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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

There's no date on this post. I think a far more concerning issue for behavioural economics is that its public champion and most active researcher Dan Ariely is facing serious allegations of academic fraud [1]. If these allegations are proven true then it throws much of the findings of the field into question due to Ariely's prominence.

[1] https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2021/08/duke-universit...

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... which is kind of ironic since one of his main assertions has always been that "almost everyone cheats a little bit while some people cheat a lot".

My takeaway from his course is that it is simply hard to do science properly. He had the example of a drunk bum showing up for a psychological experiment otherwise primarily run with students, completely spoiling the results. The first impulse is to dismiss the data point as an outlier, but then he pauses and considers that if the bum would have supported his hypothesis, he would probably have decided differently.

I would imagine there are many such cases in social sciences, that are not really clear cut.

Also in general, people can not reliably the fallacies they are prone to, so it is a constant uphill struggle. Maybe immediately crying "fraud" is not always appropriate.

not really. So far, the issue is exaggerated. He obviously obraied made up or modified data from some insurance, used them without deep suspicion. Once it was obviousl that there experiments could not be replicated, he did publish the original data. And as soon as he saw indications of inappropriatenes, he withdraw the original paper.

So, so far, one lousy, or lazy and rushed up paper publication.

> Currently, applied behavioral science is where creativity goes to die. This is a shame, since the best behavioral scientists I've ever worked with, including Dan Ariely, are creative geniuses first and behavioral scientists second.

This line is a damning criticism in hindsight.

Markup has last updated date as 1597083627107.

> updated date as 1597083627107

August 10, 2020

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