from Hacker News

Harvard ethics professor allegedly fabricated multiple studies

by 1sembiyan on 7/10/23, 12:16 PM with 215 comments

  • by biohazard2 on 7/10/23, 12:39 PM

  • by joshe on 7/10/23, 2:33 PM

    She was right about her book title "Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life."

    Committing fraud paid well. HBS professor salary is about $220K per year. Ten years of salary is a $2 million payoff. Big incentives to do this.

    Worth a policy change by university for clawbacks of salary and especially pensions and tenure. Like insider trading she should be forced to disgorge all the profits from her fraud. Dan Ariely too.

    And worth charging for criminal fraud, she defrauded her university and students. 5 years in jail seems fine.

    It's time to stop pretending academics are a medieval nobles who grow faint at the idea of their sacred honor being besmirched. With huge salary opportunities for bold populist claims academics will take big risks to achieve choice jobs even if they think they will eventually be discovered.

  • by screye on 7/10/23, 1:54 PM

    Stop treating non-sciences like sciences.

    The social sciences have a certain hypocrisy to them. "We do not need to be as grounded in math as the other sciences" runs up against "Our results are mathematically significant and deserve the same respect as the other sciences."

    Doing statistics in the hard sciences is easy, yet we study them at a graduate level. Setting up variable controls in hard sciences is easier, yet we spend years training people on eliminating even the smallest chance of error through rigid lab protocols. The hard sciences allow you to collect enough data-points, that a large effect size is almost always statistically significant... yet we report p-values religiously every step of the way.

    Social sciences have none of those affordances, yet they somehow get away with even less mathematical and statistical rigor. I mean this both in training and in practice. The social sciences are harder to control. It is a 'science' that can say very little about anything (purely due to difficulty of setting up controlled experiments). Yet, social science produces a disproportionate number of 'spicy' results.

    Not all fields will produce 'ground breaking' work and that should be fine. I'm not sure where the incentive/impetus for it comes from, but social scientists build storied careers on results that would get rejected from any respected science journal for lack of rigor. It is as if there is this pressure on every academic to prove something fundamental about human nature few years, all while it's plainly clear that we as humans know almost nothing about human nature. If centuries of work in this field has not been able to find a few foundational facts (fancy alliteration), then maybe the field needs to reconsider its ambitiousness and self-assured confidence.

  • by PaulKeeble on 7/10/23, 1:47 PM

    Almost no findings in psychology survive 20 years, almost all of them are determined to be fraudulent manipulation of data and findings or at the least fail to be replicated. Psychology is not producing scientific findings as a field, it's completely ignorable and responsible for a large chunk of the science replication crisis.

  • by throwawaaarrgh on 7/10/23, 2:21 PM

    I honestly love how archaic the science research community is. It's like we're still in the 19th century, where the claims made by people of high reputation are taken as gospel, rather than trusting a rigorous process without personal or professional reputation bias. All the bullshit about publishing for the sake of getting a grant, getting your name on a paper to up your rep, etc is amazing. Like the purpose of science isn't science but to play an elaborate professional reputation game that happens to include science.

  • by bluecalm on 7/10/23, 1:37 PM

    Not very surprising. There are incentives to publish, especially surprising stuff (so you can call it ground breaking) and no incentives to be right in a sense that your results align with reality.

    Imagine spending time to prepare a paper then collecting data just to see it doesn't show what you hoped it shows. Your choices are to bin several weeks/months of you work to the detriment of your career or help a bit so the data behaves. The risk is close to 0, the reward (or lack of punishment) is clear. It's crazy to not expect significant % of individuals facing the choice going with the massaging the data option.

    It all flies in social science because most of the stuff they "research" range from interesting but not very useful curiosities to completely pointless. No devices are being built based on it. No serious investment being made. No policies are going to be affected or if they are then studies are picked for ideological compliance not for describing reality well. You're also not going to face a lawsuit as you might in say medicine. "Your honour, I've read the study , started breaking the rules and got expelled from school" is not going to get you far.

  • by steveads on 7/10/23, 2:09 PM

    The irony is strong. Her 2018 book title: "Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life"

  • by LatteLazy on 7/10/23, 1:31 PM

    The older I get, the more prejudiced I get: STEM exists, everything else is just bullshit. Ethics is just made up. Even the less rigorous "sciences" like psychology are mostly just nonsense (unreproducible "results", driven by fashion not results, more about getting donor/client money in than actually discovering or changing anything) as far as I can see.

  • by jononomo on 7/10/23, 1:26 PM

    Dan Ariely is another person in this space who has been spouting BS (he is mentioned in this article). I remember when Ariely used to make the news on a regular basis and I'm glad that he's dropped off the face of the Earth.

  • by christkv on 7/10/23, 1:19 PM

    The worst part of these kind of studies and I include sociology and psychology studies is that they are often used to create policy in the private or public sector causing untold damage to organizations, employers and citizens.

  • by rlucas on 7/10/23, 3:42 PM

    A caution on the source; "The College Fix" is a rage-bait blog for one side of the tiresome U.S. culture war. As a result, expect sensational framing.

  • by keepamovin on 7/10/23, 1:50 PM

    I suppose that's one solution: if you don't want to become ethical you can just change the world (as in reframe it) until you do. I see nothing wrong here: he gets to profess his ethics, but doesn't actually have to live it. Mission accomplished. /s

  • by neilv on 7/10/23, 2:09 PM

    The HN title doesn't include the "allegedly" currently in the article's title.

    The lede of the article also calls it "accused of".

  • by koollman on 7/10/23, 12:34 PM

    "ethics". Well at least they are creating more examples to analyze

  • by sva_ on 7/10/23, 1:10 PM

    I like how the article simply links to sci-hub (in "Notably, a famous article discussing dishonesty [...]")

  • by hospitalJail on 7/10/23, 12:41 PM

    The Ivy leagues cannot catch a break.

    I imagine this stuff happens at state schools too, but yet another nail in the coffin of their reputation.

    Sincerely, a person who went to a school you've never heard of, but makes a ton of money because I know 4 skills that synergize and scarce.

  • by air7 on 7/10/23, 12:56 PM

    Wow. The first few paragraphs read like a story from The Onion.

  • by koonsolo on 7/10/23, 2:36 PM

    The biggest problem with scientific studies is that you get noticed for remarkable results. So what do scientists do? Either try to exaggerate their conclusion or even fraud.

    Most scientific studies are plain up boring and don't find anything new.

    Maybe papers should be graded on "how well was this study executed" instead of "what kind of unexpected result did we end up with". Because the second is really asking for exaggeration, lies and fraud.

  • by throwawayccx on 7/10/23, 3:47 PM

    Let me guess the media went alongwith it without asking not giving voice to critics

  • by alkibiades on 7/10/23, 2:32 PM

    what bothers me most is when politicians and corporations make policies based on these junk studies

    but no, we have to “trust the science”

    for example, if you create a study whose results show that diversity is good in some way, you’ll get endless citations and orgs will make policies after it. even if it’s fraudulent, no one’s likely to look too deep into it. you wouldn’t be able to publish one that said the opposite. or if you did, you’d likely end your career

  • by wruza on 7/10/23, 6:27 PM

    Notably, a famous article discussing dishonesty was found to contain fabrications, they wrote

    Isn’t that self-fulfilling and as deconstructional as can be.

  • by manvillej on 7/10/23, 4:19 PM

    the fourth part of the data colada research has been posted: http://datacolada.org/112

  • by codesnik on 7/10/23, 2:09 PM

    Researching remorse, N=1

  • by DeathArrow on 7/10/23, 1:34 PM

    Maybe he just needed more examples to discuss in his courses?

  • by trabant00 on 7/10/23, 1:44 PM

    Where there's demand there will be supply. People are asking too much of science and technology in the last decades. We want instant results, shortcuts, secrets to success. Nobody wants to pay for slow steady progress and long term results. Change your life in 30 days with this diet, stoic philosophy program, psychology tidbits book, social media app, 100 push-ups, etc. What you want to buy is what they will be selling.

  • by neilv on 7/10/23, 3:19 PM

    On the referenced DataColada pieces:

    > by Uri, Joe, & Leif

    When publicly laying out a case like this, which could destroy the reputation of someone they identify by full name, I think it'd be good form to put one's own full names on the argument.

    (Of course they'd have to stand behind it if they are sued for defamation, and the full names can be found elsewhere on the Web site. But that's not my point.)

    Putting full names on the piece that people will read says to the reader that they take it seriously enough to put their own names on it.

    And the whole alleged scandal is about integrity and what you'll put your name on.