As an aside, why is this the thing you chose to focus on in responding to me? While I do think it is true and I am willing to defend it, it's not really the ce

As an aside, why is this the thing you chose to focus on in responding to me? While I do think it is true and I am willing to defend it, it's not really the central issue. What I understand as the central point of your original comment was that we cannot condemn all of the social sciences (or 90% of the work in them) on the basis of the Claudine Gay story. I refute that with this sentence: >The longer such fraud goes uncorrected, the more rewarded a person is for their fraud, and indeed the more lengths other people go to cover up such fraud (as was argued by the OP) the more likely such fraud is normalized in a particular field. The Claudine Gay story suggests that, if anything, XKCD was wildly optimistic about the social sciences. Put another way, in the spirit of Scott Alexander's recent essay "Against Learning From Dramatic Events", the Claudine Gay story represents a significant deviation from what would be predicted by a model that assumed the social sciences had a more robust level of intellectual integrity.