5 ms·

i think at some point everyone is one of those in life

tjradcliffe 12y ago
So what. Not everyone fabricates data for a decade, lies to everyone around them about matters of enormous professional import, and endangers the career of everyone they've ever worked with, most of all their students. The article talks about "good people doing bad things", which doesn't actually happen. We have a name for people who do bad things: we call them "bad people."
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  I thought we just called them "people".
  - tjradcliffe 12y ago
    Nope. Not everything is bad enough to be worth labelling "bad" and anyone who thinks there is no difference between any ordinary decent person who does their best to behave honestly, and some bottom-feeding scum like this guy is so morally flaccid as to be an embarrassment to vertebrates everywhere. This liar got jobs based on his lies. The people who didn't get them were not--one would like to believe--publishing lies based on purely fabricated data. You'd have to be pretty evil to look those people in the eye and say, "Hey, your only problem was you were too honest! You didn't lie enough to get the job!" Were they pure and unsullied? Of course not. But only a moral degenerate is incapable of telling the difference between a systematic, deliberate, serial liar like this guy and the ordinary rough and tumble of scientific life, in which we do our best to overcome our worst tendencies, and mostly succeed. And you are relying on us every time you go to the doctor, get on a plane, drive a car, take a bus, eat a meal. You are hoping against hope that most people most of the time aren't lying and cheating their way through life, not faking research results or safety reports or maintenance logs. You are hoping, in short, that most people are not bad. So you might have the decency to demonstrate an awareness of that. It costs you nothing and we kind of appreciate it.
    - bambax 12y ago
      > you are relying on us every time you go to the doctor, get on a plane, drive a car, take a bus, eat a meal And that's why there are no health scandals, no planes ever crash, no cars are ever recalled, and there are no food scandals either (including, but not limited to, crap being passed as food, or animals being fed their own brains, etc.) The opposition psychologist "scientists" have shown towards any attempt to reproduce their findings mean this guy was not an outlier, but simply an extreme case of a general (human!) preference for story over facts. Who's us, by the way?

So what. Not everyone fabricates data for a decade, lies to everyone around them about matters of enormous professional import, and endangers the career of everyone they've ever worked with, most of all their students. The article talks about "good people doing bad things", which doesn't actually happen. We have a name for people who do bad things: we call them "bad people."

pavel_lishin 12y ago
I thought we just called them "people".
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  Nope. Not everything is bad enough to be worth labelling "bad" and anyone who thinks there is no difference between any ordinary decent person who does their best to behave honestly, and some bottom-feeding scum like this guy is so morally flaccid as to be an embarrassment to vertebrates everywhere. This liar got jobs based on his lies. The people who didn't get them were not--one would like to believe--publishing lies based on purely fabricated data. You'd have to be pretty evil to look those people in the eye and say, "Hey, your only problem was you were too honest! You didn't lie enough to get the job!" Were they pure and unsullied? Of course not. But only a moral degenerate is incapable of telling the difference between a systematic, deliberate, serial liar like this guy and the ordinary rough and tumble of scientific life, in which we do our best to overcome our worst tendencies, and mostly succeed. And you are relying on us every time you go to the doctor, get on a plane, drive a car, take a bus, eat a meal. You are hoping against hope that most people most of the time aren't lying and cheating their way through life, not faking research results or safety reports or maintenance logs. You are hoping, in short, that most people are not bad. So you might have the decency to demonstrate an awareness of that. It costs you nothing and we kind of appreciate it.
  - bambax 12y ago
    > you are relying on us every time you go to the doctor, get on a plane, drive a car, take a bus, eat a meal And that's why there are no health scandals, no planes ever crash, no cars are ever recalled, and there are no food scandals either (including, but not limited to, crap being passed as food, or animals being fed their own brains, etc.) The opposition psychologist "scientists" have shown towards any attempt to reproduce their findings mean this guy was not an outlier, but simply an extreme case of a general (human!) preference for story over facts. Who's us, by the way?