the scenes of a serial academic fraudster.
- 19870213 3y ago
  That's one way of turning a vice into a virtue... "Right, I've been found out to have fabricated years of research, entire PhDs are now junk. How can I make some more money out of this?"

andersco 3y ago

Podcast that describes many of the specifics of how her and another researcher faked their data: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id290783428?i=1000622594562 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id2907834...

ipsum2 3y ago
If you don't want to listen to it, the podcast description is a nice summary: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190568472/dan-ariely-francesca-gino-harvard-dishonesty-fabricated-data https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190568472/dan-ariely-frances...
- MengerSponge 3y ago
  Holy hell that statement from The Hartford is devastating. Insurance companies are famously risk-averse, so for their legal team to sign off on that...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

runarb 3y ago

https://archive.is/dY6PE https://archive.is/dY6PE

ipsum2 3y ago

In a similar vein, UPenn professor Angela Duckworth of "Grit" fame was caught misrepresenting statistics to embellish her claims a few years ago: https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/05/25/479172868/angela-duckworth-responds-to-a-new-critique-of-grit https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/05/25/479172868/angela-.... Who knew psychology had such questionable science?

marginalia_nu 3y ago
> Who knew psychology had such questionable science? Well given psychology is one of the two epicenters for the replication crisis, I didn't think this should be too unexpected.
- tgv 3y ago
  It is to the merit of psychology. Other branches of social sciences don't dare to propose such a thing. They know that their replication numbers are going to be worse than psychology's.
  - qsort 3y ago
    Most social sciences have numbers that are far better than psychology's. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.200566 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.200566 For fuck's sake, marketing and management has better numbers than psychology. It is to their merit they're admitting they have a problem, but it is 100% a problem of the field of study.
    - begemotz 3y ago
      You misrepresent the linked article which doesn't report replication rates but forecasted replication rates from participants "recruited through a number of mailing lists, Twitter and blog posts".
      - qsort 3y ago
        They used a prediction market, which at the time the article was published was still to resolve. This is standard practice and methodologically sound. They didn't go around asking people on Twitter.

veave 3y ago

Trust the science.

friendzis 3y ago
Believe in science*
- dekhn 3y ago
  Have faith that science is the least bad option we have
  - somedude895 3y ago
    When it comes to social psychology I think common sense trumps "science."

acatton 3y ago

> Many researchers are privately terrified of being falsely accused by the "data cops," one scientist said. But no one wants to criticize them because no one wants a target on their own back — including this individual, who was granted anonymity for this reason. "Batman is a vigilante," the scientist said. "So is the Joker." > For collaborators, it's a stressful and infuriating time. When a paper is retracted, the research is erased, and all related citations are lost. > Others who attempted to build on Gino's studies are grappling with having wasted time, money, and energy. It feels, to me, that they're making Data Colada (the data vigilante group) the bad guys here. It's like blaming the Police for stopping a criminal because they took away the criminal's source of income... I'm kinda uneasy with this line of editing :/

tgv 3y ago
Indeed. That's nasty. They throw in a detracting bit of racist accusations as well. > all related citations are lost What an extreme BS argument. It's really grasping at straws.
- prepend 3y ago
  The citations aren’t lost though, are they. They still exist in the paper, they just point to a retraction. You can still find the papers that cited the retracted paper. And I suspect you’ll still get new citations since it’s not unheard of that people cite a paper based on seeing it in some other paper, rather than reading the paper directly. I don’t think people should do that, but they do.
  - tokai 3y ago
    The citations won't be counted by the big databases like scopus and web of science, which are often a prerequisite when being measured for grants etc.
    - casey2 3y ago
      Next to nothing related to scientific research is tracked in scopus and web of science anyway, so your point is moot.

DrNosferatu 3y ago

She just faked it until she made it...

michaelhoney 3y ago

The Very Bad Wizards podcast talked a little about this case in a recent episode (https://verybadwizards.com/episode/episode-263-free-yoel https://verybadwizards.com/episode/episode-263-free-yoel - main topic is also interesting, about a professor not getting hired for what seem like not-great reasons). The podcast notes include a link to the Data Colada post about the Gino fraud: http://datacolada.org/109 http://datacolada.org/109

LatteLazy 3y ago

It amazes me that in modern times people are not required to publish their raw data. Doing so would (a) prevent errors in stats going unnoticed (b) remove the incentive to use statistics creatively (c) make it much easier and faster to find errors (d) make fraud detection easier. Increasingly I think we should be offering either direct funding or bounties to groups that DO actually check this stuff, attempt replication etc. The days of "a gentleman's word is his bond" are long gone (if they ever existed).

karencarits 3y ago
This becomes quite complicated if you do research on actual humans as privacy regualtions - especially for health related data - can be quite strict

macinjosh 3y ago

Why aren't these scientists jailed for fraud? These people are low-life criminals and should face consequences for fraud, wasting grant money and peoples time. But they aren't poors so they get special treatment.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
They didn't steal money, so they don't face jail. They stole reputation, which is not a crime that the laws deal with.
- macinjosh 3y ago
  They stole the money used to fund their fake study and the studies of people who cited them in their own studies. That is a big deal.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Fair.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Knee_Pain 3y ago

Everyone in academia knows that academia is shit. People are warned well in advance by peers, professors and everywhere online, and yet they still do it. Then, once the sunk cost creeps in, you can't help but partake into the rotten system and wish to keep it as such. Just leave and do private research, it's not worth it

sn41 3y ago
Even if you do private research, you still need your work to get peer-reviewed. The pressure comes because we need to make the results sound more dramatic, rather than "meh. some effect is visible, but nothing to lose sleep over" - that will not get you the awards, the grants, and the Nature publications. Almost all these carry over (more so) if you are doing private research, since in addition to publications, funding is a more pressing need. Is corporate life any better? I've tried both. And in terms of autonomy, it is a huge relief not to be bound to quarterly evaluations and KPAs and trying to belittle others' work just so that you don't get axed and so on.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

Everybody putting down academia as shit. But somehow we still have GPS satellites, fibre optics and AI machinery that can nearly think. I'd guess the shittiness may be isolated to a few disciplines, but that's just a guess based on data.

mistermann 3y ago
What data type does isShit() return? A boolean? Is that adequate to accurately represent the inherent complexity of reality?
jahsome 3y ago
It's rather funny you seem to make the case that you can't generalize an entire population based on the actions of individuals, then go on to... generalize entire populations based on the actions of individuals.
kipchak 3y ago
There's also gov and private research, and the things in between. GPS for example is DoD, the gov gov has funded lots of companies that make new things, like In-Q-Tel funding Keyhole which made the precursor to Google Earth[1], or Oracle which gets it's name from the program it was developed for.[2] This is not to disparage academia and fundamental research, but it's not the only possible way to make new stuff. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel [2]https://gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-project-1636592238 https://gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-p...
lowkey 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  You posted this comment 8 times, which is abusive. In addition, you've continued to use HN primarily for flamewar after we asked you to stop (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36796469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36796469). You can't do these things on HN, so I've banned the account. I hate to ban an account that has been here for 15 years, but we don't have much choice when an account is behaving like this—it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

prepend 3y ago

I’m a big fan of open data but struggle to articulate its value in a quantified way other than just my gut feeling of more transparency leads to more collaboration leads to more research leads to more knowledge. But I think examples like this mean that we’re getting closer to if a study doesn’t release all its data- raw, cleaned, and analytical tables- then it will be discounted or ignored. And there’s fame and money to be made in finding data irregularities. We still need some way to audit and confirm data regularities, but that is boring and I think no money there. I’m not sure if there will be some chore assignment for students to pick a dataset, analyze it for rigor, and post results somewhere so every paper has a link to people who checked data and found it appropriate. I hope this means 99.9% of studies have proper data and not just when we hear about the (hopefully) rare studies that falsify or just don’t work with properly and make inaccurate conclusions.

arsome 3y ago
Honestly, most of these studies are getting caught simply by not having the expected distribution on their data. I suspect improving this analysis will more often just lead to better fakes. Unfortunately I think this means we need to disregard these popsci papers, especially in the social sciences unless there's a clear, uninterested party providing the data as well.
- somedude895 3y ago
  Sociological studies should be disregarded and remain uncited until they're reproduced by an unaffiliated team that isn't ideologically aligned with the original researchers. Which isn't gonna happen for most studies since it's prohibitively expensive and most sociologists share the same biases.
hilbert42 3y ago
"We still need some way to audit and confirm data regularities," See my post that mentions Benford's Law, it's damn good a sussing out fraudulent data. Moreover, it's quite old and has stood the test of time.

hgsgm 3y ago

Why is is this old story getting frontaged so many times in one month? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=true&query=Honesty&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

0xDEF 3y ago
Libertarian techbros are on a mission to make us doubt (climate) science.

fortran77 3y ago

Maybe our “top schools” really aren’t.

profsummergig 3y ago

Might be worth mentioning that while not considered "fake" data per se, Amy Cuddy's famous Power Poses research (one of the most popular TED talks) was debunked and she eventually left Harvard.

hilbert42 3y ago

I simply don't get this. I say the same thing every time I hear of research/scientific fraud. I can understand why researchers want to commit fraud but why do they actually do it? Is it because they actually believe they can get away with it indefinitely, or are they gambling they can do so long enough to meet their goals—fool everyone long enough to get through their careers after which they couldn't care less about their reputations? I find it hard to believe these smart people actually believe they can get away with it. Surely they don't and they must know their reputations will be ruined when they're found out. As sure as day follows night, they'll eventually get caught out by others who are researching their papers and comparing their data with other researchers whether it's within weeks of publication or decades later. And they must know that AI will expose them as it can automate comparisons with similar research and their data will be found to be anomalous.

klntsky 3y ago
You are assuming that the rest of the researches are interested in exposing them. They may be in the same boat (institutions), paid by the same people to produce similar "research".
bwing 3y ago
A lot of factors: 1) People definitely did get away with this, all the time. Historically, researchers had no obligation (at least that was practically enforced) to maintain and share their data and code. Peer review would check for specific methodological flaws and nothing deeper. If someone emailed you about your 1995 study in 2005, you'd say "I no longer have the code," or, more likely, simply never email them back. 2) In a highly competitive landscape where cheating is effective, the "winners" will be heavily selected for willingness to maximize the use of cheating. Even if only 1% of the population is willing to commit explicit fraud, that 1% is going to be heavily overrepresented in a world where explicit fraud gets you the top-tier publications that bring you to prominence. 3) Ariely and Gino both made millions of dollars from their fraud that they will not have to give back. It's worth emphasizing how poorly Ariely's fraud was executed -- he did the laziest possible fraud and easily converted it into money and prestige. 4) Related to the first point, it's hard to overstate how much the culture has shifted since the '08-'12 time period. The replication crisis was just kicking into gear, and only among people who were paying attention to that type of thing. Ariely didn't come up reading Andrew Gelman's blog. There's simply far more light on any paper today than there would've been 10 years ago -- statistical and methodological understanding have come a long way as cohorts of academics came up in the shadow of the replication crisis. Having established credible groups like Data Colada to centralize these analyses has also been a big deal; tenured profs can't bully Data Colada by threatening their career progression the same way they could if accused via email by a random grad student.

jp57 3y ago

The "multi-million dollar empire" is a big part of the problem here. When scientists build a lucrative business that is based on the truth of some hypothesis they've been studying it immediately creates a conflict of interest. How can they ever be trusted to report results that would falsify the hypothesis?

ColoursofOSINT 3y ago

For those of you interested in the accusations, here are the primary sources for them[1]. The are multiple (it is a 4-part series) and it looks quite damning. [1] [[109] Data Falsificada (Part 1): "Clusterfake"](https://datacolada.org/109 https://datacolada.org/109) [2] [[110] Data Falsificada (Part 2): "My Class Year Is Harvard"](https://datacolada.org/110 https://datacolada.org/110) [3] [[111] Data Falsificada (Part 3): "The Cheaters Are Out of Order"](https://datacolada.org/111 https://datacolada.org/111) [4] [[112] Data Falsificada (Part 4): "Forgetting The Words"](https://datacolada.org/112 https://datacolada.org/112)

efitz 3y ago

I find it ironic that we have a reproducibility problem in many scientific disciplines, that we find that many notable scientists have been less than 100% honest in their research, that peer review fails to catch many of these errors, and still there are many people running around saying stupid bumper sticker slogans like “trust the science” and “I believe in science” and “95% of scientists agree…” What we’ve learned is that scientists are human and they have all the human weaknesses and venality as any other group. The practice of science in the modern day (publish or perish, beg for grants, non-blind peer review, financial conflicts of interest, politically charged university atmosphere) is rife with incentives to predetermine desired outcomes rather than let the chips fall as they may. Individual scientists of course will fall all across the distribution of integrity. I think the scientific method is one of, if not the greatest gifts the minds of the Renaissance gave us. BUT I refuse to be browbeaten by priests in lab coats or their acolytes. If you cite scientific papers in front of me trying to make a political case for a course of action, I will use my own judgment, informed by he paper as well as other factors like motivations and so forth.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nerdponx 3y ago
It's not ironic. It's a reflection of the fact that "scientists" are not an homogeneous group, and we are currently living through a slow-moving revolution in which some scientists are, broadly, taking a stand against fraud and attempting to dismantle the power/incentive structures that make it possible to perpetuate. The system is imperfect, and the work is in progress. "Trust the science" is a poorly-phrased attempt to counter the persistent conspiracy theories that various science disciplines, and the scientists that work therein, are part of this or that conspiracy to reduce your freedoms, mislead the public, etc. Or the related conspiracy theory that science broadly is bullshit and that the primary motivation of any scientific study is the continued justification of funding, rather than pursuit of knowledge. The fact that scientists can be wrong, some studies are faked or their results are overstated, etc. has little or nothing to do with it. > I refuse to be browbeaten by priests in lab coats or their acolytes. If you cite scientific papers in front of me trying to make a political case for a course of action, I will use my own judgment, informed by he paper as well as other factors like motivations and so forth. And this is exactly the kind of attitude that I described above. It's the ACAB approach applied to scientists, where it makes no sense if you look at what scientists actually do and care about. A huge number of scientists are persistently and actively fighting against the "priest in lab coat" archetype.

ny711 3y ago

Lock em' up

jfghi 3y ago

I think it’d be quite nice to celebrate process more than results. Investigating a topic and demonstrating lacks of correlation or causation is remarkably useful for future investigators. The opposite can be said if a result falsely gets promoted which causes others to waste time in attempts of reproduction or continuing a mostly failed path of analysis.

wudangmonk 3y ago

In the 6th grade I had a science project due, I of course had done nothing until the day before so I made up weeks of data in the form of journal entries from which bar and line charts were created since I was good with computers back when having pictures off the internet was considered fancy. My aim was just a passing grade and not being found out. Lo an behold do I not only get put into the school's science fair, I actually end up winning second place. This is actually how I became the science kid from then on and to live up to this name I went and invested more time into both math and science classes from then on. Eventually I went from an okay student to a top student and becoming a real scientist was something I always wished I had done. Moral of the story?, there isn't one... I just never realized just how much 'real' science I was doing back then.

say_it_as_it_is 3y ago

Can everyone stop focusing on accused persons? The court of public opinion should not rely on accusations. Donald Trump made a lot of accusations, and did you believe all of them upfront?