Hacker News Reader

Comment by RachelF | Hacker News Reader

Dan Ariely's reputation is now in tatters.

Is it? My wife was studying in a lab (real science, not social science) and there were only a handful of labs in the world working on the problem. One of the labs had a key paper that no one could ever replicate and it was widely understood to be fraud. The drama was even written up in one of the blogs focused on these issues. The PI to this day claims it’s all true and nothing was faked, still respected in their field. Every grad student working on that protein knows that result and the subsequent papers published by the same lab based on that result are complete lies.

Mind sharing which paper/PI you’re talking about?

My wife is asleep now but I set a reminder to ask her tomorrow. I believe it was this one https://retractionwatch.com/2018/03/23/caught-our-notice-the...

Posted in 2018 but people knew about it for years. I will try to get all the details as the link is fairly dry but basically they are working on this protein and this paper and the science that followed set back many grad students wasting time and money trying to create more science based on the fake science.

Hmm, the conclusion that "mitochondrial ferredoxin is required for assembly of cytosolic iron sulfur proteins" does seem to hold up though. Unless I'm mistaken.

My wife says that this is complicated and there is a lot of nuance, but there are specifics of their work that cannot be replicated, and in fact my wife's lab came to opposite conclusions for some of the results. So the labs that do work on this pathway simply ignore or refute in their future papers the Lill lab results that conflict. She said that whole paper is ignored and there was a meeting in Germany with the labs that work on this pathway and all the grad students agreed they did not trust work coming out of the Lill lab. She said she thought the paper was fully retracted and was surprised when I sent her the link that it wasn't fully retracted.

Interesting. I read his book Predictably Irrational and quite liked it (of course that doesn't imply he's a good scientist). Are there any other scandals he is involved in?

I was also wondering, because there were some other vague mentions, but couldn’t find anything concrete.

The only thing[0] I could find was one person who questioned how he could technically make a shredder do what he said he did in one experiment (and there were even photos of the shredded-but-only-at-the-edges papers)

[0] https://fraudbytes.blogspot.com/2021/08/top-honesty-research...

Interesting hearing Dan Ariely explain how he broke the shredder: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZTIm9nmurRm96kWKwxrl5dI3t7e...

Anybody with a good talent for picking up liars from a voice recording willing to share an opinion?

They contacted him and he apparently claimed that he broke the teeth on a shredder with a screwdriver. The teeth on shredders exist only to make "cross cuts". The previous generation of shredders did not have them, and cut the paper into long strips instead of confetti; which is fine for most purposes. So a claim that removing teeth prevents shredding is bogus.

(Edited to add) thinking about it, this could be an honest mistake. You could "remove the teeth with a screwdriver" by disassembling the shredder and removing some blades from the axle, which corresponds to how the shredder in this paper was supposed to work. If Dan Ariely got a grad student to modify the shredder, he could simply have misunderstood their explanation of how they did so. How the shredder was modified was not, after all, important to the experiment.

(Edit 2) Although, those who ran the experiment would need to keep the missing teeth out of the line of sight of the subjects.

It doesn't help his cause that he continued to promote this study's findings even though he knew they didn't replicate.

[0] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/08/19/a-scandal-...

yeah that’s very damning, but still roughly the same scandal? ;-)

I think the comments on this page vaguely mention other things, but couldn’t find much concrete last I checked

But seems like it was a rational play from him. He made tons of money from his book and speaking engagements, and is not going to go to jail over this. He might be laughing all the way to the bank

Don’t know why you’re downvoted. He had every incentive to lie and has historically shown dubious judgments and hyperbole.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/dan-ariel...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com