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Comment by patkai | Hacker News Reader

The narrative of the original experiment may be a "lie", but in what way is a Medium article the "truth"? It would be very important to educate and remind ourselves about how science actually works. It does not work with simple lies and truths, it is a path we follow and where we make many missteps. Even if Zimbardo did everything wrong - experiment, documentation, publishing, narrative, conclusions, influence - it is perfectly all right, the big river of science will slowly but steadily float it in the "right" direction.

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No its not alright. The idea of science is that things are reproducible and that scientists at least try to be honest about what, why and how they do their experiments. You say that scientists might as well just stop doing anything and just write fake reports. It's all the same after all!

You are right, it is not OK to deliberately lie. What I meant is it's OK from the point of view of science and science will correct these kind of "lies" in the same way it corrects erroneous measurements, documentation errors, misunderstandings, whatever. Scientific papers are actually full of these, and I dare not guess how many of them are written due to publish-or-perish (which are also some sort of lies, as the writer has not much to say, or only something with negligible importance). We could even think about lied about results as viruses which the immune system will handle.

What? There's a definite difference between "Whoops, I accidentally measured this wrong back in the day, sorry" vs "I'm covering up that I'm measured this wrong".

From a moral point of view there is. My point is that from the point of view of science the same self-correction should work in both cases, so the bigger story to "somebody lied" is that "in case of this attractive lie the self-correction didn't work well".

If he lied about the experiment and results... It's a lie. Pretty simple.

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